The convoy moved through dawn like a funeral procession.
Sekitanki sat in the back of a military truck, rifle across his lap, surrounded by soldiers who'd stopped believing in survival. The vehicle's engine coughed and sputtered—poorly maintained machinery held together by desperation and prayer, much like the soldiers it carried.
Beside him, the mysterious soldier maintained careful distance while their shoulders occasionally touched with the truck's movement. Each contact was electric—confirmation that another impossible person existed in this nightmare timeline.
Sergeant Hayashi sat at the truck's rear, sake bottle already half-empty despite the early hour. His eyes tracked the passing landscape with the hollow awareness of someone who'd seen this route claim too many lives. "First combat?" he asked Sekitanki, voice rough from alcohol and smoke. "No, Sergeant."
"Good. Means you might survive the first ten minutes." Hayashi took another drink. "Americans have this route zeroed. They know our supply schedule. Every convoy loses vehicles. Every mission loses soldiers. We go anyway because orders don't care about probability."
Corporal Tanaka—young, idealistic, still believing victory was possible—spoke up from across the truck bed: "The Americans are cowards. They bomb from sky because they fear facing true Japanese spirit. When they finally land, when they face us directly, they'll break."
No one responded. The veterans knew better than to argue with faith.
Sekitanki said nothing because he knew from history: the Americans would win. Atomic bombs were coming—though he didn't know exact dates. Every death from this point forward was mathematically meaningless, lives spent on a war already decided.
But I can't tell them without revealing I know the future. Can't save them without exposing what I am. He glanced at the mysterious soldier, who stared at nothing with careful neutrality. Their eyes met briefly.
The landscape transformed as they traveled—from devastated Tokyo to rural areas still bearing scars from previous battles. Burned rice paddies. Abandoned villages. Bomb craters filled with stagnant water that reflected empty sky.
They passed refugees moving in the opposite direction—families with possessions on their backs, eyes hollow from displacement and loss. An old granny carrying a child too still to be sleeping. A father pulling a cart bearing what might have been his son's and wife's bodies, wrapped in scorched cloth.
This was war without the propaganda glory. Just humans grinding other humans into statistical irrelevance. The ambush came thirty kilometers from Tokyo.
Classic tactics: force convoy into chokepoint, hit from elevated positions, maximize casualties before defenders could respond effectively. The lead truck rounded a bend where the road narrowed between steep hillsides. Perfect kill zone.
The first burst of gunfire tore through the driver's cab. The truck veered wildly, crashed into a ravine. Ammunition in the back detonated—massive explosion that sent shrapnel through the convoy.
Sekitanki's Carboniferous reflexes engaged before conscious thought.
He read the ambush pattern from muzzle flashes and bullet trajectories. Predicted kill zones from terrain analysis. His body moved on many months of accumulated survival instinct.
"Out! Everyone out now!" He grabbed the soldier beside him—the mysterious one who understood—and they rolled from the truck bed as automatic weapons fire raked where they'd been sitting.
Marines. American Marine reconnaissance. Maybe twenty shooters on elevated positions with overlapping fields of fire. The convoy was a slaughter.
Soldiers died before leaving vehicles. Others made it out only to be cut down in crossfire. Blood sprayed across military green. Screaming in Japanese and English mixed with the mechanical chatter of automatic weapons.
Sekitanki hit the ground hard, found cover behind a disabled truck. His rifle came up automatically—muscle memory from three years of killing to survive, now applied to human targets.
These are people. Not insects. Not honor-bound samurai. Just soldiers following orders, fighting for causes they barely understand. But they were also trying to kill him. And he'd decided three years ago that survival mattered more than philosophical paralysis. He returned fire. Three-round bursts. Aimed shots. Physics calculations about bullet drop and wind effect processed faster than conscious thought.
An American soldier fell from elevated position. Young—maybe twenty. Face registering surprise that death had found him here. First human kill with firearms. The thought arrived clinical and distant. Sekitanki shoved it aside. Emotional processing could wait. Survival required focus.
