Inside the Shikoku branch of the Global Special Incidents Response Management Committee, Fujiwara Shigetake set down the cup of black tea he had only half finished. The steam rising from it had not yet faded when he freed up a hand to take the report his subordinate offered him.
He had been in a fairly good mood.
That was about to change.
"Director Fujiwara, traces of the deep-sea warships Yamato and Takao have reappeared in the Philippine Sea. This intelligence came directly from Headquarters in Hawaii. Please take a look."
"Mm. Set it aside for now. I'll have Special Section keep an eye on it. We still haven't finished developing the specialized weapons needed to deal with those dead sea-wraiths. Best not to engage them proactively."
The subordinate knew exactly what he meant. He had read the after-action reports on those ships too.
It was not just that they appeared and vanished unpredictably, making them nearly impossible to pin down.
Even if they were found—
Almost all conventional weapons currently available were woefully inadequate against them. Attacking them was like throwing eggs at a boulder. Missiles were being shot down before they could even reach their targets.
Tactical nuclear weapons could inflict severe damage on them, but their regenerative capabilities were monstrous.
It had not even been half a month, and those two colossal warships had surfaced again, prowling the seas as if nothing had happened.
At that thought, Fujiwara could only reflect bitterly that their repair speed made even the U.S. Navy's legendary damage control teams from World War II look slow.
He was helpless in the face of it, though his expression did not show it. If he let uncertainty appear on his face, the people under him would lose even more confidence.
Those rusted, half-rotten relics of the old Imperial Navy really were absurdly hard to deal with.
Back then they had not seemed nearly so terrifying. Giant weapons of decisive war, built at the cost of the entire nation, yet they had failed to turn the tide of battle in their own era. Once Yamato had gone down under American torpedoes during Operation Ten-Go, it had simply sunk to the bottom and become the navy's largest underwater wreck.
And now?
Now those same giant ships had become enemy assets, abetting disaster and threatening to rain their guns down on Japan's own soil.
"Tell the coastal artillery batteries and anti-ship units to stay on alert. Yes—our anti-air defenses too. Shoot every one of those damned 'birds' out of the sky. The bridges linking Shikoku to Honshu and the coastal industrial zones must not be lost. And tell the people handling industrial relocation to move faster. Time is not on our side."
They had estimated the firing range of those ships based on their original designs.
The result was alarming.
Yamato's main guns alone had the range to hit nearly every vital target they had.
Its 460mm main guns fired shells weighing 1.46 tons apiece, with a maximum range exceeding forty-two kilometers. Add to that twelve 155mm secondary guns, one hundred fifty-six 25mm anti-aircraft guns, twenty-four 127mm anti-aircraft guns, and then Takao—that "super-heavy" cruiser—with its five twin 203mm main turrets, ten guns total.
It was a nightmare.
A naval artillery group had come knocking.
Japan's islands had never had strategic depth to begin with. Even Honshu, the largest of the main islands, was only about three hundred kilometers across at its widest north-south span.
Shikoku was the smallest of the four major islands. From east to west it stretched only around two hundred kilometers, and north to south it was even narrower. Back in the Sengoku period, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Shikoku, Chōsokabe territory had been broken apart quickly precisely because of that terrain: the island was narrow, lacked strong natural buffers, and its core regions could be isolated with alarming ease.
In modern warfare, that same narrowness meant something brutal—an attack on one coast could almost immediately threaten the whole island.
Most of the remaining industry and agriculture in Shikoku were concentrated on the few coastal plains that still mattered: the Tokushima Plain, the Kōchi Plain, and a handful of river mouths. The land fit for settlement and cultivation was limited, and almost all of it hugged the shoreline.
Those factories and the bridges to the mainland were exactly the sort of targets an enemy would prioritize.
If they had not been defending them so desperately, the bridges would already have been blown apart and the industrial zones leveled. Shikoku would have become an isolated grave.
The subordinate writing down Fujiwara's orders hesitated, clearly worried, before finally speaking.
"And the Prime Minister's office…?"
"The Prime Minister and the cabinet are too busy fighting with the Diet over personnel appointments in the reclaimed zones. The Imperial household has its own pile of nonsense going on too. What exactly do you expect me to say to them? Ignore it."
At that, Fujiwara's face darkened. He slapped the intelligence report down on the desk. The crisis had barely eased, and already those vermin were reverting to their old disgusting habits.
