September 18th, 1945. Six days after the promise.
The mission briefing felt like fate disguised as military orders. Sekitanki stood in the Unit 23 barracks, staring at the assignment sheet with barely controlled hope threatening to fracture his careful composure:
ASSIGNMENT: Scientific Equipment Transport and Security DetailDestination: Research Facility SevenPersonnel: Eight soldiers, three military scientistsObjective: Escort Dr. Kobayashi and research team to examine classified equipment. Provide security during extended analysis session.Duration: 12-16 hours (overnight stay authorized)Threat Level: Moderate - American observation, potential resistance cell activity
Research Facility Seven. Where his time machine was being held. Where his only way home sat under military guard, being examined by scientists who couldn't possibly understand what they'd found.
Twelve to sixteen hours of access. Maybe—if they were careful, if they were smart, if luck favored desperate time travelers—they'd get more than the ten-minute glimpse Ishida had granted weeks ago.
This was reconnaissance. The prelude to their heist. Their chance to memorize every detail, every security measure, every weakness they'd need to exploit when they came back to steal the machine.
"We volunteered," Kaito said quietly, appearing beside him. "Hayashi accepted immediately. Said we're the most reliable soldiers in the unit." "Because we haven't broken down yet. Everyone else is drinking or crying or staring at walls."
"We're good at hiding our breakdowns." Kaito's expression was carefully neutral, but his eyes held the same barely-suppressed hope. "This is it. Our chance to see inside. To plan the real operation."
Sekitanki glanced around the barracks. Other soldiers were preparing with mechanical efficiency—checking weapons, organizing equipment, the movements of people who'd stopped believing any mission mattered beyond temporary survival.
Only he and Kaito carried purpose. Only they had something to fight for beyond tomorrow. "Captain Ishida specifically requested us," Sekitanki said, keeping his voice low. "Why? He suspects we're not ordinary soldiers. This could be a test."
"Or he trusts us. You saved his life. Giri matters in Japanese culture." "Giri also matters when you're testing someone's loyalty. Put them close to what they want most. See if they betray themselves."
Kaito absorbed this. "Then we're perfect. Can't show too much interest. Can't ask suspicious questions. Just observe. Memorize. Act like soldiers bored by science we don't understand."
"Can you do that? Pretend not to care about technology from your own era?" "Can you? That's your machine. Your only way home. Can you look at it with studied disinterest while cataloguing every damaged component?"
The question was fair. Sekitanki had spent three weeks obsessing over that machine, dreaming about it, organizing components with religious precision. Could he stand in the same room and pretend it meant nothing?
I survived three weeks fighting prehistoric monsters by becoming something harder than soft. I can survive twelve hours of pretending. "I'll manage," he said. "We both will."
The convoy departed at dawn—four military trucks carrying soldiers, scientists, and equipment through streets still adjusting to occupation. Tokyo looked simultaneously familiar and alien: the same buildings, the same streets, but American flags flying where the Rising Sun had been, GIs directing traffic, Japanese civilians moving with the careful neutrality of the defeated.
Dr. Kobayashi sat across from Sekitanki in the truck bed—a figure in his late fifties, educated at Imperial University, carrying himself with the precise dignity of someone whose entire worldview had been systematically demolished.
"You're the unusual soldiers," he said, studying Sekitanki and Kaito with sharp, analytical eyes. "Captain Ishida speaks of you often. Says you ask... interesting questions when you think no one's listening."
Sekitanki kept his expression carefully blank. "Just soldiers, Doctor. No different from anyone else."
"Soldiers who speak with peculiar accents. Who carry injuries suggesting combat experience beyond standard training. Who, according to Ishida, demonstrate understanding of technical concepts that ordinary infantry shouldn't possess." Kobayashi smiled slightly. "I'm a scientist. I notice patterns. And you two are patterns that refuse categorization."
Kaito deflected with practiced ease: "The war changed many of us, Doctor. We learned things we never expected to learn. Survival has a way of making you adaptable."
"Indeed. The war taught us that certainty is an illusion. That what we thought impossible was merely improbable." His expression grew distant, haunted. "Wait until you see what's in the facility. Then you'll understand how thoroughly our understanding of reality has been destroyed."
Research Facility Seven was a concrete fortress built into a hillside on Tokyo's eastern outskirts—reinforced against bombing, designed to survive everything except the conceptual destruction of believing your nation was invincible.
