The groan of rock grinding against ancient, dormant sinew was a sound that vibrated deep in Kafka's bones. The slumbering Daitetsu was waking up, and the entire containment chamber, a fortress designed to hold a god, trembled with its first stirrings.
The orange, magma-like light in its crystalline veins pulsed faster, brighter, casting a hellish glow across the cavern. The slow, deep heartbeat was now a frantic, pounding war drum. The temperature in the room skyrocketed as the relic's core systems, a geothermal furnace, came online.
Its massive, stony head lifted fully. Two eyes, not orbs but jagged, blazing cracks of pure magma, opened and fixed on Kafka. There was no malice in them. No hunger. Only a deep, geological confusion, and the ancient, territorial instinct of a force of nature that has been disturbed. It saw Kafka not as a threat, but as an anomaly. A piece of grit in the gears of its ancient slumber.
[A primeval Golem. A terrestrial Elemental,] Jin-Woo's voice echoed in Kafka's mind, a thread of cold, academic calm in the rising storm. [Its physical resilience is absolute. Do not engage it in a contest of brute strength. You will shatter like glass.]
Kafka didn't need the warning. He could feel it. The sheer, overwhelming pressure of the Daitetsu's existence was a physical weight, a tectonic force. Trying to punch it would be like trying to punch a mountain range.
*ROOOOOOAAAAAAAR!*
The roar was not a sound that traveled through the air. It was a seismic event, a shockwave of pure concussive force that shook the very foundations of the mountain. Kafka was blasted off his feet, his Blackwing armor automatically forming a hardened shell around him to absorb the impact as he slammed against the far wall of the chamber.
He landed in a heap, his ears ringing, his senses screaming. The power of this thing was on a completely different scale from No. 10. It wasn't a specialized tool. It was a natural disaster given a vaguely humanoid form.
The Daitetsu took a step. The colossal energy conduits that had held it in place for half a century snapped like dry twigs, showering the chamber in a storm of sparks. It raised a fist, a house-sized club of obsidian and granite, and brought it down, not on Kafka, but on the catwalk where No. 9 had been standing.
It wasn't a malicious act. It was simply… cleaning. Tidying its own tomb of the unfamiliar, man-made structures that cluttered it. The entire catwalk vanished in an explosion of shrapnel.
This was his chance. While it was distracted, he had to get out. He was here to observe, not to fight.
He scrambled for the sealed exit. He slammed his armored fist against the thick alloy door. It didn't even dent.
The Daitetsu, its cleaning done, turned its magma-gaze back to him. The last anomaly in its chamber.
It raised its hand again.
'No choice. I have to fight.' The thought was a surge of pure, survivalist desperation. But how?
[This creature is a fortress. Every fortress has a gate,] the Monarch's voice cut in, a whisper of strategy in the chaos. [Its power source is its lifeblood. The 'veins' of magma that run through its body. They are protected by its stone hide, but they are not invulnerable. You cannot break the wall. You must find the cracks.]
The cracks. He looked at the Golem. It was covered in ancient, glowing script. The lines of its own magma-veins formed the strokes of these strange, geological characters. These weren't just decorations. They were channels. Conduits for its power.
The Daitetsu's massive hand descended. It was so large it blotted out the light, so fast it was a falling cliff face.
Kafka didn't try to block. He didn't try to run. He did as Igris had taught him. He moved into the attack. At the last possible moment, he dodged to the side, pressing himself against the creature's descending arm. He channeled Blackwing's power into his hands and feet, not the hooked talons, but gecko-like pads of pure adhesive energy.
He stuck to the creature's arm as it slammed into the floor, the impact shaking the world and sending a spiderweb of cracks across the reinforced ground.
And then he began to run.
He ran up the Kaiju's colossal arm, a tiny, black-clad figure against a canvas of moving stone and fire. It was like climbing a living, vertical earthquake. Chunks of rock debris rained down around him as the creature began to move, to try and shake him off.
He reached its shoulder, a wide, flat plateau of obsidian. The heat was immense, a blast furnace that was already starting to tax his armor's environmental shields.
