It seems that Kantai Collection is the new Touhou these days. Not that that's bad. But I took one look at the game, and even though I would very much so like to play it, that lottery system...oh God. And considering games like KanColle are VPN-restricted...

I initially wished to put this story in second person for the experience of writing a story as such, because the standard third-person omniscient narrator seems boring to write all the time, but lo and behold..."no second person" in the rules and guidelines. It seems this site is too scared of second person stories falling into the "trap" of interactive stories, but that is none of my business. All I know is that I wasn't going to make my own story interactive, but purely for the experience in writing in second person, but given my experience with the FF admins...

One last topic that I would like to mention is that the summary, now that I read it over a couple times, seems very...Fallout-esque, even though I wasn't thinking about Fallout when I first made the synopsis for this story. Oh well - full steam ahead regardless.

Hope you enjoy what I have to write.

-Akyuu no Joshu

Houston, Texas.

Or, more accurately, what used to be Houston, Texas.

A young man, tall but rather boyish-looking under the cap that he wears backwards on his oily dark blue hair, climbs the last of a series of upturned asphalt and rock that once made up Interstate 59, one of the many highways leading into the city. In the young man's case, he had traveled south to reach the northern outskirts of Houston, just in time to avoid a tornado that he had seen brewing up further west on his way down to the former city. He sighs lightly, pulls out a radiation-proof canteen, twists the cap off, and takes a light sip of the clean water inside - water that isn't contaminated to all hell. That water he held in his hand could possibly be the only clean water source for about four hundred miles around, give or take maybe a couple dozen more.

A breathtakingly somber scene lays before the young man as he stands putting his canteen away in the large survival backpack that he carries. The city of Houston, Texas, lays in ruins. Its multitudes of once-proud, once-tall skyscrapers that once stood as symbols of economic and social order and as the epitome of American capitalism and democracy are now in the process of urban decay, only decades after they were abandoned. Most of the skyscrapers now lie scattered about on the earth's crust like fallen Jenga pieces, their debris and broken glass littering everywhere as natural vegetation takes them over as new homes. The few that still stand are in imminent danger of collapsing at any time, both due to deteriorating infrastructure and the weight of all the animals and other wildlife that have taken up residence in the aging hulks of scrap metal that those mysterious humans always seem to be fond of building yet seem to have stopped building or occupying anymore. A scene of true apocalyptic nature, as it strikes the boy as he begins his treacherous descent down into the slight crater that surrounds the city in a perfect circle.

Polchow, Damon. Six foot three, 177 pounds. Short, dark blue hair with a slight widow's peak that tends to get very oily very fast, even if he doesn't do any physical activity. Despite his boyish looks and rather awkward tallness, he is well built from years of enduring harsh conditions that he's lived in all his life in a world devastated by weapons of mass destruction. The weather-worn backwards, dirtied and smudgy white cap, tearing at the ends, sports a small emblem, a yin-yang with large white and black wings, that is very faded and hardly distinguishable now. Light, plain black T-shirt with plenty of small rips that are the proud wounds of the journey that the boy made to reach this desolated city with a current population of zero humans, but the boy does not seem to notice or care about the mending his shirt requires. The same applies to his ordinary Levi jeans, whose endurance and reliability are proving more than its weight in gold for him at this point. The gray Jansport backpack, also dotted with various smudges of various origin, remains faithful, refusing to show any rips at all just yet despite the harsh conditions it has seen thus far with the load that it carries.

Damon hops expertly from one jagged, upturned boulder to another.

He is armed with an MK-14 Rogue Chassis Rifle System, equipped with a CRS-468 telescopic reflex sight, forward handgrip, and detachable gunsling, that he wields with his left arm quite easily and almost effortlessly, despite its heavy load. A Predator load-bearing vest sports extra 7.62x51mm DMR NATO magazines for ease of access and reload, along with extra ammunition for his .45 GAP Glock 37, which sits securely in its holster around Damon's upper right thigh.

These weapons he had scavenged from wandering bandit parties he had ambushed or from abandoned military bases and camps that he came across during his trek down to Houston. The MK-14 Rogue Chassis he found at some small military outpost hidden neatly away in the mountains of the Appalachians, and the Glock from a police station in Little Rock. He had cycled through many weapons along the way, but these he found to do the job the best and had never parted with them since. The bigger the bullet, the better, until the size starts being a problem in regards to weight. The DMR round fit his fancy quite neatly, along with the GAP round of his Glock. The bullets would stop anyone - and anything - with one well-placed shot, and there were no exceptions to this.

