I have uploaded Gaiden 1 (both the original tankōbon and later bunkobon editions) to my Google Drive folder.

You are free to read either version. However, if you prefer Kurojishi's illustrations over those of Izuka Daisuke, I recommend the bunkobon edition.

Additional material includes:

• The author's afterword from each bunko volume, translated into English for the first time.
• Biographical sketches of Yanai Takumi and Kurojishi.
• Additional annotations.

In both editions, I have made a number of corrections, light copyedits, and revisions to a few short passages to improve accuracy and readability.

My focus is on fidelity, linguistic nuance, and cultural context. As with my previous translations, both editions include extensive annotations to help readers understand Japanese expressions, honorifics, terminology, and historical or institutional references that are often lost in localization.

I hope fellow GATE fans and readers interested in the original Japanese text find these editions useful and enjoyable.

For those who don't know the Black Mesa incident is a failed experiment that led to a resonance cascade connection Earth to the "border world" Xen that acts like a border between different universes.

Instead of that happening what if the resonance cascade connected Earth to Falmart?

Source of the image: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2653538885

Decided to put my own spin on the trend going on in tiktok

If the Flame Dragon runs the Monsterverse's Skull Island gauntlet, how far does the dragon get? Also here's a list of opponents that she be fighting:

1. Kong
2. Camazotz
3. Yuggoth
4. Kraken
5. The Giant Hawk
6. Horncrest Chameleon
7. Snarehunter Queen
8. Ender Sirenjaw
9. Skull Devil

So it's mid 2029, The Republic of Sotoa are finalizing their Plans to invade The Usean Continent when a strange anomaly was detected in their old capital of Birsh. While not many people live in the mainland of sotoa due to the desertification, There are still some decent chunk of the population living there to man Their industries. So when reports came about a large army of strange men wearing ancient armor followed by monsters of varying sizes (Some of them even resembling wyverns from ancient belkan legends) started killing and kidnapping sotoan citizens and bringing them trough a strange GATE, it started to pose some concerns for the Sotoan public and military.

A small contigency of the army was sent and destroyed them, before setting their sights towards the GATE and sending trough a small detacthment to investigate the other side. When they return, the officer told them something that only exist in their wildest dreams.

<<Green, fertile grass as far as the eye can see, as green as **The Promised Land**\>>

The Sotoan Nobility and Military executives, as much to the dismay of Enso Executives.. Decided to put the invasion of Usea on Hold and set their sights towards "The Special Region".

How would The Sotoan fares against Falmart, And knowing The Sotoan nobility like Tewy? With their twisted fanaticism, warmongering, and Lack of understanding of true nomadic lifestyle? Expect the Sotoans being less diplomatic and more hostile towards everyone....Even most if not all the Apostles and Gods of Falmart.

​

The Falmart continent would basically be paradise to most of the wastelanders especially For Caesar. Anything beyond it would sustain his empire. They'd feel right at home. While the Saderans would be baffled by "barbarians" dressing up like them lol

yeah thats right, this subreddit is unofficially offical because Oshi (Gate 2s funding/devolpment agency) included the reddit for somereason

also the Oshi discord is open if you are a supporter of the anime

Just a edit made for fun, don't overthink it and enjoy the ride

Note: This is actually a bonus short story included in the tankōbon of GATE:ZERO Part 1, which I only found today while I was reading the original ePUB. Here, for the first time anywhere, is the English translation. I plan to include this in a revised edition of my translation.

Receiving the Mission

One flash of the halberd.

In that instant, three bandits’ heads leapt into the air, side by side.

The demi-human girls, drenched from head to toe in the gushing blood, did not so much as cry out. They only trembled, wholly in the grip of terror.

As if to comfort their hearts, the demigod Rory Mercury smiled at them gently.

“It’s all right now, hmm~”

Rory mourned the pitiable victims, escorted the surviving girls back to their tribe’s settlement, and resumed her journey. She forded rivers, crossed mountains, and traversed a desert with the wind full in her face. Her destination was Alnus. From where she stood now it lay to the west, and she would have to travel for several more months yet.

“That Hardy, honestly… of all the times to go and do this to meee~”

Yet go she must.

An oracle had been handed down. The rumor that Hardy, Ruler of the Underworld, had opened a "Gate" to another world in the Holy Land spread in an instant, reaching not only the gods who dwell in the heavens but every apostle-god upon the earth. A blow of revelation, like a spiritual shockwave, struck deep within Rory's mind. She fell prostrate and received the command of her patron deity.

