Masao Kubo was finishing his inspection of the equipment when the left side of his vision went dark. He turned away, using the bulky metal cylinder in front of him to hide his discomfort from the patrolling guards. The warehouse felt stuffier than usual, and his heart rate was spiralling out of control.
No, he couldn’t let them see their leader like this.
It had come on so suddenly. There wasn’t even a warning headache this time, and the pills he’d been taking should’ve suppressed his seizures. He blinked, hoping the black splotch in his eye would go away. It didn’t.
Dammit.
Kubo pulled out a transparent bottle and popped two pills into his mouth. These tablets couldn’t remove the terminal tumour in his brain; they only helped with suppressing the symptoms. Still, they seemed to be losing their effectiveness each time he took them, regardless of how much he had increased the dosage.
He was running out of time. The world was running out of time for him to save it.
The man curled his fingers into fists as he felt sweat rolling from his forehead. The blotch was fading away, for a slight relief, but there was no doubt it would be back with a vengeance. And he needed a breakthrough before it visited him for the last time in his life.
A presence approached him from behind.
“I have been ignoring Miguel Chukyunwelu’s commands for far too long,” she said. “His suspicion grows by the day, and I can no longer contain it. When will this end?”
“You know, after the last war, people struggled. Not just the losers, but the victors as well,” Kubo said without turning his attention to the person behind him. “Everyone felt small, weak. That’s what war does to people; it’s fair in that manner. And then Adolf Hitler came along with his flags and big speeches. Benito Mussolini and his traditional values. Even our Great Emperor Hideki Tojo joined in the madness for power.”
He turned around.
“All of them had the right idea, but they were not strong enough to seize it. They were all so obsessed with being the superior man that they failed to see that true superiority lies in being above men. Do you understand what I am trying to do here, Kitagawa? Do you understand our purpose?”
Yuri Kitagawa walked towards him with her hands behind her back.
“I care not, Kubo. The affairs of men are no longer any concern of mine,” she said curtly. “It is thanks to my intel that we remain one step ahead of the Marked Emissaries, and you have benefited much from it. But my daughter shouldn’t be involved in our affairs. My mission is all but complete, so I will be going away with her.”
“You will not!” Kubo raised his voice, causing a few soldiers to look in his direction. “Complete? If I recall correctly, we forged a pact when I resurrected you from the dead. As long as my mission isn’t complete, you will not be set free. Look at this!”
He jabbed a finger at the machine.
“Does it look like I have done what I set out to do? You forget what you are,” the general snarled. “When I sent you to infiltrate those cultists, I didn’t ask you to fall in love with one of them. I didn’t ask you to disappear for eighteen years! Your daughter is an unwanted product of your own mistakes, wraith. You’re treading on thin ice, and you have delayed my mission long enough. Be grateful I haven’t unmade you for your insolence.”
Purple light flickered slightly in Yuri’s eyes. “You really should not speak to your elders that way. It is only because you are my descendant that you are even allowed to resurrect me in the first place. Unmake me? Go ahead. Let us see how you take back your supply of Kiseigumos without me.”
“You think I need you?”
“I care not what you need,” Yuri snapped. “Do not forget that you killed my husband because of your stupid war with that cult! He earned the right to live when he escaped, but still! Still, you threw him into that cursed machine!”
“Bertram Harvey only died because of you. It is your fault for getting too close to those cultists. If he had minded his business and stayed in the cult without looking for you, I wouldn’t have had to silence him in the first place.”
“You…” Yuri shook with anger.
“I’m not done, woman. Don’t forget, you were the one who stopped the procedure before it could be completed. Who knows? He might have survived if you hadn’t pulled him out prematurely and let him escape.”
“It is only because I cannot raise a hand against those who have resurrected me that I have not done anything in vengeance,” the woman lowered her voice. “I mourn the dead, but I will not lose sight of the living. If your mission involves my daughter any further, I will not hesitate to leave for good. Do not try me.”
Kubo didn’t resist a smirk. As old as Yuri’s soul was, she was still naive enough to threaten him so openly.
