The hallway was a hundred meters long. For Kafka Hibino, it felt like a mile-long death row corridor.
Every sound was magnified into a cannon shot. The squeak of his cart's wheels. The frantic, terrified drumming of his own heart. The almost imperceptible hum of the fluorescent lights overhead.
He stood frozen, his knuckles white where he gripped the handle of his mop. His mind, usually a chaotic jumble, had gone eerily, terrifyingly silent. The part of him that was a man was screaming in panic, but the part that was a monster—the part honed by Jin-Woo's brutal lessons—was unnervingly calm, assessing threats, calculating escape routes.
Ventilation duct above. Too small.
Window at the end of the hall. Reinforced plas-steel. No exit.
Two hostiles. S-Class threats. Vice-Commander Hoshina, specialized in high-speed blade combat. Kikoru Shinomiya, overwhelming destructive power. Do not engage.
Hoshina pushed himself off the wall, the movement slow and deliberate, like a cat stretching before a pounce. He began to walk towards Kafka, his boots making soft, almost silent, taps on the polished floor.
"Hibino-san," Hoshina began, his voice casual, friendly even. But his eyes held no warmth. They were the eyes of a surgeon studying an anomaly on the operating table. "I don't believe we've been properly introduced. Vice-Commander Hoshina. Head of the new Anomaly Tracking Unit."
The words were a hammer blow. Anomaly Tracking Unit. He wasn't speaking to the janitor. He was speaking to his target.
Kikoru remained silent, her glare so intense Kafka felt it could strip paint. Her entire body was vibrating with a restrained energy. She was a grenade with the pin pulled.
"V-Vice-Commander," Kafka stammered, forcing a clumsy, confused smile. He knew the lie was useless, but it was the only shield he had. "It's an honor. Is there… a spill you need cleaned up?"
He gestured with his mop, the motion painfully awkward.
Hoshina's smile widened, becoming sharper, more predatory. He stopped about ten feet away from Kafka.
"There is, actually," he said, his voice dropping an octave, becoming laced with a chilling intensity. "A rather large one. It stretches from a playground in Shinjuku all the way to a certain rooftop on the Kyoen Commerce Tower. You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
Kafka's blood turned to ice. It was over. The game was up. There was no more hiding.
He dropped the smile. The janitor persona fell away like a discarded mask. His posture straightened, the weary slump of a blue-collar worker replaced by the coiled tension of a cornered animal.
He looked past Hoshina, directly at Kikoru. He saw the fury in her eyes, but also a deep, genuine confusion.
"You're… the Jumper?" she finally spoke, the words coming out as a strained whisper. It was less of an accusation and more of a desperate, disbelieving question. "The guy with the cat? But you're just… Kafka."
The use of his first name, so casual and familiar from their brief interactions, felt like a twist of a knife.
"Funny," a low, dangerous growl rumbled in the hallway. It wasn't Kafka's voice. It was a new sound, a harmony of his own vocal cords and the deeper, monstrous resonance of Kaiju No. 8. "I was just about to say, 'But you're just Kikoru'."
The temperature in the hallway dropped ten degrees.
*CRACKLE!*
The emerald energy of his power flared to life. Not a full transformation. It was a controlled, partial manifestation, just as Jin-Woo had taught him. A dark green, almost black, carapace of biological armor instantly formed over his arms and torso, gleaming under the fluorescent lights. His eyes began to glow with a faint, ominous green light. He had followed his homework assignment perfectly. He had created the armor.
Kikoru flinched back, her hand instinctively flying to her hip where her weapon would normally be. This energy signature… it was undeniably the 'Jumper'. The chaotic, wild inferno. To see it radiating from the unassuming janitor was a shock to her system so profound it made her physically recoil.
Hoshina's smile finally vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, exhilarating focus.
"There you are," he whispered, his own killing intent, sharp and cold as a razor, flaring to life. "I was wondering when you'd show up."
ALARM! ALARM! UNIDENTIFIED KAIJU ENERGY DETECTED IN SECTOR-7, OFFICER WING!
The base's automated security system roared to life. Red lights began to flash, bathing the hallway in a bloody, apocalyptic glow. Metal shutters began to slam down, sealing the corridor.
Kafka knew he had seconds.