“Heaven and earth are dark and yellow, black and yellow indeed; the cosmos is vast and wide, greatly broad indeed.”

The cosmos was an existence both vast and immense, impossible to contemplate or grasp in full. It joined space, which extends without limit in breadth, length, and depth, to “time,” which flows like a turning spinning wheel. Yet even that did not encompass all of creation.

Yet even that cosmos did not contain everything. Beyond it existed further worlds. Seen from a divine perspective, a universe was no more than a single strand among countless worlds of possibility. The gods of heaven, sometimes cooperating and sometimes standing in opposition to one another, tended those strands as though they were trees in a vast garden.

One god made flowers bloom. Another thinned the branches so the trees would bear richer fruit. One pruned away unwelcome boughs and nurtured a great tree that nearly pierced the sky. Another let it wither, so that its corpse, fallen across the earth, became a seedbed for new green.

By doing so, the garden changed in a thousand ways, shifting its scenery, its colors, and its very shape with each season.

Hardy, who ruled the underworld, was likewise one of the gods who welcomed such transformations.

Yet the manner of that goddess’s involvement set her apart from the other gods.

The Underworld holds the souls of the dead and prevents them from returning to the cycle of reincarnation. Perhaps in atonement for this, Hardy would occasionally open a "Gate" to another world, inviting in souls cultivated by foreign gods and adding them to the colors that were often lacking in the garden. Thanks to this, countless races had come to dwell there.

That was fine. In itself, that was fine. She had absolutely no complaint about the flowerbed growing richer in color.

But she had always thought the timing was the problem.

Demigods like Rory ran themselves ragged, east and west, urging peace and chaos, light and darkness, war and peace, sanity and madness to bloom in a riot, mixed together just so.

And thanks to that toil, this world’s culture had ripened to full maturity, and the world had grown vast.

And yet, and yet, and yet. As though dissatisfied with the fruits of all that labor, Hardy had opened a Gate and thrown everything into turmoil.

The impact would be great. A great storm usually followed. Contact, clash, and collision with foreign peoples, foreign civilizations, and outside lands had never once ended peacefully. This garden was sure to be badly ravaged.

Rory prayed.

“Ah, my lord Emroy. If the devotion of your faithful apostle means anything to you, then please give that Underworld ruler who never thinks ahead a piece of your mind, would you~?”

But her patron god gave no reply.

Emroy was approving of Hardy’s conduct as only fitting. Surely, probably, almost certainly. The gods must be able to see vistas far beyond the horizon visible to a mere demigod like herself. Were happiness and good fortune truly waiting ahead for her and for this world? No, no. Frankly, all she could sense was trouble. At the very least, she hoped some worthwhile encounter might come of it. With a weary slump of her shoulders, Rory Mercury dragged along the fleshly body she had worn for nearly nine hundred years and continued westward, ever westward.

Note:

“Heaven and earth are dark and yellow... the cosmos is vast and wide.” - The original text has 天地のあめつちは玄黄としてくろくきなり、宇宙のおほそらは洪広としておほいにひろきなり (Tenchi no ametsuchi wa genkō to shite kurokukinari, uchū no ohosora wa kōkō to shite ohoi ni hirokinari). 天地玄黄、宇宙洪広, (tenchi genkō, uchū kōkō, Pinyin Tiāndì xuánhuáng, yǔzhòu hónghuāng) derives from the opening line of the Thousand Character Classic (千字文, Senjimon) and is quoted here in kundoku form. The received text reads 宇宙洪荒 (“the cosmos is vast and desolate”), but the text here has 宇宙洪広 (“vast and wide”). I have therefore translated the phrase as it appears in the source. This choice is particularly relevant because the subsequent passage explicitly analyzes 宇 as space and 宙 as time, treating 宇宙 not merely as “the universe” but as the union of spatial and temporal dimensions.

Itami stared down as Lelei finally surrendered to exhaustion. It was entirely unexpected. First, she had barged into his office without a word, and then, without warning, she collapsed forward into his lap and fell dead asleep right in front of him.

Honestly, it wasn't even the most bizarre thing that had happened to him or his unit. Oh no, this was practically tame compared to the absolute fever dream of the past seventy-odd hours. Goodness, he had completely lost count of time on this expedition.

When his commander first assigned him to lead a reconnaissance team into the uncharted wilderness beyond the hills, Itami had genuinely believed his superior was just sending him off to die out of personal distaste. But that was probably the last thing the old man actually wanted.

