August 3rd, 1945. Three days before history would split open.
The morning arrived with the kind of oppressive heat that made breathing feel like drowning. Sekitanki woke to find his uniform soaked with sweat, the barracks thick with the smell of unwashed bodies and despair.
Unit 23 had been assigned salvage duty—recovering supplies from a bombed warehouse district on Tokyo's eastern edge. Low priority. Minimal danger. The kind of mission command gave to units they'd written off as expendable.
Sekitanki and Kaito volunteered immediately.
Sergeant Hayashi barely looked up from his sake. "Take Yamamoto. Three people for salvage. Rest of you, equipment maintenance. We deploy again tomorrow."
The warehouse district had been beautiful once—commercial buildings from the Meiji era, architecture blending Japanese tradition with Western industrial design. Now it was skeletal frames and ash, another neighborhood erased by incendiary weapons that turned cities into local funerals.
They moved through ruins that reminded Sekitanki of the Carboniferous—alien landscape where familiar rules no longer applied, where death waited in unexpected places.
"There," Yamamoto pointed to a partially collapsed structure. "That was the medical supply depot. If anything survived, it's there."
They approached carefully. Structural instability made every step a gamble. Floors that looked solid could collapse without warning. Walls that appeared stable could topple from vibrations.
Kaito moved with the cautious precision of someone who understood engineering failure modes. "The main support beam is compromised. We have maybe thirty minutes before this whole section comes down."
"Then we work fast."
Inside, the warehouse was a maze of fallen shelves and scattered inventory. Some supplies remained intact—bandages, surgical tools, morphine ampoules that would be worth their weight in gold to field medics.
They worked in efficient silence, loading salvageable materials into canvas bags. Yamamoto hummed quietly—some folk song from his childhood, the melody sad and beautiful.
Sekitanki found a case of penicillin, miraculously undamaged. In 1945, antibiotics were precious. These vials could save dozens of lives. Lives that history has already decided will be lost. Does saving them change anything? Or just delay inevitable deaths?
The philosophical question dissolved when he heard it: the whistle of falling bombs. Not close. But close enough that his Carboniferous-trained reflexes screamed danger.
"Incoming raid!" Kaito's voice cracked with urgency. "We weren't notified—this wasn't scheduled—" "MOVE!" Sekitanki tackled him as the building exploded.
Not a direct hit—the bomb struck two buildings over. But the shockwave propagated through connected structures. Walls crumbled. Floors collapsed in cascading failure. The warehouse district became a falling domino chain of architectural destruction.
They fell through collapsing floors, through darkness, through terror compressed into seconds that felt like hours. Impact drove air from Sekitanki's lungs. His ribs—already fractured from previous battles—cracked further. Pain exploded white-hot through his torso.
When the dust settled, they were trapped. Buried in a basement level, pinned under rubble, surrounded by darkness that pressed against them like physical weight. Sekitanki tried to move and discovered his right arm was pinned beneath a concrete slab. Kaito's leg was trapped, twisted at an angle that suggested fracture.
"Yamamoto?" Sekitanki called into darkness. No response. Just the settling groan of unstable structure and distant explosions. "He was behind us," Kaito's voice emerged strained. "When the floor collapsed, he—I think he didn't make it."
They lay there in darkness, hearing distant bombardment, wondering if rescue would come before the building finished collapsing or they suffocated from dust and limited oxygen.
Minutes passed. Maybe hours. Time became meaningless in absolute dark. Finally, Kaito spoke: "If we're going to die here, I'd rather die knowing who I died beside. Tell me your story. Real story. Everything."
And because death felt inevitable, because darkness made confession easier, Sekitanki did. He told Kaito everything: The empty genius childhood—brilliant but hollow, achieving without feeling, recognized without being known. The discovery of temporal distortions in quantum experiments. The time machine built not from scientific curiosity but from desperate hope that changing location in spacetime might fill the void inside.
The Carboniferous Period—arriving in green hell of giant insects. The centipede destroying his machine on day one. Three weeks of learning to survive by killing, by forging weapons from corpses, by becoming something harder than the soft scientist who'd left Tokyo.
"I fought a dragonfly the size of a car," Sekitanki said into darkness. "Stabbed it with a spear made from scorpion parts while it tried to eat me. That should have been the most insane moment of my life. But it just kept getting worse."
He described rebuilding the time machine from impossible materials—chitin and organic compounds mixed with salvaged quantum circuitry. The desperate jump that should have returned him to 2024 but instead threw him to Kamakura, seven hundred years in the past.
"I met people there. Real people who saw past my genius to whatever was underneath. A ronin named Takeda who taught me that honor without flexibility is suicide. A smith named Kanemoto who showed me that masters are just students who never stopped learning. A warrior named Yuki who—"
His voice broke. "She was the first person who fought me at full strength and made me feel alive. Not because of violence. Because she saw me. Actually saw me. Not my achievements or my strangeness. Just... me."
"You cared for your her. Your friend." "I don't know. Maybe. I never learned how to recognize friendship. But I cared about her surviving more than I cared about my own survival. That was new."
He told Kaito about the tournaments—four rounds of combat while dying, fighting to save Yuki's life, learning that sacrifice meant more than achievement.
"And then I tried to come home. Built another machine. Made the jump. And landed here. In 1945. In the middle of World War II. My only way home seized by military forces who think I'm a spy."
