Kasumi - 1994
Kasumi woke to the lookout's whistle.
It was still dark. She rolled to grab her shuriken and crept to the edge of the overlook. Making its way up the slope from the south was one of Shinra's robots.
Kasumi herself had encountered only one, before now. They were deadly, but difficult to deploy in Wutai. Most bridges wouldn't hold them, and their treads struggled to climb the mountainous terrain. Camped high above a steep slope, they should have been safe from any of the models they had heard of before.
This one was new: its frame mounted atop four powerful legs like those of an insect. Their points stabbed into the ground, affording it purchase and sending dirt showering down the path behind it with each step.
It had a sort of headless torso, with a machine gun mounted on either side like arms. The glint of metal under the moonlight suggested blades attached to each, both a deterrent to close combat and to ensure it could continue fighting even should it run out of ammunition.
The Shinra were clearly better at building weapons than they were at training men. The majority of their forces had been dispatched green to the field, and they won their battles by virtue of having more numbers to throw at them. Machines like this one might tip the scales more in their favor, enabling them to win without the demoralizing death toll.
They would have to defeat this one and spread what they learned, as other units had done in taking down earlier models. Because of them, Kasumi already knew their armor was too strong for Wutain incendiaries.
But, the reason it had likely found them was because they'd just raided a Shinra munitions depot. If it were daylight, she might still see smoke rising from where they'd destroyed what they couldn't carry.
Unlike the Shinra, they knew better than to camp too close to a pile of explosives. Kasumi caught the nearest of her warriors.
"Taiji, get to the stockpile and bring me something that can take that down. Take Hibari with you," she added, nodding behind him. The two of them nodded and darted off.
The machine's footfalls were growing louder. In moments, the camp would come into range of its guns. Kasumi knew from the flit of movement among the shadows that her people were moving for cover without her to command it. She took her shuriken and ducked behind a rocky outcropping.
Would that they had raided a materia cache, she couldn't help thinking. She had studied in the magic of the gods, but most of her people hadn't, depriving them of what had thus far proven the most effective weapon against these machines. But unlike their munitions, Shinra trusted their materia only to their elite SOLDIERs, who made up for their lack of unit cohesion with extensive training. Even one SOLDIER alone was a formidable opponent. No one took them on single-handedly, and targeting their camps carried a high risk.
Shinra's seemingly endless store of materia was an advantage they would likely hold until the end of the war, but it was just another number. All Shinra had were numbers.
Kasumi had people.
The robot cleared the slope and opened fire into empty bedrolls. When no screams followed, it rotated, scanning for targets. Most of her people had moved to the thicket, ducking up into positions that would have let them pick off individual men with ease. Shinra soldiers had night vision goggles, but they had trouble enough spotting them in the daytime.
The machine wouldn't need precision.
Kasumi focused, calling down lightning in anticipation of creating an opening, but the robot barely shuddered. Was it insulated beneath that armor?
Someone threw a flare out beneath it, the light making it easier to pick out the seams in its metal plating. It opened fire into the trees, and more than one of her warriors cried out. Kasumi and a few near her were safe for the moment behind the rocks, but none of them had anywhere to go without breaking cover.
Kasumi had considered Shinra might send troops after them in retaliation, but she hadn't anticipated needing to retreat. The nearest Shinra camp was the depot they'd hit, and it had suffered heavy casualties. Its remaining men posed little threat.
Surely they hadn't missed this thing when scouting the depot. Where had Shinra sent it from?
Shuriken and kunai clanged off the robot's armor, each a narrow miss of one of its joints. Kasumi focused her magic to imbue her weapon with lightning and joined them in their efforts.
Machine gun rounds continued to tear through the trees, splintering wood and downing the slimmer branches. Shouts and cries accompanied her people's movement as they fell or ducked back behind sturdier trunks.
