The East Side of the Gonaya border was a landscape of serrated bone and churning mud. While the Emperor gave his grand speech at the capital, the reality on the front lines was a chaotic, deafening roar. Thousands of lower-tier Maiju—scuttling, insectoid horrors with carapaces like obsidian—threw themselves against the jagged rock formations of the eastern ridge.
Shota Kizumi was a blur of cerulean light.
His Jet Drive armor hissed, venting steam from his shoulder plates as he skidded across a field of gore. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the faces of the friends he had left behind in Limana. He saw Syji being dragged into the dark; he heard Mirei's voice asking about Shinji. The guilt was a physical weight, heavier than the reinforced steel plating of his suit.
I ran, he thought, his teeth gritted so hard they felt like they might shatter. I was the fast one, and I used that speed to leave them behind.
He slammed his fist into the ground, launching himself forward with a Jet Launch. The air screamed as he accelerated to 500 kph, his Thermo Edge blades extending from his forearms. He cut through a line of Crab-Maiju like a hot wire through wax, leaving nothing but cauterized meat in his wake.
Suddenly, the battlefield ahead of him simply… evaporated.
A hundred yards away, a massive S-rank Behemoth was torn into three distinct pieces in the span of a heartbeat. There was no explosion, only a series of sharp pops and the shimmering glitch of blue-black energy.
Kizumi skidded to a halt, his sensors haywire. In the center of the carnage stood a figure in a midnight-blue mantle, idly dusting off his sleeve. St. Commander Wan.
Wan looked over his shoulder, his eyes meeting Kizumi's through the boy's HUD. There was no goofy joke this time. Wan simply nodded—a silent acknowledgment of a fellow speedster—before folding into space and vanishing to the next sector.
"He's not even trying," Kizumi whispered. "And I'm struggling just to breathe."
The ground groaned. From the treeline, a Titan-Class Crawler emerged, its thousand legs churning the earth into a grave. It was followed by a swarm of flyers that blotted out the sun.
Kizumi felt the familiar cold prickle of fear, but this time, it was different. The fear didn't make him want to turn around. It made him want to burn.
"You want me to run?" Kizumi shouted at the sky, his voice cracking with the sheer force of his internal rage. "Fine! I'll run! But I'm not running away anymore!"
THE SECOND AWAKENING: THE PERPETUAL ENGINE
Kizumi's Jet Core began to hum, a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated in the marrow of his bones. A warning light flashed red on his visor: CRITICAL MELTDOWN IMMINENT.
"Safety limiters? Forget them," Kizumi growled. "I don't need to be safe. I need to be fast enough to outrun my own regrets!"
He slammed his palms against his chest plate, triggering the manual override. The blue plasma of his suit didn't just brighten—it changed. The cerulean hue bled into a blinding, incandescent white, laced with veins of solar gold.
NOVA DRIVE MODE: ACTIVATED.
But it didn't stop there. As Kizumi took his first step, the friction didn't tear at his muscles. Instead, his body felt light—weightless. The Second Awakening—a passive resonance born from the total synchronization of his willpower and his specialized blood cells—settled over him.
He wasn't just wearing the armor; he was the propulsion.
Top Speed: 500 kph... 700 kph... 1,000 kph.
The sound barrier didn't just break; it shattered with a thunderclap that leveled the nearby trees. Kizumi moved so fast that time appeared to congeal into a stagnant soup. The Maiju were frozen in mid-leap, their mandibles open in slow-motion snarls.
THE MONOLOGUE OF THE BOLT
Kizumi stood in the center of the frozen battlefield, his armor radiating a heat that turned the mud beneath him into glass. He looked at the thousands of monsters surrounding him and began to walk—a walk that, to the outside world, appeared as an instantaneous teleportation.
"They say speed is about distance over time," Kizumi's voice echoed through the static of the comms. "But they're wrong. Speed is about the distance between who you were and who you want to be.
Every meter I run is a second I spend trying to forget the look on Mirei's face. Every sonic boom is a scream I'm trying to drown out. I thought being the 'fastest' meant I could get away from the pain. But I realize now... the faster I go, the more the world falls away until there's only one thing left."
He stopped in front of the Titan-Class Crawler, his white-gold armor glowing like a fallen star.
"The only thing that survives at a thousand kilometers per hour is the truth. And the truth is... I'm not the boy who ran away. I'm the spark that lights the path for the ones who stayed. If I have to burn my soul to ash to keep this world turning, then let it burn!"
FINISHER: GRAND IGNITION – STARFALL BREAKER
Kizumi vanished.
Phase 1 (The Lock-on): A massive explosion of white-gold fire erupted from his vents, stunning every Maiju within a five-hundred-meter radius. The flyers in the sky were incinerated instantly by the sheer thermal wake.
Phase 2 (The Ascent): Using Absolute Zero-Shift, Kizumi circled the Titan-Class Crawler at Mach 5. He didn't look like a person anymore; he looked like a solid ring of golden lightning. The vacuum "cage" he created was so intense it began to lift the multi-ton beast off the ground, trapping it in a vortex of swirling plasma.
Phase 3 (The Impact): Kizumi shot straight up, piercing the clouds. He reached the apex of his flight, turned his thrusters to 200% output, and dove.
"Jet Drive! Full Throttle!" Kizumi roared. "SONIC ANNIHILATION!"
He became a literal meteor. As he struck the core of the Titan-Class Crawler, the earth didn't just shake—it buckled. A shockwave of blue and gold fire rippled outward, disintegrating everything in its path.
Kizumi skidded to a stop a mile behind the blast zone, his armor smoking, his vents hissing with a violent, cooling steam. He didn't look back.
A second later, the Sonic Boom caught up.
BOOM.
The remains of the Maiju army in the East Sector were reduced to digital sparks and heat haze, wiped from existence by a force that transcended physics.
Kizumi fell to one knee, blood trickling from under his visor, but he was smiling. His suit entered Cold Shutdown, locking his joints in place, but his heart was beating with a rhythm he hadn't felt since Limana.
"I'm still moving, Shinji," he whispered into the silence of the scorched earth. "I'm still moving."
On the horizon, the dark clouds of the Rumbling continued to roll in, but for the first time, the East Side was clear. The "Jet" of Class 0-E had found his true velocity.
[TO BE CONTINUED]