Where Your God Is - Chapter 16

“I don't like this,” General Tanizaki Amuro stated firmly, his expression as firm and disapproving as a granite cliff you were about to collide head-first with.

Kikuoka refrained from initiating a shouting match with his nominal superior using what he felt was an admirable amount of restraint. Though, it said something damning about his current state of mind that he even entertained the notion, however briefly. “It's the best we have, sir.”

The older man huffed irritably and looked back down at his desk, flipping the file back a few pages and beginning to read it once again, as if anything sufficiently problematic to scrub the mission might have appeared on the bleached and pressed shreds of dead tree within the past few minutes.

That was something else Kikuoka didn't particularly enjoy about this specific superior. The man was no-nonsense, it was true, but he was also a dinosaur kept in place by being both too stubborn to retire and too politically savvy to be forced to. It would be one thing if he were simply incompetent. Even the most skilled career military officer would have been forced out by some scandal if that were the case. No, Tanizaki was good at his job and approached every problem with the seasoned wisdom of a man just past his sixtieth year.

That wasn't the issue.

The issue was that the general had him fax the documentation for the mission to his office.

Kikuoka honestly would have respected the man more if he'd insisted on carrier pigeons instead.

“The problem seems to be solving itself,” Tanizaki stated, not for the first time since news had gotten out of the SAO victims clearing the first floor. “I don't see why that means I have to consign eighteen of my most capable soldiers to a lingering coma for an unknown amount of time.”

Which, damn him, was a perfectly logical objection to make.

It simply made Soujirou's life that much harder and was, therefore, rather inconvenient to address.

“Sending in trained, competent, and capable reinforcements to help reassure the players trapped in the game that the government, their government, is attempting to do everything it can to get them out is paramount to both their morale and the public opinion of the administration currently in power managing this ongoing crisis,” Kikuoka replied stoically.

“You don't need soldiers, though.” Tanizaki tapped the desk meaningfully with a single finger. “You need people who know how to play the video game, unless I'm misunderstanding the matter.”

Kikuoka bit the inside of his cheek to keep from raising his voice again, the dismissive drawl of his superior's voice around the words 'video game' striking a raw nerve. “You understand the situation correctly, sir. The people we send in don't need to be physically-trained to the degree that your soldiers are, but they do need the self-discipline, rigorous mental training, and leadership skills the military imparts to accomplish the objective of saving lives and preserving the peace of our country.”

“We can best accomplish those objectives by the application of physical force in the real world,” Tanizaki replied, flipping the briefing folder closed with finality. “The cult's activities within sectors of society that actually matter necessitates the use of all available force where it actually matters. Once my people and the intelligence agencies drag those who planned this incident into the light, we'll make them tell us how to shut the game down.”

Kikuoka grit his teeth, his mind racing for a counterargument that, in truth, hew knew wouldn't do any good.

Tanizaki had almost certainly made up his mind before this meeting ever started, and Kikuoka wasn't in a position to draw troops without his approval. They both knew that, should it come to it, Kikuoka could go over his head, but that easily opened up the possibility of malicious compliance from a seasoned military man who would feel slighted by political overreach.

It was, largely, the same response Kikuoka got wherever he went.

No ministry wanted to second any sort of personnel to the Virtual Division he was now the head of, at least for the purpose of <<Mission Overlevel>>. Well, they didn't want to send useful personnel, either intentionally or unintentionally. Instead, they'd sent the nepo-hires, the office slackers, the guy they kept around to do IT work when the official employees were overworked, and the people who had been outed as watching too much anime.

In a word? They sent him gamers.

Kikuoka Seijirou did not need gamers.

He needed dependable, level-headed government employees of some stripe who understood the stakes and wouldn't view a potential multi-year-long stay in Aincrad as a vacation of some sort. Doubtless, there were some within the gaming community of Japan who fit that bill, but not-coincidentally those same traits would mean that they understood the importance of keeping their private and public lives separate, being productive at work, and generally maintaining the appearance of a functional member of society.

The people who had been volunteered by their superiors for consideration here and now, though, were not actually being sent because they understood anything about a virtual full-dive environment, the psychological stressors affecting the thousands of players trapped in the game, or the complex leveling mechanics embedded within <<Sword Art Online>>.

