From its tip to stern, the Ryūjin aircraft carrier was five-hundred meters long. The pride of the Shogun’s fleet, it was by far the largest ship in Japan’s navy, and certainly one of the slowest. Despite the sheer power pumped out by its quadruple nuclear reactors, the vessel struggled to hit its maximum speed, a mere twenty knots.

  Speed was not what it was made for, though, so it was hardly a concern. This was a projection of power, constructed solely to beat the British Empire in an arms race to see who could lay down the most advanced and most well-equipped carrier in the world. As naval power became less useful to modern political displays, the carrier had become the ‘trophy wife’ of Empires.

  The Portuguese had one, the King John IX, named after a recently deceased ruler. Smaller than the Ryūjin, and even its Norse-Japanese co-developed little brother, Itsuse, a carrier of a mere four-hundred and seventy meters long.

  The only true rival to the Ryūjin in the world was its chief foe, the Edinburgh, which clocked in at a four-hundred and eighty-two meters. It was, on the world scale, a dick-measuring contest of colossal proportions. One that had consumed billions of Yen, and untold billions of Pounds on the other side of the world. The Shogun had made it clear when the Edinburgh was first sighted by Japanese intelligence groups that Japan would have the largest carrier on the planet, and the greatest minds of the Shogunate had come together to see it to reality.

  It was a sight to behold as well – A crew of nearly ten-thousand men and women, capable of arming, repairing and launching up to three-hundred fixed wing aircraft and forty helicopters. The sights and sounds of it in function were like nuclear clockwork. The roar of its engines as it set off across the water, accompanied by its battlegroup of nearly ninety support vessels and protective battleships. The steady whir of its massive defensive guns rotating to track some distant target. The heat of flame from VTOL thrusters taking off and landing across the deck.

  Ryūjin was the pride of not only the Shogunate, but the entire Oda Family, as well as the Minamoto and Dojima that contributed to its construction. A symbol of power and strength.

  This made it all the more shocking to the ruling class when it was utterly obliterated.

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  Not in combat of course, for it would’ve been an honorable and perhaps even joyous thing if the great ship went down with guns blazing and crew roaring. Instead, it was the world itself that swallowed it up. Retribution for a twenty-year mistake, two decades of ignoring a problem in the north and hoping it would go away.

  A salient antimatter storm from Ezochi, the northernmost territory of ‘mainland’ Japan, which for twenty years had been ravaged by Unravelling Storms in the fallout of the Ikeda Incident, a fusion reactor critical failure. The island was swept with such storms, which would devour mountains and turn them into swamps, or reconstitute lowlands into twisted spires of strange matter.

  These storms were entirely confined to Ezochi in the twenty years since the Ikeda Incident, and all assumed that is how it would remain. Until, of course, a ‘Rogue Unravelling’ peeled across the water as the Ryūjin was making its way toward Furumi, the new world across the eastern sea.

  It would’ve been better for the human mind if there was some sort of violent explosion. If there was recognition of the sheer loss that occurred all at once. There was mayhem to be sure, as red lightning danced in the sky and harsh rains carrying antimatter radiation fell across the fleet. Where once the Ryūjin floated however, instead there was rapidly only ice. The storm swept through it, simply cleaving out nearly two-hundred meters of its length from the center, splaying the ship in half and Ravelling what was once steel and flesh into spirals of crystalline ice, that fell into the ocean below with grand yet unceremonious splashes.

  Twelve more ships were lost in the same salient, though none were such devastating losses as the Ryūjin, which was nearly irreplaceable. When the Shogun was alerted of the vessel’s loss and the death toll attached – nearly nine-thousand souls across the thirteen affected vessels – he was said to have broken years of composure to scream at the messenger in rage.

  Yet there was no enemy to direct this rage against. No war that could be fought in retaliation for it. Ezochi had long been abandoned by the Magistrate, and while Samurai still governed there, in its sole megacity and tributary villages, it was a largely wild and impossibly untame land. There was no battle to be had to avenge the Ryūjin, and this more than anything broke the Shogun’s heart.

  The official cause of death for Oda Tanetaka, Shogun of the Grand Shogunate of Japan, was a preventable form of lung cancer. One he had concealed to avoid treatment and pity. Due to the way he died however, clutching at his chest, a common rumor now spreads that with no heirs to his name and no clear legacy of who shall inherit the Chrysanthemum Throne, Tanetaka saw Ryūjin as his only son. When that son was lost, his heart shattered so irreplecably that he could will himself to live no longer.

  Ryūjin is gone. The world rebels. The Shogun is dead. Chaos begins.