They passed through three security checkpoints. Each time, Sekitanki felt eyes assessing him, guards evaluating whether he belonged. His Carboniferous-trained reflexes screamed that he was entering predator territory, that every instinct should be telling him to flee.
But he'd learned in the prehistoric swamps that sometimes the only path forward was through the predator's den.
The facility's interior was clinical brutality—bare concrete walls painted institutional gray, harsh fluorescent lighting that made everything look slightly unreal, the smell of ozone and metal and something else. Something wrong.
The smell of his machine's radiation. Faint but present. Unmistakable to someone who'd built the device, who'd been irradiated by it during construction, who'd had its signature burned into his cellular structure.
It's here. Close. Maybe fifty meters.
"Section D," Kobayashi said, leading them deeper into the facility. "We've been examining the artifact for seven weeks now. And in that time, we've made exactly zero progress in understanding its fundamental purpose."
They descended two levels. The air grew cooler, recycled through ventilation systems that hummed with mechanical persistence. More guards at every junction—Japanese military police standing alongside American observers, the dual occupation creating confusion that might be exploitable.
Sekitanki catalogued everything: guard positions, camera angles, shift change patterns, blind spots in surveillance coverage. His mind worked like it had in the Carboniferous—processing threat assessment, identifying escape routes, preparing for violence that might become necessary.
Beside him, Kaito was doing the same. Two time travelers from different eras, both cataloguing security details while pretending to be ordinary soldiers following orders.
They reached Section D.
The door was reinforced steel, requiring three separate authorization codes. Kobayashi entered them with careful precision. The lock disengaged with a heavy thunk that echoed like a heartbeat.
"Soldiers," he said, "welcome to the impossible."
The room beyond was large—maybe twenty meters square, with observation equipment lining the walls, banks of monitoring instruments, and in the center, on a raised platform surrounded by measuring devices—
His time machine. Sekitanki's breath caught. Only months of accumulated survival experience let him keep his expression neutral.
The device looked worse than he'd remembered. The temporal core housing was cracked in multiple places, held together by improvised metal bracing that the scientists had added. The outer casing showed signs of disassembly—panels removed, internal components exposed, the whole thing apart by hands that didn't understand what they were touching.
But it was there. Real. Intact enough that repair might—might—be possible. Don't react. Don't show recognition. You're just a soldier seeing something weird. Act bored. Act confused.
"What is it?" Kaito asked, his Japanese perfectly calibrated to sound curious but uncomprehending.
"We don't know," Kobayashi admitted. "The Americans brought it to us three weeks after occupation began. Said it was found in the rubble after the final bombings. Wanted Japanese scientists to examine it because its construction incorporates some techniques that appear... similar to traditional Japanese metallurgy."
He circled the machine, gesturing at specific points.
"The outer casing uses a folding technique reminiscent of sword-making. But the metal itself is wrong—alloys we can't identify, crystalline structures that shouldn't be possible. And inside..."
Kobayashi carefully opened an access panel. Sekitanki forced himself not to flinch as the scientist's hands touched components that represented months of desperate work across multiple eras.
"Inside, we find circuitry decades beyond current technology. Miniaturization we can't replicate. Materials we can't recreate. And this—" He pointed to the temporal core.
"—generates a field we can measure but not explain. It warps space around it. Makes light behave incorrectly. We've had our best inspectors examine it. They say it's impossible. But here it sits, impossible and real."
One of the American observers—a captain named Morrison, according to his name tag—spoke up in English: "Our working theory is that it's a German experimental weapon. Something they were developing toward the end of the war. Advanced radar, maybe. Or some kind of directed energy system."
Sekitanki understood English well enough. The Americans had no idea what they'd found. They were treating a time machine like experimental radar equipment.
Good. Better they stay ignorant. Better they don't understand what it can actually do. "Can we examine it more closely?" Sekitanki asked, keeping his voice carefully casual. "For security purposes. Making sure it's not dangerous."
Kobayashi considered this. "Supervised examination, yes. But don't touch anything. We've already had two researchers injured when they accidentally activated... something. Brief energy discharge. Nothing permanent, but we're being cautious now."
They spent the next hour circling the machine while Kobayashi and his team ran tests. Sekitanki memorized everything:
Damage Assessment:
The machine was barely holding together after the Kamakura-to-1945 jump. The temporal core housing had seven major cracks—structurally compromised, but still repairable if reinforced carefully. The quantum oscillator fared worse: three of its chambers were completely destroyed, and only two were still barely functional.