“I haven’t forgotten my end of the pact, Yuri.” He decided to change tactics. “If I get what I want, you’ll get a piece of all the action as well. You still want a true body to properly inhibit, don’t you?”
Yuri faltered, but she kept silent. The grin on Kubo’s face spread further as an idea slowly grew in his head.
“I thought as much,” Kubo continued. “If I succeed, our pact is over, and you will be free to do as you please.”
“I don’t need your permission to do that.”
“Then allow me to sweeten the deal. If all goes well, I will provide you with the means to fully integrate with your current body,” he lied. “With your old friend’s elixir of life, you know it is possible.”
“You mean to steal his elixir?” Yuri narrowed her eyes. “What about your plan to create a superior body?”
“Flawed, outdated. You name it.” Kubo shrugged. “I am no witch. My resources were limited, and so were my ideas. But it is fate that your old friend has reappeared in your life. Opportunities must be seized, and changes must be made to inefficient plans. If we take what he has, we can directly grant ourselves perfect bodies without the drawbacks of looking like monsters.”
“NO!”
Kubo and Yuri flicked their heads to the source of the scream: a uniformed man stomping up to them with indignation plastered over his face.
“General, please!” Lieutenant Yoshida was still shouting. “Why do you have so little faith in our people? Must we rely on a Westerner’s power to achieve our goals? What’s wrong with continuing our experiments?”
“Nothing, but I may not live to see it come to fruition.” Kubo held back the urge to lash out at the simple-minded man. Yoshida was foolishly stubborn, but he was as loyal as they came. It would be a waste to chase him away. “There have been developments, and I wish to seize this opportunity. With perfect, immortal bodies, our superiority will be indisputable.”
“But what of that creature my men have seized from the Marked Emissaries?” Yoshida insisted. “We went through all that trouble to extract her from their most well-guarded base, and you’re telling me we don’t need her anymore? What are we supposed to do now, set the vampire free? This— I cannot accept this, General!”
“Lieutenant, listen to reason—”
He swung to Yuri, jabbing an accusatory finger at her. “This is your doing, isn’t it? What lies are you feeding the General, vixen?! A woman has no place on the battlefield. How dare you interfere in the affairs of men—”
“Enough!”
Kubo’s yell echoed down the warehouse this time. His head spun along with the exertion, but the blotch, thankfully, didn’t return to his vision.
He let go of Yoshida’s wrist, which was mere millimetres away from Yuri’s face. If that strike had landed, he didn’t even want to imagine how mangled Yoshida’s body would be after Yuri was done with him.
“Do not forget your place, Lieutenant. I am the commander here.” Every word stung his lips on the way out. Pulling rank was the last thing he wanted to do, but this seemed to be the only language Yoshida understood now. “The luxury of time has never been on my side, and this is the best course of action. You are a loyal man. Do not let one moment of foolishness cloud your dedication to our cause.”
Yoshida seemed to calm down, but he was still heaving. Kubo decided to ignore it. As long as that man had no plans to interfere with his goal, there was no need to sweat the minor details.
“Keep the vampire as a backup plan and prepare the cells,” Kubo commanded. “We will have use for them very soon. Dismissed, Yoshida.”
The Lieutenant closed his eyes and pursed his lips, but he bowed slightly anyway. “Understood, General.”
Yuri watched the man walk away grudgingly before turning back to Kubo. “That subordinate of yours has trust issues.”
“That is none of your business, Kitagawa. Now, where were we?”
“What of the Marked Emissaries?” Yuri asked without losing a beat. “They are no longer a problem in this case.”
“Indeed, so forget about them. Those rats can take the rest of our parasites for all I care. Without our technology, their black magic alone cannot exceed what we can do. They cannot harness that accumulated power in any way that truly matters. All they are doing is simply draining magical creatures of their magic.”
Guilt started to spread on Yuri’s face.
“There is only one thing I need to complete our mission now: Duncan Ward,” Kubo continued. “Miguel Chukyunwelu will have no more use for your daughter if you leave his organisation. He is just an insecure man who’s only trying to keep your loyalty by holding her captive.”
Yuri cast her gaze downward as her eyes flitted around for a few seconds. Kubo waited patiently. The choice was obvious; she should be able to see that as well.