There were still tens of millions of enemies outside.
Foreign aid was scant.
Inside Shikoku, over a million refugees were still waiting to be saved.
Their already stretched forces were having an extremely difficult time holding back the Saint Organization's bioweapon armies and modern firepower.
And on top of that, isolated infections were still appearing here and there across the island, tying down more military police and public health personnel.
Yes, they had clawed back quite a bit of territory by now.
But that had come at enormous cost—massive consumption of manpower and matériel, just like the disastrous offensives in other wars. Their standing forces had been bled, ammunition stocks were plummeting, and even the factories producing shells were near despair.
They could not sustain large-scale offensives anymore.
"Damn that international 'wait-and-see' attitude. And that senile fool in the Prime Minister's office—does he honestly think anyone out there has spare capacity to save us? He'd be better off doing what Ogasawara Yusuke did and fleeing!"
Ogasawara Yusuke had still been in Shikoku only a short while ago, but the moment the great infected tide began to approach, he had used "seeking aid from our eastern neighbor" as an excuse to hop on a plane and flee east.
He still had not come back.
Honestly, Fujiwara thought bitterly, they might as well have died on the road. At least then they would not still be dragging things down.
He wanted nothing more than to continue pressing the offensive and reclaiming land properly.
But without full control over the highest authority and the coercive apparatus of the state, he could only bide his time.
Thinking that far, Fujiwara found his fingers tightening around the paper in his hand until they left visible creases behind. But after a moment, he forced his tone back under control and changed the subject.
"The new expert team's been here nearly five days now. Their work should be properly underway by this point."
His subordinate understood immediately and responded:
"Everything's proceeding smoothly. The latest inhibitor they brought is proving very effective. That said, Commissioner Kono has complained that they're short on material from special infected specimens, which is preventing further stages of drug development—especially radiation-type infected."
Fujiwara was already aware of that. As a senior Committee official, he knew the general background.
The research was not simply aimed at resisting the virus. It was meant to strengthen the human body as well—to optimize its functions, and at the same time suppress the more malignant elements of the Sumero virus.
And the regenerative properties of radiation-type infected were particularly important. Their bodies seemed to maintain a bizarre balance between repair and collapse. Current research suggested that material derived from such infected could help stabilize the relationship between the human body and the virus.
The problem was that once one of those infected died, the radiation contamination it produced was severe enough to make sample retrieval extraordinarily difficult.
He weighed the matter.
It might be worth supporting Kono Chiyo's proposal.
"What exactly is she asking for?" Fujiwara asked. "Does she want us to dispatch troops to assist her experiments?"
"No. Commissioner Kono wants to personally lead a team to Fukushima. The application is here with me. Since the ghost-warship situation was the more urgent matter, I didn't place it before you immediately. Please review it now."
He hurriedly withdrew the request form from his briefcase.
Fujiwara took it, scanned it, and began weighing it against the current operational picture.
Most of the Saint Organization's forces were now concentrated south of Tokyo. The units they had previously left elsewhere had been drawn inward to meet the fortified lines outside Shikoku.
That meant there should not be many infected concentrations left in Fukushima.
Aside from that Monarch-class specimen that had already been taken out by aircraft, and a number of mid-level threats still pending cleanup…
And besides, Kono Chiyo's motives here were hardly pure.
What should be done?
She was sent by Headquarters. The current vaccine research and inhibitor development depended on her.
Her request could not simply be ignored.
But security mattered too.
He had no intention of allowing another command disaster to unfold, and not long ago a Ground Self-Defense Force major general had gone missing while traveling to a Self-Defense Force enclave somewhere on Honshu.
He thought it over again.
More personnel, then.
And while they were at it, they could fold in another mission as well.
Not only for Kono Chiyo's sake, but because of another piece of intelligence they had obtained earlier.
After another moment of mental calculation, he made his decision.
"I approve it," Fujiwara said. "Assign Special Section's A Team to accompany her. Have them take the sea route—fewer variables. And prepare armed helicopters at the airfield as well. That other intelligence task goes to A Team too. Make sure they deploy heavily equipped."
"Understood. I'll arrange it immediately."
With a bow, the subordinate took the signed approval and left.
The room was left with only Fujiwara Shigetake in it.
He stood there, hands clasped behind him, staring at the map before him, his expression unreadable.
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