Prologue

                                    

                                          


                          
Shiho Nishizumi sat alone in her office at her family's estate. She was currently reading over reports from the Sensha-do Federation about the state of the instructor school that she was put in charge of for the time being. Usually, the job would fall to Ami Chono, her once-great pupil back in the day, but the JSDF Captain was pulling double duty now as a referee for the qualifier bracket that was being held.
                          
Hearing of the news of the new tournament and the new perks being added to the long and mostly unchanged sport had given the head of the Nishizumi family mixed feelings. Sensha-do had been untouched for so long since its founding, a sport that requires only a team's tanks, and their school's fighting style to win the day was now being change around to now include all three phases of tanks, artillery, and planes.
                          
Maybe it was just because things were changing, Shiho being someone not a big fan of change. It was because of change that she was the woman she is now, cold and unrelenting. Many people don't remember that Shiho had used to smile every day, she used to laugh, and she used to love. Those were days long gone now.
                          
Why do I do this to myself?
                          
The self-loathing thought came to Shiho's mind, as she stop reading the reports, then reach into her side drawer and pull out a small stack of pictures she always kept buried away. She should have thrown these pictures out, burn them, or rip them to pieces. Yet there was always a small part of her that kept these to remind herself she was someone different at one time in her life before the change came to be.
                          
In the first picture, a young handsome man only in his mid 20's at the time, well built and had his orange coveralls on. He was cover in dirt, grime, and oil, a testament to the hard work he did as a mechanic on tanks. He had light brown hair that stuck up at odd angles, a feature she once love so much with large greyish eyes.
                          
This was once her husband Tsuneo Nishizumi, in the current picture he stood next to Shiho as she held then 1-year-old Maho and was pregnant with Miho. Maho was in her mother's arms, but her eyes were solely on her mother's large stomach, it reminded Shiho how at the time, her child always clung to her stomach desperate to meet the new addition to the family.
                          
Shiho flip to the next picture, this one was of her late mother Nayoko Nishizumi. Shiho bore the same resemblance to her mother with little to no deviations, in the picture her mother wore a black kimono with her graying hair tied up.
                          
Nayoko was a rigid and remorseless woman. A real tigress of her day, as she rarely let Shiho out of sight as a child, always hounded home the ideals and traditions of the family even in infancy and almost never let her father Tadasu have a say in her upbringing. Shiho remember her father very little as he almost never came around, eventually, he just faded into the background, a divorce was never official.
                          
History seems to repeat itself in our family.
                          
Tsuneo and her was something that wasn't planned or arrange, which upset her mother to the point she wanted to disown Shiho, but didn't, only because she was the sole heiress at the time for the family. Shiho had met Tsueno in college, he was a mechanic for their Sensha-do team, and probably the only time men were allowed around the sport in a participating role, which was predominately female base in all phases.
                          
He was a goofball who made it his personal job to make Shiho smile, which she rarely did at that time, a result of the family's Sensha-do style of cutting off of emotions.
                          
The burly mechanic wasn't dissuaded and persisted in his quest to see her smile. He eventually succeed in this impossible quest, when at a party he jump up on the table and declare she was the only woman in the world who could scowl and still look cute at the same time. To which he received a smack on the back of his head from her, with a smile calling him an idiot.