The cannonball let out an enormous crack as it slammed into the stone floor below, cratering it as it bounced and flew off in a random direction some distance from Junko. A complete whiff. It hadn’t been aimed at Junko at all, but not on purpose. Gou’s cannon no longer pointed straight at Junko, as some additional weight shifted Gou’s aim. Now an annoying child hung off Gou’s weapon like a decoration. As was Gekko’s speciality, the boy was now being a thorn in his General’s side, rather than Junko’s.

Gou’s fury was both predictable and terrifying. Unlike Junko, his patience with Gekko was razor thin. With one massive flick of his arm he loosened the boy as if he were shaking an ant off his finger. Behind Junko the cannonball slammed into the glass walls and she felt an immense heat and light burst out as the protective fires engulfed and evaporated the projectile. How futile! Even the might of a General wasn’t able to crack the dome. A small disappointment, as at that moment the existential threat posed by the Jinchi Arkspire fell to the wayside as the immediate threat of getting turned into paste rose to the top. Gekko held on just long enough to Gou’s cannon to merit a second titanic flick of the wrist, finally sending the child flying into the air. He crashed into a heap nearby.

In that same moment Junko felt the weight on her shoulders disappear completely. It was a perfect chance! Her feet dug into the stone and propelled her forward. Sahori slipped through the air in one precise swing. Gou only turned his attention to Junko right as she moved within striking range He whipped the cannon around but it was too late-

It was too late-

-it wasn’t too late. Junko misjudged how fast the man could move the heavy looking metal cylinder, and he intercepted her strike with a resounding gong. Her blade bit across the thick cast iron cannon and threatened to get itself stuck. Junko grit her teeth, twisted her posture, and pulled back. Again her superior reflexes let her reposition. Gou wasn’t practicing a finely honed martial art. The big thug was just swinging around a piece of iron! He was full of openings! Yet her positional shift to exploit those openings failed again, as Gou easily met her blade with his cannon, sending a cascade of sparks out as the two weapons clashed.

This cycle continued once, twice, again, again, again- each time Junko pushed herself to move a bit faster, to swing a bit harder, to attack from an even harder to defend angle. Each time Gou parried or blocked her thrusts as if he were doing nothing more than swatting a fly. The speed that the hunk of muscle could move at baffled everything Junko understood about the human body. More than that, she could feel herself slowing down with each strike. Fatigue again filled her veins.

In one final desperate attempt she tried going for a low blow, using her body to prevent Gou from swinging his cannon in again to intercept. While Junko’s own mass could certainly punch above her weight, Gou’s could push back even harder. The shadow of the cannon covered her entire field of vision as Gou pressed down from above with an ever increasing force and it stopped her foolish lunge short. She felt her knees begin to creak.

“The hell!” The air was pressed out of her lungs as she tried to keep herself upright against Gou’s incredible downward strength. As expected from a General rumored to have sunk an entire fleet on his own, the man was an absolute monster. Where did all that power come from? Junko struggled to find her footing as the immovable Gou brought his cannon up and back down with bone numbing force. The wounds around her palms split and opened as she tried to hold the weapon upright. It didn’t matter if that City of King’s steel couldn’t be broken at this point. Junko was going to shatter before her blade did.

Fighting with brute force wasn’t the Kiku-ichimonji style anyway! Finally finding the right angle Junko released the pressure atop her, and the cannon slid off her sword and pushed her aside along with it. Gou responded appropriately and brought the chunk of iron back up to land atop the now unguarded Junko. Sahori was too far away to stab him now. The Iron Tower, for once, looked completely defenseless.

There was one blind spot left to exploit, though. Rather than reflexively back away or launch a follow up attack, Junko’s feet pushed her forward. The force of Gou’s push gave her the momentum to slide right under the man and his sturdy stance. The General must have been a powerlifter, with the way his stance left legs wide open. Now Junko had a real opening! Again as she moved she felt herself grow tremendously lighter, like the weight of the world was being tossed off her back every time Gou failed to accurately predict her movements. He was already turning around but it was too late. Junko was light on her feet now and her target couldn’t defend. A single strike was all she needed!

With a tremendous leaping jump Junko put her tattered feet on the man’s back, then thrust herself even higher. Gou’s bald head was clearly exposed now and Sahori leveled out as Junko prepared to make a clean swipe. His arms might be like tree trunks and his muscles rock hard, but you couldn’t train a skull. One swift cut and she’d take off that last bit of unsightly hair from the man. Cleaving a head in half wasn’t her preferred method of execution but beggars couldn’t be choosers, especially when trapped in this fishbowl from hell.

Sahori flashed out with Junko’s practiced precision. By all measures it was a perfect, well calculated slash, despite the horrible condition of her body. Even she was taken aback by how clean her technique remained despite her deplorable state. Those skills her father taught her were nothing to scoff at.