Beside him, the mysterious soldier fought with wrong-era proficiency. His movements were too modern. Suppressing fire tactics. Tactical positioning. Combat doctrine that wouldn't be formally developed for years. He moved through the battlefield reading threats like someone who'd studied this war from historical distances.
He's from the future too. Has to be. They ended up in the same bomb crater, bullets whipping overhead. Close enough to speak without shouting. "You're not from here," Sekitanki said in modern Japanese, taking the risk.
The soldier's eyes widened. Responded in same dialect: "Neither are you." "Later. After this." "If there is an after." Perfect understanding crystallized between them. Two people who shouldn't exist, fighting in a war neither belonged to, using knowledge from eras these weapons couldn't imagine.
An American grenade landed in their crater. The soldier saw it first. "Move!" They scrambled out as the explosion tore earth apart. Shrapnel screamed past Sekitanki's head—close enough to feel wind, far enough to miss.
The crater that had been cover became grave.
They sprinted through chaos toward new positions. Sekitanki's body moved in patterns learned from fighting creatures that attacked from all directions simultaneously. Duck, roll, sprint, slide—Carboniferous agility applied to modern combat.
A Marine emerged from behind a vehicle, rifle tracking toward them.
Sekitanki's blade—the demon sword Kanemoto had forged in Kamakura, still strapped to his back—came out in one fluid motion. The weapon that had defeated legendary samurai now carved through rifle stock and human flesh in the same strike.
The Marine fell, blood pooling beneath him, eyes wide with confusion that a Japanese soldier carried a sword that moved like liquid death.
Another Marine charged. The mysterious soldier intercepted—hand-to-hand combat executed with disturbing efficiency. Movements too clean, too practiced, suggesting training from an era that had refined killing into science.
Within seconds, the Marine was down.
They moved together now—coordinated without discussion, reading each other's intentions through shared understanding of being displaced, being wrong for this timeline, being survivors who'd learned that hesitation meant death.
The battle lasted seventeen minutes. Unit 23 repelled the ambush through desperate fighting and superior knowledge of losing everything. The Americans withdrew—tactical retreat after inflicting maximum damage. When silence returned, it was heavier than gunfire.
Sekitanki stood among corpses—Japanese and American mixed together, all equally dead, all equally meaningless. His hands shook from adrenaline and the weight of having killed humans with modern weapons.
Three Americans. I killed three American soldiers who were fighting for the morally correct cause against a nation committing atrocities across Asia. Does fighting for survival make me complicit in those atrocities? Does context excuse action?
He had no answers. Just blood on his hands and the terrible understanding that war didn't care about moral complexity. Corporal Tanaka lay nearby, bleeding from a leg wound. Yamamoto—the unit medic—worked frantically to apply tourniquet, but arterial blood pumped with each heartbeat. "I can't stop it," Yamamoto said, voice breaking. "The femoral artery is severed. He needs surgery. Real surgery. We don't have—"
Tanaka looked up at the sky, face pale from blood loss. "Tell Akemi... tell her I'm sorry. The photo. It's in my jacket. Make sure she gets it." He died before finishing the sentence.
Twenty-one years old. Had a fiancée waiting in Kyoto. Kept her photograph over his heart. The bullet had gone through both. Sergeant Hayashi stared at the body, sake bottle forgotten. "He was supposed to marry after the war. They'd planned everything. House in the countryside. And more. He showed me the letters."
No one responded. What could anyone say?
The convoy had lost three trucks, nine soldiers, most of the medical supplies. They completed the mission because orders didn't acknowledge failure as option.
That night, survivors made camp in a bombed-out village.
Hayashi distributed sake rations with mechanical efficiency. "Drink. It's the only thing that helps. Tomorrow we do this again. Day after, again. Until we're the ones who don't come back."
Sekitanki sat apart, cleaning blood from his rifle. His first kills with modern firearms. Three young soldiers—probably conscripts, probably draftees who'd rather be anywhere else.
I've killed before. Carboniferous taught me that. But those were animals. These were people. The weight settled into his heart like ice. The mysterious soldier approached carrying two ration tins. Sat beside Sekitanki without asking permission. Offered one tin.
