(Side Story — January 21)
January 21, 2026. Motomiya City, Fukushima Prefecture.
Unlike neighboring Nihonmatsu, Motomiya still saw a fair amount of survivor activity. Remnants of the Self-Defense Forces who had fled from Koriyama had joined up with the local police and built a solid defensive line around a large prison on the outskirts of the city. Before the epidemic-control effort began, sometime in late November, the area had received orders from Tokyo to thoroughly investigate all suspected infections.
As a result, the prison and the warehouses around it were converted into an infection containment center. Large numbers of infected residents were forcibly taken there from their homes and hospitals. Prison guards from other facilities, along with dispatched epidemic-control personnel and soldiers, were housed in the same airtight fortress.
Huge quantities of supplies were transported in. Armed soldiers were stationed throughout the prison.
So when the concentrated outbreak finally came, this containment center paradoxically became the safest place around.
When reports of mass infection started reaching Motomiya's epidemic-control center, the people in charge reacted quickly. They were the sort of officials sensitive to shifts in the situation, the kind of creatures who knew how to preserve their own lives and power. That decision of theirs became the reason they were able to stabilize things when the great outbreak first erupted.
The prison director and the local SDF commander agreed to isolate symptomatic people deeper inside the prison. Even before orders came down from above, they had already begun dealing with the severely infected. At first they used gunfire. Later, as the number of infected kept rising and ammunition resupplies failed to arrive, they sent in heavily armored soldiers armed with melee weapons to execute them instead, conserving bullets.
By the time the top-level order finally arrived—kill every infected person regardless of severity—they had already completed the purge.
They had even had enough breathing room to reinforce the outer defenses. Sensing danger, they seized vehicles from nearby residents and parked them around the prison's concrete walls and barbed wire, creating yet another perimeter.
The prison itself was a large, sturdy structure. The infected had no siege weapons and no way in. As long as internal infections were controlled, those inside could rest easy.
The high walls were their shield. The mountains of food and supplies they had stockpiled meant hunger was no concern. There were three water reservoirs nearby. Food, water, medicine, firearms, ammunition—they lacked for nothing.
While everyone else was panicking during the outbreak, they were still methodically clearing infected prisoners.
On January 2, the satellite network and ground signal stations were destroyed. They hesitated, uncertain what to do next. Then came the news from Tokyo that the capital had fallen to the infected, and fear spread through the prison.
On January 4, just as they were preparing to abandon the order to hold their ground and flee by ship to Shikoku, remnants of the northern Self-Defense Force group that had been sent to relieve Tokyo arrived after being struck near Tochigi by mutinous SDF units aligned with local garrisons. Some of those survivors escaped here.
With the arrival of heavy equipment and trained personnel, thoughts of carving out an independent domain began to spread among them. Once contact with Tokyo was lost, that mentality only grew stronger by the day.
The prison itself sat in the suburbs. Outside Motomiya, there were no other large settlements nearby, only small villages. That made it easy for them to expand outward, and before long, the infected in the surrounding area seemed to vanish.
Special infected still inflicted casualties from time to time, but they hardly cared. Professional soldiers were their elite units; the ones sent forward to hold the line were the uninfected civilians.
Most losses, therefore, came from non-military personnel.
Those poorly protected, badly trained people were expendable. Survivors from Koriyama, Nihonmatsu, Tamura, and elsewhere kept flocking to the place once word spread that there was a functioning survivor base here.
And no one forced them to stay.
They risked their lives scavenging precisely because they wanted more supplies. The base itself was far from lacking in food or goods, but the prison had effectively become a military dictatorship. It had no intention of distributing provisions freely. Strict rationing was the rule. If you did not go out, you received only enough to keep you alive.
If you wanted a better life, you went out and looted it yourself.
The authorities would even rent out weapons and equipment to you. The price was simple: each week you turned over part of whatever supplies you brought back.
