Time warped.
The moment stretched into a crystalline, slow-motion tableau of impossible choices. For Mina Ashiro, the world became a series of distinct, hyper-focused snapshots.
The first snapshot: Hoshina's terrified, urgent shout.
The second: the collective gasp of her troopers as they all looked up.
The third: the descending star. It wasn't a meteor. It was too precise. A spear of white-hot plasma, trailing an ion-tail, screaming through the atmosphere with a purpose that was both beautiful and terrifyingly malevolent.
The fourth, and most disorienting, snapshot: the janitor. The monster. Her childhood friend. The man she had cornered and was prepared to execute—erupting into the very form she had sworn to destroy. His transformation wasn't a slow, gruesome process. It was an instantaneous, concussive detonation of raw power. One moment, Kafka Hibino stood there in surrender; the next, the hulking, armored behemoth known as Kaiju No. 8 stood in his place, its roar a physical shockwave that cracked her cannon's targeting lens.
The final snapshot, the one that would be seared into her memory forever: the monster, Kafka, her oldest friend, crossing the fifty meters between them in a single, earth-shattering bound. He wasn't moving to attack her. He was moving to cover her. His massive, obsidian-black body, bigger and more dense than she had ever seen it, became a living bulwark between her and the heavens.
It was an act of pure, selfless instinct. An answer to a promise made decades ago, now honored in the most monstrous way imaginable.
The spear of light hit him.
*KRA-KOOM!*
The sound was not an explosion. It was the sound of reality breaking.
A dome of pure, white energy erupted on the rooftop, expanding outwards with apocalyptic force. It vaporized the railgun emplacement, flash-incinerating the metal. It sent the armored mechs and troopers—including Hoshina and Kikoru—flying like discarded toys, their suits screaming with proximity and energy warnings.
Mina, shielded by Kafka's colossal back, was spared the initial blast, but the sheer kinetic force still lifted her from her feet, throwing her violently against the interior of her command post.
The entire base was bathed in a light brighter than the sun. And at its epicenter, Kaiju No. 8 took the full, unmitigated force of an orbital strike.
A raw, guttural scream of pure, undiluted agony was ripped from his monstrous throat. It was a sound that shook the very foundations of the base. The plasma burned, not like fire, but like a sustained stellar flare, melting through his hyper-durable hide. The hardened plates on his back, tougher than any known material, glowed cherry-red, then white-hot, then began to liquefy, sloughing off in molten chunks.
He was being unmade. His very being was being atomized by an attack on a cosmic scale.
But he did not buckle.
He dug his massive feet into the rooftop, the reinforced steel and concrete beneath him melting into slag from the sheer pressure and heat. His muscles, each as thick as a bridge cable, strained against the impossible force. He was a mountain holding back the sky, and the sky was winning.
"He's not… going to make it…" Kikoru gasped, struggling to her feet at the far edge of the roof, her visor cracked and her suit alarms blaring. She watched in abject horror, the monster she had wanted to capture was sacrificing itself for the Commander.
"What was that?! Where did that come from?!" Hoshina yelled, already back on his feet, his blades glowing as he prepared for a follow-up attack, his eyes scanning the sky.
Kafka's monstrous mind was a maelstrom of white-hot pain. But one thought cut through it all, a single, desperate imperative: Protect Mina.
He felt his own energy reserves being incinerated. He was dying. He needed more. More power. More mass.
He reached inside himself, to the new, volatile pools of energy he'd consumed. He ripped the power from the cores, not guiding it, but detonating it. He used the biological data from the gorilla-Kaiju, not to form limbs, but to reinforce his own cellular structure, his own bones.
With a final, defiant roar that mixed with the scream of the plasma, he forced his body to evolve under fire. His bones thickened, his muscles grew denser, and his hide, even as it burned away, was regenerating at a frantic, impossible rate. He was shoveling his own life force into the furnace to keep it from consuming him.
And then, as quickly as it began, it was over.
The beam of light vanished.
Silence descended, broken only by the crackle of a hundred fires and the groaning of stressed metal. The rooftop was a ruin. A crater of molten steel marked the impact zone.
And in the center of it, Kaiju No. 8 stood, still upright. Barely.
He was a horrific sight. The entire back half of his body was gone, incinerated. What remained was a smoldering, steaming ruin of blackened flesh and exposed, glowing bone. He was steaming like a volcano, a green, viscous fluid—his blood—hissing as it dripped onto the molten metal.
He held his form for one, long, shuddering moment. He turned his head slightly, his glowing blue monster eyes finding Mina's terrified, disbelieving gaze through the smoke. He had kept his promise.
Then, his eyes flickered, the light within them dying. His colossal body finally gave out. He fell forward, not with a crash, but with the slow, tired fall of a collapsing statue, landing in a heap on the ruined rooftop, shrinking as he fell. By the time he hit the ground, the monstrous form was gone, leaving only the small, unconscious, and horrifically burned body of Kafka Hibino.
For a moment, nobody moved. The entire Defense Force was paralyzed by the whiplash of what they had just witnessed.
Mina Ashiro was the first to snap out of it. She scrambled out of the wreckage of her command post, ignoring the protests of her suit's damage sensors. She ran to Kafka's side, falling to her knees in the slag.
"Kafka!" she cried, her voice cracking.
His back was a ruin of burned flesh. His janitor's uniform was fused to his skin. He was breathing, but each breath was a shallow, painful rattle. He had taken a direct hit from an anti-god weapon, and had somehow, impossibly, survived by becoming a monster.
Hoshina's voice cut through the air, calm, sharp, and deadly serious. "It was the Architect," he said, looking at the sky. "That wasn't a Kaiju attack. It was an assassination. A tactical strike from orbit. The Architect wasn't targeting Kafka. It was trying to eliminate the greatest conventional threat on the board: Commander Ashiro."
The realization hit everyone at once. This wasn't a random event. The moment Kafka had been exposed, the Architect had used the opportunity, the chaos, to try and decapitate the leadership of its primary opposition.
It had seen Kafka not as a target, but as a distraction.
"And it failed…" Kikoru whispered, staring at Kafka's prone form with wide, unreadable eyes. "It failed because of him."
Mina ignored them. She gently reached out to touch Kafka's shoulder, her mind reeling, her heart a war of conflicting emotions. Duty. Friendship. Horror. Gratitude.
He was a monster. He had lied to them all.
And he had just saved her life, at the cost of his own.
Suddenly, a cold, empty presence descended upon the rooftop. It was not the crushing pressure of an attack, but the simple, silent arrival of a ghost.
Everyone froze. Their combat instincts screamed, but they couldn't place the threat.
In the center of the rooftop, standing over the fallen body of his "student," was Sung Jin-Woo.
He hadn't teleported or appeared in a flash of light. He had simply… stepped out of a shadow. His face was a mask of cold fury. The air around him shimmered with a barely-contained power that made the orbital strike feel like a child's firecracker. His violet eyes weren't glowing. They were burning like two miniature black holes.
He looked down at Kafka's ruined body. He then looked up, his gaze sweeping over the armed troopers, over Kikoru, over Hoshina, before finally settling on Mina Ashiro, who knelt by Kafka's side.
"You did this," he said. It wasn't a question. His voice was quiet, but it resonated in the soul of every person on that roof. It was a voice that promised consequences on a world-ending scale. "You broke my toy."