Unfortunately Junko’s expectation of a fair fight definitely was something to ridicule. Her blade swung wide and cut nothing but air. Junko predicted everything down to the second, and the clean miss at once felt like a fluke. Gou’s body still turned to face Junko, his large body incapable of dodging with such short notice. Like when his cannonball missed her, Junko’s attack hadn’t failed because of anything the target did. As he brought his cannon around and its black barrel leveled at her torso Junko noticed something that only now dawned on her.

Gou hadn’t moved, she had. In fact Junko hadn’t stopped moving at all. Her giant leap, that acrobatic display of dexterity, facilitated by the sudden rush of weightlessness she felt...never ended. The seconds ticked by and gravity refused to slow her down and pull her back down. She rose like a balloon let go by a child. Junko floated.

“This is my privilege, Miss Junko,” with one fluid motion General Gou reloaded his cannon with another heavy iron ball and a powder charge. “My jutsu crushes most men’s bones within seconds. You can withstand quite a bit more punishment than expected. You are a worthy final foe for my Atlas. How does it feel? The crushing weight of the depths, and the buoyancy of the sea, as I command. You face a force of nature itself!” Junko pinwheeled her arms to try and swim away, but that wasn’t exactly how being weightless worked, was it?

“It’ll be quick. You won’t even realize you’ve died.” As before the grand General’s aim was spot on, and with no solid surface to push against Junko couldn’t even pretend to dodge. She dangled in the air like a mote of dust, and no tricks of positioning or reading body language or surprise dashes or lunges were possible in that miserable state. In that nauseating weightlessness she was no different than those animal corpses in the water, floating in a current they couldn’t understand. There was practically no distance between herself and Gou either. His fingernail flicked across the surface of the metal and sparked its short wick. Even fish in a barrel would have been harder to hit than herself.

That precision worked both ways. From her belt Junko snatched up the gourd she pilfered from Motonubu, which sloshed with liquid. Despite her awkward position she hurled the woody flask towards Gou’s cannon right as the wick caught flame, and the flimsy container burst on impact, spraying it with liquid. The sparked wick fizzled out in an instant and the water splashed up into Gou’s eyes, momentarily causing him to flinch and break eye contact. As soon as that occurred Junko felt her weight return all at once and gravity again pulled her straight down. She fell at an odd angle, though, and barely had time to roll onto her side to break the fall. Vision! That’s how the General’s jutsu worked, he had to maintain vision of his target.

Gou’s eyes already began to open again. The expression across his face was anything but pleasant. His free hand wiped the moisture from the base of the cannon and he easily tossed the soaked charge away, sliding another one in with ease by the time Junko managed to get on her feet. She needed to stay out of his line of sight! Rather than charge head on, her feet again pushed her forward, but this time in a tangent to where Gou stood. She spiraled around him as he rapidly turned to follow her path. Gou’s cannon swung out at the same time as he tried to lead his shot. Slow! Too slow! The man could swing his cannon around with lightning speed, but just swinging the thing around wasn’t the same as aiming it. At this distance Junko could dash faster than the General could lock in on her. In a few more seconds she would be too far for him to track with his eyes, and she could close the gap without fear of being intercepted. It was like running circles around a bull! It didn’t matter how sharp the horns were, if it couldn’t chase you down.

Of course, this wasn’t the General’s first rodeo. Rather than fire his shot at the nimble target he took his aim just a little bit lower. The stomach churning boom shook the air as the iron shot fired out and slammed into its target. Junko didn’t even try to dodge because she wasn’t that target. Gou’s aim was completely off the mark! Now she could leap in before he reloaded and strike again. It seemed like a colossal mistake.

As with everything, jumping to conclusions was Junko’s undoing. The ‘missed’ cannonball collided into the stone platform around where Junko ran and shattered it completely. Her feet lost traction as chunks of loose rock shifted under her, and she again found herself waving her arms around to maintain balance. The cannonball punched right through the platform and hit with so much force it sundered an entire third of the structure, sending it careening off to the side as it lost support. The floor under her feet crumbled down towards the glass below. Junko pivoted and tried to run to the nearest stable section of the structure and made an easy leap for it.

Rather, it would have been easy under normal circumstances. All at once what felt like a hundred anvils pulled down on her body and she sank like a chunk of iron tossed into the sea. Gou’s Atlas found her again. Each step became more impossible than the last as Junko pulled herself across on the collapsing platform. She stumbled, veins popping out on her neck and legs as she forced herself to take another few impossible steps before falling to her knees. With no other option she threw her entire body forward in one last ditch attempt to bridge the gap before the last bits of unstable rock tumbled down below, and just barely managed to get her one free hand onto the jagged lip of the still standing platform.

Junko’s fingers dug into the rock as the rest of her body fell down. Below her she felt searing heat as the artifact skulls immolated the pieces of platform below. They melted even stone! A human body would stand no chance at all. While almost all of Junko’s body dangled completely out of the sight of Gou, the immense strain of increased gravity still pulled her at her like an anchor. Fingernails cracking she realized that no, Gou could still see her. He could still see her just fine. Junko’s trembling hand, holding onto the edge of the stone floor, could be seen just fine. His Atlas didn’t need to see all of Junko to work. Even with just her exposed hand, the impossible pull of gravity tugged at her and beckoned her towards a fiery death below.