Silence. Then Kaito laughed—broken, bitter sound. "We're mirrors. Different eras. Different reasons. Same result: lost in time, fighting to survive, carrying weight no one else can understand."
"Your turn. Tell me your story." And Kaito did. His voice emerged quiet, raw with emotion held too long:
"My grandmother raised me. Tanaka Hisako. My parents died when I was six—mag-lev transport accident in 2210. She was all I had. Worked three jobs to put me through medical school. Never complained. Just... loved me. Unconditionally. The way grandparents do."
"Then the diagnosis. Neurological Degeneration Syndrome. The only disease 2228 medicine can't cure. Progressive, fatal, destroys neural pathways faster than we can repair them. She had six months. Maybe."
His breathing became ragged. "I couldn't accept it. I'm a medical student—I should be able to save her. So I researched. Found classified papers about successful time travel experiments in 2215. The technology existed. The government just locked it down because of 'temporal paradox risks.'"
"I spent two years building my machine in secret. Worked night shifts at the hospital, stole components, violated every law about temporal mechanics. My plan was simple: jump forward fifty years, steal the NDS cure from whatever future develops it, bring it back, save her."
"The night before I left, she held my hand. Said, 'Kaito, where do you go at night? You look so tired.' I wanted to tell her. Wanted to say, 'I'm building a time machine to save you.' But I couldn't risk her trying to stop me."
His voice broke completely. "So I lied. Said I was studying. She smiled—that smile that meant she knew I was lying but loved me anyway. Said, 'Whatever you're doing, be careful. I want my grandson to outlive me. That's the natural order.'"
"Three days later, I activated the machine. It should have sent me to 2278. Instead, I materialized in May 1945. Middle of a battlefield. My machine was destroyed on arrival. I spent the first week just trying not to get killed. Then I realized: I'm stuck. I'm stuck 283 years before my grandmother even exists. And she's dying without me."
Sekitanki heard tears in the darkness. Kaito wasn't sobbing—just quiet crying, the kind that came from wounds too deep for dramatic expression.
"The worst part? In my time, we've extended lifespans. People live to 150 regularly. My grandmother is only 94. She could have decades left if NDS wasn't killing her. And I'm here. In the past. Unable to help. She's probably already—"
"Don't." Sekitanki interrupted, voice firm despite pain. "Don't finish that thought. She's still alive." "How can you know?"
"Because time doesn't work that way. You left 2228. You'll return to 2228. From her perspective, you'll have been gone days, maybe weeks. Time doesn't pass in your era while you're displaced—that's how temporal mechanics function. She's still alive. Still waiting. Still hoping you'll come back with the cure."
Silence stretched. Then: "You really believe that?"
"I know it. I've been displaced across eras. Kamakura people I knew didn't age while I was in the Carboniferous. Time is relative. Your grandmother is still alive. And when we get home—when we get the machine working—she'll still be waiting."
"Thank you." Kaito's voice was thick. "I needed to hear that. Needed to believe it's not too late." "It's not too late for either of us. We'll get home. We'll fix what we broke. We'll tell the people we love that we understand now."
They lay there in comfortable silence—two people from different futures, understanding each other perfectly across the impossible gulf of 204 years.
Finally, Sekitanki asked: "When we get the machine working... when we go home... what's the first thing you'll do?" "Hug my grandmother. Tell her I love her. Give her the cure—if I can find it. If rebuilding the machine is even possible. You?" "Walk into my mother's kitchen. Tell her I'm sorry. That she was right about everything. That genius without humanity is just emptiness wearing a prestigious mask."
"Your mother sounds wise." "She is. I just couldn't hear it until I'd lost everything." More silence. Then Kaito said quietly: "If we die here, before getting home, before keeping our promises—will it have meant anything? The survival. The fighting. The becoming something different than we were."
Sekitanki thought of Yuki's final words: Live forward. That's what would make me proudest.
"Yes. Because we tried. Because we refused to let impossible odds dictate our story. Because we became people who could carry promises across time itself. That matters even if we fail."
"You're more optimistic than I expected from someone who spent three weeks fighting prehistoric monsters."
"The monsters taught me that survival is achievement enough. The people in Kamakura taught me that survival with purpose is better. You're teaching me that survival with friendship is what makes the struggle worthwhile."
A sound above—shifting rubble. Voices calling in Japanese.
"Here!" Sekitanki shouted. "Two survivors! We're trapped!" Unit 23 had come looking. Hayashi's voice filtered through debris: "Hold on! We're digging!" It took six hours to excavate them. When they finally emerged into afternoon light, Sekitanki's arm was numb from compression and Kaito's leg was definitely fractured.
But they were alive.
Yamamoto hadn't survived—his body was found crushed under the initial collapse. Hayashi held a mini funeral, face expressionless. "I'll write to his wife. Tell her he died doing his duty. Tell her the Emperor thanks her for her sacrifice."
Empty words. Meaningless comfort. But all they had. As medics treated their injuries, Sekitanki and Kaito exchanged looks. "We're going to make it," Kaito said quietly. "To the machine. To rebuilding. To home."
"Both of us. Together. That's a promise." "A promise." They shook hands—modern gesture sealing modern vow in pre-modern war.
But neither knew the truth yet: the machine could only carry one person's mass through temporal displacement. The physics were absolute. One would go home. One would stay.
And three days later, Hiroshima would burn with atomic fire, beginning the countdown to war's end and the final desperate race to escape before everything collapsed.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Atomic Shadow"]