The first sensation was pain.
Not the clean pain of a surgical incision or the sharp clarity of a broken bone. This was fundamental wrongness—every atom in Sekitanki's body screaming that it existed in the wrong configuration, displaced from its natural timeline, forced through dimensions that shouldn't permit passage.
He materialized three meters above pavement and fell.
The impact drove consciousness into fragments. His ribs—already fractured from the Kamakura tournaments—cracked further. His right arm, barely functional since the Carboniferous infection, went completely numb. Blood filled his mouth, copper-sweet and wrong.
But he was breathing. Still breathing. Always still breathing. I'm home. The thought arrived before his eyes opened. Before he could process anything except the impossibility of survival. Months of displacement across eras—359 million years in the prehistoric past, 700 years in feudal Japan—and finally, finally, the temporal coordinates had resolved correctly.
Tokyo. Modern Tokyo. His Tokyo.
Sekitanki forced his eyes open and saw pavement. Actual modern pavement, not Carboniferous peat or Kamakura dirt. The texture was wrong for 2024—rougher, less refined—but it was paved. Roads existed here. Infrastructure. Civilization.
He pushed himself upright, ignoring his body's protests, and looked up.
Buildings. Actual buildings with windows and architectural style that belonged to his era. Power lines crisscrossed overhead. Street signs in Japanese marked intersections. Everything screamed home with such intensity that tears blurred his vision before he could stop them.
"I made it." His voice broke from disuse and emotion. "After everything—the insects, the samurai, the impossible survival—I actually made it home."
He stood on shaking legs, testing his weight. His left leg held. His right protested but functioned. Good enough. Everything was good enough because he was home.
Sekitanki started walking, then jogging, then running despite broken ribs and accumulated damage that should have left him bedridden. His heart hammered not from exertion but from desperate, overwhelming hope.
Months. Many impossible months of being lost in time, and finally he could—
He could tell his mother he understood now. Could apologize to his father for the years of cold distance. Could explain that emptiness wasn't strength, that genius without connection was just isolation wearing a prestigious mask.
The street opened into a wider avenue, and Sekitanki's sprint faltered.
The buildings were modern but wrong. The architectural style was 1940s, not 2020s. Art Deco influences mixed with Imperial Japanese design. The power lines were damaged, hanging loose like broken spines. And the pavement beneath his feet—the pavement that had seemed so wonderfully modern—was cracked and scorched.
Details sharpened as his scientist's mind engaged despite emotional devastation:
No cars. Not modern cars. No vehicles at all. Rubble scattered across the intersection. Buildings with walls blown out. The smell—industrial fire mixed with something organic and terrible. And the sky. The sky was wrong.
Too much smoke. Too much ash. The sun filtered through particulate matter that suggested massive fires burning somewhere close. This isn't 2024.
An old granny emerged from a partially collapsed building, carrying a bundle wrapped in scorched cloth. She moved with the hollow-eyed efficiency of someone who'd stopped processing horror hours ago.
She spotted Sekitanki and froze.
"Are you lost, youngin?" Her Japanese was classical—the formal pre-war dialect that existed between Kamakura and modern. "What unit are you with? Your uniform..."
She stared at his twilight-colored kimono, blood-stained and torn, marked with symbols that wouldn't exist for decades in her timeline.
Sekitanki tried to respond. His modern Japanese emerged flat and strange to her ears—future dialect processed through three years of linguistic displacement.
Her expression shifted from concern to fear. "Spy? Are you—" The air raid siren cut her off.
The sound was primal—mechanical wailing that bypassed conscious thought and went straight to hindbrain panic. The old granny's face transformed to absolute terror.
"Take cover!" She dropped her bundle and ran. "They're coming back! They're coming back!" Sekitanki heard it then: a sound he'd never experienced in person but recognized from history documentaries his physics professors had used to explain energy conversion rates.
The drone of engines. Massive engines. Dozens of them.
