The world was a smear of pain and noise. Akira's consciousness flickered like a dying bulb, each jostle from the medics' stretcher sending fresh agony through his shattered body. The sounds of battle—the shriek of metal, the thunder of Kikoru's axe, the high-frequency hum of Hoshina's blades—felt distant, muffled.
[Ravan: Host removed from primary engagement. Systemic collapse in progress. Combat log analysis incomplete. External tactical assessment: unavailable. New primary threat identified. Probability of Central Storage Vault breach: 82% and rising.]
The words scraped through his mind. The vault. No. 9 wasn't here for them. They were just… data points. An obstacle course. The real prize was behind those doors.
"The… vault…" he slurred, trying to sit up. A firm hand pushed him back down. "He's going for the vault…"
"Stay down, son," a medic's voice, strained but calm, cut through his delirium. "Let the captains handle it."
Through blurred vision, he saw the heart of the battle. Vice-Captain Hoshina was a whirlwind of silver and blue, a specter of precision. He didn't trade blows with the Clone A; he existed just outside its reach, his kodachi licking out to score a dozen shallow cuts on its limbs and torso. He wasn't trying to kill it. He was mapping it, testing its reaction speed, its adaptive limitations. "Annoying," he muttered, a flicker of frustration on his usually playful face. "They're not built to win. They're built to stall."
Kikoru was the opposite. She was a force of nature. With a guttural roar, she met Clone B's lumbering charge head-on. Her axe crashed against its carapace-armored forearm with a sound like a mountain breaking. The force of the impact drove the creature back a step, cracks spiderwebbing across the rocky texture. She didn't give it a moment to recover, pressing the attack with brutal, overwhelming strikes. "You are not," she snarled, each word a hammer blow, "keeping me from him!"
A weak, static-filled voice crackled over the squad's open comms. It was Reno, his words labored with pain but his mind still razor-sharp. "Shinomiya… its right shoulder… the alloy plate… shifts upward… after a block… half-second window…"
Kikoru didn't acknowledge him verbally. On her next swing, as Clone B raised its arm to block, she feinted. The axe dipped low, then, following Reno's call, she pivoted and drove the pommel upward like a piston into the tiny gap beneath the creature's raised arm. There was a wet, crunching pop. Clone B shrieked, its arm hanging at a suddenly useless angle.
The Observer was still in the fight.
Headquarters: Command Center
The air in the command center was frigid with controlled panic. Screens flashed red across the main display—Sector 2 was a loss, Sector 7 was dark, comms were down across half the base.
Mina Ashiro stood before the central holotable, her posture ramrod straight, her face an impassive mask. But her eyes were moving at lightning speed, absorbing every data point.
"Vice-Captain Hoshina and Officer Shinomiya are engaged with two derivative units in Sector 4-West," a controller reported. "They've contained the threat but cannot disengage."
"The artillery barrage had no effect on Kaiju No. 9," another voice called out, tinged with despair.
Mina's gaze was locked on a single feed—a drone view from high above Sector 4-West. It showed the lone, horned figure of Kaiju No. 9 walking with placid, unhurried steps through the devastation. It ignored the fighting. It ignored the shells still occasionally falling around its distortion barrier. Its path was unwavering, direct.
Straight toward the massive, reinforced doors of the Central Sample Storage Vault.
Mina's blood ran cold. She saw it with the clarity of a sniper's scope. The entire assault, the chaos, the three-pronged attack… it was all misdirection.
"He's not here to destroy the base," she said, her voice cutting through the comms chatter, cold and absolute. Every officer in the room fell silent. "He's here to shop."
She leaned forward, her finger stabbing the comms button for the all-captains channel. "All units, priority shift. Converge on the Central Sample Vault in Sector 4-West. Disengage all other operations. I repeat, all other sectors are secondary. Do not let that creature touch the vault. If those samples are compromised…" She didn't need to finish the sentence. The horrified silence that answered her was enough. If No. 9 assimilated the high-grade, stabilized kaiju DNA and experimental cores within, it wouldn't just win the battle. It would become a god.
Sector 4-West: The Unraveling
No. 9 reached the vault doors. They were a masterpiece of Defense Force engineering, ten feet thick, a blend of layered alloys and energy-dampening composites designed to withstand a direct impact from a Fortitude 9.0 Daikaiju.
It didn't rear back to punch. It didn't gather energy for a blast.
It simply placed its shimmering, alloy-clawed hand against the cold steel.
The surface beneath its touch didn't melt or buckle. It… unwove. The molecular bonds of the metal came apart silently, the solid matter turning into a shimmering, liquid-like field of distorted space. It was like watching reality itself dissolve under its touch. The intricate locking mechanisms, the pressure seals, the biometric scanners—they were all being rewritten into irrelevance, line by line, code by code.
In the command center, a technician stared at his readings in disbelief. "Captain… it's not breaching the door. The energy signature… it's not explosive. It's… transformative. It's rewriting the matter at a subatomic level."
Mina's lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. Her worst fear was confirmed. Its powers were evolving beyond simple destruction.
Akira saw it too, from his stretcher. The doors were coming apart without a sound. A silent, terrifying apocalypse. "No…" he breathed, the word a ghost.
Kikoru saw it. With a final, furious roar, she brought her axe down in a devastating arc, finally shattering Clone B's carapace and pinning it to the ground. She didn't wait to see it dissolve. She turned, her eyes blazing with fury and desperation, and launched herself toward No. 9. "GET AWAY FROM THERE!"
Hoshina, still dancing with the hyper-fast Clone A, cursed. "Shinomiya, wait! Don't engage it alone!"
It was too late.
Kaiju No. 9 didn't even turn to look at her. Its focus was entirely on the door, now half-dissolved into a shimmering, opaque portal of warped space.
Its voice, dry and rasping, echoed inside every mind in the sector, a cold whisper that froze the blood.
"The archive opens."
The last of the vault door dissolved. Beyond the shimmering veil was not a room, but a darkness so profound it seemed to swallow the light. And within that darkness, faint, monstrous silhouettes pulsed with a slow, rhythmic, captive light. The heart of Tachikawa's research, its greatest weapons and its greatest curses, now lay naked before the enemy.
The real battle for the future began now.
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T/N :
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