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The EMP pulse from Scunner's shell hit like a tidal wave of electromagnetic death. Every digital system on the Seawall died instantly—screens went black, targeting computers flatlined, communication arrays dissolved into static.
But the Jaegers kept moving.
Aidan had seen this coming. After his time in the Transformers world, dealing with Decepticons whose mere presence could crash military satellites and scramble base-wide communications, he'd made damn sure the Jaegers could survive electronic warfare. Every critical system had redundant shielding, hardened circuits, and electromagnetic countermeasures built into the core architecture.
The Shatterdome's systems flickered but held. The Wall of Life's defenses went dark. The city behind them—millions of civilians in towers full of electronics—went silent and afraid.
But the Jaegers fought on.
"Manual override! Now!" Marshal Thompson's voice cracked across the Wall's emergency channel. He was stuck in the Seawall's command bunker, watching his digital fortress become a very expensive piece of concrete. "Get the backup systems online! Move!"
Technicians scrambled to revive analog controls that hadn't been touched in years. Mechanical gears ground into motion. Pneumatic systems hissed. The Wall's plasma cannons swiveled on manual traverse, tracking Scunner as it lumbered closer to the barrier.
The cannons opened fire—blue bolts of superheated plasma hammering into the Kaiju's armored shell. Scunner flinched, staggered, stopped its advance.
People in the command bunker exhaled in ragged relief.
Then Cherno Alpha's situation went from bad to catastrophic.
The Russian Jaeger had pivoted toward Scunner on Pentecost's orders, breaking off its assault on Raiju. The wounded Category-4 seized the opening. Its body compressed, throat bulging like a toad's vocal sac. Through the translucent flesh, you could see blue liquid churning—glowing, viscous, wrong.
"Ptthhhhhh!" Raiju's jaws snapped open and spat.
A stream of fluorescent acid sprayed across the gap, moving faster than Cherno could react. The combat prediction system screamed warnings, but there's only so much fifty tons of metal can do when physics says no.
The acid hit Cherno's head dead-center.
Cherno Alpha had been rebuilt along aggressively Soviet lines—all brutal pragmatism and zero aesthetic compromise. The Conn-Pod sat in the chest rather than the head, buried under meters of armor plating that could shrug off most attacks. No escape pod, because escape meant cowardice. The reactor sat above the pilots' heads like a nuclear crown.
Live together or die together. No middle ground.
The armor was legendary. Thirty centimeters of hull steel that had taken punishment from a dozen Kaiju and kept fighting.
But Raiju's acid was Category-4 biochemistry, evolved specifically to crack open armored prey. The liquid ate through Cherno's back plating like it was tissue paper, leaving a crater of corroded metal the size of a car.
Inside the Conn-Pod, Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky felt the heat breach their armor, felt the structural integrity alarms shrieking. They looked at each other for half a heartbeat—the kind of wordless communication that only came from years of drifting together, married together, fighting together.
"Forget it," Aleksis said in Russian. "Scunner first."
"Da." Sasha's hands moved across the controls. "For the Wall."
Cherno's feet locked into sprint position. Pulse jets fired from the soles, and the Jaeger rocketed forward on columns of superheated air, accelerating toward the Seawall where Scunner was testing the barrier.
Behind them, Raiju watched the Russian Jaeger charge away. The Category-4 considered pursuit for a moment, then dismissed it. There were better targets.
It looked up.
Crimson Typhoon was fighting for its life three hundred feet in the air.
Slattern was simply too massive for conventional engagement. Category-5 meant triple the mass, quadruple the strength, and a hide thick enough to shrug off most weapons. Those tentacle-tails could grab a Jaeger and crush it like aluminum foil.
So the Wei Tang brothers had taken the fight vertical.
Crimson stayed airborne on continuous jet-burn, circling Slattern like a matador working a bull. Both hand-mounted plasma cannons fired in steady rhythm—green bolts punching into Slattern's armored hide, burning deep, searching for vital organs. The third arm's rotary cannon glowed cherry-red, tracking the Category-5's movements, waiting for the perfect killing shot.
Aidan's combat prediction system turned good aim into scary-accurate aim. Nearly every plasma bolt found flesh. Slattern roared and thrashed, absolutely furious but unable to reach the airborne target.
Then the prediction system screamed a warning.
"Left side, three o'clock! EVADE!" Jin Wei's shout coincided with the alert.
Raiju had deployed membranous wings from its sides—biological adaptation, somewhere between a flying squirrel and a prehistoric terror. It launched itself from the water like a cruise missile, angling straight for Crimson Typhoon's flight path.