A blade severed something on the right side of the robot, and that gun sputtered to a stop. Yulong shouted out guidance on where to target: the ammunition belts were exposed for a short gap where they fed into the gun from the ammunition drum.
Taiji and Hibari returned. Gunfire caught Hibari and took her down, but Taiji reached her position with a pack of explosives.
The robot returned its attention to the thicket. It had reached the treeline and began cutting through the trees with its attached blades, as if it intended to plow right through to the seaside cliffs.
If they detonated anything to destroy it now, the blast would be too close to her people. She needed to lure it away.
Kasumi threw her shuriken again as she thought of how else she might catch its attention. The blades caught it between the plates of its armor, delivering a shock that stalled it for just a second. In that second, someone's knife cut through the second ammunition belt. All it had now were its blades.
Kasumi stepped out from behind her cover as her shuriken returned to her hand. She threw it again, and this time the robot seemed to take notice of her. Its body began to turn.
"Taiji," she said. "I want you to plant the explosives just there"--she pointed to a spot in the middle of their empty camp--"then back off and detonate them on my mark."
"You're not really going to..."
"It can't fire. I only need to avoid its blades. Don't hesitate."
Kasumi ran forward, shuriken in hand, to command the machine's full attention. "Get clear!" she shouted to her people in the trees, and ducked beneath the robot's bladed arm as it spun towards her. Its legs shifted position slowly, but its torso swivelled fast. She danced left, right, around behind it, and thought for an instant she wouldn't be able to control this thing's path. She could barely keep up with it.
She ducked behind a mangled tree and its blade caught for an instant in the trunk. Beyond it, Kasumi caught a glimpse of her people darting away up the path. She jammed one point of her shuriken deep into the armor, ducked beneath the second arm as it swung, and delivered a shock of lightning. The machine froze, and she turned to run.
It recovered and gave chase. Its legs slammed into the ground behind her, picking up speed and closing the small lead she'd had on it. She passed where Taiji had readied the explosives and dove, shouting the signal. She threw her arms up over her head as the blast slammed into her.
Her ears rang. The stench of exploded munitions burned its way into her lungs, a different scent from the incendiary mixtures she had spent her youth carefully learning.
Her body obeyed her as she hauled herself over onto her back, but pain blossomed in her arm. A piece of shrapnel. If it was the only one, she'd been lucky.
Ahead of her was the dark hulk of the robot. Its legs were splayed, the remains of its body collapsed between them. One of its arms remained attached, just barely, and Kasumi spotted the other close to the treeline.
It wasn't even one of Shinra's more powerful bombs, she knew. They would drop those from above, careless with their targets because they could afford to be. They would hear the whistle and brace themselves, knowing some place they had passed through only hours before might be gone when they returned.
Kasumi had been glad to see the depot go up in smoke. She had lost no one in that raid, and left with the satisfaction that those bombs would claim not a single Wutain life. Even having lost people now, in Shinra's reprisal, she knew it was worth it.
Gorkii appeared suddenly from behind her. She startled, jarring her arm, and winced. She hadn't heard him coming. She didn't hear him as he spoke either, but she could see her name in the shape his lips made.
"I can't hear you," she said. The words vibrated in her throat, but even her own voice was stolen before it reached her ears.
Gorkii switched to the hand signals they used to maintain stealth. Injured? he asked her.
Kasumi motioned to her arm. "I can't tell how bad it is, but I don't feel anything else."
I'll look. Gorkii took her arm gently in his hands, and Taiji joined them with a torch. The two of them looked her over, checking for other injuries. They found nothing but bruises, but under better light, Kasumi's glance fell on a large piece of armor plating that had buried into the ground not far from where her head had been.
She let out a breath.
I'm going to pull it out, Gorkii signed to her. Taiji held the torch steady, and Kasumi grit her teeth. She cried out as Gorkii pulled the shrapnel free. Blood ran down her arm, its warmth fading into the sensation of Gorkii's healing magic. The bleeding slowed, and he wound a bandage tight around what remained. Pressure made the pain blossom, and her mind went black for a moment, nothing but the ringing in her ears.
