“How long do you think we have been here?” asked Kawa softly. He was sitting on the floor with his back leaning against the cold steel wall. 

James unconsciously shrugged his shoulders. “How should I know? Maybe ten hours? Or two days?”

Kawa glanced back up at the steel wall. They had tried everything in order to at least place a dent on the steel wall, but nothing worked. Not even their katanas could do any damage.

“This is stupid.”

“Excuse me?” Kawa asked as he turned to the Lunan samurai. 

James was staring really hard at his hands. “Europa is always a step ahead of us. I should have known that they would be up to something… like this. Fucking Snow!”

“You mean Lord Yuki Snow?” Kawa asked nervously. James was not like this at all, which was scaring him a little bit.

“Of course, who else?” James snapped. “Here, we are trapped. We can’t reach out to anybody outside. Our comrades… no, our friends died for us just so that we could get information for them. They fucking died! All for the sake of Earth and Moon. Europans must be laughing at us by now.”

“What about Mars? They are part of this too.” Kawa frowned at his partner's odd behavior. “Besides, isn’t this Europa’s spaceship? All of the Europan samurais were killed. Don’t you think it’s strange that Europans would turn against each other?”

“Shut up. You’re trying to confuse me!” James shouted at him.

Kawa did not say anything any further.

“Dammit… Dammit!” James slammed his fist on the steel wall only to yelp in pain. “If only I was stronger!”

“James, please listen to me.” Kawa sighed lightly. He was rubbing his sword’s red handle with his rough thumb. “If they were still here, they would not like how you acted. That was not what they wanted. They would have wanted you to move on and keep going forward.”

“How the fuck should you know?! You don’t care about them! I mean, you never did!”

Kawa narrowed his eyes in anger. “Of course, I did and still do! You don’t know how I feel right now, but I can tell you that I’m familiar with how you’re going through. You want to take revenge on the one you so deeply hate. Or you want to blame someone for our friends’ deaths.”

The Wolf Samurai looked away from his friend, trying to hide his emotion that was threatening to show up on his face. “So, you lost someone important to you before?”

“Yes. My family.”

James whipped his head toward Kawa in surprise. “Your family? What happened to them?”

“My mother and sister got caught up in the battlefield and were killed by the Martian samurais. I found out a few years later. My father… He got killed by this very spaceship, Jove. At first, I was almost consumed by anger and guilt. I should have done something to prevent their deaths. I should have gone home and not stopped by that stupid sword shop. I could have stopped my father from leaving and waited for my mother and sister instead. There were so many possibilities that I should have done. I blamed myself at first, but the blame turned to Martians eventually.

“So, when this spaceship first showed up that morning, I was… I was more than eager to start the mission. I wanted to kill whoever was controlling Jove… I wanted to get revenge on them and the Martians for what they had done to my family.”

Kawa pulled his katana a little from his scabbard. Roaring flames were either begging or threatening to get out of the scabbard. “And then, our friends died… Jessica, Shiro, Alex, and Matt. And so did other fellow samurais too. Think I don’t know how you are going through this? You don’t know anything about me.”

“I’m sorry,” James muttered.

Kawa gave him a small smile. “You don’t have to apologize. You can’t help having such horrible feelings. The first time was pretty hard. I was there before.”

James nodded his head once and then found the blood-stained floor a little more interesting than anything else. Finally, he said after a few quiet minutes, “I was abandoned by my own parents when I was only a toddler. And then, I was abandoned by the orphanage when I was only 12 years old. They could not feed everyone, so… one by one they left us in the middle of nowhere. And…”

Kawa did not push James into saying anything more, which the Lunan samurai was grateful for.

“WARNING! APPROACHING CERES. CHANGE OF COURSE RECOMMENDED.”

Kawa and James stood up so fast that they almost fainted due to the sudden rush of blood leaving their brains.

“Ceres?” James asked in confusion. “We went that far? But I didn’t feel any movement…”

“It’s different from Limitless. Jove is the solar system’s largest spaceship, so we can’t feel any movement even though it is moving.”

“Well, in that case… it must have been about a day, right? We were a half day away from Mars when we discovered this spaceship.”

“Yeah, I think so, but… is this spaceship piloting by itself? Autopilot or something like that?” Kawa asked. He took one more look at the computer display on the table, but it asked for the password again. 

“Do you think we will crash?” James asked nervously. “We have to get out of here!”

“Chaos pill. Do you have it?” Kawa asked.

“Yeah, plenty of Chaos pills! About thirty or so… Why?”

“Can you please give me one? I think I have an idea about how to get out of this room,” Kawa said as he reached out his hand.

“Okay, sure. What are you planning to do?” James took a pill out of his package that was attached to his belt. 

“I am going to destroy the door,” Kawa flashed a big grin on his light tan face. “With my flaming sword, of course.”

“Is it even possible?” James handed the pill to the Dragon Samurai.

“Oh, there are many ways I can do with my sword,” Kawa said, withdrawing his flaming sword. “I’m not too fond of drugs that make us become insanely stronger. But this…”

He tossed the pill into his mouth. “This is an emergency.”

The flames on his sword grew louder and bigger. He pointed it at the steel wall where the door was right behind. All of the flames on his sword moved all the way to the tip, making a fireball.

He pulled his sword away from the fireball, which was sitting in the air by itself. “Stay back, James! It’s going to leave a mark for sure!”

In the samurai-style way, he swung his sword gracefully through the air until it hit the fireball. As soon as it landed on the fireball, the attack was shot so fast that James could not even see it until the damage on the door appeared.

After the cliche explosion and smoke faded away into the air, they were looking at the large hole.

“Holy fuck! Why the fuck didn’t you do that earlier?” James ran to the hole out of excitement. He pulled out his own katana. “It’s my turn!”

As soon as he swung his sword, the sharp wind gust cut the door into pieces flawlessly. They jumped through another hole of the destroyed door just when they heard another loud announcement from the main computer.

“WARNING! APPROACHING CLOSER TO CERES AT FIVE THOUSAND KILOMETERS AWAY.”

“What, already?” James yelled in panic. “We have to get out of here!”

“We have to find the escape pods… that’s if Jove has them!”

“APPROACHING AT ONE THOUSAND KILOMETERS…”

“Over there!” James stopped right past one of hundreds of consistent sliding doors. Upon hearing him, Kawa halted only a few feet ahead of him.

“I think I saw the emergency exit sign!”

All of sudden, the whole spaceship started shaking violently. James and Kawa nearly yelped in surprise and collapsed to their knees.

Immediately, they got up from the floor and kept going, heading for the emergency exit sign James recently saw. Kawa slammed his fist onto the keypad, causing the door to stop sliding completely.

“Here it is!” James pointed at the large sign with flashing red words: “EMERGENCY EXIT.” Right below it, there were two escape pods sitting. They quickly jumped into the pods as soon as their doors slid smoothly open.

The countdown to launch out of Jove was the last thing they heard.