The night city was a concrete jungle, and Kafka Hibino was its newest, most terrified prey.
He sprinted across the gravel-dusted surface of a rooftop, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground. The wind whipped past his ears, a frantic symphony accompanying the thunderous, twofold beat in his chest. His own human heart hammered away with panic, while the monstrous engine of Kaiju No. 8 pulsed with a wild, exhilarating power.
Every sinew in his body was on fire. The consumed core had supercharged him, elevating his physical abilities to a terrifying new level even in his human form. His legs, once the sturdy but unremarkable limbs of a man in his thirties, were now pistons of coiled muscle, launching him across ten-meter gaps between buildings with an ease that defied physics.
'This is insane!' he thought, landing silently on the edge of an adjacent office block. 'This… this power…!'
He could feel the hunt. It wasn't just the distant wail of sirens growing closer; it was something more fundamental. His heightened senses painted a 3D map of the city in his mind. He could perceive the heat signatures of the Defense Force squads mobilizing below. He could hear the faint, high-frequency whine of drone rotors spinning up two blocks to his south. He could even taste the ozone discharge from their advanced weaponry on the back of his tongue.
They were converging. Casting a net. And he was the fish.
"Meow," a tiny voice protested from inside his jacket.
"Shh, kitty," Kafka grunted, adjusting the rescued feline. "Bad time for complaints."
His new senses were a double-edged sword. He was aware of everything, which meant he was aware of just how screwed he was. There was no escape. They were professionals. Relentless.
Unless…
He remembered Jin-Woo's final words, and the almost bored way he had simply ceased to exist, melting into the alley's darkness. He had no such power. He was a rampaging bull in a city of glass, and they were tracking the vibrations.
But Jin-Woo hadn't just given him a meal. He had given him an idea. The path to power wasn't just about overwhelming force. It was about control.
He skidded to a halt behind the large air conditioning unit of a skyscraper, pressing his back against the cool metal. He needed to think, not just run. What had Jin-Woo done? He had used the shadows. He had become one of them.
Kafka closed his eyes, ignoring the chaos, and focused inward. For the first time, he didn't try to suppress the beast within him. He reached out to it.
'Okay,' he projected into his own mind. 'You're the monster. You're the one they're after. How do we hide? Show me.'
The response wasn't a voice or an image. It was a surge of instinct. A flood of predatory knowledge that was not his own. The beast knew how to be invisible. Not through magic or skill, but through sheer biological manipulation.
He felt the power within him shift. Instead of flowing outwards, generating heat and energy that their sensors could track, he pulled it in. He commanded it, a novice king on a roaring throne, to subside. To cool. To mimic the world around it.
It was excruciating. It was like trying to force a star to stop shining. But he gritted his teeth, sweat pouring down his face, and pulled.
His external body temperature began to drop, matching the cool night air. The bio-electric field he was emitting flickered, sputtered, and then collapsed inward, shielded by his own skin and bone. He forced his breathing to slow, his two hearts to beat in a softer, less detectable rhythm.
He was performing a biological cloaking. Masking his signature.
In the lead APC, an operator stared at his console in disbelief.
"What the…? Sir, I've lost him!"
Soshiro Hoshina, monitoring the feed from a shoulder-mounted display, scowled. "What do you mean, 'lost him'? He was heading north-by-northeast at seventy kilometers an hour."
"I know, sir! But the energy signature just… vanished. It's gone. It's like he was a lightbulb, and someone just flipped the switch. There's nothing on thermal, nothing on bio-scan, nothing."
Kikoru slammed a gauntleted fist against the vehicle's interior wall, leaving a sizeable dent. "Impossible! Nothing can just disappear!"
"This 'nothing' seems to specialize in the impossible," Hoshina retorted, his eyes narrowed in thought. He tapped his comms unit. "All drone units, switch to visual spectrum. Sweep every rooftop, alley, and open window in a six-block radius of the last known position. Our target is now a ghost. Find it."
He looked at the tactical map, a glowing grid of the Shinjuku ward. The target's trail had ended abruptly on the roof of the Kyoen Commerce Tower. The surrounding area was a dense network of buildings, a perfect hiding place.
A grim smile touched Hoshina's lips. "It's smart. It knows it's being tracked, and it knows how to hide. This is a real hunt."
The beast had gone to ground. And the hunters were closing in.
From the absolute darkness of a different, much higher rooftop, Sung Jin-Woo watched the proceedings with a detached, academic interest.
He observed the swarm of Defense Force drones, little more than sparks of light, as they began their systematic search. He watched the armored vehicles cordoning off the streets below. He saw the elite soldiers, clad in their powerful exoskeletons, preparing to begin a building-by-building sweep.