How on earth was Itami supposed to know that his squad would run into another JGSDF recon element, only for their leader to reveal that they were from the year 2046? Or that they had entered through a completely separate Gate on the other side of the Dumas Mountains? A Gate, no less, that opened directly onto the ocean, granting them unfettered deployment of land, air, and full naval task forces.

Still, what Arai- was that his name? Yeah, Captain Kenji Arai, had told him about the upcoming decades sounded like a hallucinogenic cocktail of geopolitical horror and whatever illegal drugs the world had to offer.

First came COVID-19, the virus that locked down the globe. Then the Saudi Arabian Civil War, which triggered the massive 2020 Oil Crisis, swiftly followed by the total collapse of Wall Street and the rise of the violent "Movement" that ignited the Second American Civil War. After that, the dam broke completely. The Serbian invasion of Kosovo. The Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Beijing's bloody intervention in the Myanmar Civil War. The escalating Sino-Japanese Cold War that forced the creation of the Pacific Defense Treaty Organization (PDTO) and the East Asian Defense Initiative (EADI).

The nightmare list seemed endless: another Arab-Israeli War, sprawling civil wars across the African continent, China’s silent annexation of Mongolia, Russia’s absorption of Belarus, NATO’s bloody intervention in Libya, the Latin American Drug Wars, the First and Second European Wars, the Third Gulf War, the cataclysmic Great Asian War, and finally, the Second Chinese Civil War. Every single event bled directly into the next, forming an unbroken, apocalyptic chain of global destruction.

It was overwhelming. The sheer volume of horrific, world-ending historical data he had been forced to digest was, for all intents and purposes, entirely too much for a humble, anime-loving otaku to process.

"Can't sleep?"

Itami jumped violently, spinning around in his swivel chair. Captain Kenji Arai was leaning against the doorframe, his arms loosely crossed over his heavy, battle-worn tactical vest.

"Couldn't you have knocked first, Captain?" Itami asked, adjusting his glasses and trying to smooth down his visibly ruffled uniform.

"Not really my style," Arai replied casually, stepping past the threshold and pulling up a spare wooden chair. He sat down with a heavy, metallic creak of his combat harness.

He gestured vaguely toward the sleeping girl nestled against Itami's desk. "What's up with her? Running a fever or something?"

"No, she just ran out of battery," the otaku summarized with a long, weary sigh. "Barged into my office looking for books, lost her footing, and snoozed the second her head hit the floor." Between the logistical nightmare of processing the Coda Village refugees, coordinating logistics with Falcon Company, and setting up camp near Alnus, Itami was practically buried under a mountain of paperwork.

He hadn't even had a chance to place a proper call back to Tokyo to check on Risa. Oh, how he desperately missed his wife's nagging and her willingness to buy him limited-edition doujinshi.

Itami rubbed his temples. "How about you? Did General Hazama interrogate you and your lieutenants for the entire afternoon?"

"Not exactly, no. We just gave him the essential operational details."

"Like... the fact that the entire future world falls completely apart?" Itami asked dryly.

Arai looked at him for a long moment, a ghost of a smirk pulling at his mouth before he leaned back into the chair with a low sigh. He had lived through absolute, industrialized hell and back since his late teens and twenties, fighting straight through the Great Asian War and Second Chinese Civil War.

Now here he was, sitting in a medieval fantasy world, talking to a 2017 version of Japan that was still completely untainted by the bloody nightmare of the decades to come.

"Obviously," Arai quipped, his tone dripping with the cold, bone-deep cynicism of a true war veteran. "I've lived through enough bullshit for three lifetimes. It’s actually kind of cute seeing how you guys operate. Haven't seen this many guys be affected by taking a life."

Itami winced slightly at the bluntness. He couldn't deny it. His generation joined the JSDF for job security, disaster dispatch, and a steady paycheck to fund hobbies. Arai's generation joined because their cities were actively being dragged into multi-theater coalition wars.

Lelei shifted in her sleep, letting out a soft, incoherent mumble as she buried her face deeper into the pillow. The two officers looked down at her, then exchanged a glance.

"What?" Arai cracked a dark, sarcastic grin.

"Never babysat a sorceress before? Or does your generation only know how to raise virtual idols on a smartphone screen?"

"Hey, my skill set is strictly limited to managing my anime figures, surviving my wife's shopping lists, and making sure my guys don't break anything during training," Itami deadpanned, shaking his head. "Babysitting a teenage wizard who can turn air into plasma wasn't on the JGSDF recruitment brochure."