They were being offered as a show of apparent good faith within the political-bureaucratic environment around the Virtual Division and, most importantly, they were expendable.

“I am not, however, wholly without sympathy for the mission you have been given Lieutenant Colonel Kikuoka,” Tanizaki stated, drumming his fingers on the folder for a moment before pulling open a drawer of his desk and removing a much thicker document and handing it to the younger man.

Hoping that his face did not show precisely how grateful he was for the potential lifeline he was being thrown, Kikuoka took the folder – more of a binder, really – and set it in his lap before reading the cover.

Forced Medical Discharge Records

Kikuoka blinked and, abruptly, felt the sudden urge to slam his head against the general's desk. Taking a deep breath, he bowed his head towards the older man. “I feel as though I have made quite the fool of myself. Please forgive me.”

Tanizaki snorted. “I have reviewed your record, Lieutenant Colonel. You are a good soldier. Thoughtful, meticulous, analytical, loyal... there are a number of commendations in your files, all submitted by men who I know would not do so without merit. But you are still young. The solutions you use come from, as the Americans would say, 'inside the box.'”

“As you say, sir,” Kikuoka dipped his head again, taking the light chastisement for what it was.

“I have taken the liberty of ordering the records in that file screened for those who were discharged due to psychological instability, injuries sustained stemming from behavioral or substance issues, or those whose discharges were dishonorable for some other reason. That said, I have not had the time to personally inspect the jackets of the soldiers listed and the documents I had pulled only cover the previous ten years. Should you wish to access further, you have the contact information for my secretary,” Tanizaki stated, then paused.

Kikuoka hesitated a moment before deciding to shave away a bit more of his pride. “Any further advice you have for me would be extremely valuable, sir.”

“I will preface this by admitting that I do not understand this 'full dive' technology,” Tanizaki stated bluntly, grimacing in obvious distaste. “It is not, I feel, because I am too old for it, as many of your contemporaries might allege. It is because, the more complex you make an operation, the more discreet points of failure you imbue it with, as can be seen by the incident you are dealing with. I prefer things to be, if not simple, then at least as uncomplicated as possible; likely because I deal with a great many issues which are irreducible beyond their current military or political dimensions.”

“As you say, sir,” Kikuoka stated with a nod, feeling as though the older man had earned any sort of bland agreement to whatever worldview he wanted to ramble about.

“That said, I am not unfamiliar with operations such as the one you are now responsible for. I do not envy you your task, either. JSDF personnel have rarely been asked to participate in joint training exercises and suppression missions against terrorist groups outside of the home islands, but such a thing has occurred.” Tanizaki paused, reaching for the cup of coffee sitting on his desk and taking a long sip.

A long, thoughtful sip.

Which, in Kikuoka's experience dealing with superiors, was a definite clue that the older man was carefully considering how to say something without stating it outright. Or, more likely, how to pointedly not say something, making the subject obvious by its exclusion.

Those moments had always strongly implied the desire of the officer in question to see something done while deniably omitting the actual instruction from their orders. The reason he'd risen to the rank he had was, in no small part, his ability to read between the lines of such conversations and see the subtext being removed from the discussion.

The cup was set back down upon the platter with the quiet chime of porcelain on porcelain.

“Such missions often involve hiring natives of the region in order to more properly understand the unique social and cultural challenges involved when facing partisan threats,” Tanizaki stated carefully, beginning to drum his fingers along Kikuoka's mission-briefing file again. “This is especially important in operations which maintain some degree of secrecy. The identities of such individuals cooperating with our military or the military of allied nations in such instances, are of paramount importance to keep outside of public knowledge lest they be targets of retaliatory attacks, much like you have done with your 'Agent Idol.'”

There were the beginnings of understanding blooming within Kikuoka's mind, and though he saw the logic to it, he could not say he liked it.

“Understanding all of this,” Tanizaki stated, leaning forward to place his forearms on the table and mesh his fingers together, adopting an even more serious mien than usual, “my advice is to understand when the potential danger of a civilian contractor is an acceptable risk, especially when such a risk makes the soldiers under your command safer. These individuals and their valuable service often go unreported, unappreciated, and lost within piles of reports to ensure the press does not criticize strategic and logistical necessities.”