It is Damon's belief that without this razor-sharp efficiency, someone like him would never be able to survive on their own in this world. Indeed, it is unheard of for a young man like Damon to wander about in the irradiated wasteland alone, with no apparent protective gear and armed to the teeth with military grade weaponry.

Another two hours pass as Damon enters the broken streets of the city of Houston. When the nuclear war - or, as everyone liked to call it, World War III, broke out, Houston was one of the first cities to get hit, surprisingly enough. As it turned out, it was meant to be a distraction target as Iran secretly targeted a coordinated volley of intercontinental ballistic missile strikes at Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, the Pentagon, and Seattle, when Iranian operatives installed a dirty bomb in South Central Houston and set it off. As Houston was evacuated, the missiles rolled in, and the age-old political and military school of thought known as mutually assured destruction got shoved down the black hole of forgotten history forever. In the ensuing exchanges of warheads, the shock of all the rockets hitting the earth triggered mass earthquakes around the globe, one of which hit Texas so hard that Houston, ironically, became the only city still largely intact once the aftershocks finally died down, despite the fact that it was the first city to be abandoned.

To Damon, the term "World War III" was despicable and ignorant. To him, the conflict that destroyed the world of the generations before him could hardly be qualified as a world war at all. It was a shitstorm of nuclear explosions and chemicals thrown around the world that lasted exactly for a month and only ended because the missile strikes killed everyone and anyone related to the operation of the rest of the nukes, and everyone else who still weren't dying of radiation or other infections agreed to stop bombing the absolute hell out of one another. How ironic - but it was deserved, in his opinion.

If people had become so stupid to the point of bombing each other with weapons they knew could very well cause the end of the world, then let them all die. They didn't deserve to live with that extent of stupidity anyway. The other three or four billion other innocent people they took with them may have been tragic, but in the end, no one cares, because they're just all a statistic now, was Damon's reasoning. Everybody else is too busy making sure that they are not going to die of radiation poisoning tomorrow. And regardless, there is nothing they can do about their world now except attempt to carry on their miserable lives. Thinking about the deaths of everyone else is just a burden everyone can live without.

The late afternoon sun boils the scorched earth, the radiation clouds in the atmosphere from the nuclear fallout of the war acting as greenhouse gases and reflecting heat back down onto the planet. At least those stupid idiots didn't launch enough nukes to glass the entire fucking planet like that one meteor did to the dinosaurs or whatever or cause nuclear winter or anything of the sort. Not that it mattered to Damon, who jogs down the overgrown and abandoned Hirsch Road to reach his destination, Pasadena District, at a brisk pace.

In fact, temperature didn't matter at all to Damon. It never did, among many other things that normal, un-irradiated humans would find irritating.

Damon's load-bearing vest clacks and clicks as the magazines bump against one another with Damon's quick gait. Because of his inhuman ability to run at a set pace seemingly without limit, Damon found that he had access to much more of the world than almost anyone else. The survivors of the war were confined to areas either unaffected by all the radiation or areas that were painstakingly cleaned by valiant hazmat crews who risked their lives to make suitable areas to live for everyone else.

Wow, such valiance, much heroism.

Too bad they're all dead, poor bastards.

Damon never understood why so many people set out to participate in Operation Revival. It was an international movement called on by the United Nations as their last global announcement for people to salvage what they could from the world and clean as much radiation as they could. Of the three billion survivors in the world, about another half a billion soon began succumbing to the fallout as they fought to clean up the radiation with what limited supplies they could. It was because of their efforts that South America, Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Siberia, and Alaska are now virtually rid of radiation.

Not to mention the Arctic and the Antarctic were basically untouched, because at least the nuke-happy idiots knew not to bomb a place where no one lived. Now, ironically enough, the two poles are the most inhabited regions in the world, as people decided to go live with the penguins and polar bears.

Obviously, bad things happen when you relocate entire populations of hungry refugees onto areas with virtually no means of producing food naturally.

There are no more penguins or polar bears or seals left in the world.

Eh, it could've been worse.