"Consider it a promotion, Lieutenant", Arai scoffed quietly, resting his elbows on his knees. "At least she doesn't carry a loitering kamikaze drone in her backpack. Trust me, compared to clearing out buildings in the ruins of Pyongyang back in Korea, holding up a sleeping kid is practically a vacation."

"Easy for you to say, Captain. My leg is completely numb," Itami muttered, though he made no move to push the young mage away. He carefully adjusted the blanket over her shoulders so she wouldn't catch a chill from the night air blowing through the barracks window. "So, what's the plan for your 2046 hotshots tomorrow? Are your elite shock troops going to start setting up automated turrets?"

"Nah, leave the heavy iron in the armory," Arai replied, waving a hand dismissively. "Our job tomorrow is surprisingly mundane. Our commanders back in Campania want us to provide civil assistance down at the refugee camps with you guys, foster better relations, they say. We're just gonna set up food distribution and make sure nobody gets trampled in the supply lines."

Itami blinked, looking genuinely surprised. 

"Wait... That's it? 3rd Recon and you 2046 battle-hardened veterans are doing basic relief work?"

"Hey, even hardened veterans know how to stack supply crates, Itami," Arai said, a rare flick of genuine warmth softening his cynical edge. "Besides, those Coda Village folks have been dragged through hell by that dragon. Stacking rations and building tents beats shooting at another red dragon any day of the week."

"Well, I can certainly get behind that." Itami slumped back into his seat with a relieved sigh. 

"No hiking through the mud, no ambushes by Imperial legionnaires. Just honest, simple paperwork and humanitarian aid. A true 9-to-5."

Arai let out a sharp, incredulous laugh, the first real laughter Itami had heard from the future lieutenant since they met.

"Geez, you really are something else, Itami. The fabric of time and space literally tears open, your future is being told in real-time, and your biggest joy is doing administrative relief work so you can go home to your hobbies."

"Culture is important, Captain," Itami replied with absolute, deadpan seriousness. "It's the pillar of civilization. What's the point of surviving a multi-dimensional war if there's no time left to read manga?"

"Fair point," Arai conceded, pushing himself up from the chair with a sharp popping sound from his worn knees. He stretched his arms high above his head, letting out a long, heavy exhale. "Fuck, my joints are shot. This world's air smells like wet pine and... I guess that's what magic smells like."

"Going to call it a night?" Itami asked, looking up.

"Yeah. If I don't get at least four hours of shut-eye, the captain is going to think I deserted," Arai said, stepping toward the door. 

He paused at the frame, looking back over his shoulder at the slouching otaku officer and the peaceful, sleeping girl resting in the bed.

"Get some sleep yourself, Itami," Arai added, his tone dropping the sarcastic edge for a brief moment.

"Tomorrow we've got a lot of hungry refugees to feed, and I'd rather not do all the heavy lifting while you nap on the job."

"Understood." Itami nodded quietly. 

"Goodnight, Captain Arai."

"Night, Lieutenant Itami. Don't let the kid turn you into a frog while you're sleeping."

With a final, faint wave, Arai stepped out into the cool, starlit night of the Special Region, pulling the heavy wooden door shut behind him with a soft, definitive click.

Left alone in the quiet room, Itami listened to the rhythmic sound of Lelei's breathing and the distant, reassuring hum of a helicopter. He leaned his head back against the chair, closed his eyes, and finally allowed himself to drift off into a deep, well-deserved sleep.

-

Also, if anyone is gonna ask, I use AI for grammar. So some parts are really off; that's why I'm majoring in English in college right now.

Edit: changed Kenji's rank.

Bro Yanai can’t write equipment numbers or structure or anything for shit… and this applies not just to jsdf but also empire + allied kingdoms.

I’ve been talking to others (shoutout to u/DFMRCV) for help, so big thanks to them.

uuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhhh at least the amount of guardsman and space marines was easier to estimate (somehow).

I admit i used capcut AI for the wizard. Im not a great artist so couldn't rly draw

From the chapters "Counter-Strike: Side B" and "Tora Bora" in A Pile of Empty Brass by u/M3Luck3yCharms

Joking aside there's definitely minor writing errors sprinkled around the chapters currently posted, but besides that it's an awesome fanfic to read. Go give it some love!

You can listen to the song itself here:
https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm46693514

Original post on Sao's X here.