The brothers moved as one organism. Plasma fire cut off. Left arm snapped into striking position, knuckles crackling with 415 kilovolts of stored charge. Jets pivoted, bringing them face-to-face with the incoming Kaiju.
"SCHLTTHH!" Crimson's electrified claws punched straight into Raiju's belly, driving deep enough to feel internal organs rupture.
"RRRAAAHHH!" Raiju screamed—not in pain, but in rage—and its rear claws locked onto Crimson's torso. Wings beat furiously, driving the grappled Jaeger downward, toward the water, toward Slattern.
The brothers throttled the jets to maximum, fighting gravity and a Category-4's muscle mass. Metal groaned. Hydraulics screamed. Raiju's claws wrapped around Crimson's forearms, crushing the plasma cannons. Sparks fountained where metal deformed.
But the third arm had finished charging.
The rotary cannon pulsed scarlet, energy condensed into a single devastating shot. The barrel swung toward Raiju's head—point-blank range, impossible to miss—
"CRUNCH!"
One of Slattern's tentacle-tails whipped up from below and caught the third arm mid-swing. The appendage was strong as a bridge cable and fast as a striking snake. It yanked, deflecting the shot.
The energy beam screamed past Raiju's head and vaporized empty sky.
Then Slattern's tail squeezed.
"KRK-KRK-CRRRRAAACK!"
The third arm shattered at the elbow joint, torn clean off in a spray of hydraulic fluid and sparking wires. Alarms shrieked through the Conn-Pod as damage assessments cascaded across every screen.
The tail kept coming, wrapping toward Crimson's head.
Both of Crimson's primary arms were locked in Raiju's death-grip. The Conn-Pod—all three pilots, the entire neural interface—was housed in that head. One good squeeze and it would pop like a grape.
Inside the Conn-Pod, the Wei brothers made a decision in the space between heartbeats.
The triangular reactor on Crimson's chest blazed white-hot. Every reserve power cell dumped its charge into the main cannon. The energy build-up was visible even through the armor—light spilling from seams and vents, turning the Jaeger into a miniature star.
Slattern's tail was inches from the Conn-Pod when the reactor cannon fired.
"BWWWAAAAMMM!"
The beam was thick as a telephone pole, concentrated enough to punch through warship armor. At point-blank range, it cored Raiju like an apple, burning straight through the Category-4's torso and out the other side. Bioluminescent blood vaporized on contact with the beam's edge.
Raiju's scream cut off mid-shriek. The Kaiju went limp, held together only by momentum and dying nervous system.
But that shot took everything. Every watt, every amp, every ounce of thrust capacity. Crimson's jets sputtered and died. The Jaeger dropped like a cut puppet, three hundred feet straight down.
The brothers had two seconds of freefall to make peace with their ancestors.
They positioned Raiju's corpse underneath them—one final desperate gambit. Using a dead Kaiju as a meat cushion wasn't graceful, but grace was for people who weren't about to hit the ocean at terminal velocity.
"BOOOOOOM!"
The impact sent a wall of water fifty feet high in every direction. The shockwave reached the shore, rattling windows in buildings half a mile inland.
The water curtain hung suspended for one impossible moment—
Then Slattern charged through it like it wasn't there.
Crimson Typhoon was still getting to its feet, water streaming from its damaged armor, when the Category-5's full mass slammed into it. The collision knocked the Jaeger backward, and both titans went down in a churning chaos of water and violence.
The ocean surged back in, covering everything.
Underwater, Slattern's tentacle-tails wrapped around Crimson's limbs, locking them in place. The Category-5's jaws closed on Crimson's head—the grind of teeth on metal echoing through the water.
Crimson's remaining arms tried to push the jaws apart, servos screaming at maximum load. But Category-5 meant strength that made Category-4s look like house cats. The pressure differential was obscene.
Metal began to deform. Then crack. Then tear.
Inside the Conn-Pod, the Wei Tang brothers were still drift-locked, still fighting, still trying to save their Jaeger when the Conn-Pod breach alarm turned their world into a scream of warning sirens.
Slattern's head ripped backward.
Crimson Typhoon's head came with it—torn from the shoulders in a shower of sparking cables and hydraulic lines, seawater rushing into the exposed Conn-Pod breach.
The Jaeger's body went limp.
The pilots never felt the water.
The drift connection severed first, cutting them off from the Jaeger, from each other, from consciousness.
300 , 500 , 1000 Each milestone will have 1 Bonus chapter.