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â â âŻâŻâŻâ a/n: this chapter has been rewritten and edited.â â â â â â
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The examination hall was large and deliberately ordered, each candidate positioned on an individual elevated platform spaced at precise intervals from the next, the whole arrangement carrying the geometry of military formation. Banks of machinery flanked each station, scanners and biological readers humming at a frequency you felt more than heard, their pale diagnostic light washing across the candidates' vitals in slow, methodical sweeps as they waited.
The AI voice rang out across the examination hall with the flat, unhurried cadence of a system that had run this sequence more times than anyone in the room could count.
Body measurement and form assimilation complete. Kaiju muscle fibers, fully operational. Now measuring unleashed combat power.
The synthetic suits responded by completing their assimilation sequences simultaneously, and the room shifted in an instant â a ripple of involuntary reactions moving through the candidates like a current, sharp intakes of breath and quiet exclamations of disbelief stacking over one another. The sound of people discovering for the first time what it felt like to have something fundamentally nonhuman threading itself through their physiology, and finding the answer considerably more overwhelming than they had braced for.
You stood on your own platform and felt the familiar pressure of assimilation settle across your frame. No sharp breath. No widened eyes. The sensation was not new to you â you had worn variations of this suit before, in quieter rooms with fewer people, on occasions when a proposed improvement or a new feature had required a body willing to generate usable data.
That history lived somewhere in your muscle memory, apparently, because your body had simply accepted the sequence and continued, leaving you free to observe the reactions unfolding around you with a stillness that probably read, to anyone paying attention, as either remarkable composure or profound disinterest. You didn't particularly mind either interpretation.
Ichikawa Reno, UCP 8 percent.
"Umâ excuse me?" The silver haired boy on the nearest platform started, his brow creasing with the particular confusion of someone encountering an acronym they hadn't been prepared for.
He didn't get far with the question. The proctor preempted him with the reflexive efficiency of someone long past the point of waiting for it to fully form.
"UCP stands for unleashed combat power," Hoshina said, his grin already settled into its characteristic position, eyes tracking across the row of candidates with that particular quality of hisâattentive in a way that consistently managed to disguise itself as something more casual. "It's a measure of how much of the suit's total output youâre capable of drawing out at any given time."
There was a synchronized murmur of Ohâs that moved through the candidates like a wave once the explanation settled.Â
But not everyone shared in that collective exhale of comprehension. You had been acquainted with the terminology long before today, and with considerably more than its surface definition â and you were fairly certain that you weren't the only one. You had clocked Kikoru Shinomiya's name on the applicant roster that morning with a recognition that required no second glance. The General Directorâs daughter. Surely she had enough exposure to the Kaiju world and understood everything that was unfolding now.
"Soâ in other words," Ichikawa said, his voice losing altitude with each word, "I'm only capable of drawing out eight percent of this suit's power."
âEight percent is nothing to sneeze at, kid.â Hoshina returned, the laugh that accompanied it carrying enough genuine ease to sand the number's edges down considerably. "For reference, yerâ average trained general officer only clocks in around twenty anyway."
There it was. a quality you had noticed in him beforeâthe facility with which he could deliver a cold fact and have it arrive as something warmer, without any visible effort expended in the translation.
"Vice Captain!"
The voice cut across the hall from the direction of the analytic team with enough urgency to draw the room's attention in one clean motion, yours among it, though nothing in your expression particularly moved.
âHm?â Hoshina angled toward them, a hum of acknowledgement falling somewhere between mildly intrigued and entirely unhurried.
"We have a standout among this year's candidates." The analyst's voice carried the barely-contained momentum of someone delivering news they had already watched land in their own head and found satisfying. "Kikoru Shinomiya's unleashed combat power is forty-six percent.â
You had anticipated something substantial from her â the General Director's daughter had placed consistently at the top of every preceding recruitment round that had tested physical aptitude, and she had ranked just behind you in the written examination, the one that drew from government-accessible records on kaiju biology and combat theory. You had gone into today expecting to be unsurprised by her.
And yet.
Forty-six percent, pre-enlistment. The number settled over you with a weight that was difficult to immediately categorize â not quite disbelief, but something adjacent to it, the particular quality of awe that only arrived when something confirmed rather than contradicted your existing impression of a person, and still managed to exceed it.
She was young, startlingly so, and her output was already pressing against the lower threshold of what a Platoon Leader was expected to sustain â officers whose average combat draws ranged somewhere in the fifties to seventies, and who had spent years earning those figures.
Your gaze moved toward Hoshina on instinct.Â
Through the clear partition of the analysis room, you found him easily. His composure was intact, as it almost always was, but there was something in the set of his expression that you had learned over time to read as the closest he typically came to being visibly impressed.
