Emissaries - A Kai Side Story

Chapter 4.5: A World Where the Sakura Blooms

NOTE: This chapter marks the end of Emissaries. Now, if you've read the previous chapter, you'll notice that there were still a lot of missing holes regarding the story of the emissaries and this is intentional. We will revisit the emissaries again, though not on this side story. As of the time of this writing, three chapters are currently being worked on for the main story. We'll return to that soon enough.

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Night 67, Daihokuriku

Good evening, diary. Here I am at the tail end of what had been a day filled to the very brim with action and excitement–not a single second of today was spent without blood being rigorously pumped throughout the entirety of my body. That is until tonight. Regrettably, I find myself once more in the dark, damp, insect-filled dugout of a trench, struggling to find a settled place to allow me to write. In this world without electricity, I only have the restless, orange flame of an oil lamp to accompany me, with the only other source of light breaking the shadow of the night being the silver glow of the two moons smiling down on us from above.

Instead of describing the unimaginative state of affairs that I am in right now, I opt to detail the events that transpired today and how I got here.

Earlier this morning, after I last wrote down something in this diary, I went straight to be given my gear and weapons before being directed to fill in the landing craft, which was being readied to be sent into the waves. There were a lot of these landing crafts spread among the many transport ships that came with the fleet, but for some reason that I will probably never know, we still had to be crammed into them like a pack of sardines. Luckily for me, I was able to get to the very edge of the craft, giving me a luxurious, unobstructed view of how things unfolded, although I was now more likely to fall into the ocean. Once things were set, and we were all itching to get out and blast the demons, the loud sound of whistles all across the ships being blown simultaneously filled the air, marking the start of our operation.

As soon as our landing craft roared to life and began plowing through the waves, hostilities commenced: looking closely at the wonderful cliffs and white, sandy beaches of the continent of Daihokuriku, I noticed something strange. Dotted all across the coastline, whether it be the towering cliffs or the perilous rocks jutting out of the sea, there were what appeared to be gigantic, humanoid statues colored a solid, shiny brown positioned equidistant from one another. At first, I thought these were some sort of curious, surreal art from the natives, similar to how we construct towering statues of Buddha but a bit more theatrical. Then, they all started moving in synchrony, their limbs, torso, and other body parts twisting and turning as if they were actual people. At that point, I dismissed any explanation that these were made possible by the natives' magical sorcery present in this world as their poses struck home: they appeared like a baseball pitcher about to throw a fastball.

This was not lost on everyone else, who had also been captivated by the strange-looking statues on the beach. As soon as the statues' poses changed in a second, we all ducked behind what cover we could find, for they had thrown something in our general direction. Mere seconds later, eye-blinding orbs of intense light–similar to the ones produced by the bombs the machine dragonflies dropped on the Atago during our crossing–manifested throughout the ocean, assaulting us in a shower of radiance, ocean water, and deafening blasts.

Kablam! Kablam!

Fortunately for us, the blasts missed our landing craft. Had it not been for our late realization that those statues–golems, as I prefer to call them–were actually another non-monstrosity asset wielded by the Demon Lord Nosgorath, we would not have been here watching two of our landing craft and the (surviving) men that they carried capsizing into the ocean. As much as it ached me to have the landing craft stopped to help them, someone's got to fuck the demons up and so our boats continued for the beaches. As luck would have it, however, the great iron hulks of the Navy getting smaller and smaller behind us did not fail to catch sight of what had happened. I watched as their massive turrets with their gigantic guns slowly turned to train their impressive, intimidating bores on the coastline of Daihokuriku, ready to send true hell to the demonic golems that stood ready to shower us with more bombs.