"You need to eat. Body can't process trauma on empty stomach." "Not hungry." "Eat anyway. That's what survival requires." He opened his own tin, began eating mechanically. "First time killing humans with firearms?"
"Yes." They ate in silence. Finally, Sekitanki asked: "How long have you been here?" "Three months. Arrived May 1945." The soldier's voice dropped to modern Japanese. "You?"
"Three days." "You adapt fast. Too fast. That's how I knew—no normal soldier moves like you. Like you're reading the entire battlefield simultaneously." Sekitanki studied him. Young—maybe nineteen. Japanese features but something in his bearing suggested different cultural context. Eyes that held weight beyond his apparent years.
"I've fought things from 359 million years before humans existed. Samurai from 700 years ago. Now I'm in humanity's worst war." He paused. "Time traveler?"
The soldier absorbed this. Nodded slowly. "Same. Machine malfunction threw me here. Three months of surviving this hell, trying to find resources to rebuild." His voice broke. "I just wanted to save my grandmother."
The pain in those words was raw and absolute. "What's your real name?" Sekitanki asked. "'Jikan Haisha' is fake—closest translation to 'time loser' without being obvious. Real name's Tanaka Kaito. I'm from 2228."
Sekitanki's breath caught. "2228? That's 204 years after my era." "You're from?" "2024." Kaito's expression shifted—wonder and sorrow mixing. "You're from the past of my past. And we both ended up here. In the worst possible moment of the twentieth century."
"Your grandmother. She's in 2228? Still alive?"
"Was when I left. Barely." Kaito's hands trembled. "She has Neurological Degeneration Syndrome. NDS. In my era, we've cured everything else, but NDS still kills. She had months, maybe weeks. I'm a medical student. I spent two years building a time machine in secret—planning to go forward fifty years, steal the cure from whatever future develops it, bring it back."
"Your machine malfunctioned." "Catastrophically. Threw me backward 283 years instead of forward fifty. I materialized in May 1945, middle of a battlefield. My machine was destroyed in the transition. I've been trying to survive long enough to find technology advanced enough to rebuild, but 1945 Japan..." He laughed bitterly.
"My machine is here. In a research facility three kilometers away. I'm working toward access." Kaito's head snapped up. "Your machine survived displacement?"
"Partially. Needs repair. But the core components are intact." Sekitanki paused. "We help each other. We get it working. We both go home."
"Why trust me?" "Because you saved Yamamoto during the ambush. I saw you pull him to cover when you could have left him. Time travelers who keep their humanity are rare. You haven't lost yours. Not completely."
"Neither have you... Sekitanki." They shook hands—modern gesture in pre-modern war. The friendship that would define everything began in that moment.
But neither knew the terrible truth yet: only one of them could go home. The machine couldn't carry two people's mass through temporal displacement. The physics were absolute.
One would survive. One would stay behind. One would die in 1945 or live stranded forever. But that revelation was still ahead. For now, there was just hope. Just the understanding that impossible survival became easier when shared.
"Tomorrow we have another escort mission," Sekitanki said. "Fifty percent casualty estimate."
"Then we make sure we're in the surviving fifty percent." Kaito smiled—genuine warmth breaking through wartime grimness. "I didn't survive three months to die before meeting someone who understands."
"Same." They sat together as night fell over devastated Japan. Two time travelers from different futures, both lost in 1945's hell, both carrying promises to people they loved, both refusing to die before finding a way home.
Around them, Unit 23 drank and prepared for tomorrow's probable death. Sergeant Hayashi stared at nothing, bottle empty, eyes holding the thousand-yard stare of someone who'd stopped believing survival was possible.
But Sekitanki and Kaito believed. Had to believe. Because they'd survived impossible displacement across time itself. What was World War II compared to that? The answer, they would learn, was: humanity's capacity for industrialized slaughter exceeded nature's casual violence by orders of magnitude.
But for tonight, there was friendship. There was hope. There was the understanding that they weren't alone anymore. And sometimes, in hell, that was enough.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "Confessions in the Ruins"]