“Fine. What would you have me do now, then?” The woman looked back up at him, conviction written all over her face.
“That Westerner trusts you because you belong to his past.” Kubo broke into a grin. “Use that trust to take an elixir. If not, bring him here. I have ways of making him talk. That’s all I need from you now. After that, you can live out a normal life with your daughter for the rest of your days.”
“Consider it done.”
Kubo watched the woman walk away as he leaned against the machine, trying to control his heart rate again. This affliction was weakening far quicker than he had anticipated.
He recalled receiving that terminal diagnosis just four years ago. It had come as a shock to the doctors back then, considering that he had lived a relatively healthy life and had not much of a reason to develop such a grotesque tumour so quickly.
But as he thought more about it, he slowly figured out the origin of this rapidly developing affliction.
It all started back in nineteen eighteen, just one year after the First Great War. Thanks to its strategic alliances, Japan had earned itself a seat at the League of Nations, but it was always inferior to the Western countries sitting at the same table.
As such, a secret organisation was formed for paranormal research— the idea was to look into otherworldly means to ‘balance the power on the tables’, so to speak. Masao Kubo, who was still a Lieutenant Colonel back then, was placed in charge of that department.
While many around him often disregarded paranormal occurrences as mere ghost stories, Kubo had seen a lot more than one ghost in his lifetime. And so, he accepted the position with grace, swearing to use occult research to lift his country out of its inferior position.
But he had never expected to uncover a buried past right in his own ancestral home.
Two decades later, Kubo discovered an enchanted dagger that was at least five hundred years old, along with multiple scrolls written by his ancestor. Taking a few days away from work, Kubo spent his time deciphering the scrolls.
It was a much-needed break for him as well. A strange cult called the Marked Emissaries had been breaking into his research facilities and stealing from their magical parasite reserves. Well-trained as Kubo’s soldiers were, they were still just mere humans with minimal paranormal knowledge. None of them knew proper magic, and so they were no match for the exotic black magic those cultists wielded.
According to the scrolls, Kubo’s family descended from a powerful warlord who fell from power after he was cursed by a foreign witch. There wasn’t much useful information in the scrolls, other than the countless lamentations of the warlord, cursing himself for indirectly driving his daughter to death.
What caught Kubo’s eye, however, was how the girl died.
That five-century-old dagger that she had used to stab herself was coated with traces of a very rare type of magic that could preserve life. As such, the daughter’s soul had never left the Earth but was instead trapped in this weapon all this time.
Excited by his findings, he got ready to present them to the government, asking for more funding for this breakthrough in magic research. If all went well, they could even obtain real magic to combat their foes, be it the other countries or the Marked Emissaries.
However, the Japanese government was too preoccupied with the upcoming second war to entertain him, and they even suggested a complete shutdown of his department.
Enraged and dejected by their short-sightedness, Kubo took it upon himself to resurrect his ancestor in hopes of gaining paranormal abilities. Of course, it didn’t turn out the way he had expected.
After a complicated ritual involving Kubo’s blood as well as a fresh female corpse, Yuri Kitagawa was brought back to life in a new body. For the last step of the ritual, Kubo bound the freshly resurrected zombie with a pact that compelled her to his mission of elevating Japan above the common people.
After all, five hundred years of dwelling within an enchanted weapon granted her some rather potent magical reserves. Without the pact, there could be no controlling her if she went rogue.
Unfortunately, Kubo wasn’t a properly trained Sorcerer— all he had were some old scriptures from his years of occult research to base the ritual on. In his carelessness, he accidentally splashed some remnant waste magic into his eyes while haphazardly creating the pact.
With the benefit of hindsight, it was laughable how he did not immediately deduce that it was the cause of the tumour. Perhaps it was the universe’s way of balancing fate. Men like him could only achieve greatness with death nipping at their heels.
So be it.
It was never about personal glory or anything petty like that, anyway. The world would still turn, regardless of man’s opinion. The world would still change, no matter how much humanity protests. So there was no point resisting; its trajectory was all that mattered.
And he would be the one to guide it.15Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡIdYcO5mxRZ
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