Five days.
In the sterile, humming heart of Tachikawa Base's medical wing, five days felt like an eternity. The air was thick with the scent of antiseptic and unspoken anxiety. For 120 hours, the only news from Critical Care Room 3 was a steady, monotonous report: "Vitals stable. No change in consciousness."
Outside that door, Kafka Hibino had become a piece of the furniture. He'd worn a groove in the linoleum floor with his pacing, driven the nurses to distraction with his constant, worried inquiries, and survived on a diet of vending machine coffee and protein bars. His own miraculous recovery—a few bruises and exhaustion where his friends had sustained critical injuries—was a topic of hushed speculation among the medical staff, but his palpable, gut-wrenching worry overshadowed the gossip. He wasn't a suspect here; he was just a man desperately waiting for his friend to wake up.
Down the hall, in a shared room, Reno Ichikawa and Kikoru Shinomiya were navigating their own recoveries. Reno's chest was a map of bandages and healing tissue, each breath a careful, measured effort. Kikoru's pride was as bruised as her body, her leg immobilized, forcing her to rely on a crutch. Their rooms had become a gathering point for the other recruits.
"Maybe he used some secret technique," Iharu Furuhashi postulated, sprawled on a spare chair. He'd toned down his usual volume to a hospital-appropriate whisper, but his energy was undimmed. "Like, a super-secret, one-time-only move that drains your life force! That's why he's out cold!"
Haruichi Izumo, ever the pragmatist, adjusted his glasses. "The energy readings suggest a controlled yet catastrophic release of power, not a life-draining technique. The patterns are consistent with an overload, but the source... remains anomalous."
Aoi Kaguragi snorted from his spot by the window. "Who cares about the source? The point is, he fought a fortitude 8.0 kaiju to a standstill and lived. That's not just talent; that's a whole new definition of the word." The respect in his voice was real, overshadowing his usual competitive bluster.
The speculation was the base's background noise, a nervous hum beneath the official reports and procedures.
In her office, Captain Mina Ashiro faced a different kind of barrage. Data pads were stacked high, filled with incident reports, sensor logs, and the preliminary—and frustratingly inconclusive—findings from the investigation into Kafka Hibino. The evidence was a maddening circle: the energy signature matched him, his survival was statistically impossible, yet his background was so utterly ordinary it was boring. A deep background check had turned up nothing but decades of janitorial work and failed entrance exams.
Hoshina leaned against her doorway, watching her sort through the files. "The old man's record is cleaner than a surgically scalpeled kaiju bone. Either he's the best deep-cover operative in history, or we're reading the scanner data wrong."
Mina didn't look up. "The data isn't wrong, Soshiro. Our interpretation of it is incomplete. Keep digging. And double the discreet watch on him. I want to know if he so much as sneezes differently."
Hoshina nodded, his usual grin absent. The mystery was a knot he couldn't tease apart.
On the morning of the fifth day, the silence in Room 3 was broken.
Akira Kurogiri's return to consciousness was not a gentle drifting. It was a system reboot.
[Ravan: Initiating system restart. Core systems online. Host consciousness restored. Total downtime: 119 hours, 43 minutes, 12 seconds. Welcome back, Akira.]
His eyes opened. Not a flutter, but a sharp, instantaneous focus, taking in the sterile white ceiling, the blinking monitors, the IV line in his arm. His body ached with a deep, pervasive soreness, the echoes of shattered bones and torn muscle that had been forcefully knitted back together. The 99% liberation had been a sledgehammer to his system; his unique biology had been the anvil upon which it was reforged.
His first coherent thought was primal, bypassing all higher reasoning.
His hand, slightly trembling, fumbled for the nurse call button. He found it and pressed it. Once. Then again. Then he held it down, creating a frantic, incessant, and wonderfully familiar BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP! that shattered the ward's quiet.
Outside, Kafka jolted awake from a half-doze, his heart hammering against his ribs. That sound! He knew that impatient, demanding rhythm. He scrambled up so fast he knocked his chair over and practically fell through the door. "Akira! You're awake!?"
Akira's head turned, his gaze sharp and clear, landing on Kafka. "Kafka. Food. Now. I'm dying. Anything. Everything. Go."
Any other person might have asked for water, or about the battle, or the state of the world. Kafka, who understood Akira on a fundamental level, just nodded, his worry instantly transforming into a mission. "Right! Yes! Food! I'm on it!" He spun and bolted out the door, his voice echoing down the hallway. "HE'S AWAKE! AND HE'S HUNGRY! SOMEONE GET A DOCTOR! AND A BUFFET!"
Controlled chaos erupted. Nurses rushed in, their professional calm broken by the sudden awakening of their most critical patient. They began checking vitals, flashing lights in his eyes, all of which Akira endured with the impatient air of a hungry tiger trapped in a cage.