Damon passes underneath freeway 510 and notices a small pack of wild dogs patrolling around Clinton Drive. His experience with the natural wildlife never was good: all the radiation in the air, especially in North America, which had been one of the main targets of the nuclear holocaust, eventually rolled over the entire country, causing the survivors to dig in, Fallout-style, to avoid dying of radiation-induced cancer. Needless to say, the wildlife either escaped if they could or simply shriveled up and died. The very few who stayed and survived became irradiated to the point of immunity, like the dogs now sniffing at some old trash barrels overturned onto the street. It is as if the radiation had reverted them back to their ancestral dire wolf roots, and their bodies swelled several times their normal domestic house-dog sizes and their behaviors became much more aggressive. At some points, Damon considered the wildlife to be greater enemies than the rogue humans he'd met.

As he tries to sneak around behind a faded and ruined brick wall, he hears one of the dog barking hysterically and swears under his breath. Most likely those dogs had not smelled the scent of a human for so long that it was too easy for them to detect his presence, so he ducks low against the wall. His hands, clothed in black fingerless gloves, clench as he withdraws a knife handle from the right side of his load bearing vest, and at a press of a button, the knife blade swings down like a Swiss army knife, then spits out another sharp steel segment at an angle to form a makeshift karambit knife.

As soon as the first dog jumps over the wall, Damon times his attack perfectly to quickly stand and catch the dog in its chest and stop it dead in the air, severing the spinal discs to deny the animal the use of its legs. The other two dogs bound over the wall after their leader and quickly grind to a halt to face the mysterious human and yelp in surprise to see the sight of their leader bleeding and not moving, lying on the ground in front of the human. The scent of blood, however, throws the dogs into a frenzy, and they rush at the human, thirsting for more blood. Damon lifts the dying dog still impaled on his karambit and simply slaps away both of the charging dogs with one fluid, quick flick of his arm and hurls the dog on his knife onto the body of one of its followers, pinning it down. The last dog jumps for Damon's throat again, but Damon drops his rifle onto the ground, deftly snaps his karambit back into the handle, drops the handle, and grabs the irradiated dog by its jaws in the air. For a moment, the dog helplessly flails its legs in midair, a foot or two off the ground, and with another fluid motion, Damon rips the dog's body apart into two grisly, bloody, gory halves and tosses the two halves of the corpse aside. The pinned dog yelps and barks, struggling to escape the weight of the alpha dog that has by now expired, and Damon crushes his hiking boot down on each of the last dog's legs, breaking all of them and causing the dog to whine and scream in unintelligible pain. Damon then grabs the dead dog above it by the limp head and proceeds to club the dead dog against the live dog until both are bleeding pulps of lifeless organic tissue. He leaves the corpses and gathers his weapons again, grumbling that the damn dogs made him waste his time. The vultures and crows will find the bodies soon enough.

Thankfully, Pasadena District is not too far away now, where there should still stand a certain house that contains the prize that Damon seeks, given that the street signs are still legible after all these years.

The prize that Damon Polchow is looking for in an abandoned city that has many other items of value that have still not yet been claimed or stolen because of its shield of high radiation is a prize only he knows. No one else in the world knows about his objective, a fact that he personally feels very proud and powerful about possessing. He had heard rumors from friendly communities in Chicago that in the last decade before the nukes dropped, American scientists were suddenly deported from their country for allegedly working on ethically questionable research and development projects, but no one really knew what exactly they were working on. For whatever reason, they ended up in Japan, and no one heard from them ever since and became largely forgotten in the mushroom clouds that followed. But Damon is a risk taker, a gambler. He enjoys the thrills of hitting the jackpot when he strikes it hot, and even if his gambles do not pay off, he still enjoys the process of reaching the end of his efforts, because anything is better than living life in those boring-as-all-fuck CCPL outposts scattered throughout America, where survivors managed to dig in and do what they could to get rid of the contamination in their area. Damon himself traveled from the CCPL branch in Springfield, Illinois to come to Houston. When Damon heard that rumor and found that no one was really willing to dig deeper into the mystery, he made it his mission to find out what this "secret" project entailed. Luck had fallen right into his outstretched hand as soon afterwards, he had heard that a military airdrop had delivered an American scientist from Tokyo to the town so that he could recover what he could from his home. Tracking him down, Damon kidnapped the scientist and interrogated him mercilessly about the secret project, and eventually, he extracted all the information he needed to get started.