He saw his target. A large, pulsing glyph of magma on the creature's chest. Its heart. Its core.
He leaped from the shoulder, his own body a projectile, and formed the drill-spear construct with his arm, the technique he'd used on the jelly-monster. He poured all the power he could muster into that single, piercing point.
He hit the chest-glyph dead center.
*KRA-SHIIIINNNG!*
It was like striking diamond with a hammer. His spear shattered, the energy dissipating harmlessly across the creature's chest. A hairline fracture, less than an inch deep, was all he had to show for it. He was thrown back by the rebound, landing hard on the chamber floor.
The Daitetsu looked down at the tiny scratch on its chest, its expression, if it had one, one of mild annoyance.
This was impossible. Even its weak points were too strong.
He was outmatched. Completely and utterly. This was not a fight he could win.
He scrambled to his feet, a new, desperate plan forming. He couldn't win. So he had to escape. The door was sealed. That left one other option. He looked up, at the roof of the cavernous chamber. A thousand meters of solid rock.
'You wanted to see a monster,' Kafka thought, a wild, reckless light in his eyes. 'Fine. I'll show you a monster.'
He let go. He embraced the eye of the storm.
His body exploded in his full, berserk transformation. The four arms, the raw, unbridled power. But this time, it was a controlled burn. At the center of the rage, he was cold, focused.
He looked at the Daitetsu. He didn't charge.
He planted his feet, and his two primary, massive arms began to glow with a furious, almost white-hot emerald light. He poured every ounce of his Kaiju power into them, the very power of Kaiju No. 8, the one said to be able to rival a Numbers Weapon. He was building up a charge, a single, all-or-nothing blow.
The Daitetsu, sensing the massive energy spike, recognized him now as a genuine threat. It raised both of its massive, stony fists, preparing to bring them down and crush this noisy insect for good.
Just as its fists began to descend, Kafka roared, and he didn't punch forward. He punched down.
He slammed his two super-charged fists into the chamber floor.
*KRAK-A-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
It was an earthquake. His target had never been the Kaiju. It had been the prison.
The entire foundation of the chamber shattered. A spiderweb of colossal fissures ripped across the floor, glowing with his emerald energy. The carefully constructed containment sphere, already weakened by the Architect's tampering and the Daitetsu's awakening, suffered a catastrophic structural failure.
The floor beneath the massive Golem gave way. With a final, surprised roar, the Daitetsu, the ancient Sleeper Under the Mountain, fell. It plunged down, into a newly opened chasm that led to the very heart of the volcanic caldera it had been built over—a lake of pure, incandescent magma.
Kafka didn't wait to watch. In the same motion as his punch, he used his two secondary arms to claw at the ceiling. The shockwave of his own punch, combined with the collapse of the chamber, had fractured the rock above. He tore at it, ripping a hole, a tunnel, an escape route straight up.
He began to climb, a desperate, powerful ascent through rock and earth, a monster digging its way back to the surface as the tomb of a god collapsed into a volcano beneath him. He could hear the muffled, furious roars of the Daitetsu as it dissolved and reformed in the magma below, trapped for now in its own natural element. He hadn't killed it. He'd just knocked it into its own basement.
He burst out of the ground on the mountainside, a kilometer from the derelict plant, in a shower of dirt and stone, and collapsed onto the damp earth, his monstrous form receding, leaving him panting under the moonlight.
The mountain groaned, a plume of black smoke beginning to rise from the caldera where the power plant used to be. The prison was broken. The sleeper was awake. He had failed his mission to simply observe. He had failed catastrophically.
But he was alive.
[Your solution was… unorthodox,] the Monarch's voice echoed in his mind. There was no praise. There was no anger. Only a cold, detached analysis. [You have unleashed a Primeval Golem upon this continent. The consequences will be… significant.]
Kafka just lay there, staring at the smoking mountain. He had walked into the tomb of a god and, in his desperation to escape, had accidentally kicked the door off its hinges for the whole world to see.
The secret of the Sleeper Under the Mountain was about to come out. And he was the one who had woken it up.