They were organized. Efficient. Utterly outmatched.
[Let's see what you've learned, Kafka Hibino,] he thought, his gaze fixed on the Kyoen Commerce Tower.
He had felt the moment Kafka consumed the core. He had felt the chaotic eruption of power, a crude and unrefined explosion of energy. And then, more impressively, he had felt the moment Kafka managed to wrestle that power into a state of near-dormancy.
It was clumsy. Like a child trying to hide a bonfire under a wet blanket. To Jin-Woo's senses, Kafka's hidden signature was still as obvious as a lighthouse in a fog. But to the crude technology of the Defense Force? It was an impressive first step. The boy had potential. Instinct.
The cornered rat was learning to be a snake.
A faint buzz near his ear announced the arrival of one of the search drones. It hovered fifty meters away, its optical sensors sweeping the area.
Jin-Woo didn't move. He didn't need [Stealth]. He simply stood there, letting the drone's camera pass over him. On its screen, the operator would see nothing but an empty rooftop. Light and energy itself seemed to bend around his form, making him functionally invisible to both machine and mortal eye unless he wished to be seen.
He was the observer. The teacher watching his new, unwilling student take his first test.
[Show me you are worth the investment.]
Kafka held his breath.
A drone, a sleek, black machine with a glowing red optic, hovered just past the edge of the air conditioning unit. It hummed like a giant, metallic hornet. He was so close, he could read the serial number stenciled on its side.
He pressed himself flatter against the unit, every muscle screaming. The biological cloaking was taking a massive toll. It was an active, conscious effort to suppress a volcano.
The drone's red eye panned across his location, paused for a second, and then moved on.
It hadn't seen him.
Kafka let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding for a full minute. A dizzying wave of relief washed over him. It worked. He was invisible.
"Halt! You there!"
The voice, sharp and feminine, shattered his relief.
Kafka's head snapped around. On the far side of the rooftop, having ascended from a fire escape, stood two Defense Force troopers. One of them had his rifle leveled directly at him.
And standing just in front of them, her golden hair catching the city lights like a halo, was Kikoru Shinomiya. Her colossal axe was slung over her shoulder, and her gaze was fixed on him with the intensity of a hawk spotting a rabbit.
They hadn't detected him with sensors.
They had found him with their own two eyes.
He had been so focused on hiding from the machines, he had forgotten about simple, old-fashioned recon.
His mind went blank. He was caught. It was over. All of it.
Kikoru took a step forward, her expression a complex mixture of curiosity, aggression, and something else… recognition? "I don't know what kind of Kaiju you are," she said, her voice echoing across the rooftop, "but you give off a strange feeling. I know you from somewhere…"
Of course she did. She'd seen him dozens of times. Cleaning the barracks. Scrubbing the floors. Kafka Hibino, the lowly janitor.
"Surrender now," she commanded, "and we might bring you in alive for study."
It was over.
No.
Jin-Woo's voice echoed in his memory. "Become a true predator."
A predator doesn't surrender.
Kafka did the only thing he could think of. He turned, grabbed the terrified cat out of his jacket, and held it up.
"Meow?" the kitten offered innocently.
Kikoru, the troopers, everyone stared. There was a moment of profound, baffled silence.
"I, uh… was just rescuing this cat!" Kafka said, his voice cracking. "It was stuck up here! Yep! That's it! Just a civilian doing his civic duty!"
It was the dumbest, most ridiculous lie in the history of lies. A civilian on a cordoned-off skyscraper roof, in the middle of a high-level Kaiju hunt, holding a cat.
He was praying they'd just think he was an idiot who had gotten past the barricades.
Kikoru's eye twitched. She lowered her head, her bangs shadowing her face. A low, dangerous aura began to emanate from her.
"Are you… making fun of me?" she asked, her voice dropping to a deadly whisper.
'Oh crap,' Kafka thought. 'I just pissed her off.'
He had a choice. Maintain the lie and get arrested, or…
He chose option three.
With a surge of power, he bent his knees and leaped.
He didn't jump to another building. He jumped straight up. Ten stories. Twenty stories. He soared into the night sky like a cannonball, a tiny, screaming cat clutched to his chest.
Kikoru and the troopers could only stare, their jaws agape, at the man who was now a rapidly shrinking dot against the backdrop of the moon.
"Well," Hoshina's voice crackled over Kikoru's comm, having witnessed the whole thing through her suit's camera feed. "I don't think that's a normal civilian."
On his distant rooftop, Jin-Woo watched the spectacle and, for the first time since arriving in this world, a genuine, amused smirk spread across his face.
The test wasn't over. It had just gotten interesting.