He wasn't alone in that. The candidates around you had come alive with it â voices dropping into urgent murmurs, heads turning, eyes wide and fixed on the display still holding Kikoru's number. Most of them lacked the context to fully parse what forty-six percent meant in practical terms, but they had Ichikawa's eight as a reference point, and they had the undisguised energy running through the staff, and between those two things they had pieced together enough to know that whatever they had just witnessed was not ordinary.
Furuhashi Iharu, fourteen percent.
Kaguragi Aoi, fifteen percent.
Izumo Haruichi, eighteen percent.
The evaluation pressed onward, names and numbers accumulating with a momentum that outpaced expectation at nearly every interval.Â
And yet, the examinees themselves received their results with the slightly deflated quality of people measuring themselves against a benchmark that had been set impossibly high by Kikoru Shinomiya.
It was understandable.Â
But to anyone with sufficient context to read the data rather than simply react to it, the picture being assembled was remarkable in its own right. The averages of this yearâs examinees were running conspicuously above anything the preceding recruitment cycles had produced, and the gap was not marginal.
"Having just one person who can manage over ten percent is considered a good result," Konomi's voice broke through the ambient hum of the machinery, "but thisâ"
You caught her gaze through the glass partition without turning your head by more than a degree, and gave a single, almost imperceptible nod. The comment had been understood by the crowd as an unfocused way of someone processing a surprise out loud.Â
But the exchange that followed was between the two of youâa conversation conducted entirely without words, in the compressed shorthand of people who understood exactly what the numbers meant.
Hoshina glanced toward you at the sound of her voice, something shifting in his expression with the quality of a man cataloguing details he found interesting. His eyes stayed on you for a moment before he spoke.
"This might be our luckiest year yet," he said, his tone landing somewhere between observation and quiet amusement, unhurried in the way that most things he said tended to be.
The evaluation resumed its course, moving through the remaining candidates with the steady, mechanical rhythm of a process that had been designed to be uninterrupted. And for a time, it was.
Then the system registered Kafka Hibino's result, and the rhythm stopped.
Kafka Hibino, zero percent.
The silence that followed among the staff was deafening.Â
Zero percent was not a low score. It was not the kind of result that existed in the established range of documented outcomes, not for a candidate who had cleared the prerequisite examinations, not for an enlisted officer, not for anyone who had ever been formally measured anywhere in the world.Â
If Kikoru Shinomiya's forty-six percent represented the highest figure ever recorded at the pre-enlistment stage, then what was currently displayed on the analytic screen existed at the opposite extreme of the same spectrum.
That was a new low record.
The examinees around Kafka, for their part, received the announcement with the mild, uninvested curiosity of people who had no framework to understand why the number warranted any particular response. A zero was low, presumably. These things happened, presumably. The subdued tension radiating from the staff in the analysis room did not register as the aberration it was.
What followed did not help clarify matters.
Kafka Hibino, apparently unwilling to accept the verdict without further investigation, announced his intention to produce some combat power regardless of what the equipment believed, and adopted a stance that could most charitably be described as effortful â knees bent, fists clenched at his sides, his entire frame trembling with the concentrated exertion of a man attempting to will something into existence through sheer biological stubbornness, his face deepening through successive shades of red as the seconds accumulated and the machinery registered nothing new whatsoever.Â
The overall impression you got was of a man engaged in a struggle that had very little to do with combat power and considerably more to do with internal pressure of an entirely different variety that may or may not⌠come out of his ass.
You felt the laugh before it reached your face and redirected it somewhere it wouldn't be visible, your expression holding by a margin that was narrower than you would have preferred to admit. Your composure survived the encounter, technically, though it required active maintenance throughout.
Hoshina's did not survive it, nor did he appear to make any effort toward that endâhis laughter carried across the hall with the uninhibited ease of a man thoroughly entertained, commentary woven between it at Kafka's expense with the practiced fluency of someone who had discovered a target and intended to make the most of the opportunity.
Through the partition, Konomi found your gaze with an expression that communicated, with extraordinary efficiency, the full weight of her feelings on the matter â something in the region of disbelief, secondhand mortification & embarrassment, AND the particular exhaustion of someone who had grown accustomed to this and had not, in fact, grown accustomed to this.
You held her gaze and said nothing. There was nothing to add.
Eventually, the situation resolved itself. Kafka's campaign concluded without yield (thankfully, because what he might yield wouldnât have been combat power but something very different), and the roll call moved forward with the slightly dazed momentum of something that had been briefly derailed and was now attempting to recover its footing.
It was your turn.
The number that appeared on the analytic display did not produce the same disruption that Shinomiyaâs had, nor the bewildered silence that had greeted Kafka'sâbut it produced something.Â
A current of renewed attention moving through the candidates nearest to you, heads turning with the delayed quality of people who had been looking elsewhere and were now recalibrating.Â
Thirty-two percent, second highest in the cohort, recorded for someone who had been standing quietly at the edge of the proceedings for the better part of the morning without attracting any particular notice.
