The battlefield fell into a stunned, disbelieving silence. The roars of the titans were replaced by the hum of an impossible technology and the weight of a single, indomitable presence.
Kafka, his Kaiju form sputtering and flickering, struggled to reassert control. The casual, dismissive gesture from the pilot of AETHEREA had hit him with the force of a tectonic plate. It wasn't just physical; it was a conceptual attack, a perfect negation of his own momentum and energy. He had been swatted like a fly.
The Daitetsu, its ultimate attack absorbed into nothingness, stood motionless, its magma-eyes blinking with something akin to confusion. In its millennia of existence, nothing had ever simply eaten its fire.
"This is Captain Narumi," the woman's calm, amplified voice announced, a formal declaration to the chaos. Gen Narumi, Commander of the First Division, a living legend whispered about in the barracks but rarely seen. He was known as the 'Strongest Soldier of humanity', a title he had earned through decades of impossible victories. "Third Division forces, stand down and fall back. This target is now under the jurisdiction of the First Division."
His tone was not a request. It was an edict.
"First Division?" Hoshina breathed from his perch on the Golem's shoulder, his mind racing. "What is the First Division doing here? And with that?" He was looking at Numbers Weapon 10, the mythical weapon, the next generation of power, flying effortlessly before him.
In the command center, Mina Ashiro was frozen, her eyes locked on the image of the silver suit. "Narumi… " she whispered. Her mentor. The man who had taken her under his wing after her father's death. The one person whose authority she had never questioned. He wasn't supposed to be here. Aeterea wasn't supposed to be ready.
"Captain," Hoshina's voice, now laced with a newfound, profound respect, crackled over the comms. "With all due respect, my team has identified weaknesses. We can—"
"Your team has done an admirable job of irritating it, Vice-Commander," Narumi's voice cut him off, cool and precise. "That was your purpose. To gather data. You have succeeded. Now, the professionals are here to finish the job."
The insult, delivered with such casual superiority, stung every member of the ATU.
Narumi ignored them, his attention fixed on the Daitetsu. His Aeterea suit, a thing of sleek, elegant lines, had no visible thrusters, yet it hovered with a quiet, gravitic grace.
"Terrestrial Golem-class, designation Daitetsu," Narumi stated, as if reading from a textbook. "Analysis complete. Core energy signature located. Structural integrity compromised by 2.7 percent due to localized thermal and kinetic stress." He was seeing, in real-time, all the data the ATU had risked their lives to gather. "Conclusion: a durable, but primitive, opponent. A blunt instrument."
He raised his hand again, palm facing the Golem. "Time to put it back to sleep."
The Aeterea suit began to glow, not with a fiery, chaotic light, but with a pure, cold, white brilliance. The air around Narumi warped, space itself seeming to bend to his will. He was gathering an impossible amount of energy.
The Daitetsu, recognizing a mortal threat for the first time, roared and swung its massive stone fist.
Narumi didn't even look at it. From his back, two shimmering, wing-like constructs of hard light erupted, and in a single, fluid motion, they formed a massive, translucent shield that intercepted the blow.
*BOOOONG!*
The sound was not of a crash, but of a cosmic bell being rung. The shield held. It didn't even ripple. It perfectly, effortlessly, negated the Golem's world-breaking physical strength.
Kafka watched, his flickering Kaiju form forgotten, his mind reeling. 'He's like him.' The way Narumi moved, the quiet confidence, the absolute control over a power that seemed to rewrite the laws of physics… it was different from the Monarch's dark, necromantic magic, but the sheer scale of authority was the same. Sovereign was the King of the Dead. This man was a king of something else. Light. Energy. Reality itself.
With the Golem's attack nullified, the energy in Narumi's other hand was fully charged. He didn't unleash a beam or a blast. He clenched his fist.
In front of him, the air itself solidified, forming a colossal, thirty-meter-long spear of pure, solidified white light, humming with a power that made Kafka's teeth ache.
"System Designation: [Gungnir]," Narumi stated calmly, the name of his attack announced with the finality of a death sentence.
With a thought, the spear of light shot forward. It didn't scream through the air. It moved in perfect, chilling silence, crossing the distance to the Golem in a fraction of a second.
It did not hit the Golem's hide.
It phased through the outer layer of stone, just as Kafka had phased through the lab door, but on a massive, offensive scale. It passed through the miles of rock and obsidian, its sole purpose to find one thing.
The Golem's central core.
There was a moment of absolute silence.
And then, the Daitetsu's entire body was illuminated from within by a catastrophic, white light. The magma in its veins turned from orange to a brilliant, searing white. The ancient glyphs on its body overloaded, burning out. It let out a single, silent, final roar of disbelief.
And then it simply… disintegrated. Not into chunks of rock, but into a fine, gray dust that was scattered to the winds. The mountain that had walked, the god of the earth, the unbeatable monster… was gone. Erased from existence.
A single, colossal battle had been ended in under ten seconds by a man who had barely seemed to move.
The silence that followed was broken by Hoshina. "Well," he said into his comm, his voice a strained, breathless whisper. "I think… he found the crack."
Captain Gen Narumi floated in the sky, the Aeterea suit's light fading, the field now silent but for the wind. He slowly turned his helmeted gaze, not to the Defense Force line, not to the ATU, but directly down at Kafka, who had finally managed to reassert and stabilize his Kaiju form.
Narumi descended, landing silently a few dozen meters away from him.
"Kaiju No. 8," Narumi's voice echoed, cold and analytical. "So you are the military's dirty little secret."
There was no admiration. No surprise. Only the cold, detached interest of a biologist looking at a new, potentially dangerous, specimen.
"You possess a remarkable level of power," Narumi continued, "But you are uncontrolled. Unrefined. A wild beast on a fraying leash."
He took a step closer, his mere presence a suffocating pressure that made Kafka's own considerable power feel small and primitive.
"From this moment on, your development is no longer the sole responsibility of the Third Division," Narumi declared, the authority in his voice absolute. "The First Division will be taking a… personal interest in the cultivation of our new asset." He looked Kafka up and down. "You have the potential to be a useful sword for humanity. Or you could be a plague. My job is to find out which. And if you are the latter…"
His visor gleamed in the harsh military lights, his unseen eyes holding a promise of absolute, final judgment.
"...I will be the one to personally break you."