The training ground had become a meat grinder.
Of the one thousand applicants who had started, nearly eight hundred suits now glowed with the red light of "DECEASED." The remaining survivors were battered, exhausted, and running on fumes.
Kafka Hibino was one of them.
He was alive, but only just. His suit was scarred, his breathing was ragged, and his rifle was dangerously low on power. He and Reno had managed to stick together, a surprisingly effective team. Reno's youthful reflexes and aggressive tactics were perfectly complemented by Kafka's encyclopedic knowledge of Kaiju weak spots.
"How many?" Kafka gasped, leaning against a crumbling wall.
Reno checked his suit's display. "I'm at fifteen kills. You're at twelve. Not bad for an old timer." Despite the dire situation, a note of respect had crept into his voice. "The prodigy, Kikoru's little fangirl club leader, has twenty-five. She's hunting solo."
"Figures," Kafka muttered. The gap between the truly talented and the rest of them was a chasm.
Suddenly, a new alert blared through their suit communicators. It wasn't Captain Orin's voice; it was a panicked male operator from the control tower.
"CODE RED! CODE RED! WE HAVE AN UNCLASSIFIED ENTITY ON THE FIELD! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL APPLICANTS, CEASE COMBAT AND EVACUATE TO THE NEAREST EXTRACTION POINT!"
Before they could even process the warning, the ground began to shake violently. A roar, deeper and more powerful than any Yoju, echoed through the city, shattering the remaining windows.
From behind a row of collapsed buildings, a new monster emerged.
This was no training drone. It was a massive, Honju-class Kaiju, a horrifying cross between a mole and a centipede, covered in thick, drill-like armor plates. It was easily a Fortitude 6.0, a real threat that a full Defense Force squad would struggle to contain. It must have been hibernating deep beneath the city, awakened by the chaos of the exam.
"They... they didn't know it was here?" Reno stammered, his face pale.
The Honju let out another roar and smashed its armored head into a building, bringing it down in a cloud of dust and debris. The remaining applicants scattered, their training forgotten in a wave of pure terror. Their low-power rifles were useless against a beast of this scale. They were lambs in a slaughterhouse.
In the observation tower, Captain Izumi Orin cursed, her dead eyes now wide with alarm. "Get me a strike team! Now! And get those kids out of there!"
"It's too late!" an operator yelled. "It's moving towards the main group! They won't make it to the evac point!"
The Honju had spotted the fleeing applicants. It reared up, its multiple insectoid legs digging into the ground, preparing to charge and trample them all.
Kafka watched the scene unfold, a cold dread washing over him. Reno was among those in the direct path of the charge. They were going to die.
He had a choice.
He could run, save himself, and live with the knowledge that he had let them all die while hiding his secret. He could remain Kafka Hibino, the failure, the survivor.
Or...
He looked at his hands, at the hands that had somehow broken a military scanner. At the hands that could become something more. He thought of Mina, of his broken promise. He thought of the bald man on the rooftop, of the dismissive word: "boring."
No more, he thought, his fear replaced by a sudden, defiant calm. Not anymore.
"Reno! Get them out of here!" Kafka yelled, and before his young partner could reply, he broke cover, running not away from the Honju, but directly towards it.
"OLD MAN, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" Reno screamed.
Kafka ignored him. He sprinted into a dense cloud of dust and smoke, disappearing from view. He needed cover. He needed a single second where no one could see him.
He found it behind the collapsing facade of a building. He closed his eyes.
Let's go.
The transformation was explosive, fueled by adrenaline and purpose. Pain and power surged through him as he became Kaiju No. 8.
He burst out of the dust cloud, no longer a man, but a ten-meter-tall monster of grey and blue. The remaining applicants froze in their tracks, their terror compounding as they saw a second, even larger monster appear.
Kafka ignored their screams. He only had eyes for the charging Honju. He planted his feet, lowered his shoulder, and met the charge of the six-point-oh Kaiju head-on.
KRA-THOOOOOM!
The impact was cataclysmic. A shockwave erupted outwards, shattering the street and sending cars flying. The two Kaiju were locked in a primordial struggle of brute force. The mole-centipede was all raw power, but Kafka had technique. He dug his heels in, his monstrous muscles straining, and slowly, impossibly, began to push the larger beast back.
In the control tower, everyone was stunned into silence.
"What... what is that?" Captain Orin whispered. "It's Kaiju No. 8." The monster from Kikoru's report. The one with the capture order. What was it doing here?
On the ground, Reno stared, his jaw slack. The dust cloud. The suicidal charge. His brain finally connected the two impossible points. "No way... It can't be..."
Kafka let out a roar, channeling all his latent power into a single, explosive shove. He drove the Honju backwards, lifted it, and with a titanic effort, suplexed it over his shoulder, slamming it into the ground with enough force to crack the very foundations of the city block.
The Honju lay stunned. It was his chance. He remembered the weak points. Mole-types have a secondary nerve cluster at the base of the skull, protected by their thickest armor. You can't pierce it... but you can shatter it with blunt force.
He drew back his fist, channeling every ounce of his Kaiju power into it. This would be the finishing blow.
And then, it happened.
He felt it again. The ripple. The signal. The broadcast of an alpha power that made the Kaiju cells in his body seize up with instinctual dread.
But this time, it wasn't a distant tremor. It was close. Incredibly close.
pop.
A sound so small, so insignificant, that almost no one heard it.
Kafka froze, his punch half-thrown. He looked down at the Honju.
The monster's head, its thick armored skull, the part he had been about to shatter... was gone. It had simply vanished, leaving a perfectly clean, cauterized hole. The rest of its massive body slumped to the ground, inert.
Kafka stared at the impossible sight, his Kaiju mind unable to process it. What had just happened?
He scanned the ruined cityscape. And he saw him.
Two blocks away, standing atop the very same department store the Honju had been attacking earlier, was Saitama. He hadn't changed out of his hero suit yet. He stood with one hand nonchalantly in his pocket, his red boots planted firmly. He had one fist extended, a wisp of steam rising from his knuckles.
He hadn't been aiming for Kafka's monster. He had been aiming for the one that interrupted his shopping. A casual, long-distance pest removal. A punch thrown from over a kilometer away with such pinpoint accuracy that it had vaporized its target without so much as scorching the ground around it.
Their eyes met across the distance. Saitama's blank, emotionless gaze, and Kafka's wide, monstrous, disbelieving stare.
Saitama just gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. It was a strange gesture. Not of approval, not of aggression. It was a nod of acknowledgement. 'You. The Leek Monster. I see you.'
Then he turned and leaped away, disappearing from view.
The new, unseen urban legend, the "Silent God of J-City," had just performed another unexplainable, uncredited miracle.
Kafka stood there, his own monstrous form suddenly feeling small and fragile. He had just gone through the battle of his life, revealed his greatest secret, and was about to land the winning blow.
And the bald man had stolen his kill. Casually. Accidentally. From a kilometer away. Because the monster had gotten between him and a good bargain.
Kafka's Kaiju form began to steam as he involuntarily powered down, the sheer, mind-breaking absurdity of it all too much to handle. He started to shrink, hidden from the control tower's view by the corpse of the Honju.
He was going to have a lot of explaining to do. If he even knew where to begin.