January 17
(Side story)
Outside the brightly lit headquarters building of the Global Committee's Japan Branch, a vast number of soldiers stood guard in layered defensive positions.
Sandbags, barbed wire, anti-tank hedgehogs, dragon's teeth, artillery pieces of every caliber, and armored vehicles of all kinds formed a dense defensive ring around the building. Even the remaining U.S. forces stationed in Japan were present. Security was extraordinarily tight.
This building had become the current center of power in Japan. Cabinet officials and Global Committee personnel were now gathered inside what had once been an unremarkable office building.
Even in the apocalypse, the upper ranks remained impeccably dressed as they convened to discuss the latest developments.
The situation was already on the brink of total collapse. Human forces in Japan had been driven back again and again, now cornered into a mere eighteen thousand square kilometers of land.
Most of Japan had already fallen.
Kyushu had been the first region to be completely overrun. The 4th Division and 8th Division, sent to halt the infected swarms advancing from the southwest, had been devastated in the Battle of Kumamoto.
Their command center had been decapitated in a single strike, and the surviving remnants had been broken apart and reassigned to other units. Coastal anti-ship missile forces had been destroyed by missiles launched by the Apostle Organization.
The Okinawa Defense Group could no longer be redeployed. After the naval rescue operation on January 13 failed, the troops stationed in the Ryukyu Islands became little more than abandoned outposts, able to maintain contact only through undersea cables.
Solar magnetic storm interference was still ongoing, severely hindering counteroffensives around the world. Satellite deployment would have to wait until atmospheric ionization returned to normal.
The good news was that low-altitude aircraft could still be used for missile guidance and communications.
The bad news was that Japan currently had none to spare.
Then there was Hokkaido, now completely out of contact.
That region had once held Japan's largest field force: the 2nd Division, 7th Division, 5th Brigade, 11th Brigade, and the Hokkaido Supply Depot. But on the very day of the outbreak, most of those forces had been redeployed to Honshu by high command.
Now they had retreated alongside everyone else, all the way to Shikoku.
With contact lost, no one knew what had become of Hokkaido. Reconnaissance aircraft previously dispatched had been unable to approach the island. Conditions there were extremely severe, and close observation was impossible.
Last came the utter chaos of Honshu.
Although some surviving military units had managed to establish isolated safe zones in scattered areas, less than a month after the outbreak the national capital had already fallen, senior officials had fled overnight, the ancestral institutions had collapsed, the imperial family had been displaced, and the industrial zones were mostly destroyed.
The blow to morale had been catastrophic.
The 1st Division and 12th Brigade of the Eastern Army, responsible for defending the Tokyo metropolitan region and the Kanto area, had been completely annihilated during the rearguard fighting after the Battle of Tokyo.
Only the 1st Infantry Regiment under the 1st Division had narrowly escaped destruction, thanks to its assignment protecting the Tokyo core and conducting disaster evacuation operations for the retreating leadership.
In central Japan, formations such as the 3rd Division and the 10th Division had originally covered Kinki, Tokai, Shikoku, and other inland regions, handling regional defense and disaster response.
Now most of them were uncontactable, scattered and fragmented, each isolated in local prefectures and forced to fight on their own after being cut apart by the infected.
At present, Shikoku held the largest concentration of surviving military power in Japan. After reinforcement by reservists, police, and other personnel, the number of armed ground defenders had reached more than 120,000.
The Air and Maritime Self-Defense Forces together still retained around 40,000 personnel.
But all three branches were suffering from obvious shortages in ammunition and equipment.
The navy had taken disastrous losses in the recent Okinawa operation, including both Izumo-class carriers and several Takanami-class and Akizuki-class destroyers. It was practically a reenactment of Midway.
Ground forces had suffered just as badly. Most of the remaining armored strength had been expended in the fighting around Tokyo.
As for the air force, multiple bases had been destroyed within hours of the war beginning.
It had no capacity to recover.
Evacuees from other regions had been settled in quarantine zones far from the Shikoku mainland, such as Shodoshima and Awaji.
The skies over Japan no longer held the great swaths of light they once had. Only fortress-like Shikoku, fully purged of infected, and a handful of critical military cities still shone faintly amid the chaos of the apocalypse.
Faced with this desperate situation, those who remained were now about to make an important decision.
A swarm numbering in the tens of millions was pressing southward from northern Japan. Forces already reeling from infected advancing out of Honshu and Kyushu were at the breaking point. If even more infected converged here, was the Apostle Organization planning to repeat on Japanese soil what it had already done on the Korean Peninsula?
Korea's infected, under the Apostle Organization's direction, had already captured Seoul, the last major fortress of the Republic of Korea. The surviving Korean government had fled to Jeju Island less than a week ago. And yet Seoul had been a heavily fortified megacity with more than a million people and extensive defenses. Its fall had been unthinkable.
Now the swarms occupying Seoul were locked in a brutal clash of flesh against steel along the 38th parallel against North Korean forces.
Tokyo had fallen earlier, yes—but that had happened because it collapsed from within before defenses had fully been established, only two weeks after the outbreak began.
Seoul, by contrast, had been much more heavily defended. And yet even the South Korean forces falling back from the 38th parallel had been unable to hold it.
The implications were terrifying.
Now, trapped within Shikoku, the remaining Japanese government had already activated universal conscription. Factories were churning out vast quantities of makeshift weapons. Cold steel, firearms, artillery—anything that could be produced and fired at the enemy was deemed good enough.
They had reached the final line.
They had to fight major blocking actions in Hyogo and Osaka. Massive operations also had to be launched against infected in Okayama and Hiroshima.
If they failed, the infected would break through the outer defensive cordon of Shikoku.
And once that happened, the situation would become irretrievable.
At this very moment, Japan's surviving leadership and the commanders of the U.S. forces stationed there were deciding the fate of what remained of Japan.
Would the flame of human civilization vanish from the Japanese archipelago?
That question hung over everyone in the room like a dark cloud.
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