Kikuoka swallowed, finding his mouth suddenly dry. “Sir, I-”

“That is all the time I have for this meeting,” General Tanizaki stated suddenly, standing and saluting. “Dismissed.”

“Sir!” Kikuoka responded, standing so quickly the binder almost slipped from his grasp as he saluted the senior officer.

The (ostensibly-former) Lieutenant Colonel retreated from the office in something of a daze, walking out to be greeted by his security detail and a waiting car. Although Aum Shinrikyo had yet to make an attack on the Virtual Division's staff yet, most felt it was just a matter of time. As the very public head of said organization, he was a key target to stymie the attempts at resolving the problem that the cult had caused.

All the while, Kikuoka was deep in thought over a significant moral quandary.

Which, in his line of work, was rather remarkable given all of the other moral quandaries he was already preoccupied with.

He believed he had understood the implications of the general's advice, if one were to call it that. Operation Overlevel, the plan to send trained agents in with inventories packed with Kirito's level of over-preparedness as the example and with artificially-inflated stats, had one major problem. And, like all of his major problems, it had been personnel related.

The simple fact was that the core dev team of Sword Art Online was either dead, traumatized, currently in a foreign country, or been placed in protective custody and were only available in a limited advisory capacity. There were a lot of people who worked at Argus, though, and the very least he'd managed to accomplish was leveraging his relationship with Yuuki Shouzou (courtesy of his daughter's continued survival) to receive first pick among the employees who were staying with the company as it was transitioning to new ownership under RECT.

There just weren't all that many people experienced at actually playing the goddamn game.

So, he'd been forced to get a bit creative given that most of the beta players were currently trapped in the game and the ones who weren't through some stroke of luck or fate, understandably wanted nothing to do with the incident no matter how much money he offered. The social stigma was just too powerful to ignore, the bulk of them having decided to hide or destroy their consoles and pretend the entire thing had never happened.

There was a vanishingly short list of individuals, though, who had been in the game as long as alpha testing, were unaffected by the social stigma of associating directly with the game, and desperately in need of some combination of money, favors, and other things that Kikuoka could offer. They had been used as training staff in an isolated partial-clone of a 'clean' SAO server running at limited capacity with heavy restrictions on the primitive pre-alpha <<Cardinal>> version they were using.

Even among the thirty or so 'trainers' he'd managed to secure the services of in preparation for a class of agents to be taught how to survive in Aincrad, most of them would sooner go to jail than actually log into the game proper.

Most.

There were, however... nine individuals who had already volunteered their services without prompting should he be unable to find trained personnel to send into the game. It had been a footnote in the mission briefing, designed to illustrate how dire the need for personnel really was and presenting the only other available alternative.

Kikuoka had never considered it in a serious light given the potential blowback if it were ever discovered, even as something of a supplemental insurance against the primary plan.

Perhaps the most damning part of the entire idea was that Kikuoka could entirely see why they would volunteer. More than that, he could also see the benefits to allowing them to do so, in their situation. Staring out of the armored vehicle blankly at his surroundings as they rushed by, Kikuoka's eyes alighted on one of the giant electronic billboards that the hub of central Tokyo had become famous for. Upon it, a figure in black and purple armor spun through an intricate dance using rubber chickens as weaponry against a towering monster aggressively attempting to kill the more diminutive one. There was a sudden smash-cut to Illfang exploding into a cloud of particles and people cheering before the battle was replaced by the image of a massive red and white striped bowl filled to overflowing with fried chicken.

Gamers know the power of chicken. Do you?

The sight brought an amused huff of laughter to him, even if it was tinged with regret.

“At least you'll be quite wealthy when you get out, Kirito,” Kikuoka smirked, still amused.

After a lingering moment, though, he gave in to the urge to request an update and reached for his phone before hitting one of the first numbers on speed dial. It rang for a few seconds before the woman on the other end picked up. “Hello Seijirou, everything went as expected with the general?”