"The F.L.E.E.T. Project", or the Fleet Expansion and Enhancement Test, was initiated in 2001 by a team of American engineers, codenamed "Constitution", who were contracted by the U.S. Navy to build enhancements to the American navy as a direct response to the September 11 attacks. Quickly, the members of Constitution realized that their budget was much lower than they had initially anticipated, with most of the funding diverted to the American Air Force and Army instead, yet their standards and requirements remained the same. Unwilling to lose their contract but simultaneously unable to develop any real improvements to the American current ship technology with their limited funds, they brought in Ukrainian and Romanian scientists and doctors who specialized in stem cell research. Their solution was not to make improvements to current generation ships, but instead use the cheap, older-generations of ship technology - namely that of the second World War - and condense it to the size of a human. In other words, their goal was to create a fleet of humanoid robots - or something like that - that had the firepower of World War II-era ship technology that would be incredibly cheap but still be able to wield significant battle power and augment the larger, more modern ships of the American fleet nicely as escort boats or naval support squadrons. But the problem with making robots was that the funding necessarily for such robots would probably exhaust their tiny budget before their project could be completed, and most likely the Navy would find out what they were doing and cut their contract immediately. So instead, they brought over those European scientists so that they could instead artificially create humans genetically altered to harness the power of ships within them. They had planned to keep their work as classified as they could, because they knew the Navy brass would immediately drop their contract if they found out that their work involved the shaky moral grounds of artificial human creation, and reveal their finished products at the very end so that the Navy would have to pay them no matter what. Unfortunately for team Constitution, the Navy found out anyway, but instead of dropping their contract, the brass kicked them out of the country over to Japan, where they worked with Japanese doctors and engineers to finish the job. From what Damon learned from the American scientist he had interrogated, the team eventually decided to name their new human ships after the World War II navy of Imperial Japan, as a token of thanks for the heavy Japanese team's involvement and assistance with the F.L.E.E.T. project. The scientist told Damon that they had shipped one of their first products to Houston, Texas, to be transported to the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, but as fate would have it, the nukes fell a few days after its arrival in the city. Apparently, it had been moved to the underground basement of the home of one of the American scientists as an extra safety precaution that it did not fall into the wrong hands, and it has sat there to this day, inactive.

Damon made sure that the product - ship - whatever you call it - did not get affected by radiation. The scientist said so, at the threat of death. If that bastard turns out to be wrong, Damon thought, he's going to have one hell of a time dying.

And for some reason, apparently all of the ships that they had managed to build were girls. Perhaps the female body was easier to work with on a genetic level. Or maybe those damn scientists were all just horny old men who wanted to make the excuse of having ass and tits in their workplace.

Doesn't matter now, now that most of those scientists are dead from radiation poisoning. Japan wasn't spared from the nukes either, as Japan was a major ally of the United States.

Following the directions that he had beat out of the scientist and memorized, Damon arrives on West Rustic Drive of the Pasadena District. The green trees that once occupied these suburbs long ago are now all just bony skeletons of dead matter, and the houses themselves appear as if they, too, are dying from the lack of human occupation. As Damon scans the empty and windy streets for the correct address, everywhere he looks, he sees ugliness. The world had become a giant sphere of rotting, putrid ugliness as the result of the war. Ugly, ugly, ugly. For someone who was born into the world after the nukes fucked everything, this kind of environment should be normal. But Damon's mother had taught him what beauty was. She made him, her son, realize just how damn ugly this world truly was - both in its people, and in itself. Damon wanted to change that. Damon was determined to create for himself a world that wasn't so damn ugly all the time.

Hopefully this ship girl, when he finds her, isn't as ugly as the rest of this world is.

Damon locates the correct house - an ordinary two-story house that typifies the American dream, with a garage and backyard. The windows are all beat out, the front door is barely hanging in place, and a row of crows screech at Damon as he walks up to the front door and kicks it down, causing the birds to fly off in fright. He swings his Glock 37 around as a precaution against any house robber or other roamer like him who may be after the same prize as he, as unlikely as that may be.