You were aware of the attention in the same way you were aware of most things â immediately, and without visible reaction. What you were less prepared for was the specific texture of being looked at by a room full of people who had just updated their assessment of you without warning, which produced, after a beat of internal processing, a response that you could only characterize as deeply underwhelming relative to the occasion.
"Oh," you said.
The word sat in the air, solitary and entirely insufficient, and you left it there.
Soon after, The group was redirected to the training grounds.Â
Rules were outlined, guidelines delivered, the procedural architecture of the examination laid over the top of everything with the brisk efficiency of people who had done this before and intended to move through it without interruption.
What remained after, sharp and immediate beneath the noise of everything else, was the simple, clarifying weight of the exam itself.
For years, you had occupied the other side of this equationâstationed behind the operational line in the non-combatant unit, your view of the field mediated through screens and readouts and the controlled remove of the control room.
You had supported and observed and recorded, had watched others move through spaces exactly like this one with something that was not quite envy and not quite admiration, but lived in the territory between them.Â
Now you were standing where they had stood, the training ground spreading out before you with the particular quality of a place that did not care about the distinction between a number on a display and the person behind it.
Thirty-two percent was what the machinery had measured. Whether it translated into something real and functional under field conditions was a question that only the next several minutes and you could answer.
Then, you noticed, with a detachment that surprised you slightly, that you were calm.Â
Your heartbeat sat at a register that had no business being as even as it was. This was only the second time in your life you had faced kaiju in a life or death context, and yet the fear that should have accompanied that fact was absent.Â
Or if not absent, then submerged beneath something older and more practicedâthe particular steadiness that developed in people who had already survived the thing they were supposed to be afraid of.Â
You had seen worse than this. You had lived through worse than this, in circumstances that had not come with rules or guidelines or your trustworthy Vice Captain overseeing the field from a position of considerable competence.
One Honju. Thirty-five Yoju. Dozens of candidates. And Hoshina somewhere on this field.
You can do this.
The start signal blared across the grounds.
You launched forward.
The suit answered immediately, the assimilation that had felt like familiarity during the measurement phase now translating into something altogether more visceral â every stride extended beyond what your body alone could produce, the ground disappearing beneath you at a rate that took a moment to fully register as your own movement.Â
The wind hit your ears and stayed there, a constant pressure as you closed the distance toward the gate where the nearest Yoju had already begun to move, its grotesque silhouette low and coiled, limbs twitching with the anticipatory energy of a predator.
You leveled your firearm at its neck, finger tightening on the triggerâ
The report of a different weapon split the air a half second ahead of yours. The Yoju crumpled, its core obliterated with an efficiency that left nothing for your bullet to find.
"Whoopsies!" Shinomiya's voice arrived immediately after, light and entirely unapologetic, and she strode past you with the unhurried confidence of someone who had not remotely considered that the kill might have belonged to anyone else. She threw a glance that carried more amusement than contrition over her shoulder.
You exhaled through your nose and tamped the flare of irritation down.
"That's fine," you said, to no one in particular, because it was fine, and because standing still on an active field was not a viable alternative to moving forward.
You kicked off the ground and caught the ledge of the nearest building in one motion, the suit amplifying the momentum of the vault until you cleared the rooftop in a single fluid arc and landed with your boots finding purchase on the edge.Â
The elevation rewarded you immediatelyâthe entire battlefield resolved into something legible from up here, the chaos below arranging itself into patterns that were invisible from ground level.
Yojus moved in scattered clusters through the debris, their screeches compounding off the concrete in overlapping waves. The candidates were engaging them in the disorganized, effortful bursts of people whose bodies had not yet reached an understanding with their suitsâshots going wide by margins that would narrow with training, dodges landing a fraction too late, movements carrying the particular stiffness of unfamiliarity. The field was chaos in the specific way that first engagements always were.
For you and Shinomiya, it was something else entirely. Something that had, without any formal declaration, become a competition.
You moved through the Yoju in a parallel track to hers, the two of you cutting through the field from different angles with efficiency.Â
Her shots carried more weight, her aim arriving at its conclusions with a certainty that came from raw, exceptional power. But you were faster, and your awareness of the field as a wholeâthe habit of someone who had spent years reading tactical situations from the remove of a monitorâtranslated on the ground into a spatial fluency that let you anticipate rather than react.
Her kill count pulled ahead regardless. You didn't begrudge it. You had already found something she hadn't.
The Honju announced itself before it was fully visible â the ground registering its approach as vibration before the silhouette rose from the far end of the field, massive and bristling, its hide armored with jagged protrusions that caught the light as it moved, each step dismantling the concrete beneath it with the indifferent force of something that had not evolved to be careful. The candidates in its immediate radius scattered. The ones further out stopped moving entirely and stared before running away.
This was your window, and it was closing.
You were already moving toward it when the familiar, particular tendency of things failing to go according to plan made itself known. Not through any single dramatic development, but through the simple, inevitable arithmetic of Kikoru Shinomiya being faster than you.