“Truthfully? Better than I'd hoped,” Kikuoka found himself smiling as he relaxed a bit. “I have a set of files regarding potential candidates. Not active-duty, but recently discharged for medical reasons. Mostly injured soldiers with amputations and the like. A few with chronic conditions.”

Midori was quiet for a moment, then sighed tiredly. “I can't believe we missed that.”

The younger man nodded against the phone instinctually. “We've been putting in quite a few hours, Midori. Perhaps we should schedule some more vacation days now that the situation in the game isn't so dire. Speaking of, anything significant to report?”

“Nothing problematic,” the Kirigaya matron replied, the slightest rustle of her hair over the line. “The Elf War is beginning on schedule. We caught a glimpse of Kirito and Asuna's party moving into the forest from one of the streamers.”

“No announcement from Keyboard-Smash?” Kikuoka asked, rubbing at his chin.

“We think Yuri-san in the psych department has the right read on the situation. Any kind of announcement would draw more attention to the questline than it already has and potentially attract people towards the PVP aspects. It's in everyone's best interests that this pass as an unremarkable part of the game, at least until there's a problem,” Midori replied at length. “What we've seen of Argo's newsletter seems to support that.”

“Your son and his friends continue to impress,” Kikuoka stated honestly. “I'm quite happy that we've managed to ensure they'll be financially compensated for all of this trouble.”

Midori sighed deeply. “I do worry about that. I keep seeing the commercial everywhere and can't help but think of the way Kiri-ah, Kazuto would always shy away from public events.”

“He's a smart young man, Midori. He'll understand that the situation is complicated. We needed the PR, the donations from large corporations help our bottom line, and the royalties for his image will augment the savings accounts he has set up nicely.” Kikuoka's justifications sometimes rang hollow, but... given everything he knew of the boy, Kirito would likely declare the entire thing the ultimate kind of 'cringe' and then ignore it existed as hard as he could.

“I hope so. I have to admit I'm still amazed at the kinds of money they were willing to put down for exclusive rights,” Midori stated.

“Kirito and his friends had the good fortune to stage their assault on the boss two weeks before Christmas. With the tradition as it is here in Japan, the returns they saw from the advertisement made them happy enough to reuse it outside of the holiday season, and that's setting aside the international sales spike,” Kikuoka assured her.

 “That's actually the funniest part of it, you know?” Midori mused rhetorically. “Kazuto doesn't actually like fried chicken all that much. Oh, he likes the mashed potatoes, the gravy, and the biscuits... but not that chicken. At most, he'll pick apart a breast for the sake of Christmas dinner.”

Kikuoka chuckled, feeling lighter and warmer than he had after the disheartening conversation with the general. Which brought him back to the real reason he'd need to call in, sadly. “Midori... if I ask you to handle something... off the books, would you?”

The older woman audibly paused at the blunt topic change. “I... ah, I assume this is... important?”

The Lieutenant Colonel nodded. “It is. I need a list of senior hospital staff at the facility where the Serene Garden servers are being housed. Preferably the ones closest to retirement age. I just... don't need anyone to know we're looking at those records.”

There was a beat of silence, then a firm reply. “If it will help my children, I'll get it done as quietly as possible, Seijirou.”

“Good. I should be back at base in an hour.” Kikuoka nodded, exchanging a few more pleasantries before saying goodbye to the woman.

The scenery continued to pass by, Kikuoka sitting in silence as his mind continued to work. The laptop sitting next to him called for his attention, along with the myriad of government reports he needed to respond to. Still, his mind was elsewhere.

“She's a married woman, Seijirou,” he chastised himself firmly. “Don't make the mistake of seeing things that aren't there.”

Sadly, the heavens didn't see fit to reply to his assertion.

~~~

Another look past the curtain into things happening IRL with everyone's favorite overworked government functionary. Thankfully, he seems to be making some unexpected progress in his goals.

Alright, on to other news! I actually had to count votes this time instead of there being a clear winner. So here are the totals after adding up everything between the two sites:

Winning Peace: 86

Industrious: 84

Mind Games: 73

...with The New Ron taking up fourth and Where Your God Is holding at fifth.

Still, that's an impressive first month start for Mind Games. Very promising. This week will feature a chapter of Winning Peace and... either Industrious or Mind Games. One of the two. We shall see.