For a full minute, the world was a silent film.
No one moved. No one spoke. The only sound was the faint, mournful whistle of wind through the skeletal remains of a nearby office building.
The colossal, crushing pressure that had forced them to their knees was gone. Vanished. But its absence was a ghost that haunted the air, a vacuum where a mountain had been.
Kikoru Shinomiya was still on her knees, her gauntleted hands pressed into the fractured asphalt. Her breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. Her mind, usually a whirlwind of strategy and self-assured confidence, was a wasteland of white noise.
She replayed it. Again and again. The man. The gesture. The impossible shadow that had unmade a god-tier monster with the indifference one might show to a fly.
'That wasn't a fight,' her mind stammered, the thought fragile as glass. 'That was an… an execution. No. Less than that. It was pest control.'
She looked down at her hands, at the cutting-edge technology of her suit, the source of her immense power. It suddenly felt like a child's toy. A cheap plastic imitation of strength.
CLANG.
The sound of metal hitting pavement made her flinch. Vice-Commander Hoshina had dropped his blades. His arms hung limply at his sides, his face, visible through his shattered visor, was a mask of utter disbelief.
"Vice-Commander…?" Kikoru's voice was a dry rasp.
Hoshina didn't seem to hear her. His mind, the finest analytical engine in the Third Division, was desperately trying to process the data.
Threat Assessment: Failure.
Data Input: Anomaly. Unclassifiable.
Analysis: An entity appeared via spatial distortion. Exhibited reality-warping aura. Manifested a secondary entity of indeterminate composition. Annihilated a Resilience 8.9 Honju with a single, kinetic strike. Entity then de-materialized. No Kaiju energy detected. No known weapon signature.
His brain was spitting out error messages. It was like trying to use a calculator to define infinity.
"Did you… get any readings?" he asked the empty air, his question meant for the command center that was undoubtedly deaf and blind. "What was its resilience score? 9.9? 10.0? Does the scale even go that high?"
The questions were absurd. To assign a number to that felt like trying to capture the ocean in a teacup.
THUD.
Kafka Hibino, his monstrous form stained with his own green blood and the grime of battle, landed heavily on the pavement. The tendrils that had ensnared him had gone limp and slack the moment the Juggernaut's life was extinguished.
His senses were screaming. As a half-kaiju, he perceived things the others couldn't. He hadn't just felt pressure. He had felt… authority. The natural order of the world being inverted. A food chain being rewritten with a new, terrifying predator at its absolute peak. He, Kaiju No. 8, had felt like a worm in the presence of an eagle. Prey.
That feeling, more than the visual spectacle, was what chilled him to his core.
Chaos. Pure, unadulterated chaos was the only way to describe the Third Division's command center.
"All western-quadrant comms are down!" an operator shouted. "Battlefield monitors are fried! The static discharge wiped the primary servers!"
"I need a damage report, now!" Mina Ashiro's voice cut through the panic like a diamond drill. Her face was ashen, but her eyes burned with fierce intensity.
"The main power grid is a mess, Commander! It's like an EMP, but… not. It specifically targeted our high-frequency monitoring systems!"
"Satellite feed!" Mina snapped. "Give me anything we have left!"
A junior operator frantically tapped at his keyboard. "Got something… just before we lost the link! A single frame from the Himawari-9. It's… it's not much, Commander."
The image flickered onto the main screen. It was blurry, distorted by atmospheric interference and the sheer overload of the event. But it was there.
A single, humanoid silhouette standing amidst the devastation. The image was grainy, but they could make out a dark coat or jacket. The most disturbing part was that the entity itself seemed to be a patch of static, as if light and energy refused to properly resolve around its form. Behind it, the shadowy blur of the summoned creature was a titanic blot of ink against the gray ruins.
The room fell silent. They stared at the impossible image. The ghost at the scene of the crime.
"Code name," Mina said, her voice dangerously low. "We're assigning this anomaly a code name. Until we know what it is, all reports will refer to it as 'Sovereign.'"
"Commander!" another officer interjected, his voice trembling. "Are we sure it's a threat? It… it saved them. It destroyed the Juggernaut."
Mina turned, her gaze like ice. "It destroyed a Resilience 8.9 monster with a flick of its wrist and then vanished, frying our entire sensor network in the process. It operates on a level of power we can't even measure, let alone comprehend. It is not our friend. It is not our ally. It is an unknown variable of catastrophic potential. Treat it as the single greatest threat this world has ever faced. Is that understood?"
The entire room seemed to feel a chill.
"Yes, Ma'am!" they replied in unison.
Mina turned back to the screen, her knuckles white where she gripped the command console. Her internal thoughts were a storm. 'A human who can command monsters? A Kaiju that looks like a man? A third option too alien to contemplate? What are you?'
Her eyes narrowed.
"Find it," she whispered. "I don't care what it takes. Find Sovereign."
Sung Jin-Woo leaned against the grimy wall of an alleyway several kilometers from the battle, the noise of a bustling city—Shinjuku, according to a street sign—a dull roar in his ears.
His hand was braced against the brick, and his head was down. He was not admiring his handiwork.
He was exhausted. Critically so.
The jump between realities had ripped through his reserves like a meteor. He had expected it to be costly, but this was on another level. His connection to the vast abyss of his shadow power felt thin and frayed, a spider's thread stretched across a galaxy.