"Honju destroyed by Kikoru Shinomiya," Konomi's voice arrived through your earpiece with the clean finality of a door closing. "The Final Exam is over."
The tension in your chest deflated. You let out a long sigh, turning your head in time to catch Shinomiya lowering her weapon, her lips moving in what looked like a murmur directed at no one. And for just a moment, before she had registered that anyone was watching, her expression carried something that had no business being on the face of someone who had just single-handedly ended an examination.
Something heavier than the occasion warranted, something almost lonely.
"Recalling drones. Well done, everyone."
You pushed yourself forward, arranging your expression into something warmer than you currently felt. "Shouldn't you be happier? You just took down a Honju."
"Hm?" The shift was instantaneous â whatever had been there a moment ago vanished without a trace, replaced by that particular grin of hers, bright and entirely self-possessed. "I am happy. Though this much is nothing."
"I see," you said, sweat tracing a slow path down your temple.
"Now thenâ" She stretched with the unhurried ease of someone whose body had barely registered the last twenty minutes as exertion, tilting her head so that her twin ponytails swayed with the motion. "I suppose I should go find Kafka Hibino and revel in his foolishness for the fourth time today."
"Maybe consider cutting him some slacksâ"
The words dissolved.
Every nerve in your body fired at once, a cold, full-body alertness that preceded conscious thought by half a secondâthe deep, instinctive kind that did not wait for your mind to catch up before pulling your attention toward whatever had triggered it
You and Shinomiya turned at the same moment.
Something stood at the far edge of the settling dust, where the field gave way to shadow. Tall, the proportions subtly, deeply wrong â limbs elongated beyond any functional anatomy, joints articulating at angles that shouldn't have existed on anything living.Â
Its outline seemed to resist definition, bleeding into the darkness at its periphery as though it occupied the space between being present and not being present, and couldn't quite commit to either.
The training ground seemed to quiet, the ringing in your ears amplifying the silence.
That thing... wasn't in the mission briefing.
"What is that." Shinomiya's voice came out low and level, the question stripped of its inflection, but the absence of it told you more than the words didâshe was controlling her tone, unwilling to let fear slip past.
The figure tilted its head. A slow, considering movement like it had all the time it required.
A smile split its face. Not human. Not kind. Jagged, asymmetrical, constructed from entirely the wrong materials, wearing the shape of an expression without any of the architecture that gave expressions their meaning. Pure malice wearing the borrowed skin of joy.
You didn't see it move. That was the part that stayed with you afterward â not the violence of it, but the absence of transition, the way causality seemed to skip a frame entirely. One moment Shinomiya was beside you. The next, she wasn't, and the sound that reached you in the space between those two moments was wet and grotesque. The sound of flesh.
âShitâ
Your knees registered the fear before the rest of you did, threatening to buckle. You locked it out through nothing but reflex, forcing your weight down and your stance open as your breath jammed somewhere in the column of your throat.
The question arrived with a violence of its ownâ âis she dead?â â but you didn't let it take root, because the alternative was that she was alive and her suit had absorbed what it could.Â
If she was wounded, then she needed you to still be standing, and you clung to that belief with desperation.
But you couldn't look for her. You couldn't afford to look anywhere except forward, at the thing that was still standing there at the edge of the dust and the dark⌠because it was pointing at you.
The strike didn't announce itself. Pain arrived before your nervous system had finished processing the movement that caused it. White. Total. Detonating across your side with a heat that had no gradation, no build, only the immediate and absolute reality of something having gone very wrong inside your body.Â
You heard yourself breathe and the sound of it was wrong, each inhale fragmenting against something that resisted it, the air arriving in pieces rather than whole, like trying to draw breath through a fistful of broken glass that shifted with every expansion of your chest.
Blood spilled down your side in a heat that didn't abate, soaking through the suit with a persistence that your body hadn't caught up to registering as dangerous yet, still too flooded with the immediate present to process anything beyond the next second.
But twice now â barely, at the outermost edge of perception â you had caught it move. Not the movement itself, but the ghost of it, a ripple that passed across its hand like a disturbance in still water, there and gone before the eye could confirm what it had seen. That was all. Two instances of almost-nothing.
It was enough to know that it moved faster than thought, and that thinking was therefore not going to save you. But it could be useful.
"W-What is thisâ" Shinomiya's voice broke through the silence, too loud, the edges of it fraying in a way that fear produced and training hadn't yet learned to suppress, the sound of someone whose composure had found its limit and was no longer pretending otherwise.
Every survival instinct you possessed screamed at you to tell her to be quiet, to shut the fuck up before it gave the thing in front of you something to orient toward. The words formed and died in your throat, swallowed by the pain that had taken up residence in your chest and was expanding with every breath you tried to draw.
The creature thankfully paid her no particular attention. It turned instead toward the Honjuâthe one that had been destroyed, now stirring awake once more. The hand that reached out to it moved with a gentleness so deliberate it curdled.