At first, some city councilmen and lower-ranking government officials objected. Men who had once been lofty public servants found it intolerable to be treated the same as ordinary civilians.
But just as before, the prison was now under military control. Affairs once managed by bureaucrats were now under SDF oversight. The civilians had become useless.
The local civil government had effectively collapsed.
A few high-ranking officials—the mayor and the like—were still preserved because they could serve to calm the population. They had been bought off and kept in place. After being shown the fist once, they did not dare stir up trouble again. And so the prison survivor base's military-political structure took full shape.
Because the base's position was ultimately defensive and provincial, because they mostly stayed huddled on the outskirts of Motomiya like turtles hiding in their shells, the Apostles never bothered targeting them. After all, the place was not interfering with the broader situation, and the organization was busy dealing with the diehards in Shikoku.
The government in Shikoku, meanwhile, had no bandwidth to spare for this region. Some time earlier they had only dropped a few written orders and material supplies, instructing them to hold out and wait for the right moment. That suited the prison's leadership perfectly.
And so the base operated steadily right up to January 21.
That morning, Saigo Tatsuyuki picked up the Howa Type 64 rifle from beside his bunk, preparing to head out toward Nishigō Ryūno. The weapon resembled an FN FAL in appearance, an old piece he had rented from the SDF quartermaster only the day before.
It had cost him more than twenty bottles of medical alcohol. He and his regular teammates had scrounged up a good haul of medicines from a clinic, finally qualifying them as valuable enough customers to exchange for firearms.
Saigo stroked the stock the way a man might caress a lover. The smoothness of the metal gave him a strange kind of pleasure.
"What a beauty," he murmured, kissing a rifle older than he was.
Then he slung it over his shoulder and left the cell.
There were not enough rooms in the prison. Living in cells could not be helped. There were simply too many people. To preserve some privacy, most residents had lined the bars with sheets of corrugated cardboard to block the gaps.
As soon as he stepped out, the neighbor in the next cell opened his door too and greeted him. Saigo returned it.
"Morning, Saigo. Heading out?"
"Morning. Of course I am. But first I'm getting breakfast. I won't have the strength to go outside otherwise."
The two men smiled and headed toward the mess hall together.
In Saigo's eyes, the atmosphere here still was not too oppressive. Relations between people were not heavily restricted. Only movement between residential zones was tightly controlled. No one was allowed to wander into other sections without reason, and soldiers guarded each area.
After breakfast he went to collect ammunition.
Firearms, being controlled weapons, were kept separate from their rounds. People were allowed to keep rifles while living inside, but not ammunition. If you needed bullets, you drew them before going out. Whatever you did not use, you returned. If you came back with spare rounds, the military stored them for you.
"Next! Next!"
An officer used a temperature scanner on one person and waved him through. It was easy to go out, far harder to come back in. Returnees had to undergo temperature checks, wound inspections, and blood testing. The blood of the infected slowly turned green; early infection could evade the naked eye, but medical equipment could catch it.
Plenty of people were lined up ahead of Saigo, preparing to head out. Beyond the iron gate lay the dangerous outside world. Still, there were roving military outposts throughout the surrounding kilometers, which made it seem reasonably safe.
He passed through inspection without trouble.
The moment he stepped outside, though, he saw a convoy of military vehicles racing toward them from the distance.
"Move! Move!"
At the shout of the officer, people scattered in panic.
"Emergency! Out of the way! Get them back inside!"
One of the men in the lead vehicle threw out a little booklet. Without even waiting for the barriers to be cleared, the military truck forced its way through and charged into the inner compound.
The checkpoint officer picked up the booklet and saw the words "External Deployment Unit." He remembered previous orders: in emergencies, vehicles from field teams were not to be obstructed. So he let them pass without question.
"My God!"
"What happened? Why are they in such a rush?"
"Everyone back inside the base! Something's wrong!"
Seeing the crowd starting to buzz in confusion, he hurriedly drove them back. He had a bad feeling this was serious.