The tachyon emitter array was a total loss and would need to be rebuilt from scratch. The power system had been mostly fried during the jump, leaving it unstable and dangerous to reconnect. The navigation computer was corrupted, its data possibly beyond recovery. Even the outer casing had suffered—disassembled in fourteen separate locations, with multiple panel mounts bent or broken.
In short, the machine hadn't just failed—it had survived something it was never meant to endure.
Security Observations:
The room was under constant surveillance. Four guards were posted inside at all times, and cameras covered every corner—except for a narrow blind spot near the ventilation shaft. The door was secured with a triple-code lock, though only Kobayashi and Morrison knew the full sequence. American observers were present during every examination, watching closely and recording everything.
Security relaxed slightly after midnight, when the detail dropped to two guards—still risky, but the only window where movement might go unnoticed.
Exploitable Weaknesses:
The guard shift changed at 2200 hours, creating a fifteen-minute window where orders overlapped and attention fractured. The ventilation system connected to the main facility and was wide enough for a person to crawl through. Power to Section D ran through a basement junction that could be shut down if reached. Meanwhile, American and Japanese personnel were still coordinating poorly—jurisdictional disputes leaving small but exploitable gaps.
Sekitanki absorbed all of it with the same analytical detachment he once used to study Carboniferous predator patterns. This was just another survival problem. Another impossible situation to be reduced, planned around, and solved—because failure was not an outcome he allowed himself to consider.
"Your turn," he murmured to Kaito during a moment when the scientists were distracted. "What do you see?"
"Electronic security is 1940s-level primitive. No digital systems. No networked monitoring. Everything manual. Everything exploitable." Kaito's eyes tracked the room with predatory assessment. "The real problem is will power. Too many guards, too many observers. We'd need a distraction. Something big enough to pull security away without triggering facility-wide lockdown."
"Fire?"
"Too obvious. They'd assume sabotage, lock everything down. We need something that looks like an accident or an external threat. American-Japanese tensions, maybe. If we could trigger a jurisdictional dispute, create confusion about who has authority—"
"Then we could slip through the cracks." "Exactly."
Dr. Kobayashi approached them. "Soldiers, I need to run a high-energy test. For safety, please wait outside the chamber. Observation room is through that door."
They filed into the observation room—a smaller space with reinforced glass overlooking Section D. The scientists remained inside, preparing their test. Sekitanki and Kaito stood side by side, watching through the glass as Kobayashi's team positioned measurement equipment around the machine.
"We're going to steal it," Kaito whispered. "Actually steal it. This isn't theoretical anymore. We're committing to this." "Yes." "People will die. Guards doing their jobs. Maybe scientists. Maybe even Kobayashi, who seems like a decent person caught in impossible circumstances."
"I know." "And you're okay with that?"
Sekitanki thought of the Carboniferous—killing giant insects to survive, becoming apex predator through necessity. Thought of Kamakura—fighting tournament battles that should have killed him. Thought of every impossible thing he'd done to stay alive.
"I'm okay with whatever it takes to go home," he said quietly. "I've killed before. I'll kill again if necessary. The only question is whether you can." Kaito was silent for a long moment. Then: "My grandmother is dying. I'll do whatever it takes. Kill whoever stands between me and saving her."
"Then we understand each other."
Through the glass, Kobayashi activated the test. The machine hummed—that familiar subsonic vibration that Sekitanki felt in his bones. The temporal core began glowing faintly, residual quantum energy responding to the scientists' probing.
And then something went wrong. The glow intensified. Became blinding. Reality warped visibly around the machine, space-time bending in ways that made the eyes hurt to see.
"What's happening?" Morrison shouted. "Kobayashi, shut it down!" "I'm trying! The system isn't responding!"
The temporal field expanded rapidly, unstable and wild, quantum energy cascading through the chamber. Alarm klaxons screamed. Automated safety systems engaged, trying to contain whatever they thought was happening.
But Sekitanki understood immediately: the machine had detected his presence. His quantum signature, burned into his cells during construction, was resonating with the temporal core. The device was trying to establish connection with its creator.
It's reaching for me. Recognizing me. The field expanded toward the observation window. Scientists scattered, guards shouted, American observers were screaming into radios for backup.
"Everyone out!" Morrison ordered. "Evacuate Section D!"
Chaos erupted. People fleeing the chamber, guards trying to maintain order while also running, the entire facility responding to what they thought was a catastrophic equipment failure.
In the confusion, Sekitanki pressed his hand against the observation glass.