He looked up through the smoke and ash and saw them emerging from clouds like mechanical gods of destruction: B-29 Superfortresses. American bombers. The largest aircraft of World War II, each one carrying enough incendiary weapons to destroy entire neighborhoods.
Understanding crashed down with physical force. I'm not in 2024. I'm in World War II. I'm in the middle of a firebombing raid.
The Carboniferous had been terrifying—giant insects, constant predation, an ecosystem where everything wanted to kill him. Kamakura had been brutal—samurai warfare, tournament combat, honor-bound violence.
But this was different.
This was humanity's capacity for industrialized slaughter made manifest. This was science—his beloved physics and chemistry and engineering—weaponized to kill efficiently at unprecedented scale.
The first bombs fell.
Sekitanki ran on pure instinct, Carboniferous reflexes overriding conscious thought. He read trajectories from falling objects, predicted blast patterns from bomber formation spacing, calculated optimal shelter using physics equations his Tokyo University professors had taught him.
The irony wasn't lost on him: using knowledge from his peaceful 2024 era to survive his own civilization's worst impulses eighty years earlier.
An explosion erupted thirty meters ahead—thermite and napalm creating temperatures that flash-boiled the air. The heat wave hit him like a physical wall, singeing exposed skin, evaporating moisture from his eyes. He dove behind a concrete barrier as shrapnel screamed overhead.
More explosions. Closer. The ground rippled like liquid as shockwaves propagated through earth and stone. Buildings collapsed in cascading sequences—support structures failing, floors pancaking, creating dust clouds that mixed with smoke to form a choking gray hell.
Sekitanki's mind catalogued everything with detached precision even as his body fought for survival:
Temperature: approximately 800 degrees Celsius near impact points. Air pressure fluctuations: severe enough to rupture eardrums. Oxygen depletion: fires consuming atmospheric O2 faster than it can be replenished. Survival time in this environment: minutes, maybe.
He crawled through rubble, following his Carboniferous-learned instincts for finding defensible positions. A partially collapsed building offered shelter—basement access still intact, concrete walls thick enough to withstand near-miss explosions.
He descended into darkness as the world above burned.
The basement was occupied. Two dozen civilians—mostly elderly and children—huddled in the dark, holding each other, praying to gods who seemed absent during humanity's worst moments.
They stared at Sekitanki—blood-covered, wearing impossible clothes, speaking strange Japanese—with expressions mixing fear and desperate hope.
"Is it over?" a child asked. Maybe eight years old. Clutching a stuffed rabbit missing one ear. "No." Sekitanki couldn't lie. "It's just beginning." The raid lasted forty-seven minutes.
Sekitanki knew because he counted every second, tracking time by his heartbeat and the rhythm of falling bombs. An old habit from the Carboniferous, where time-sense meant survival.
When the drone of engines finally faded, when the explosions stopped shaking the foundation, when silence returned with a weight that felt heavier than sound—that's when he emerged.
Tokyo was damaged.
Fires burned everywhere. Not small fires. Firestorms—conflagrations so intense they created their own weather patterns, winds strong enough to lift bodies, temperatures that liquefied glass.
And the bodies.
They were everywhere. Some intact, most not. The incendiary weapons hadn't just killed—they'd incinerated, leaving human remains that looked more like modern art sculptures than people who'd been alive forty-seven minutes ago.
A parent and child embracing, fused together by heat. An old gramps's shadow burned into concrete, his body vaporized so completely only his silhouette remained. A business worker still sitting at a desk, carbonized but maintaining perfect posture.
Sekitanki walked through this landscape and felt something inside him break in a way the Carboniferous and Kamakura never managed.
This was humans killing humans. Not nature's indifference. Not honor-bound combat. Just industrial-scale murder justified by national conflict and historical grievances he barely understood.
Survivors emerged from shelters, wandering in shock. A mother searching for her daughter, calling her name over and over, voice breaking with each repetition. An elderly gramps pulling his dead wife from rubble, hugging the body, refusing to acknowledge she was gone.