"There, there," it said. The voice arrived like silk being dragged slowly across broken glass, smooth in texture and wrong in every other quality, carrying the particular cruelty of something that had learned the cadences of tenderness without understanding their purpose. "Good boy." A pause, the smile widening by degrees that made it worse rather than better. "I'll leave the rest to you."
Its gaze moved to Shinomiya with the unhurried ease of something that had already decided how this ended and found the process mildly entertaining.
"Chew well." The finger extended, lazy, almost bored. "And eat up, now."
Time fractured. You didn't think. Thinking would have taken too long.
You moved.
The tackle took Shinomiya off her feet and the world became noise and velocity simultaneously â a storm of invisible bullets tearing through the air at the coordinates you had both just vacated, the sound of them like razored wind screaming past your ears, concrete detonating in white bursts around you as the rounds found the ground instead, sparks cascading off shredded steel in brief, violent arcs.
And then the bullets that didn't miss found you instead.
Pain arrived everywhere at once, your back, your leg, the left side of your ribs, each impact a separate detonation of white heat punching through tissue with a thoroughness that the suit reduced without eliminating, Your lungs compressed against the damage and then expanded and found the expansion worse.
"Y/N's output spiked to fifty percentâNo, it dropped again." Konomi's voice echoed through your earpiece at a register that cut through the haze with the particular urgency of someone watching numbers behave in ways that numbers weren't supposed to behave. "Damn it. Vice Captainâher vitals are blinking red. She's losing blood faster than the suit can compensate."
"Hey â L/N!" Shinomiya's hands found you, shoving you back with a strength that her panic hadn't diminished, her eyes moving across the damage with an expression that had abandoned composure entirely. "You're bleedingâ"
"You could see that?" The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, the question turned back with the amused quality of something that found the observation charming, and the finger lifted again.
It pointed at Shinomiya.
"Moveâ" The word tore out of you with an edge that your usual register didn't carry, your hand finding her and pulling before the instruction had finished leaving your mouth, the two of you displacing from the point of aim as another volley tore through the space where she had been standing.
She ducked according to your command. But not clean enough.
The sound of the impacts that found her arm preceded the blood by less than a second â three of them in a tight cluster, tearing through flesh and leaving the edges of the wounds cauterized and ragged simultaneously, her arm snapping back with the force of it as a sound escaped her that she clearly hadn't meant to make.
The creature watched. Its head tilted at an angle that added degrees past the point of comfort, and the smile stretched further along its face in a way that faces were not architecturally designed to accommodate, the expression soaked through with a mockery so thorough it had moved past cruelty into something closer to aesthetic appreciation.
"Then," it said, and the voice was closer than it had any right to be, close enough that the sound of it seemed to bypass your ears entirely and arrive somewhere more interior, "take care of things here."
It patted the revived Honju once, then it was gone.
Not retreating. Not moving. Simply â absent, the space it had occupied returning to ordinary air without transition.
The silence it left behind had a weight that the noise hadn't. Your lungs worked against the damage and found the effort expensive, blood soaking through the suit in a spreading warmth that your body was beginning to register with increasing insistence as a problem that required attention it wasn't currently receiving.
Shinomiya had gone very still beside you, one hand wrapped around the torn flesh of her arm, her eyes bright with tears she hadn't let fall yet, her breath arriving in the shallow, controlled increments of someone who was holding themselves together through nothing but sheer will.
The Honju was standing. It was no longer inert.
"Shinomiya's bleeding."Â
"What's goinâ on down there?" Hoshina's voice cut through the control room like a blade drawn clean, the question carrying none of its usual ease, stripped down to something harder and more immediate beneath it.
"I'm picking up active vital signs from kaiju that were already neutralized in the training area." Konomi's voice had shed its professional register entirely, her eyes fixed on her screens with the wide, unblinking quality of someone watching something that shouldn't be possible happen in real time. "There arenât residual readingsâ Itâs like they're reviving. One after another in sequence."
"That's not possible," another staff member cut in, the words arriving too fast, panic wearing the thin disguise of objection. "Kaiju in that condition cannot regenerateâthe cellular degradation alone should make revival structurally impossibleâ"
"Resurrected Honju fortitude estimated at 6.4."
The number hit like a hammer.
Hoshina's jaw tightened, the calculation running behind his eyes before the echo of it had finished. A fortitude of 6.4 on a resurrected Honju meant that whatever had reconstituted it had done so at a magnitude that exceeded its original state.Â
There were only two people currently on the premises with any realistic capacity to engage something at that threshold.
"Hoshina." Mina Ashiro's voice arrived from beside him with a composure that didn't diminish its authority â if anything the steadiness of it made the command land with more weight than urgency would have. Her eyes were already on the field monitors. "We're deploying."
"Roger." The word came out flat and certain, and he was already moving as he said it, his gaze cutting toward the operations team with an efficiency that left no room for the question. "Activate every examinee's remote shield. And get a portion of the drones back into the field. I want visualsânow."
