The official report on the R&D mission was a masterpiece of clinical understatement. It stated that the ATU team had encountered "significant automated resistance, culminating in three repurposed Kaiju-Containment Drones" and that "Special Operative Hibino's experimental weapon system proved instrumental in disabling the hostiles with a previously undocumented area-of-effect energy projection."
"Energy projection," Hoshina scoffed, reading the final draft in his office. "It's like calling a black hole a 'gravity event'. The language is precise, but it tells you absolutely nothing about the sheer terror of the actual experience."
Mina Ashiro stood by the window, looking down at the training grounds below. "The language is designed to do exactly that," she replied, her voice weary. "It's to give the Joint Chiefs a report they can file away without having a collective aneurysm. The truth is not something that can be contained in a document."
The truth, in the week following the mission, had become a poison seeping into the foundations of the Third Division. Kafka's "energy projection" had been felt across the entire base. Every officer, every cadet, every janitor knew that something on the level of the Yokohama incident had just happened deep within their own walls.
The official story was flimsy, and no one truly believed it. The whispers that had followed Kafka before had now grown into a silent, palpable aura of fear and suspicion. He was no longer just the weirdly powerful rookie. He was an anomaly that had been publicly measured, and the scale of his power was terrifying.
The lie was cracking. The masquerade was falling apart.
Kafka felt it every day. Troopers would fall silent when he entered the mess hall. His ATU teammates, aside from Hoshina and a deeply conflicted Kikoru, would only speak to him in clipped, professional tones. Even Reno Ichikawa, his staunchest supporter, was now hesitant, his hero worship tainted with an obvious, unspoken fear. He had seen the way Kafka had looked at him after the shadow-spear incident, and he knew something was deeply wrong.
"The fear is becoming a problem," Hoshina said, tossing the datapad onto his desk. "It's affecting morale. It's making him a pariah. A pariah is an unpredictable asset. And I hate unpredictability."
"What do you suggest?" Mina asked. "We can't tell them the truth."
"No," Hoshina agreed. "But we can give them a new, more… manageable story. A demonstration. We need to reframe Hibino. Not as a walking apocalypse, but as our pet apocalypse. Our guard dog. Dangerous, yes, but loyal, and ultimately, on our side."
Meanwhile, Kafka was in his own private purgatory. Hoshina, having witnessed the 'Shadow's Grasp' firsthand, now pushed him to replicate it in the training grounds. The problem was, Kafka couldn't.
"I don't know how I did it!" he'd insisted, after a frustrating hour of failing to summon more than a few pathetic, grasping tendrils from the floor.
He knew, intellectually, that the attack had been born of a perfect, enraged synergy between himself and Blackwing, triggered by the Architect's psychic assault. It wasn't a technique he could simply turn on and off. It required a level of emotional alignment and raw power that was, for now, beyond his conscious control.
His inability to perform only deepened the other agents' suspicion. His power was not only terrifying, it was volatile and unreliable.
His nights offered no relief. The Monarch's lessons became even more brutal.
[You touched the precipice of true power,] Jin-Woo's voice echoed in the dreamscape as Igris effortlessly disarmed and disabled him for the twentieth time. [And now you cannot find the path back. Why? Because you are hesitant. You are afraid of your own potential. You fear what you will become if you truly let go.]
"KEKEKEKE!" Beru shrieked in his mind as he tore off Kafka's spectral arm. "The hatchling fears his own claws! Pathetic! A predator who fears its own teeth will starve!"
He was trapped. His keepers demanded control he didn't have, and his teacher berated him for a weakness he couldn't overcome.
The breaking point came during a simple supply transport mission. The ATU was tasked with escorting a convoy carrying volatile Kaiju core material to a long-term storage facility. It was supposed to be a milk run.
The Architect, however, had other plans.
The attack came in a narrow, urban canyon, a classic ambush. It wasn't one monster; it was a swarm. Dozens of new creations, Kaiju No. 9's latest batch, erupted from the sewers and buildings. They were wolf-like, agile, and fought with a terrifying, networked intelligence.
But they were just a distraction.
The true target was Kafka.