The temporal field touched the barrier between them. For a moment—just a moment—he felt the connection. The machine recognizing him. Welcoming him home.
I'm coming back for you. Soon. I promise. Then the field collapsed. The machine went dormant. The crisis passed, leaving only smoking equipment and terrified scientists.
But the seed had been planted. The facility would be in chaos for days, investigating what went wrong. Security would be disrupted. Patterns would change.
Perfect conditions for a heist.
[FOUR HOURS LATER - FACILITY MEDICAL BAY]
The "accident" had left two researchers with small injuries and everyone on edge. Sekitanki and Kaito were being checked over by facility medics—standard procedure after exposure to unknown energy.
"You're both fine," the medic said, finishing his examination. "No radiation exposure. No cellular damage. You were lucky." Lucky. If they only knew. As they left the medical bay, Captain Morrison approached. His expression was troubled.
"Something's not adding up," he said in English. Sekitanki pretended not to fully understand, but caught enough. "That machine—it's never activated spontaneously before. Seven weeks of testing, zero anomalies. Then you two show up and suddenly it goes haywire?"
"Are you accusing us of something, Captain?" Sekitanki asked in broken English. "I'm saying it's suspicious. Very suspicious. I'll be recommending your unit be barred from future facility access."
Perfect. Act offended. Give him what he expects. "We did nothing! Just followed orders!" Morrison studied him, then nodded. "Maybe. But I'm watching you both. If I find out you're involved in something—anything—you'll wish the machine had killed you."
After he left, Kaito whispered: "That was a threat."
"That was confirmation he suspects us. Which means we're running out of time. If he investigates our backgrounds, he'll find inconsistencies. Our cover is solid but not perfect."
"How long do we have?" "Days. Maybe a week. Then American intelligence will start asking questions we can't answer."
They returned to the barracks in the truck convoy, sitting in silence while Tokyo passed by outside. The mission had been successful beyond their hopes—they'd seen the machine, assessed its condition, identified security weaknesses, and inadvertently created chaos that would make the heist easier.
But they'd also started a clock ticking. American suspicion would grow. Japanese security would adapt. Every day of delay made their task harder.
"We need to accelerate everything," Sekitanki said as they climbed out of the truck. "The heist. The repair. The escape. All of it happens soon or it doesn't happen at all."
"How soon?" "Two weeks. Maybe three. We gather the team, finalize the plan, and we steal our way home." Kaito nodded. Then, so quietly Sekitanki almost missed it: "I'm scared. For the first time since arriving in 1945, I'm actually terrified."
"Why? We've faced worse odds."
"Because before, we were just surviving. Now we're planning. Making choices that'll get people killed. Committing to action we can't take back." Kaito's voice was hollow. "In the Carboniferous, you killed to survive. In Kamakura, you fought because refusing meant death. But this? This is premeditated. This is choosing to become something that kills for personal gain."
Sekitanki understood completely. This was the line between reactive violence and proactive murder. Between survival and crime. Between being forced into impossible situations and choosing them.
"I know," he said quietly. "But I stopped being innocent the moment I built a time machine without considering the consequences. You stopped being innocent when you violated causality to save your grandmother. We're already guilty. This just makes it obvious."
"Does that make it easier?" "No. But it makes it honest."
They entered the barracks to find Sergeant Hayashi drunk as usual, other soldiers in various states of breakdown or recovery. Unit 23 had become a collection of people who'd survived but stopped living.
Except them. They still had purpose. Still had hope. Still had promises to keep.
"Tomorrow we start recruiting," Sekitanki said. "We need five people besides us. People willing to die for someone else's escape. People who've lost everything and want their deaths to mean something."
"I know exactly who to ask."
That night, Sekitanki lay in his bunk and stared at the ceiling. In his mind, he ran through calculations—trajectories, probability thoughts overall. The same analytical thinking that had served him through multiple eras.
But underneath the math, he felt something else: guilt. Because he was leading people toward probable death. Because he was planning violence. Because he was becoming the kind of person who'd sacrifice others for personal goals.
Is this what I've become? Is this who Yuki and Takeda and Kanemoto saved? Someone who'd kill for a chance to go home? He had no answer. Just the crushing weight of necessity and the knowledge that he'd do it anyway.
Because going home—telling his mother he was sorry, explaining to his father that he finally understood—that mattered more than his own innocence. I'm sorry. To everyone who'll die. To everyone I'll betray. To the person I used to be. But I'm going home. Whatever it costs.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "Borrowed Time"]