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The morning mist clung to the terraced rice paddies like the breath of sleeping dragons as RKA-385, “Rika” and MSK-974, “Misaki”, worked side by side in the shallow water. Their movements had fallen into the rhythm perfected over seasons of monotonous labour, an endless cycle of bend, plant, step forward.
They had come from the same birthing batch, had received the same neural downloads, shared the same dreams of some day earning freedom from their indenture. They were batch sisters, as close to blood family as clones could have. But over the seasons of working together, something deeper had bloomed between them - stolen glances, hands that lingered when they touched, conversations that stretched late into the night in their shared dormitory.
"I had the dream again," Rika said softly, her conical hat casting shadows over her face as she carefully positioned rice shoots in the fertile mud. "The one where we're sitting by a real fire, not those heating elements in the barracks. And we're eating actual food, not protein paste."
Misaki smiled, though she kept her eyes on her work. Overseer Tenka had a sharp eye and a sharper tongue for workers who seemed idle. "What kind of food?"
"Something that used to walk around on its own legs," Rika laughed quietly. "Maybe even something that chose to be there on the plate."
"And were we alone by this fire?" Misaki asked, her voice dropping to barely a whisper.
Rika's cheeks flushed despite the cool morning air. "We were. Just us, with nowhere we had to be, no quotas to meet. Free to..." She trailed off as Misaki's fingers brushed against hers beneath the murky water.
"Free to choose our own names," Misaki said, her touch lingering. "I dreamed we could do that. I dreamt we could break the cycle and choose who we wanted to be."
"What would you choose?" Rika asked, her heart racing at the contact.
"Sakura," Misaki said without hesitation. "Like the trees that bloom even after the worst winters. And you?"
Before Rika could answer, a sharp crack echoed across the paddy as Overseer Tenka's bamboo stick struck the water near them with explosive force.
"Working or gossiping?" Tenka snarled, her face twisted with irritation. A natural born human, she relished in her task to oversee clones. She wielded her authority like a weapon and never hid her disdain for those she regarded as less than human. "Production quotas don't meet themselves, and Lord Kuyō doesn't pay for idle chatter."
"We were working, Overseer," Rika said, quickly separating her hand from Misaki's and reaching for another bundle of rice shoots.
"Working? I see two clones playing at being human." Tenka's stick cracked across Rika's bare shoulders, sending her stumbling forward into the water. "Batch-sisters thinking they're special, thinking they deserve more than their programming." Another blow caught Rika across the back as she tried to steady herself. "You're tools, nothing more. Tools don't have feelings. Tools don't form attachments."
Misaki started to move toward Rika, but Tenka's stick blocked her path. "Stay where you are, clone. Back to work, both of you. And if I see you two together again... there will be consequences beyond a few welts."
Rika straightened slowly, water and mud dripping from her meagre work attire, her back throbbing where the bamboo had struck. She caught Misaki's eyes for just a moment - seeing anger there, and something that looked like care and worry - before Tenka's stick pointed them toward opposite ends of the paddy.
"Spread out. Maximum distance - minimal distraction."
As Rika waded away from Misaki, she felt anger rise in her chest. They were not slaves, they were paid workers. The way Tenka treated them was driven by hate, not necessity. She bent down, getting back to her work with mechanical precision, but her eyes kept drifting toward Misaki's distant figure.
It was then that the first rumble echoed across the valley.
Rika turned toward the noise, muddy water dripping from her hands as she clutched a bundle of green shoots. Around her, hundreds of other clone workers continued their endless labor, their conical hats bobbing like fishing floats across the terraced fields.
The rumble grew louder.
"Keep working," barked Overseer Tenka from the elevated path between paddies. "Lady Kuyō's forces are on patrol today. Show your respect for your master through labour."
But Rika knew that sound. Every clone in Shima learned to recognise the thunderous footfalls of armies marching to war. This wasn't just a patrol. She looked across the paddy toward Misaki, who had moved closer to the elevated path where Tenka stood. The overseer was shouting something at a group of workers, her stick raised threateningly, but the growing mechanical thunder drowned out her words.
The first mech crested the hill like a steel mountain given life, its massive frame bristling with weapon pods and targeting arrays. Steam hissed from cooling vents as hydraulics whined under the strain of supporting thirty tons of walking death. The rising sun glinted off the proud red armour and a white flower, the Kamon of House Kuyō, painted on its front. Warning klaxons wailed from its speakers as secondary weapon systems tracked across potential targets.
