The infirmary was quiet, the antiseptic smell a sharp contrast to the coppery scent of Kaiju blood that still clung to the air outside.
Kafka Hibino sat on the edge of a medical cot, wincing as a robotic arm finished sealing the synth-flesh patch over his cracked ribs. The official story was that he'd been thrown against a wall by the blast from a friendly's grenade. It was a plausible lie in a night full of impossible truths.
"You were reckless," Reno said, standing by the door. His own suit had protected him from serious injury, but his face was bruised, his arm in a light sling. He wasn't scolding; he was stating a fact, his voice low and heavy with the things they couldn't say. "Charging that thing alone..."
"Someone had to," Kafka replied quietly, avoiding his gaze. "You were in its path."
"And then it appeared," Reno continued, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Kaiju No. 8. From the same dust cloud you ran into. And then... he showed up."
He didn't need to say the name. Saitama's presence was a memory now branded onto the soul of everyone who had been there.
"You know them both, don't you?" Reno asked. It wasn't an accusation. It was a plea for understanding in a world that no longer made sense. "Somehow, you are connected to the two biggest mysteries on the planet."
Kafka looked up, his expression tired and defeated. He opened his mouth to deny it, to lie, but the sheer, overwhelming absurdity of the past twenty-four hours had worn him down. He just gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.
Reno stared, his mind visibly struggling to connect the dots. The washed-up old janitor he'd mocked for months was a secret monster who was also friends with a god who complained about groceries. He let out a long, slow breath. "My life was so much simpler yesterday."
"Mine too," Kafka said, a ghost of a wry smile on his lips. "Mine too."
Before they could say more, the door to the infirmary slid open.
Vice-Captain Soshiro Hoshina stood there, his uniform immaculate, not a speck of dust or ichor on it. It was as if he had been through a completely different, much cleaner battle. But his eyes... his eyes were different. They were bright with a feverish, almost predatory intensity that made Kafka's skin crawl.
"Cadet Ichikawa, you are dismissed," Hoshina said, his voice flat. Reno, knowing an order when he heard one, gave Kafka a worried look and quickly left.
Hoshina stepped into the small room, the door hissing shut behind him. He didn't speak. He just walked over to a small display unit on the wall, which showed Kafka's medical scans. He brought up the image of Kafka's ribcage.
"Three fractured ribs. Significant soft tissue damage," Hoshina stated, tracing the lines on the screen with his finger. "According to the suit's impact telemetry, the blow you sustained should have pulverized your entire torso. You should be dead."
Kafka's blood ran cold. "My suit... it must have absorbed most of the..."
"It didn't," Hoshina cut him off, turning to face him. The full force of his intense gaze fell upon Kafka. "The suit's internal dampeners were completely overloaded. It recorded an impact force that was, and I quote, 'universally unsurvivable for a baseline human male of your age and mass.' And yet, here you are, with three cracked ribs that your biology is already healing at a rate twenty times faster than normal."
He took a step closer. "When you rammed that rebar into the Kaiju's joint, you displayed a tactical knowledge of its anatomy that is not in any current Defense Force manual. Knowledge that could only be gained from direct, first-hand experience."
He paused, letting the words hang in the sterile air.
"Then there is the matter of the bald anomaly," Hoshina continued, his voice low and dangerous. "He is the single most powerful entity we have ever encountered. A being that Kikoru Shinomiya, in her full-power suit, cannot even make flinch. A being whose presence alone broke the will of an entire Kaiju army. And you... he knows you. He seems to be, for reasons that defy all logic, your acquaintance."
Hoshina leaned in, his face now only a foot from Kafka's. The sheer, predatory focus in his eyes was terrifying. But it wasn't the look of a prosecutor. It was the look of an obsessive scholar who had found the key to the universe.
"I am not going to ask you to confirm my suspicions, Cadet Hibino," he said softly. "Doing so would force me to report you, and you are, for the moment, far too interesting to be dissected in a lab."
Kafka couldn't breathe.
"But know this," Hoshina whispered, his voice a blade's edge. "Your every move will be watched. Your every action analyzed. You are a living contradiction, a bridge between the world we knew and the world that is coming. To me, you are the most valuable tactical asset on this base."
He straightened up, his professional mask slipping back into place. "And as such, I am officially reassigning you. From tomorrow, you will no longer be on sanitation duty. You are now a provisional member of my personal squad. You will be my adjutant in the field. You will be by my side during all future combat engagements."
Kafka stared in disbelief. It was a promotion. It was a death sentence. It was Hoshina putting his most prized lab rat directly into the line of fire to see what would happen.
"Dismissed, Cadet," Hoshina said, turning to leave. As his hand touched the door panel, he paused.
"One more thing," he said, without looking back. "The anomaly's power... the casual, effortless way he ended it all... It has shown me that everything I know is obsolete."
He looked down at his own hands, the hands that had mastered a thousand sword techniques. "My path as a warrior must now change. I must evolve or become a fossil. And I believe that by observing you, and the god you seem to know, I will find the key."
The door slid open, and he was gone.
Kafka was left alone in the silence, his heart hammering against his newly fractured ribs. Hoshina's tactical meltdown in the face of Saitama's power hadn't broken him. It had reforged him. He had become something new, something more dangerous: a man with an obsession. And that obsession now had a name.
It was Kafka Hibino. He was no longer just a secret monster; he was now the key to a madman's quest for relevance in a world of gods. His life of quiet desperation was officially over. His new life of high-stakes, terrifying scrutiny had just begun.