The stonework around her hand cracked and groaned as the gravitational pressure only grew by the second. Her fingernails shattered and bled as they pressed even harder. Gou didn’t even need to fire his cannon again. As long as Junko’s hand remained visible he could just wait her out.

At that moment though, Gou’s cannon wasn’t aimed at Junko. It was aimed to his side, pointed at another target. “Stay down, boy.” Gou’s rumbling voice carried notes that almost sounded compassionate. “This struggle is over.”

Gekko turned and spat. He was bleeding profusely from the nose, which made his own words sound almost comically nasal. “Make me, General Fatass.”

A heaving, disappointed sigh rolled out of Gou. “Defiant to the end, Cadet?”

“I’m so sick,” Gekko struggled to stand, much less talk, “of taking orders. It was bad enough I had to hold my tongue every day we did your mindless chores. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die with a clear mind.”

With his eyes locked onto Junko’s straining hand and Gekko standing too far away to pose any threat at all, Gou gave the most imperceptible of shrugs. “If you had followed your orders and taken your own life, your Annitou comrades could have been saved. Do you think Cadet Ringo and Cadet Hajime deserve to die as well?”

“You!” Gekko wheezed. “You’re killing them too! Why do I have to bear that burden, huh? Oh, right, because Annitou’s policy is ‘everyone should sacrifice except the people at the top’. Typical.”

“Even someone as ignorant and hard-hearted as you should be able to tell the difference, boy.” Gou’s words rumbled out with a solemn gravity. “I regret it has come to this and did everything in my power to stop it. You, on the other hand, seem almost happy to see your comrades perish. It is a sad thing to witness.”

“Trash!” Gekko tried to yell, but ended up just coughing instead. “What a trash way to look at the world. If you feel bad, that makes it okay? Boo hoo, cry me a river. Why does everything have to be about dying?” He wiped his nose and stumbled a bit, causing Gou to lift his arm in preparation. The boy posed no threat, but it never hurt to be cautious. “What are you scared of, huh? I have no jutsu, no combat ability- I’m a translator! I only joined this awful Navy because if I didn’t, you morons would have taken my mom to translate instead! Why was I even kept on the island in the first place, you should have just sent us all back to the mainland!”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Gou lowered his aim slightly. Junko’s hand pressed hard into the stone and blood was pooling rapidly around it. No doubt the oppressive force of his Atlas crushed it completely and she was only hanging on by sheer willpower now. Even that in time wouldn’t be enough, once the bones had been compressed into dust. “Annitou only functions as a nation on the absolute trust of its soldiers. After we sent the first translator home, if I sent you as well then other Generals would start asking questions. You know me, boy.” He squinted, his eyes slightly dry from the constant staring. “What I did was for everyone’s benefit. Unlike you, who only acts in your own interest. Like a stray dog. Anything to live one more day, isn’t that right?”

“Oh yeah? So you told Hajime and Ringo you were going to kill me, huh?” The bitterness in Gekko’s voice was clearly apparent now, not just his anger at the immediate situation. “Great. Glad I sacrificed so much for my country. Really made it all worth it to know everyone was ready to let me die as soon as it became expedient.”

“Are you really that hurt, boy? Don’t try to tell me now you held any loyalty to your people, with that attitude. Always doing the bare minimum, coming up with excuses...and when the time came, you failed to protect anyone. Now your death will serve no purpose at all.”

“I’m sick of being told what I should be dying for!” Gekko’s voice cracked. “How about what I should be living for, huh? You and your ilk are so focused on death! It’s beyond stupid! Is your life so empty that’s all this is? Just one big race to the grave?”

“We all die, boy.”

“We all live, too! And you know what, even if life is miserable, at least I’m choosing it myself. What gives you and your giant ass the right to make that decision for everyone else? If you want to die so badly, go right ahead. Don’t drag a bunch of innocent people into it!”

That comment in particular seemed to irk the implacable Gou, though his attention didn’t waver. Junko’s hand was a complete pancake now, and was so flattened into the stone that the platform was beginning to crack under the weight. Even if she did hang on within seconds the whole section would crumble from under her and that would be it. Gekko was clearly trying and failing to distract him and General Gou wasn’t having it. “You are a teenage boy with no experience, no history, no loyalty to anyone. What could you possibly have to live for, Cadet Gekko?”

There was a subtle shift in the boy’s tone. Gou noticed it before he even registered the words that tumbled out of the boy’s mouth all at once. “If I died, I wouldn’t get to watch tools like yourself get what was coming to them.” The insubordination in his voice! Gou’s free hand flashed to his side and he struck the wick of the cannon immediately. Gekko could barely stand and certainly couldn’t dodge. The child’s disrespectful attitude would be put to rest right then and there.

Another immense shockwave pounded through the air as the cannon again fired. Gekko shut his eyes tight in anticipation. Despite all he had witnessed and despite what he had said, this wasn’t something he would have much rather not been a part of.