It began, as so many stories do, and as Yasushi Kazuo had intended, the following morning in Japan. 

“Kei-kun? Does yours work?”

The student seated at the back of the classroom, his pensive expression aimed towards the window, turned to glimpse at the high school girl waving her blank cell phone in his face. The depth of Nakamura Kei’s disinterest in her question or concerns was unfathomable; he wanted nothing more than to continue staring outside at Sagami Bay, where the waters that morning glistened with greater intensity than Kei had ever seen. The sparkles upon the surface glimmered red as if the sands below had been littered with rubies.

“Asuka, did you forget to charge it again?” the boy asked.

“No! Kei-kun, I mean your Internet,” Asuka tapped her phone and showed Kei the empty bars on her home screen, “Nobody can connect this morning. Someone on the radio said service is down in all of Kamakura. Show me your phone.”

“I forgot it at home,” Kei lied, “Can’t you live without your favorite boys’ love web novel for just a day?”

“It’s not just any day,” Asuka said, “The last chapter ended on a cliffhanger. I need to know if Benji-sama is okay.”

“Well, I don’t have my phone,” Kei shrugged, “And homeroom’s about to start.”

Asuka sulked off to join the other students who continued to stare perplexed at their phones. No, Kei thought, just looking at them isn’t going to turn the service back on. He wondered if maybe an earthquake had caused the loss of service. He recalled the Great Kanto Earthquake as well as the Heizen Gate Incident in the late 13th century, where after a major tremor, the regent of the Kamakura Shogunate slaughtered his subordinate Taira no Yoritsuna and some ninety or so of his followers.

Meandering speculation of this nature was somewhat of a specialty for Nakamura Kei who, unknown to his less cultured classmates, moonlighted as the infamous web novel sensation Sakamoto Rei, author of the Unbound and IseLateral series, both tales of an aloof and mysterious high school boy who saves the world from a terrible evil. Of course, Kei was also intimately aware of the identity of Asuka’s favorite boys’ love novelist. They had once met at a convention, exchanged contact information, and Kei was seeing her later this afternoon at an ice cream shop to discuss their writing and other passions.

This was his reward for living a dispassionate school life where most thought of him as some kind of serial loner. Kei didn’t have any interest in his schoolmates who only cared about what was on TV last night or which clubs to join. That’s why Kei always wrote his fantasy epics by inserting himself as the hero of every story and cast the rest of his classmates as sacrificial body bags. After all, only someone with his enigmatic brand of youthful intelligence could compel the forces of evil to retreat into the shadows.

And that’s why, while the rest of his classmates, and in fact the rest of Japan and perhaps the world struggled to understand why no one could access the internet on their phones or personal computers the morning after Yasushi Kazuo’s disappearance, Nakamura Kei looked out over Sagami Bay, where the morning waves lapped against the beaches of the ancient capital and the first red-eyed machine waded onto its shores. Kamakura, home of the Great Buddha and Mt. Kamakura, whose fading glory was saved briefly by pedestrian tourists who sang the elegy of the city with grainy black and white photography and spirited donations to the Egara Tenjin Shrine, and now the second red-eyed machine made its way to the shores, followed by the seventh and then the thousandth.

Nakamura Kei watched as the coruscating rubies beneath the bay streamed onto the beach, each covered with an armored exoskeleton that shimmered like glowing prisms. The mechanisms were hoisted by an uneven number of metallic legs, which carried the horde faster than any car or high speed rail that Kei had ridden. 

Within seconds they had cleared themselves of the dunes. They bulldozed through the national highway as if they were stepping through sand castles. When a few of them reached the seaside park just above the beach, they stopped and flashed their eyes. Particle beams carved fresh fissures into the earth and the grassy lawn disappeared in a sea of fire. A deep unsettling rumble set off the city sirens.

“What was that?” 

Asuka and the other students finally saw what Kei had been watching and rushed to the windows. Fear shook their legs and drained their faces of color. Some screamed and fled from the room. The homeroom teacher, Mishima-sensei, yelled for everyone to rush to the gymnasium. Kei, however, watched with explicit anticipation as a lone straggler made for Kamakura Academy. Kei had risen from his seat, hands outstretched and glued to the windows. His teary eyes turned to the heavens with gratitude.

“Finally,” Kei said as the machine hit breakneck speeds, “A worthy opponent.”

Nakamura Kei unfurled his hands at the window, at the eyes that descended upon him with no hint of malice or acknowledgment. But Kei knew they would learn his name soon, and his name would strike fear into their metal hearts. Nakamura Kei could almost feel the flames brimming in his palms.

“Holy flar—”

The irreverent machines trampled police stations, fire departments, the Kaigan Bridge, men and women, flower shops, elementary and high schools like Kamakura Academy, children, shrines and temples and all other trivial things along the Nameri River. From east and west, the mechanical legions flooded Kamakura like a torrential squall, born from never before seen red gemstones at the bottom of the bay. Within a matter of minutes, Kamakura was a wasteland of rubble and broken dreams. But before the smoke from smoldering flames even reached the sky, the legion had already left, fanning about in all directions, with the bulk of the machines heading north, towards Tokyo.

Yasushi Kazuo had often wondered what it would take to topple Tokyo. During the war, its paper cities had been reduced to cinders, but its people remained strong. During the occupation, the foreigners, naively believing that they had reconstructed Tokyo in their image, soon realized it was they who had become Japanese. Tokyo survived the treacheries of the imperial bloodline, the woes of a lost generation, multiple interpretations of Godzilla, and for decades, in the quiet suburb of Hatagaya, Tokyo had housed Kazuo and his fantastical dreams.

But Kazuo also never forgot about the fates of Nara, Kyoto, Kamakura; these had all been the old capitals, and who was to say that Tokyo was to be the last? Why then, did Kazuo look to his left and to his right, to all the iterations of post-apocalyptic Japan crowded upon bookshelves, calling themselves Neo-Tokyo, Shin Tokyo, Tokyo 3.0. Why was it not in anyone’s imagination that Sapporo or Nagasaki could assume the prestigious title of capital of Japan, that for all its brilliance, the luster of Tokyo should one day fail and the city should take its rightful place alongside its ancestral predecessors?

It sickened him, the unoriginality and hubris of it all, so much so that he penned an elegy to the city of Tokyo, leveled by the horde of indiscriminate monsters now rampaging across Yokohama. 

From Kamakura they rose, the Federation of H, and all the technologies of the world stood helpless against the magnificence of the singularities that governed it. Tokyo was the symbol of this modern technology. Its blinding lights, the streets of Akihabara, the museums of Roppongi, Shinjuku and its claustrophobia, and so it was Tokyo that was especially helpless against the onslaught of these superior machines birthed from Kamakura. The old capital dragged Tokyo in all its technological splendor into the grave, and the world knew that Tokyo was finished.

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