Finding the stairs down to the basement, hidden behind a small door that reveals a set of small stairs underneath the stairs leading up to the second floor, Damon descends into the complete darkness of the basement. The electric lights obviously would not work, so trying to flip them on would be a waste of effort, so Damon proceeds without a light source. Instead, his sickly yellow eyes the color of yellow fever morph colors like a chameleon to black, hiding the bright hue within the shrouds of darkness, and Damon can see in dark perfectly. Rows of boxes full of various, miscellaneous items litter the floor, unorganized and strewn about, most likely the result of a lazy homeowner, but a tall, secure safebox the size of a big gym locker that looks like it could fit a whole person inside it stands upright against the wall furthest from Damon, draped with a clean white curtain lined with a fine layer of dust. Damon holsters his Glock and pulls off the curtain, staring at the lock that restricts access to the contents of the safebox. Sighing, Damon simply grabs the lock with his hand, and, putting his other hand firmly against the front of the safebox, he tugs sharply at the lock, breaking it cleanly off so that he can fiddle with the lock mechanism within and unlock the door without having to kick his way in. He pulls the door slowly open, preparing to catch anything that falls out in case the contents within are going to spill out without warning.

But nothing of the sort happens. Instead, the door quietly squeaks to a stop, revealing a girl within.

"...Fifth Fubuki class destroyer, Murakumo," Damon whispers.

Even with the dulled visual senses that his night vision inflicts on his eyesight, Damon can still easily make out the physical appearance of his prize.

Fifth Fubuki Class Destroyer, Murakumo, encased in the body of a teenage girl who didn't look any older than fifteen or sixteen. Five foot seven or eight, about. A long, white one-piece sailor uniform with blue outlines and a red necktie, with the ends of the uniform reaching just past down her pelvis to her upper thighs. A dark gray undershirt that matches the same size as her sailor uniform. Long, sleek white hair that gives off a hint of pale or teal blue. Dark black pantyhose covering the slender legs and black-white loafers. Two metal blades that somehow hang in the air, suspended just behind her head, above the ears that add five or six more inches to her height. Her eyes are closed, and she is not breathing.

Following the instructions he had obtained, Damon reaches into the safebox and simultaneously presses the two buttons on her strange metal headgear, one on each side. Immediately, Murakumo's eyes snap open, revealing pure white scleras with no pupils. Her jaw begins to move, and a monotone, robotic voice begins to emit from her throat.

"Operating system initializing...

Retrieving system files...

Activating main power core...

Assessing main body condition...

Assessing equipment condition...

All conditions met and satisfactory. Fifth Fubuki Class Destroyer, Murakumo. Service number 39.

System lock detected. Please speak your name, your reference number, and password to proceed."

"Ken Simpson, reference number 17,468. Password, ENIAC."

A moment of silence passes as Murakumo seemingly does nothing. For that second, Damon is considering what he is going to do to the scientist when he returns to Springfield, but Murakumo's robotic monotone once again pipes up.

"...system lock lifted. Murakumo, now active."

Then, the darkness of the basement is somewhat dimly lit by a low, light green backlight that illuminates the upper cups of Murakumo's headgear. Her eyes, which lacked pupils, then develop said pupils, an orangish-red that reminds Damon of the inner fleshy juices of a tomato. Murakumo blinks a few times and emerges from the safebox, as the metal fastenings that held her in place within the safebox disengage and allow her to move. She stands before Damon and scowls at him.

"...what's going on here? You're not Admiral Sherman. Where is he? Where am I? Who are you?"

The sound of a sweet female voice falls upon Damon's ears, something he has not been able to enjoy in a very long time.

"The chain of command has been changed due to an unexpected development in circumstances. Starting today, you will henceforth be taking orders from me."

Murakumo narrows her eyes.

"Ha, ha, ha," she says, unamused. "I know what kind of person you are. You're one of those sick fucks who like to dream about how they tie up little girls in the dark and do disgusting things to them? Is that what this is? Do you realize who I am?"

Damon's eye twitches. What the hell did those fucking scientists do to build these girls?

"Fifth Fubuki class special-type destroyer, Murakumo. Modeled directly off the Japanese special-type destroyer of the same name from 1928 to 1942. One of the first finished ships of Project F.L.E.E.T.," Damon says in a low voice, keeping his patience intact.

"And who are you, then, exactly?"

"Damon Polchow. Irradiated survivor of the recent global shitstorm that is popularly known as World War III. Now your new commanding officer. Am I clear?"

Murakumo gives him an even more bizarre look.

"Damon...Polchow...? Survivor...World War III...what on Earth on you talking about?"