Sekitanki tried to help. Pulled a trapped teenager from collapsed building. Helped people have shared water from a broken pipe with children whose parents hadn't survived. Used his knowledge of anatomy—learned from studying Carboniferous creature structures—to apply improvised tourniquets to the wounded.
But there were too many. Too much damage. Too much death.
That's when he saw them: Japanese soldiers moving through the ruins with military precision. They were loading something onto a military truck, treating it with reverence despite the chaos.
Metal. Partially melted but recognizable. Sekitanki's heart stopped. His time machine.
The device he'd built in Tokyo 2024, destroyed by a centipede in the Carboniferous, rebuilt using medieval materials in Kamakura, had somehow survived temporal displacement to land here. In World War II Tokyo. And the military had seized it.
His only way home. The only device that could return him to his era, his family, his life.
And it was being driven away. Sekitanki ran. Carboniferous agility let him dodge through rubble, vault over debris, close the distance faster than human reflexes should permit. His hand stretched toward the truck bed, fingers almost touching the machine's scorched surface—
A rifle point slammed into his skull. Pain exploded white-hot. His vision fragmented. He tasted blood and ash and failure as he collapsed. Soldiers surrounded him immediately, weapons pointed. One spoke in archaic Japanese—pre-war dialect that Sekitanki's modern ears struggled to parse: "Identify yourself! Deserter? Spy? Foreign agent? Speak!"
Sekitanki tried to answer. His modern Japanese emerged mangled, wrong-sounding to 1945 ears. Grammar too simplified. Vocabulary too contemporary. Pronunciation shaped by linguistic drift that hadn't occurred yet.
He sounded exactly like what he was: someone who didn't belong in this era. The soldiers exchanged looks. One gestured with his rifle: "American spy. Look at his clothes. His speech. Obviously infiltrator."
"Wait—I'm not—I'm Japanese—I'm—" A boot to his ribs cut off protest. Already-broken bones cracked further. His vision whited out. Through fragmenting consciousness, Sekitanki saw his time machine being driven away. Disappearing into smoke and chaos. His only escape vanishing while he lay helpless and bleeding.
The last coherent thought before darkness claimed him: I survived 359 million years of prehistoric monsters. I survived medieval samurai warfare. I survived three years of impossible displacement across time.
And I landed in humanity's worst war. In an active bombing zone. With my machine seized by military forces who think I'm an enemy spy. I'm so far from home. Farther than I've ever been.
Consciousness faded. In the darkness behind his eyes, he heard his mother's voice—memory surfacing unbidden: "Hankō, why do you always push yourself so hard? What are you trying to prove?"
And his own reply, cold and distant, from months and an eternity ago: "That I'm worth more than just existing." Now, lying in the ruins of 1945 Tokyo with soldiers deciding his fate, Sekitanki understood the terrible answer: He'd proven he could survive anything.
But survival without connection, without home, without the people who made existence meaningful—that wasn't victory. That was just prolonged dying wearing a different mask.
The soldiers hauled him upright. Bound his hands. Threw him into the back of a military truck that smelled of diesel and despair. As they drove through burning Tokyo toward whatever fate awaited captured spies, Sekitanki looked up at the ash-choked sky and made a promise:
I will get home. I will retrieve that machine. I will survive this era like I survived the others. Because I finally understand what I'm surviving for. Not achievement. Not genius. Not filling the void with accomplishments that don't matter.
But connection. Family. The chance to tell my mother I'm sorry. To tell my father I understand now. To prove that the empty kid who left three years ago learned what it means to be human.
I will survive. No matter what this war throws at me. The truck disappeared into smoke and ruin, carrying a time traveler who refused to die toward a war that killed millions without mercy.
And somewhere in the burning city, his time machine sat in a military facility, waiting to be examined by scientists who couldn't possibly understand what they'd found.
The machine that was his only way home. The machine that might also be the key to changing history itself.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Infiltrator's Gambit"]