The moonlight glinting off Kafka's newly-formed claws painted the derelict yard in an eerie, emerald glow.
The remaining eight Yoju, creatures that operated on pure, primal instinct, hesitated. The scent in the air had changed. The clumsy, panicked prey they had surrounded just minutes ago was gone. In its place stood something else. It looked the same, but it felt, smelled, and moved like a predator. An alpha.
Their mindless aggression was now tinged with a sliver of self-preservation. A few of them took a skittish step back.
"They feel it," Jin-Woo's voice observed from the sidelines. "Your shift in presence. You are no longer projecting the fear of a human, but the killing intent of a Kaiju. You are finally speaking their language. Now, finish the lesson."
The lesson. Kafka felt a jolt, as if waking from a trance. He had been so lost in the thrill of wielding his new claws, he'd forgotten this was a test.
He didn't wait for them to charge. He became the aggressor.
He lunged forward, covering the twenty-meter distance to the nearest Kaiju—a boar-like beast with bony tusks—in a blur of motion. He didn't use explosive power; he used the efficient, predatory grace his inner beast was teaching him. Low to the ground, every muscle working in perfect synergy.
The boar-Kaiju snorted and lowered its head to gore him. Kafka sidestepped the charge with an unnatural fluidity, his body moving in a way a normal human's couldn't. As the beast lumbered past, he brought one of his massive claws around in a vicious backhanded arc.
SHLICK!
The clawed gauntlet tore through the creature's thick hide, severing its spinal cord in a single, effortless motion. The Kaiju collapsed into a heap, its legs twitching for a moment before falling still.
There was no wasted energy. No dramatic explosion. Just a quiet, lethal finality. It was murderously efficient.
He didn't pause to admire his work. He was already moving toward the next target. The Yoju, their hesitation turning back into mindless rage, swarmed him.
It was no longer a fight. It was a harvest.
He used the insectoid creature's scythe design as Jin-Woo suggested, his right arm morphing into a long, curved blade of green energy. With it, he danced between them, a whirlwind of emerald death.
A lizard-like creature with chameleon skin tried to camouflage itself against a rusting tank. Kafka's new senses, however, didn't rely solely on sight. He could feel the flicker of its bio-energy, a pale candle in the darkness. He threw a condensed shard of his energy—a crude imitation of a dagger—that pinned its shadow to the tank, and then bisected it with a clean sweep of his scythe.
His body was a weapon, and his imagination was the forge. Every moment, every kill, he learned something new. He learned to form a shield of hardened energy over his chest to block a spray of spines, just as Jin-Woo had hinted. He learned to create small, bladed spurs on his heels for extra traction and a nasty surprise for anything that got behind him.
In less than three minutes, the yard was silent once more, save for Kafka's own heavy breathing. Thirteen Kaiju corpses littered the concrete, their bodies dismembered, impaled, or bisected by an array of creatively violent methods.
Kafka stood in the center of the carnage, his arms slowly returning to their normal human shape, the emerald glow fading. He was drenched in sweat, his lungs burned, and his mind felt like it had just run a mental marathon. He had never felt so completely and utterly exhausted.
And he had never felt so powerful.
He looked over at his teacher. Sung Jin-Woo stood in the exact same spot, arms crossed, his expression as unreadable as ever.
"You pass. Barely," Jin-Woo said, his voice flat. "Your application is still crude. You are inefficient, reactive, and you telegraph every move. But you have learned the most important lesson."
"Which is…?" Kafka panted, leaning over with his hands on his knees.
"That the power is yours to command. You have moved from being its terrified jailer to its clumsy master. From this point forward, there will be no more accidental transformations. No more panicked outbursts. When your power is unleashed, it will be because you willed it. Understand?"
"Yeah…" Kafka breathed, a genuine sense of accomplishment warming his chest. "Yeah. I understand."
A rare, almost imperceptible nod of approval came from Jin-Woo. "Good. Then our business for tonight is conc—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
His head tilted, just a fraction of a degree. A stillness came over him, the placid calm of a mountain before an earthquake. His gaze was no longer on Kafka. It was fixed on the darkness beyond the industrial complex, out toward the city.
Kafka felt it a second later. A prickle on the back of his neck. His own Kaiju senses screamed a sudden, sharp warning. Something was coming.
It wasn't the frantic energy of the Defense Force. This was something else. Something slow, deliberate, and utterly malevolent. It was a cold, intelligent presence that slithered through the night, a stark contrast to the mindless hunger of the Yoju.
"Company," Jin-Woo stated, his voice losing its professorial tone and taking on the chilling quiet of a predator that has scented a rival.
"Is it the Defense Force?" Kafka asked, his body tensing for another chase.
"No," Jin-Woo said, his eyes narrowing, the violet light within them intensifying. "This signature… it's synthetic. Arrogant. The same faint taint as the creature in the alleyway you failed to dispose of cleanly."
Kafka's blood ran cold. The same signature?
He knew what that meant.
Kaiju No. 9.
From the main road leading into the complex, a figure emerged from the darkness.
It looked human, at first glance. It wore a tattered trench coat and walked with a steady, confident stride. But its movements were too smooth, its limbs too long. As it stepped into the faint moonlight, the illusion shattered.
Its "face" was a smooth, bone-white plate, with a single, vertical slit that glowed with a faint red light. It had no mouth, yet a voice emanated from it, a calm, synthesized, and deeply unsettling baritone that grated on the ears.
"Remarkable," the figure said, its head tilting as it surveyed the field of slaughtered Yoju. It completely ignored Kafka, its glowing slit-eye fixed solely on Sung Jin-Woo. "To think another creation would achieve a level of energy manipulation so quickly. Your work is… impressive, if a little messy."
It thought Jin-Woo had killed the Kaiju.
Jin-Woo remained silent, his gaze unwavering, analytical.
The figure, Kaiju No. 9, took another step forward. "I detected a significant energy release. A blossoming of a new numbered specimen. But I arrive to find not a rampaging beast, but a quiet executioner. Tell me, brother. Who was your architect? What purpose were you designed for? You don't feel like one of mine."
It thought Jin-Woo was a fellow numbered Kaiju. An intelligent, human-like creation just like itself. An uninvited guest who had stumbled into what it believed to be a family reunion.
Kafka felt a surge of pure terror. He was standing between two absolute monsters. The cold, silent king of shadows, and the twisted, mad scientist of the Kaiju world. The only thing worse than being their target was being caught in the crossfire.
Jin-Woo finally spoke, his voice a low rumble of arctic cold.
"You," he said, his violet eyes locking onto the creator of monsters. "You smell of death and failed experiments. You are the architect of this world's misery."
His tone wasn't accusatory. It was a simple statement of fact.
"And you have a core," he continued, a terrifying stillness in his words. "One that I suspect is far more potent than these worthless scraps."
He took a single, deliberate step forward, the pressure that Kafka had come to know so well beginning to bleed into the air, a crushing wave of pure, condensed killing intent.
"I believe," Jin-Woo said, a dangerous, violet glow building around his hands, "I have found my next meal."