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Half a month later.
The monsters were coming faster. Everyone knew it, even if nobody wanted to talk about it out loud. When this whole nightmare started, you could count on having six months between attacks - time to rebuild, to mourn, to pretend things might go back to normal. Then it dropped to three months. Now they were lucky to get six weeks.
Last Tuesday, a Category-3 had torn through Sydney's harbor like it was made of cardboard. Striker Eureka caught it about three miles offshore - close enough that people on Bondi Beach could hear the grinding of metal against monster flesh, close enough to see the spray of alien blood turning the water electric blue. The Jaeger won, eventually, but not before the thing had grabbed a container ship and used it like a club. Forty-seven people died in that "successful defense."
The brass kept calling them victories, but Aidan had seen the casualty reports. Every fight was getting bloodier, every monster was getting smarter, and the time between attacks kept shrinking like a noose tightening around humanity's neck.
According to the pattern analysis, they had maybe five weeks before the next one hit somewhere along China's coast. When that happened, Crimson Typhoon would be the only thing standing between millions of people and whatever horror crawled out of the ocean this time.
The whole world was watching the Arc Reactor project now. Clean energy that could power cities without poisoning them - it was the first piece of genuinely good news humanity had gotten since the war started. News crews were calling it the "Earth's Lifeline," which was laying it on pretty thick, but maybe not wrong.
Dr. Newton had been sharing his research on what the Kaiju were actually doing to the planet, and it wasn't pretty. The things were basically biological weapons designed to poison everything they touched. Their blood turned into toxic gas when it hit the air. Their bodies leaked radiation and amino acids that killed everything in the water for miles around. Every attack wasn't just about destroying cities - it was about making Earth uninhabitable for humans and perfect for whatever the Precursors had planned.
Nuclear weapons just made it worse. You could kill a Kaiju with a tactical nuke, sure, but then you'd poisoned a hundred square miles and given the aliens exactly what they wanted - a dead planet ready for colonization.
Jaegers were supposed to solve that problem. Kill the monsters clean, keep their blood out of populated areas, make sure humanity could win without destroying itself in the process. It was a good theory. In practice, every fight was a desperate scramble just to keep the things from reaching the shore.
But that was about to change.
Shatterdome Base, Bay Three.
Crimson Typhoon stood in the massive maintenance bay like a sleeping giant, all sharp angles and crimson armor plates. Three arms instead of two, a single glowing eye instead of a traditional head design, built for speed and precision rather than brute force. It was pride and joy, answer to the question of how to make a Jaeger that could think as fast as it could fight.
Aidan stood on the observation platform, going over the specs one more time. The numbers told a story, but they didn't capture what it felt like to watch this thing in action.
Crimson Typhoon - Mark-4 Jaeger Built in Changzhou, 2018.
Height: 76 meters.
Weight: 1,722 tons - light for its size because every ounce of unnecessary metal had been stripped away. Three pilots instead of two, because engineers figured if two minds were better than one, three had to be even better. The neural load was insane, but the coordination was like watching a deadly ballet.
The combat record spoke for itself:
Osaka, 2019: Tore apart "Onibaba" in under four minutes
Ho Chi Minh City, 2020: Put down "Hundun" without a single civilian casualty
Bangkok, 2021: Killed "Taurax" so cleanly they could harvest its organs intact
But those were Category-2 monsters, back when humanity still had the luxury of fighting one at a time. The next one coming would probably be a Category-3 or worse, and it wouldn't be coming alone.
"Tuantuan, how long to strip the chest assembly?" Aidan called out.
A holographic panda materialized next to him - his AI assistant, designed to look cute and harmless because people got nervous around anything that looked too smart. "Approximately 130 hours for chest disassembly, assuming no complications."
"What about full teardown?"
"230 hours, give or take. But you'd be rebuilding from scratch at that point."
Aidan nodded. They'd start with the chest, swap in the Arc Reactor, then see how much of the rest they could upgrade before the next attack. The Wei Tang triplets had been training on the new control systems for weeks, and their sim scores were getting scary good.
"And Tuantuan? Be careful with the neural link system. Those three brothers have been wired together for years - mess up their connection and they'll be sitting ducks."
"Understood. Preserving pilot interface integrity."
"Don't waste the diesel either. We might need it for testing backup systems."
The bay came alive as robotic arms descended from the ceiling like mechanical spiders. Under Tuantuan's guidance, they began the delicate work of taking apart a machine designed to fight gods.
Crimson Typhoon was weird among Jaegers. Most ran on nuclear reactors - big, hot, powerful, and simple. Crimson Typhoon ran on diesel pistons. Thousands of them, spread throughout the frame like artificial muscles. Fifty pistons per major muscle group, all coordinated by the "Midnight" processing core in the chest. It was maintenance hell, but it meant the thing could move like a living creature instead of a walking tank.
Aidan's plans went way beyond just swapping power sources. Retractable energy claws instead of the spinning saw blades. Repulsor jets in the feet for aerial maneuvers. An upgraded electromagnetic cannon that could work as both a sniper rifle and a shotgun depending on what the situation called for.
If everything went right, Crimson Typhoon wouldn't just be faster and stronger when they were done. It would be capable of things no Jaeger had ever done before.
The question was whether they'd have time to finish before the next monster crawled out of the ocean looking for a fight.
PLZ THROW POWERSTONES