Kyoto Line

During the bombing of Kyoto, the city is devastated by artillery shells. People seek shelter and some try to salvage what's left. Saruwatari Kaito makes his way to his workplace, a munitions factory, and finds it intact. He then travels through the destroyed streets to reach a tower in the Dead Zone. From there, he uses infrared binoculars to observe the fortified Kyoto Line and the activity of the Northeast Asian Coalition Front. He eagerly awaits the retaliation from Emiko and the chaos it will bring. The Kyoto Line. Shelling began just before the evening whistle. The sun had fallen from the sky, its last rays bathing the entire city of Kyoto in purple. The flashes of .203mm cannons firing would have looked like lightning to any observer. The next hint anyone had that something was amiss was the roaring of shells as they fell to earth. In movies and cartoons, a falling artillery shell makes a whistling sound as it falls. In reality, they sound like a train is falling on you. A train loaded with fire and death and shrapnel and smoke, with a conductor straight from hell who can't wait to take you home with him. By the time you hear it, there's nothing you can do. You can only stare up at the sky and wonder if today is the day your office block and everyone inside is turned into powder. After the first shots had landed, the world was silent. People flooded out of buildings, rushing to shelters. No one talked. No one screamed. No one stopped to look at the piles of concrete and wood, speckled with what had once been their friends and neighbors. Everyone was listening, listening for the next shell to fall. The barrage continued into the early hours of the morning. Some people returned home, or, failing that, what used to be their home. Some wandered into the streets, looking to loot the rubble before Ameiko officials arrived to perform cleanup. Many more opted for the security of the shelters. Saruwatari Kaito didn't either. Kaito scurried towards the munitions factory he had been working at before the barrage began. He had to navigate the rubble and human detritus that littered Kyoto's streets. Kaito slithered through a water pipe, half obscured by blooming moss, waded through slurping patches of mud, and swung from rusted rebar that left a fine layer of flakes on his palms. But he was used to it. On occasion he would recognize someone, or part of someone, he had once known. A secondary school teacher. A man he had raced bicycles with when he was a boy. A girl who had rejected his advances with as much courtesy as possible. There was a time he would have mourned them. A time he would have fallen to his knees and wept. There was a time when his wails of horror would have been echoed all across the city. But that time was long gone. Now he merely acknowledged their absence from his life. Luckily, he found the factory just as he had left it. A metalworked sign hung askew, the only indication anything had happened at all. Kaito could make out the letters of K.O.P.2, still visible despite chip paint and years of rust. His ten-speed sat outside, miraculously untouched by the chaos around it. The route to the Kyoto outskirts was a familiar one. As familiar as any route could be, with streets which were no longer there. Where there had once been pavement, now there were only gaping chasms, as if a giant hand reached down and ripped a handful out of the earth. In some, filled with putrid water, bloated corpses drifted, their skin pale and their features distorted. Once Kaito reached the Dead Zone, he had to dismount and travel on foot. The Dead Zone had been the first target of the Rosuke in the bombing of Kyoto. That was before the ameko had fully fortified the city, before shrines bristled with anti-aircraft batteries, before the Kyoto Line had been drawn. It took him almost an entire hour to reach the tower. His tower, as he thought of it. One of the few buildings left unscathed by the shellings. The tower was old, made of hand-carved stone. While some sections remained intact, it had still turned green with disrepair. Its wooden roof long ago toppled inwards, taking a floor with it. Kaito's hands slipped on slick, cold stones and foul-smelling wood as he scrambled upwards. After an exhausting climb, Kaito settled into his blind. It had been constructed from odds and ends, found in various buildings throughout the Dead Zone. A soiled mattress, draped over various pieces of furniture, and hidden almost entirely behind a bedsheet faded gray with oil and stained by blood. Kaito rummaged through a rotting chest of drawers for his most prized possession. A pair of infrared binoculars he had scavenged from a dead man during a shelling many years ago. He rested on the mattress and stared out at the Kyoto Line. It stretched for miles in length and width, filled with coils of razor wire bristling with gun turrets of every shape and size, threaded together by trenches filled with Emiko and Nihonjin alike. There were no lights, but Kaito could still see the world as bright as day, traced in infrared gray. He silently watched the Kyoto Line for several minutes, before looking further east, towards the Northeast Asian Coalition Front. He could see that it too bustled with activity, as Chosen Jin, Shina, and Rosuke raced for the inevitable counter-shelling. Kaito waited patiently. It was only a matter of time before the Emiko retaliated. Kaito wanted to watch the shells fall. He wanted to watch Hell on Earth.