Emergency. Emergency. All Examinees are to evacuate to the nearest shelter immediately.
The metallic announcement blared overhead, cutting through the chaos of collapsing buildings and the Honju's guttural roar.
"Evacuate?" Shinomiya's voice was shaking, though not with fear â the tremor in it was something hotter, something that had bypassed fear entirely and arrived directly at fury. Her eyes hadn't moved from the Honju. "If we don't stop it here, casualties might increase."
You weren't so sure. Blood dripped down your side as you forced yourself upright, your legs trembling beneath you. "Shinomiya, we're not in the condition to fight. And the immediate threat â whatever that was â it's already gone." Your breath caught in your throat as you staggered. "Lives won't be lostâthe 3rd Unit's Captain and Vice-Captain are here. They're probably heading over as we speak."
Shinomiya's jaw tightened, her teeth finding her lower lip hard enough to whiten the skin around it. Her weapon was up despite the way her arms were shaking, her entire frame vibrating with the effort of holding a stance her injuries were actively working against. "You do know what our duty is." It came out less like a question than an accusation, directed at the hesitation she had heard in your voice rather than at you personally.
"Yes." you said. The word came out steadier than the rest of you felt. "I'm not saying we stand down. I'm saying we don't engage beyond our capacity. We stall for time until backup arrives"Â
"Fine." The word came out clipped and low, Shinomiya's teeth still set against each other, her fingers closing around her firearm. She straightened and her eyes settled back on the Honju with a focus that had burned itself down to something cold and absolute.
Suddenly, there was a displacement of air.
"Watch outâ"
The shout tore out of you and your body moved simultaneously, or tried to â the gap between intention and execution had never been more apparent, your legs delivering a fraction of what you demanded from them, the debt of accumulated damage collecting itself in your muscles at the precise moment you needed to spend what you didn't have.Â
The wounds you had taken pulling Shinomiya clear of the earlier volleys had been making quiet withdrawals from your reserves ever since, and the account had run short without announcing itself.
The Honju's palm came down.
The crack of the impact reached you as a physical thing, a pressure wave through concrete and sternum simultaneously, and Shinomiya disappeared into the face of the building behind her.Â
The wall received her and then failed to, stone fracturing outward in a burst that showered the ground in debris, steel groaning as the structure folded inward around the point of impact before the whole compromised mass came down on top of where she had landed.
You stopped breathing for a moment that had no precise duration.
Then the rubble moved.
One hand, then a shoulder, then Kikoru Shinomiya dragged herself upright through the remains of a load-bearing wall with the grim, silent determination of someone who had decided the alternative was not available to her. She was bleeding from her hairline, the crimson spreading down through her golden bangs in dark, branching lines, her frame trembling with a violence she was refusing to acknowledge as her body's way of requesting she stop. Everything about her should have suggested she was finished.
Her eyes found yours. Dropped to the rifle in your hands.
One second. No words required.
You lurched forward and threw it, the motion costing you in a way your side made immediately and emphatically known, and she pulled it out of the air with a grip that was steadier than it had any right to be given what she had just come out of, her shattered firearm already irrelevant.
You didn't wait to see what she did with it. Your pistol, an issued secondary firearm, was already out. Your feet finally managed to move and carried you wide to the opposite flank in a trajectory that ate into your remaining reserves with every stride.Â
You fired. The bullets cracked out in quick succession as you drew a line between yourself and the Honju, working to split its attention, to give Shinomiya enough room to operate without its focus consolidating on a single point.
The rounds found its hide and accomplished approximately nothing.
The suit's output had been bleeding away steadily since the first volley of air bullets had torn through you, the percentage on your display reading as a quiet indictment of the arithmetic involved in taking critical hits in sequence without the opportunity to recover between them.Â
Each trigger pull felt like a negotiation with your own bodyâyour grip less certain than it had been, your stance costing more to maintain, every impact you registered against the Honju's deteriorating hide landing with the approximate effect of rain against a cliff face. The numbers were not in your favor and had not been for some time.
Then the voice in your earpiece arrived at a pitch that bypassed professional entirely.
"The Honju's vitals have undergone a change â its severed uniorgans have fully regenerated!"
Your eyes snapped across the field to Shinomiya before the sentence had finished. She was exposedârifle braced, weight forward, not behind cover, and the earpiece that should have been relaying the same information to her was gone, lost somewhere in the debris of the wall she had just been thrown through. She couldn't hear any of it.
"It's condensing energyâthe output readings are spiking, it's about to dischargeâ!"
"Take cover!"Â
The discharge came without further warningâa condensed bloom of light that erased the field entirely for the span of a breath, the shockwave arriving a fraction of a second behind it and hitting with the full, indiscriminate weight of displaced air and superheated debris. The sound came last, the way it always did when something was close enough, a concussive pressure that flattened hearing into a sustained, empty ring. Dust poured into your lungs and stayed there. For a long moment, the world contracted to the sensation of your own heartbeat and the grit between your teeth and nothing else.