As the ATU engaged the swarm, a single, different creature appeared on a rooftop overlooking the convoy. It was slender, humanoid, and clad in a shifting, chameleonic hide. It held a long, rifle-like appendage that glowed with a sickening, yellow light. It was another specialist. Another counter-measure. A sniper.
Hoshina saw it first. "Hibino, sniper! Twelve o'clock high!"
Kafka looked up just as the creature fired. He didn't see a projectile. He felt it. A wave of the same neural-scrambling energy that the drone in the lab had used. It wasn't aimed at his body. It was aimed at his mind.
He braced himself, expecting Blackwing to form its psychic shield.
But this time, the attack was different. It wasn't a crude wave. It was a focused, piercing dart of psychic energy. It bypassed Blackwing's generalized defense and struck the core of his being with surgical precision.
Its target wasn't Kafka Hibino. Its target was Kaiju No. 8.
The feral beast at the heart of his power roared in agony, tortured and provoked beyond all reason. His control, the fragile discipline he and his masters had been building, shattered. The careful balance between man, monster, and Monarch broke.
"KAFKA!" Kikoru screamed as she saw his eyes flare with a wild, uncontrollable emerald light.
His body exploded in a full, berserk transformation. Not the sleek, controlled armor of his 'Numbers Weapon'. This was the raw, primal form of Kaiju No. 8, larger and more monstrous than ever before, his muscles bulging with unnatural power, a second set of massive, functional arms ripping from his back. He wasn't a soldier anymore. He was a calamity.
He let out a roar of pure, unthinking agony and rage that shattered every window for three city blocks. He didn't attack the enemy. He just swiped, a blind god of destruction, his massive claws tearing through a building facade as if it were cardboard, bringing the entire structure down on top of a part of the Kaiju swarm, crushing them by accident.
He was out of control. A mindless, rampaging Kaiju, unleashed in the middle of Tokyo, right in front of his entire squad.
"Contain him!" Hoshina roared, his face pale. This was his worst nightmare realized. The pet had broken its leash. "Do not kill him! Subdue him!"
But how could they? He was stronger than anything they had ever faced.
From his sniper perch, the Architect's creation adjusted its aim. Its objective wasn't to kill Kafka, but to prove a point. To show the Defense Force the true nature of their so-called weapon.
As the berserk Kaiju No. 8 turned, its glowing, mindless eyes landing on the transport trucks he was supposed to be protecting, the sniper fired a second time.
Not at Kafka.
But at Kikoru.
Kafka, in his rage, saw it. A flash of yellow light. The threat to her. The core desire, the sentimental attachment the Monarch had spoken of, pierced through the red haze of his rage.
[Control yourself, my soldier. A King does not permit his beasts to run wild.]
Jin-Woo's voice was not a lesson this time. It was an ice-cold, absolute command, reinforced by the full power of the Shadow Vow.
The command was like a bucket of liquid nitrogen thrown on a bonfire. The roaring rage of Kaiju No. 8 was instantly, violently quenched. Kafka's conscious mind, which had been a passenger in its own skull, was thrown back into the driver's seat.
He regained control just in time to see the psychic dart streaking towards a horrified Kikoru.
He moved, his huge, monstrous form crossing the street in a single bound. He didn't try to block the non-physical attack. He just put his own body, his own mind, in its path.
He took the second psychic hit directly. The pain was immense, a thousand nails of pure agony driven into his brain, but he held on, gritting his monstrous teeth, refusing to lose control again.
He turned his now-clear, intelligent gaze to the rooftop. The sniper, seeing its attack had failed and that its target was once again lucid, immediately began to retreat, its chameleon hide melting into the background.
The damage was done. The remaining swarm of wolf-kaiju had been annihilated by Kafka's uncontrolled rampage, but the convoy was in ruins, and his team was staring at him with looks of absolute, unadulterated terror.
He had won the fight. He had saved them all.
But in doing so, he had completely, and perhaps irrevocably, destroyed the lie. He wasn't a hero in a bio-suit. He was a monster, a time bomb. And everyone had just seen the timer hit zero. The masquerade was over.