Gorkii's hands were moving again, and she focused on them in time to make out him telling her he was going to check the others. She nodded and gestured with her good arm for Taiji to go with him. Taiji hesitated, touched her shoulder, and left, taking the light with him.
Kasumi lay back against the ground and looked up into the sky. The dark of night still reigned, a gibbous moon climbing higher among the stars as it grew nearer to daybreak. The same sky hung over the capital, where her daughter was asleep in her futon, the faces of Da-chao watching over her.
Yuffie was not yet four, too small for the challenge of hiking the mountain herself to see the world as the gods did. Kasumi thought of returning in time for her birthday, carrying her up to the cradle of the palm, and pointing out to her all the rivers below that Leviathan had traced through their land.
Kasumi had heard that the people of Midgar didn't even remember their own gods. Shinra had offered its marvels under the guise of progress, and now Midgar belonged to them so wholly that no one remembered the places that had existed before it.
Kasumi didn't know whether Mako truly represented progress, but she knew that Shinra didn't, not for Wutai. Everything that Shinra offered was a foothold. Allowing their reactor meant ceding land to Shinra and allowing their people the necessary presence to maintain the equipment. A Shinra blockade on eastern coal had already forced them to ration their electricity, but a Shinra reactor meant that Shinra would always decide if their electricity was to be rationed. Shinra security would move in to protect the company's secrets.
Allow Shinra into Wutai, and in a few short decades, it might have another name, too.
They had no intention of bowing to that, no matter how many bombs Shinra dropped or how many ports they seized. Wutai could feed itself, and if the blockade crippled their ability to produce their own weapons, they could seize them instead from the Shinra.
Kasumi was determined that Yuffie would not forget who she was or where she came from. She was a Kisaragi.
Her own mother looked after Yuffie now in her absence, alongside Godo's aging parents. Kasumi knew they would teach her daughter the old ways, but she wondered if it was lonely in that big house. There weren't so many children Yuffie's age in the capital; with the war brewing on the horizon, many had chosen to wait, and now they kept on waiting.
Some of them would never have the opportunity.
But Kasumi meant to see as many of them through this as she could. This was their land, and the gods were on their side. They made Shinra pay dearly for every inch, and the tide would soon turn. The war might not be over by November, but they would make Shinra regret ever setting foot in Wutai.
Gorkii returned to her field of vision, and she pushed herself back up with her good arm. "How many did we lose?" she asked him. She still couldn't hear her own voice, but she tried not to let that trouble her. She knew from experience that a flashbang detonated too close could cause the same ringing, the same temporary hearing loss. Give it time, and it would return.
Seven dead. Twelve wounded.
Seven was too many, she thought, even as she knew the cost of learning a new machine could and had come steeper.
"Can we still make it to Beiyang Point?"
Gorkii looked skeptical, and he shook his head. Better to send a runner to Godo's camp.
Kasumi nodded. It was unlikely another attack would come tonight. A new machine meant there weren't many of them yet, and the soldiers in the area would hesitate before attacking a unit that had taken one out. All they defended was some distant corporate interest, and they lacked Wutai's resolve.
That was why Wutai would win in the end.
"Send two," Kasumi told him. "The rest of us will wait here and nurse our wounds. Once it's light out, I want people gathering the wreckage."
Gorkii tilted his head inquisitively.
"Staniv is with Godo's camp," she explained. "I want him to take a look at it. Even with the blast damage, he might be able to work out weaknesses to exploit."
Gorkii nodded. I'll organize it. You rest.
"I won't argue," she said. She held out her good arm, and he helped her to her feet. They crossed the ruined camp to where her bedroll remained largely unscathed. Kasumi sank back into it and looked up at the stars until sleep found her, the same stars as over the capital. She would see it again.