And he was right.
More vehicles came back soon after. One, then two, then more—nine in total. All the mobile outposts sent outside had returned. Once the last vehicle was in, the outer barbed-wire gate was locked tight.
Everyone fell back behind trenches and high walls.
Even before official notice was passed around, rumors of an approaching corpse tide had already begun spreading. Panic simmered through the population.
By afternoon, the soldiers on the high towers with their powerful binoculars could clearly see it: the infected advancing in such density that their bodies blurred together into a black tide on the horizon.
Saigo found himself drafted into the reserve force. He held the Type 64 rifle in trembling hands, more terrified than excited. In normal times he would never have had a chance to get into the SDF. Now they were taking anyone.
He had never seen anything like this before.
Then a soldier in dark green came hurrying over—his team leader. The man shouted:
"We've got our orders! No active engagement! Start spraying the suppressant!"
"Understood!"
"Keep it down!" the officer snapped, lowering his voice at once. "Those are the orders from above. No loud talking."
Then why are you shouting? the men silently cursed.
They scrambled to move the chemical drums. According to rumor, the stuff had come from Shikoku. It was supposed to interfere with the infected and make them avoid the area.
The busy day passed quickly enough. The expected scene of hundreds of thousands of infected storming their defenses never came.
The prison's leadership had chosen an avoidance strategy. They would stay passive, avoiding direct combat as much as possible.
The tens of thousands of infected were not something a few thousand defenders could stop. They did not even have a million rounds of ammunition. Warplanes from Shikoku had recently been flying repeatedly toward northern Japan, which had already completely fallen. That did not look like ordinary supply drops.
The abnormality of the situation unsettled the leadership, so they sent out reconnaissance vehicles while waiting for clearer intelligence from Shikoku.
And sure enough—something was terribly wrong.
Wave after wave of the corpse tide was moving south. When they connected that to the earlier small-scale migration events within Fukushima, the picture became clear. They had once been delighted that local infected seemed to be drifting south and thinning out. Now their northern "countrymen" had arrived to replace them, and their luck had run out.
So they acted immediately.
Total lockdown. Strict avoidance. The stockpiles were enough to keep everyone fed for over half a year. They could afford to wait.
At least for now, the strategy was working.
The enormous tide of the dead passed by as though the prison did not exist, flowing south along the highways through Motomiya. The suppressant seemed to be doing its job.
Night fell over the dead city. From time to time came faint, miserable cries in the distance—whether from infected or survivors, no one could tell.
The wind that had crossed the mountains became a dry, heated current on the lee side—a föhn wind, in geographical terms.
As it passed through anything pierced with holes, it made a bleak, whistling sound, like a song played by Death himself.
"Captain, most of the third wave has already passed."
Standing atop one of the taller towers, Saigo lowered his binoculars and spoke to the officer beside him, who had been resting with his eyes closed.
"Good. That means we're off shift. Go relieve the next squad. Time to clock out."
The officer removed the peaked cap shading his face and led them down.
From morning to night they had watched the vast corpse tide pour through Fukushima, wave after wave. What remained in Motomiya were only scattered pockets of infected, stragglers no longer under control.
Those strays would still be a serious threat to their daily lives. Sooner or later, another purge operation would probably be necessary.
Saigo was still thinking about that when he felt a chill on the back of his neck. A bird flew past beside him. He thought perhaps it was only because he was not dressed warmly enough. He should have worn a scarf.
But why did all his comrades suddenly look so shocked?
He was just about to ask when a sensation of weightlessness and pain struck him all at once.
His body fell before his eyes.
Ah. So my head fell off.
That was his final thought.
Before darkness took him, he saw the panic on his comrades' faces—and the vast flock of shapes descending from the sky.
"Enemy attack! Enemy attack!"
The survivors screamed into the base.
Everything was over.
Gunfire exploded across the compound. Bursts of flame lit the night sky.
Join here to read ahead.
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