You became aware of your own fists, clenched against the rubble in front of you.
Slowly, with the deliberate caution of someone who understood that what they were about to see might require preparation, you raised your eyes above the edge of your cover.
'Please... don't let me see a body.'
The smoke moved in slow, drifting columns through the space where the discharge had landed, and from inside it a silhouette emergedâupright, moving with purpose, resolving through the haze into something your brain took a moment to correctly file.
'Hibino?'The thought arrived with genuine bewilderment, the kind that preceded sense-making rather than following it. How he was here and not in the shelter with the rest of the evacuated examinees was a question that opened immediately onto several others, all of them jostling for priority.
"Everyone managed to get out." His voice carried differently than it had during the examination â the same cadence, recognizably his, but weighted with something that hadn't been there before, something that sat underneath the familiarity like a different foundation entirely. "Thanks to the time you bought them."
And then his body did something that bodies did not do.
The sound of it preceded the comprehension of it â bone restructuring with a density of noise that your nervous system filed instinctively under wrong before your eyes had confirmed what was happening, flesh splitting and reforming with the particular wrongness of matter rearranging itself according to a different set of rules than the ones you had been operating under your entire life. What squared its stance against the Honju a moment later was not Kafka Hibino. Or rather â it was, and also wasn't, and the category you needed to put that in didn't currently exist in your available taxonomy.
âA human that was a kaiju. Or a kaiju that had been a human. Orââ
"You were a kaiju this entire time?" Shinomiya's voice cut through before your own thoughts could finish forming, sharp with the reflexive suspicion of someone whose mind had gone immediately to the most operationally concerning interpretation. "Don't tell me this was a planned infiltrationâ"
Hibino's kaiju form skidded to a halt directly in front of her with a momentum that suggested the stop had been more abrupt than intended, and thenâand this was the part that would live in your memory for some timeâhe brought his hands together, bent forward at the waist, and wiggled in a posture that could only be described as supplicatory in the manner of a dog that had done something it was aware it shouldn't have and was banking heavily on being forgiven anyway.
"Kikoru." The voice that came out of the kaiju body managed, against considerable anatomical odds, to sound genuinely sheepish. "Pretty please â keep this between us. The Defense Force doesn't need to know about any of this."
"WHO SAID YOU COULD CALL ME KIKORUâ" The volume Shinomiya achieved dĂŠpite her injuries was nothing short of impressive. "AND WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUâRE DOINGâ"
"This is not the timeâ" You stepped out from cover with whatever authority your increasingly unreliable body could project, one arm extended toward the Honju, which had begun the specific, deeply unwelcome process of condensing energy between its jaws again. "Both of you. Focus."
Shinomiya snapped her attention back to the field, jaw tight, expression grim.
Hibino straightened. The sheepishness vacated his bearing entirely, replaced by something quieter and more certainâthe particular steadiness of someone who had stopped performing confidence and arrived at the actual thing.Â
"Don't worry," he said, and there was enough weight behind it that the reassurance landed without needing to be argued for.
He moved.
The impact of his fist against the Honju sent a shockwave through the ground that traveled up through the soles of your boots and kept going, your knees absorbing the remainder as you braced against the involuntary step backward it demanded. The sound of it arrived a fraction laterâenormous and final, the kind of collision that left no ambiguity about what had happened to the thing on the receiving end. Flesh gave way with a totality that the word tearing didn't quite cover, bone fragmenting into a fine dispersal that drifted down over the battlefield like the aftermath of something that had briefly been solid and had been reminded that it didn't have to be.
Hibino stood in the settling debris, and the silence that followed seemed to agree with him.
"Let's see you come back from that," he said.
The remains twitched.
The confidence evaporated so completely and so immediately that it was almost its own spectacleâhis entire bearing contracting around the sound he made, something in the upper register that he would probably prefer not to have on record. "I was joking, I was completely joking, please don'tâ"
The movement stilled. Definitively, this time.
Hibino exhaled from a place somewhere in his lower abdomen, the relief traveling visibly through his entire frame as he reached up and pressed a hand against his forehead in the manner of someone whose heart had briefly gone somewhere it hadn't been invited. "Don't do that to me," he said, to the remains, with complete sincerity.
You gathered what remained of your functional locomotion and began covering the distance toward Shinomiya, each step conducting a precise inventory of every injury you had accumulated over the last several minutes and presenting the full bill simultaneously. You were approximately halfway there when Hibino's kaiju form lurched suddenly in your directionâfast, too fast, the movement carrying the shape of a lungeâand your heart seized with the specific, ungenerous certainty that you had survived everything else today only to be taken out by someone technically on your side.
His hand closed around your arm and yanked you sideways.
The Yoju hit the ground where you had been standing with a force that left a crater.