"I don't want to fight you," he growled, his voice a distorted baritone.
"I'm afraid you no longer have a choice in the matter," Hoshina said, reaching behind his back. With a whisper of oiled steel, he drew his twin blades. The high-frequency hum as they powered on filled the hallway. "As of this moment, Kafka Hibino, you are designated Code Black. A Kaiju threat inside the wire. And you are to be subjugated. By any means necessary."
He lunged.
Hoshina was a blur of motion, a living missile of disciplined violence. He closed the ten-foot distance in a fraction of a second, his blades a cross-hatch of deadly light aimed at Kafka's neck.
Kafka reacted on pure instinct. He didn't have time to form a claw or a spear. He just brought his newly-armored arms up in a block.
*KRRRRRR-AAAANG!*
The impact was thunderous. The force of Hoshina's strike sent shockwaves through Kafka's body, lifting him off his feet and sending him crashing backward through the drywall of the hallway. Plaster, wires, and insulation exploded outwards.
He landed in an adjacent, empty office, the air thick with dust. His arms throbbed, deep gouges torn into his biological armor where Hoshina's blades had connected. But they had held. The armor had worked.
"Incredible durability," Hoshina's voice said, echoing from the ruined wall. He stepped through the jagged hole he'd just created, his blades held at the ready. "Your armor has a higher tensile strength than most Honju hides. The data from this will be magnificent."
Kafka scrambled to his feet. There was no escape. This wasn't the open city. This was a locked-down military base. He was a rat in a steel trap.
"Kikoru, now!" Hoshina commanded.
From the hallway, Kikoru Shinomiya came crashing through the wall like a wrecking ball. She hadn't waited for a door. She wore her full combat suit, materialized in seconds by the base's emergency deployment system. In her hands, she held her mother's legacy, the colossal, jet-powered battle axe, Numbers Weapon 4.
AXE OUTPUT AT 75%! a synthesized voice blared from her suit's speakers.
Her face, visible through her visor, was a mask of cold fury and conflicted sorrow.
"Why, Kafka?!" she screamed, her voice distorted by her helmet's speakers. "Why did you lie to us?!"
"It's complicated!" he yelled back, dodging to the side as she brought the giant axe down.
KRA-DOOM!
The axe hit the spot where he'd been standing, and the entire floor of the office collapsed. The desk, the chairs, the floor itself—all of it disintegrated into rubble, revealing the girders of the floor below. The sheer destructive power was terrifying.
He was completely outmatched. He had two of the Defense Force's finest pinning him down.
'I can't win. I just need to escape.' He thought desperately.
His mind flashed to his conversation with Jin-Woo. The lessons. His power. He still had a trick up his sleeve. A messy one he had failed to control a hundred times in practice.
As Hoshina blurred toward him from the left and Kikoru raised her axe for another devastating swing from the right, Kafka channeled all the raw, chaotic power he could muster. He didn't try to shape it. He let it explode outward from his back.
The two small, parasitic arms erupted from his shoulder blades once more. But this time, they weren't small and emaciated. They were large, fully formed, and tipped with wicked-looking claws. Two extra limbs for combat. He looked like a four-armed demon.
But they weren't for fighting.
The two extra arms shot out, not at Hoshina or Kikoru, but at the ceiling. They punched through the plaster and metal with ease, their claws finding purchase on the support beams above.
With a monstrous roar, Kafka pulled.
He used the arms to launch himself upwards, ripping through the ceiling and into the maintenance crawlspace above, just as Hoshina's blades and Kikoru's axe converged on the spot where he had been standing, creating a devastating explosion of energy and debris.
He scrambled through the ducts, the base's alarms screaming all around him. He was wounded, terrified, but he was moving. He had one goal: get outside.
Down below, Hoshina and Kikoru stood back-to-back in the ruined office, staring up at the gaping hole in the ceiling.
"He's learning," Hoshina said, a thrill in his voice. "He's adapting in real time. Creating new biological functions on the fly. This isn't just a monster. It's a genius."
Kikoru said nothing. She just stared at the hole, her knuckles white around the handle of her axe. The image of the friendly, clumsy janitor was shattering, being replaced by this four-armed, armor-clad monster that fought with the cunning of a seasoned veteran.
The hunt was on. And it was taking place in their own home.