Behind it came the ashigaru, Lady Kuyō's clone warriors in their distinctive red armour, advancing in perfect formation. These were her sisters too, Rika realized with sick clarity - clones bred for war instead of labour. Some carried traditional naginata, the curved blades catching the morning light, while others bore rugged slug rifles. Their disciplined march sent vibrations through the water, rippling against Rika's legs in rhythmic waves.
Then, from the opposite ridge, came the enemy.
Two blue mechs bearing House Ishida's silver crane burst from the treeline, their weapon systems already spinning up to firing speed with mechanical screams that cut through the morning air. Behind them streamed a tide of House Ishida ashigaru in blue-lacquered armour, their war cries echoing across the valley as they charged down the slope. Steam vented from their mech's joints as they pushed their machines to maximum speed.
Rika dropped her rice shoots and began to run, desperately trying to make her way toward where Misaki stood near the elevated path. Workers scattered in all directions, some diving into the deeper water, others trying to flee toward the dormitory buildings and storage facilities.
The first exchange of fire lit up the dawn like artificial lightning. The lead Kuyō mech's twin autocannons carved brilliant lines of tracer fire across the sky, the shells moving so fast they seemed like solid beams of light. The rounds struck the lead Ishida machine center mass, punching into its chest armor in sprays of molten metal and sparks that rained down on nearby ashigaru who screamed in pain as their armour and flesh were melted into one. Hydraulic fluid sprayed from severed lines as the wounded mech staggered, its pilot struggling to steady the mighty war machine.
The Ishida mechs responded with a coordinated barrage of missiles that arced high before diving down like metal falcons. The projectiles slammed into the Kuyō formation with thunderous explosions that lit up the morning sky. Ashigaru warriors vanished in sudden flowers of flame and smoke, their screams lost in the roar of detonations. Body parts and pieces of red armor rained down into the rice paddies like a grotesque hailstorm.
But the Kuyō mech stood firm, its armor scarred and blackened but intact. Its pilot's voice boomed across the battlefield through external speakers: "For House Kuyō! For honour!"
Rika stumbled through knee-deep water, her conical hat lost somewhere behind her. Around her, panic spread through the worker ranks like ripples in a pond. A stray autocannon round carved through a group of fleeing workers, the high-velocity slug turning bodies into red mist before continuing on to splash harmlessly into the water.
The mechs closed distance with thunderous strides, each footfall crushing irrigation channels and sending geysers of mud skyward. One of the Ishida machines stepped directly through a cluster of workers who had been too slow to flee. Rika watched in horror as the massive foot came down with a wet, crushing sound, and when it lifted, nothing remained but crimson stains in the churned mud.
The ashigaru armies met in the center of the paddies with a crash that seemed to shake the earth itself. Rika could see individual combats unfolding with terrible clarity - red and blue armor clashing in deadly choreography. A Kuyō warrior's naginata swept the legs from an Ishida opponent, sending her tumbling into the water, only to have another blue-armored fighter drive a katana through the victor's neck in a spray of arterial blood.
Slug rifle fire painted tracer lines across the battlefield in deadly patterns. A line of Ishida ashigaru advanced in formation, their weapons chattering, cutting down Kuyō defenders as well as dozens of workers caught in the crossfire, their bodies falling into the blood-tinged water. But the Kuyō line closed to melee range, and suddenly the neat formatiosn dissolved into a chaotic melee of blade against blade, armour against flesh.
Rika watched an Ishida warrior - her face young and determined - parry a naginata thrust and counter with her katana, opening her opponent's throat in a single fluid motion. The fallen warrior's blood sprayed across the younger woman's armor as she stepped over the corpse, already turning toward her next opponent. A second later, a burst of autocannon fire from the damaged Kuyō mech swept across that section of battlefield, and she simply ceased to exist, vaporized by the high-explosive shells.
A stray missile struck the embankment near Rika, throwing her face-first into the mud. She lay there gasping, tasting earth and iron, as the battle raged above her. Through the chaos, she caught glimpses of the mechanized slaughter - the wounded Ishida mech, trailing hydraulic fluid and coolant, crushing friend and foe alike as its damaged gyroscopes failed to find stable footing.
The Kuyō mech's autocannons opened up again, their rotating barrels spitting streams of shells across the field. Where the fire swept, ashigaru warriors were cut down like wheat, their armor offering no protection against such devastating firepower. A group of Ishida fighters who had been advancing in formation one moment were reduced to scattered fragments of armour, flesh and bone the next, their battle cries cut short by mechanical death.
Meanwhile, the undamaged Ishida mech had flanked wide, using the chaos to position itself for a killing shot. Its large rail cannon charged with a rising whine that cut through the battlefield noise, and when it fired, the electromagnetically accelerated slug punched clean through the Kuyō mech's side armor. Internal explosions lit up the machine from within as vital systems failed in cascading disasters.