You stood very still for a moment. Scared shitless. Reacquainting yourself with the fact that you were still alive, and directed a considerable volume of internal profanity at the kaiju-human-whatever standing next to you who had just made your blood pressure do something inadvisable without any apparent awareness of having done so.
You stood very still for a moment, reacquainting yourself with the specific, unfamiliar sensation of still being alive, while a significant quantity of thoughts about Kafka Hibino organized themselves somewhere behind your expression and stayed there.
Hibino turned to face you after he had finished with the Yoju, and something in his face did the thing that faces did when they were working up to asking for something they already suspected the answer to.
"I'll keep it a secret," you said.
"Wha â how did youâ"
"It wasn't difficult to anticipate." Your voice had lost most of its available volume somewhere in the last twenty minutes and was operating on what remained.
Shinomiya exhaled through her nose. "It was obvious," she said, with the flat economy of someone who had run out of energy to elaborate.
Hibino's kaiju form folded back into itself as he moved toward her, the transformation reversing with the same wrongness as it had arrived, until he was crouching beside the blonde in something approximating his original shape, his expression settling into something that was less relieved than it was quietly, genuinely concerned.Â
"You're hurt badly," he said, the lightness entirely absent from his tone now. "You need to stop pushingâ"
"You're one to talk." The chop that came down on the back of his head from the other direction landed with a precision that suggested it had been aimed rather than impulsive, and Ichikawa stepped into view with an expression caught somewhere between relief and a frustration that had clearly been building since before any of this had started. "You ran off without a word and transformed in front of half the recruitment cohort."
Hibino winced, less from the hit than from the accuracy of the summary.
"Hibino Kafka." Your voice came out rougher than intended, the effort of producing it at any volume reminding you in specific terms of the damage to your ribs. "How many people know. About you."
Ichikawa answered before Hibino had assembled a response, his eyes still on his friend with an expression that hadn't finished deciding whether it was angry or something more complicated than that. "Just the four of us standing here."
The silence that followed had the atmosphere of a group of people who had just survived something together and hadn't yet determined what to do with that fact.
Then Shinomiya's torso listed forward without preamble â not a stumble, just a quiet, total failure of the will that had been keeping her upright, her palms finding the ground a moment before the rest of her followed.
"Shinomiyaâ" Ichikawa's voice cracked on the second syllable.
You took one step toward her with whatever your legs had left, which turned out to be exactly one step. The ground came up to meet you with a patience it hadn't extended to anything else today, and the darkness that followed didn't arrive dramaticallyâit simply replaced everything else, the way sleep did, without asking.
The last thing you registered was Ichikawa's voice, somewhere above you, the alarm in it reaching you from a distance that was already growing. "L/N, tooâ?!"
"Ashiro and Hoshina on scene," Ashiro reported into her earpiece, her voice carrying the same controlled cadence it always did, as though the scale of what surrounded them was a variable she had already accounted for.
Hoshina said nothing. He was too busy looking.
The battlefield had been dismantled in a way that didn't map cleanly onto any engagement scenario he had run in his head on the way over. The Honju's remains were distributed across the field in a sprawl that suggested the end had been neither clean nor distant â grotesque heaps of tissue and splintered bone that were still producing thin threads of smoke, as though whatever had animated the creature was reluctant to finish leaving. The infrastructure had fared accordingly. Concrete had been introduced to forces it hadn't been engineered to absorb, and the results were spread across every surface within eyeline.
âWhat kind of fight does this to a field?â
The question wasn't rhetorical. He was genuinely trying to reconstruct the sequence of events from the physical evidence, and the sequence he was arriving at was one he didn't entirely want to arrive at.
"Captain Ashiro, Vice Captain Hoshina." Two officers jogged up from the far end of the field, their breathing carrying the specific quality of people who had been moving quickly for longer than was comfortable. "No examinees on the field. We've done a full sweep â the area's clear."
"We've confirmed four examinees in Shelter Six." A brief pause, the kind that preceded information rather than followed it. "Kikoru Shinomiya and L/N are among them."
The tension that had been sitting across Hoshina's shoulders since he had stepped onto the field didn't leave entirely, but it shifted â redistributed itself into something more manageable, something that wasn't the specific, cold variety of dread that came with not knowing. He exhaled once, quietly, and kept his eyes on the wreckage.
âThey're safe.â
The General Director's daughter injured or worse was a consequence he had no interest in being responsible forâthe professional implications alone were considerable, and he was self-aware enough to know that wasn't the only reason the thought had weight.Â
But the relief that had arrived a half second before that particular reasoning had finished assembling itself had not been about Kikoru Shinomiya, but you instead.
He didn't examine that too carefully. Not here, not now.
"All examinees confirmed accounted for," Konomi's voice followed, the exhale beneath the professionalism audible to anyone listening for it. "Full evacuation achieved."
"Roger," Ashiro replied, already moving. "See to it that everyone in that shelter receives immediate medical attention. All of them."
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