Eiji was still at the training academy in Shijima when he was given a nickname that stuck for the rest of his career as a soldier. Not only did it supplant his real name until the day he died, but he would also give it to his daughter as hers on official documents.
It was a stiflingly hot and humid day in the imperial capital, two weeks after the summer solstice. He and his fellow cadets were striking at wooden dummies with training swords of heavy mahogany, and the drill had been going on for over six hours – the only pauses being upon the shattering of a wooden sword or the splitting of a dummy. These pauses only lasted as long as it took for the ruined object to be swapped with one of the fresh replacements – which always seemed to be waiting close by, just out of sight until needed.
Tormented muscles, sinews, and bone pushed to the point of breakdown, two trainees had already collapsed from a combination of dehydration, sunstroke, and simple fatigue. Another dislocated his shoulder and broke his wrist with the recoil from an uncontrolled and awkward blow.
Every hour, one of the drill commanders would single out four of the most exhausted-looking cadets and ask each one a different question. Some of the questions were simple issues of factual recollection – “How many soldiers did the Shin Emperor have under his command in the final battle for Nakakuni, and what were the exact numbers of dead, wounded, and captured after the battle was over?” – and others were subjective matters of rhetorical philosophy – “If the Kolsivite gods truly existed, could they be expected to lend their supernatural assistance to the Kolsivite armies out of cultural loyalty, or to the Meihonese forces out of a divine love for true justice?” Each question was equally cruel in its obscurity and the ease with which even a passable response could and would be dismissed on some technicality.
If three correct answers were given in a single round of questioning, the trainees were assured, the drill would end and the whole body of them would be free of duty for the rest of the day and night. They so far had not gotten better than one correct answer in a round, and the questions never repeated.
Upon the start of the eighth straight hour of what was amounted to little more than striking heavy sticks against heavier logs, the seventh round of questioning began. The first selected cadet paused briefly from her weakened strokes to contemplate the number of seasons that had passed since the unification of the kingdoms of the Meihonese homeland, and after a few moments her eyes rolled back into her head and her legs went slack. She collapsed, smashing her face into her wooden target. For a few breaths, she remained propped an unconscious ragdoll on her practice sword, which had gotten stuck point first into the soil at her feet, blood dribbling from a gash in her eyebrow. When she came to it was with fruitless dry-heaves, tasting blood, dust, and bile. She was still on her hands and knees in the dirt when the drill commander moved coolly on to the next cadet, counting this as the first wrong answer.
Next, Yuuhei Kurotou (who was a friend of Eiji’s) was with some difficulty able to accurately list the number of dead from the first battle for Ajanum, along with which of these were blade-inflicted, which were gunshot wounds, and which were caused by explosion, fire, and other miscellany. At the last minute he realized that he had better specify the variances possible in these numbers depending on whether spear wounds and other impalings were counted as miscellaneous or blade wounds. Even though Yuuhei’s answer was an astounding feat and the drill commander accepted it as correct, no one yet felt any particular relief. Even the gratitude they felt toward him was muted and hesitant. There were still two questions left.
The next question went to Eiko Takahashi, which put the cadets just slightly at ease. She was the golden child of memory, famous among them for only having to hear even the most complicated explanation or trivial information once and thenceforth being able to recall it forever. She could also reason through even the most sophisticated of logical puzzles with ease. True to form, she named every province and city in both the Meihonese Empire and the Kolsivite Federation along with the top five commanding officers assigned to each province on both sides without losing the rhythm of her sword strokes, in a state of fatigue which would have made it difficult for many to name the current Emperor.
The drill commander moved next to Eiji, who continued to strike his target. The assembled body of trainees held their collective breath.
“Why do you want to fight?” was all that the drill commander asked.
He intended to leave no chance of a fully satisfactory answer. He was prepared to reject any response Eiji gave; the reality was that training command had given the order to continue the exercise until there had been at least one death. The rounds of questioning were a strategic illusion, designed to create a sense of urgency, individual pressure for the well-being of the entire group, the acceptance of having to watch the deaths of friends, and above all the idea that there was in fact a potential for victory even against seemingly impossible odds. This was the way Meihonese special forces were trained.
Eiji took a deep breath and then broke his training sword against the torso of his wooden target. “To keep this my great and beloved metropolis safe!” he spat, red-faced and hoarse.
A training attendant was beside him immediately with a new wooden sword, which he took and in one movement struck the target dummy twice, first breaking its wooden head from its wooden body and then splitting it in two down the middle.
He turned back to the drill commander and held out the new training sword, showing a long jagged crack running the length of its wooden edge.
“This one is broken too,” he said.
The drill commander proceeded to call the end of the drill, and dismissed the cadets.
The other trainees, feeling that Eiji had saved their lives without the knowledge that for at least one of them it was actually so, never again called him by his real last name, Kimura, which in Old Meihonese meant “Wooden Village”. From then on they called him by the new name Daitokai, which meant “Great Metropolis.”
For his break from protocol the drill commander was transferred to the Front, where he met his end only a few weeks later in a small, tactically insignificant skirmish just outside the city of Hweul, in northern Hansilla province.