[Mana… there is no mana in the air.]
It was a terrifying realization. In his old world, mana was in everything—the air, the earth, living beings. It was the background radiation of existence, the fuel he breathed.
Here? Nothing. The atmosphere was spiritually dead. Sterile. It was like he was holding his breath, with no hope of a next one.
He tried to draw upon his army. He focused, reaching into his own shadow.
[Igris.]
A faint stir. A flicker of loyal acknowledgement from an impossible distance.
[Beru.]
A frantic, worried buzz from the ant king, also hopelessly far away.
He could feel his Marshals, his strongest commanders. But they were on the other side of an uncrossable ocean. Summoning them now would be impossible. He had managed to manifest a single, nameless Shadow Kaiju for a moment only by pouring the very dregs of his remaining power into it. Another such feat would leave him completely comatose.
As for his millions of other soldiers… they were gone. He couldn't feel them at all. Their link was severed.
He pushed himself off the wall, forcing a steady gait. Panic was a luxury. Weakness was a death sentence. He had survived being the world's weakest E-rank Hunter. This was just a new, more complicated brand of weakness.
He used [Stealth]. The familiar sensation of erasing his presence from the world was a comfort, but even maintaining it was a slow drain on his pitiful reserves.
He moved through the crowded streets of Shinjuku, a ghost in the river of humanity. The language was familiar enough, the technology a slight variation of his own Seoul. Smartphones, glowing billboards, news tickers.
He stopped, his gaze drawn to a giant public screen. A news anchor was speaking with a grave expression. Behind her were images of the Yokohama devastation. Then, a picture of a Kaiju. Not the one he had killed, but another, more sinewy creature. The text below it read: "Kaiju No. 9's trail gone cold."
His eyes narrowed. [Numbered Kaiju? An intelligent one?].
Interesting. A world plagued by monsters. A world with warriors who fought them. A world… without mana.
It was a puzzle. And to solve it, he needed two things: information, and power.
He continued his walk, his senses sifting through the city, learning.
A few days later, he had found a temporary equilibrium. He learned that he could absorb minuscule amounts of life energy from the environment, from plants and animals. It wasn't mana, but it was something. A slow, tedious process. Replenishing his power would take years, perhaps decades, at this rate.
Unless he found a more potent source.
The wail of a Kaiju alert siren split the evening air.
WEEE-OOOO-WEEE-OOOO!
Panic erupted. People screamed and ran, a tide of terror flooding the streets.
Jin-Woo, standing on the edge of a skyscraper's roof, looked down.
At the entrance to a packed subway station, a Yoju-class monster had emerged. It was a slimy, vaguely crocodilian beast, about the size of a large truck, with a row of pulsating sacs on its back. It swiped its claws, sending a kiosk flying into the crowd.
A young woman tripped, falling hard. The Kaiju turned its beady eyes on her, its jaws drooling a viscous, corrosive fluid.
'Defense Force ETA: Four minutes,' Jin-Woo assessed, his senses telling him where the responding units were. 'Civilian casualty probability: 98%.'
He sighed. It was an infinitesimally small sound lost in the wind. A nuisance. Dealing with it himself would expend precious energy. Not dealing with it was… inefficient.
He didn't move from his spot. He didn't need to.
He merely glanced down at his own feet. His shadow deepened, stretched, and from it, a slender, dark form rose up, featureless except for the two daggers of solidified night it held in its hands. A single Shadow Assassin. One of his countless grunts.
[Go.] The command was not spoken. It was willed.
Down below, the world seemed to slow for a moment.
The assassin dropped from the roof. It wasn't a fall. It was a silent, controlled descent, faster than gravity, wrapped in shadow.
It landed in an alleyway, a brief ripple in the darkness, and then shot out towards the Kaiju.
It was a blur. A streak of black that was there and then gone.
SHLK.
The sound was almost imperceptible. A quiet, final cut.
The crocodile Kaiju froze. The corrosive drool dripped from its jaw. The terrified woman on the ground stared up, squeezing her eyes shut for the killing blow.
But it never came.
The Kaiju's head, along with the top half of its torso, slid sideways with a wet, heavy sound, falling to the ground with a sickening splat. The cut was perfect, unnaturally clean, the edges cauterized black by shadow energy, preventing even a single drop of blood from spilling.
Before anyone could even register what had happened, the Shadow Assassin had already dissolved back into the nearest shadow, its duty done.
Three minutes later, a Defense Force squad arrived, weapons hot. They found a scene of chaos, terrified civilians… and a perfectly bisected monster.
A young officer cautiously approached the corpse, his rifle raised. He knelt, examining the bizarre cut.
"What… what in the hell?" he muttered, running a gloved finger along the clean edge. "No blast marks. No blade marks. It's like it was cut by a laser, but there's no burn residue."
His superior came over, his face grim. "Any witnesses see what happened?"
"No, sir. Everyone was running or hiding. It was just… there. And then it was dead."
They looked around at the towering skyscrapers of Shinjuku, at the countless dark alleys and shadowy corners. An unsettling feeling crept up their spines. They were being watched.
The younger officer stood up, his gaze sweeping the rooftops.
"It's like a ghost did this," he whispered.
And just like that, an urban legend was born.