Steam and coolant fluid sprayed everywhere as the wounded mech staggered like a drunken giant. Its pilot, following the Path of Steel's doctrine that death before dishonour was the only acceptable end, spoke her final words over the external speakers: "Honour to House Kuyō. Honour to the Steel Path."
Then she detonated her mech's reactor with a flash that turned the world white.
The explosion flattened everything within hundreds of metres, including the Ishida mechs. The shockwave picked up Rika like a child's toy and hurled her through the air, water and debris following in a deadly cloud. She slammed into an embankment hard enough to drive the air from her lungs, then tumbled into shallow water as the world turned to ringing silence.
***
When Rika awoke, the sun was high overhead and the battlefield was silent except for the occasional moan of the dying and the gentle lapping of water against the embankments. She had been lucky to land on her back, or else would have drowned lying unconscious in ankle deep water. She pushed herself up on shaking arms, spitting mud and blood from her mouth, her ears still ringing from the explosion.
The rice paddy had become a graveyard.
Bodies floated everywhere - ashigaru warriors in their ruined armour, clone workers still clutching rice shoots and pieces of mechs jutting from the water like the ribs of metal whales. The water itself had turned into a rusty brown mixture of blood and hydraulic oil, the oil creating rainbow patterns on the surface that caught the sunlight in mockingly beautiful displays.
Rika waded through the carnage, searching. "Misaki!" she called, her voice cracking. "Misaki, where are you?"
Her friend had been near the elevated path when the battle began.
She found Misaki beneath a section of the Kuyō mech's arm, the massive piece of metal having been hurled clear when the reactor detonated. Her beautiful braided hair was matted with blood and mud. The metal beam had crushed her from the waist down, but her upper body was intact, her eyes closed as if she were merely sleeping.
"Misaki," Rika whispered, kneeling beside her friend's body as tears streamed down her face. She took Misaki's hand, still warm but growing cold, and held it against her cheek. "You're free now. Free to choose your own name... Sakura."
Around her, the rice shoots they had planted that morning floated like funeral offerings among the dead, their green promise of next season's harvest now just another casualty of the endless struggles for power that consumed Shima.
"Get up, clone!"
The voice cracked like a whip across the battlefield. Rika looked up through her tears to see Overseer Tenka picking her way through the debris, her bamboo stick in hand. The woman's clothes were torn and she bore a gash across her forehead, but her expression was as cruel as ever.
"The battle's over. Time to get back to work." Tenka surveyed the carnage with cold efficiency. "Salvage what rice you can. Lord Kuyō will want her fields replanted by tomorrow." She spotted other surviving workers scattered across the battlefield and began shouting at them. "You! Stop gawking at the bodies! And you - gather those scattered tools!"
Rika remained kneeling beside Misaki's body, unwilling to leave her friend's side.
"Did you hear me, clone?" Tenka's stick cracked across Rika's shoulders, the same spot she had struck earlier. "Your batch-sister is dead. Mourn on your own time. These fields won't tend themselves."
"She has a name," Rika said quietly, not looking up.
"What?" Tenka leaned closer, raising her stick again.
"Her name was Misa... Sakura." Rika's voice was steady now, cold as winter steel. "She wasn't just a clone. She had a name."
Tenka's laugh was harsh and ugly. "Clones don't have names, they have designations. And dead clones don't even have that." The bamboo stick smacked across Rika's back again.
Rika's hands closed to fists, angrily punchinging them into the mud. Her right hand hit the grip of a katana that lay beside a dead ashigaru, its blade still stained with blood from the battle. In one fluid motion - without thinking and without hesitation - she grabbed the sword and quickly rose to her feet while swinging the blade in a wide arc.
The strike was clumsy, but the sharp blade cut across Tenka’s chest, effortlessly slicing through her garbs and carving through her flesh. The overseer's body stood for a moment with a confused expression, her bamboo stick still raised, before toppling backward into the bloodied water with a splash that seemed to echo across the silent battlefield.
The surviving workers who had witnessed the kill stood frozen in shock. Some stared at Rika, others at Tenka's motionless corpse, unable to process what they had just seen.
Rika wiped the katana clean on her muddy vest top, only now feeling its weight and balance. The weapon felt right in her hands, as if it had been waiting for her. She knelt one final time beside Misaki's body, pressing a gentle kiss to her friend's forehead.
“I’ve broken the cycle,” she whispered. "And I'll go to find my own name now."
Without another word, she turned and walked away along the elevated path, the katana at her side and her back straight with newfound purpose. Behind her, most of the other workers remained frozen in shock, but a couple of them began to cheer.
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