Kafka returned moments later, not with a buffet, but with a large bento box he'd commandeered from the staff cafeteria, plus six bananas, two cartons of milk, and a handful of energy bars. "It's a start!" he announced, placing the haul on Akira's lap.
Akira didn't bother with niceties. He tore the lid off the bento and began shoveling rice, chicken, and vegetables into his mouth with a speed and efficiency that made the attending nurses pause in their tracks.
It was this scene that Mina and Hoshina walked in on. They paused at the doorway, taking in the spectacle of their prodigious recruit inhaling calories like a vacuum cleaner.
"Glad to see your appetite survived intact, Kurogiri," Hoshina drawled, a hint of his old smirk returning as he leaned against the doorframe.
Akira looked up, a piece of grilled fish halfway to his mouth. He swallowed. "Captain. Vice-Captain. The kaiju," he said, his voice flat and serious, devoid of its usual teasing edge. "It got away. I had it. I pushed it to the edge. And it ran. I let it run." The regret in his tone was genuine, a heavy weight in the room.
Before they could probe further, the room's population swelled. Kikoru appeared, leaning heavily on her crutch, followed by Reno, paler than usual and moving carefully, supported by a nervous-looking Iharu.
"You're awake," Kikoru stated, her voice a mixture of relief and its customary sharpness.
"Took you long enough," Reno added, though a faint, relieved smile touched his lips.
The core of the incident was now reunited in one cramped hospital room.
Mina stepped forward, her arms crossed. "Your account, Akira. We need it. From the beginning. The teleportation."
Akira took a long swig of milk, washing down a mouthful of rice. "It wasn't teleportation. Not in the pure sense. It was a perception filter combined with immense velocity. It moves faster than the eye can track or the mind can process, creating the illusion of dislocation. It's a highly efficient evasion tactic." The lie was delivered with a cool, technical precision that brooked no argument. His eyes flicked to Kafka for a microsecond.
The cue was taken. Kafka took a deep breath, launching into his performance with nervous energy. "Yeah! It was so fast! One second we were in the square, the next it had all three of us—me, Reno, Kikoru. It took us to that chemical plant. Then the big, horned one—the main one—it talked to the skinny one. It said..." He paused for dramatic effect, his eyes wide. "It said it wanted to fight Akira alone. That we were just... distractions. So the skinny one stayed with us, and the main one took Akira away, just zoom, to the shipyards."
He was talking rapidly, hands gesturing, selling the story with every fiber of his being. "The skinny one... it was insane. So strong. It knocked me out with one hit! I was down for the count. Out cold. Reno and Kikoru... they protected me." He looked at his two friends, his expression flooding with genuine emotion. "They fought it. They got really hurt protecting me. I... I couldn't do anything." He hung his head, the picture of shame and gratitude.
It was a masterful lie, woven seamlessly around the painful truth of their injuries and his own inaction during the fight's beginning. It explained everything: the two locations, the split foes, his minimal injuries, their severe ones, and the kaiju's terrifying intelligence.
Akira gave a nearly imperceptible nod of approval.
[Ravan: Passive scan complete. Subject Kafka Hibino shows elevated stress markers and cardiopulmonary activity consistent with high-stakes deception. Narrative, however, is internally consistent and aligns with known physical evidence. Probability of acceptance by current audience: 82%.]
Mina listened, her sharp eyes missing nothing. She watched Kafka's earnest face, Akira's calm validation, the way Kikoru's jaw tightened slightly at the memory, the bandages on Reno's chest. The story was airtight. It was almost too perfect, but it covered every base. Her doubt, a cold stone in her gut, remained, but it was now buried under a mountain of plausible deniability and concern for her injured soldiers.
"So it ran," Hoshina summarized, bringing the focus back to Akira. "After all that."
"It ran because it was losing," Akira stated, peeling the last banana. "It's adaptive. Intelligent. It knows it needs to recalibrate. Letting it escape was a strategic failure. It'll return. And it'll be stronger." He looked around the room, at his bandaged friends, at his commanders. "Next time, we finish it. No matter the cost."
The gravity of his words settled over them, a grim promise. The immediate battle was over, but the war had just escalated into something far more dangerous.
From down the hall, the excited voices of the other recruits filtered in. "Is it true? Is he really awake?" "Did he say how he beat it?" "I heard he used the kaiju's own horn to stab it!"
The legend of Akira Kurogiri was being written, overshadowing the confusing mystery of the blue kaiju for everyone except Mina Ashiro. As she watched Kafka hand Akira another milk carton with a relieved, goofy smile, she filed her suspicions away. Not dismissed. Just shelved. For now.
The chapter closed not on answers, but on the scene in the hospital room: a group of survivors, bound by shared trauma and secrets, sharing a moment of relief over a pile of empty food containers, the specter of a smarter, stronger enemy looming on the horizon.
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T/N :
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