Damon takes a step forward, towards Murakumo. "Listen, a'ight? When you got transferred here to Houston, Ira - "

"Eeeeeh?!" Murakumo looks stunned. "I'm still here in Houston? What the hell am I doing in Houston? We're not at Charleston?"

"No, we're not, and let me explain. To make a long story short, right when you came here to Houston, World War III broke out when America and Iran started flinging nukes at each other, and that caused every nation with nukes to start bombing everyone else. It's been a long time since then. You hadn't been activated all this time - I'm the first person to reach you."

Murakumo looks visibly shaken. "Th - Then...wait, what...what year is it...?"

"2029."

"Wh-Whaaaaa...?! That far ahead...?! Wait, then - then when did this...this World War III start? I've only ever heard of the first two!"

"The bombs fell back in 2010. Most of the development team that built you is dead."

Murakumo is silent, too shocked to speak at first.

"...what about...what about the admiral...who was supposed to..." she almost whispers in a meek voice.

"Don't know what happened to him. I wasn't even born back then, so hell if I know."

"But you - you somehow knew about me! How did you know? Why have you come for me? I think - I think you're just trying to bullshit me - "

But Damon's patience snaps. Swiftly pulling out the knife handle from his vest, he raises the knife handle high above Murakumo's head, and a sharp shing! rips from the bottom of the handle, revealing a nano-thin blade shaped like a harpoon point, and plunges the knife right into Murakumo's cranium and piercing her brain.

"O-Ow?!" Murakumo yelps with the pain and grabs at Damon's right arm, but suddenly she freezes, finding herself devoid of all control over her limbs and body. Only her eyes and jaw are able to move so she can still talk. A thin trail of blood drips down her face as a small tile screen that flips up from the top of the knife handle projects a percentage, steadily rising from 0 to 100, which Murakumo can clearly see from her perspective through the transparent screen.

"Wh-what're you doing?! Stop, stop!" Murakumo shrieks, not knowing what is happening to her and extremely frightened over her inability to control her own body. "What're you going to do to me?! What do you want from me!?"

"You're annoying, and I don't have time to deal with your constant questions," Damon mutters calmly. "I already told you multiple times. You're taking orders from me now."

"B-But you haven't shown any credentials! For all I know, you could've just murdered everyone and just been feeding me lies all this time! Release me, now! ! !"

But Damon coldly watches the pixel numbers that glow in the dark hit 70, then 80, then 90, despite Murakumo's begging and screaming.

"P-Please! D-Don't shut me down, I'm begging you! A-A-Anything but that! N-No! No! ! ! NOOOOOO! ! ! ! ! !"

Her bloodcurdling shriek is cut short as soon as the pixels form the number 100, and Murakumo's arms drop limply down at her sides. Damon continues to hold the knife in place until the glowing numbers fade away and the tile screen folds itself back up into the handle. Damon removes the knife deftly and quickly, with only a few small streaks of blood remaining on the nanoblade. As Damon retracts the blade and puts the knife handle away, Murakumo's body trembles a bit, and she stands up straight again, putting her hand on her head where the knife had struck her, groaning.

"Owww...you know, even if I'm a ship girl, something like that still hurts..." Murakumo shakes her head to clear the fuzzy consciousness of hers.

"So then, are you going to follow my orders or not?" Damon asks quietly.

Murakumo glares up at him. "...I have no choice. You somehow overrode my command protocol and altered my commanding officer identification to be yourself..."

She looks away, scowling again.

"...Admiral."

Damon sports a small grin, but he hides it quickly before Murakumo sees it. He takes off his backpack and sets it on one of the boxes nearby, and he unzips one pocket to take out a small hand towel that he uses to wipe the blood off Murakumo's wound.

"Will this wound heal by itself?" Damon asks.

"...it will, given enough rest," Murakumo replies. "But why are you being nice to me now? Are you messed up in the head or something? You just stabbed a girl in the head, you know?"

"I hacked a ship girl to begin following my orders. Now that you are mine, it's also my responsibility to make sure that you're fully operational at any time that I need you," Damon clarifies, putting the hand towel back away in his backpack and putting it back on. "Now follow me. I'll fill you in on what's happened for the past two decades as we travel."

"If such is your command..." Murakumo sighs. "Where are we headed to?"

"Charleston. The Naval Weapons Station and Docks. I need you to get armed."