Chương 1: Vacation's over

A shriek echoed through the forest. That didn't usually happen in the woods in Delaware, where I was just taking a walk. I bolted after it. The trees gave way, spread far enough to make running possible. An occasional branch lashed me as I ran through. I reached the forest path. A monster the rough shape of a crab, the size of a new pickup truck, occupied the path. Its pincer pierced a woman through the stomach and chest, holding her up. She clutched the claw with limp hands, already dead.

A teenage kid, not even fifteen, lay by the side, a trickle of blood going down the side of his head, unconscious. What the hell was a kaiju doing here in Delaware? A small one, but still. I dropped onto the path.

"Hey." The crab turned, throwing aside the woman's corpse. Blood sprayed around as she rolled on the forest path. I stepped toward the kaiju, rolling my shoulders. It had been a while since I had something to fight. The crab bolted to me, surprisingly fast on its pointed legs. It crossed the distance in a second and stabbed at my midsection with the pincer. I let it happen, bracing myself. The claw hit my stomach. The impact spread through me as mild discomfort.

The sharp tip of the claw barely pierced the skin, drawing a lone droplet of blood. I didn't move, taking the impact through my back leg. The kaiju crab stopped dead, its body folding against me like it had hit a wall. It grabbed at me with the other pincer, trying to catch my waist. No sense of self-preservation, I realized. I knocked the pincer aside with my hand. The kaiju jerked sideways. I jumped a bit back, spun, and low-kicked a tree. The trunk exploded, the tree falling sideways.

As the kaiju recomposed, preparing to charge at me again, I ran by the tree, breaking through branches, and caught the trunk under the crown. I spun, raising the tree, using it as a giant club. I swung down at the kaiju. The tree cleaved the air and hit the top of its shell. The impact boomed through the air, the shell shattered, the kaiju pushed to the ground, and splattered like a crushed cockroach. All right. I headed to the woman. She lay in a pool of her own blood.

Her eyes didn't move, staring up at the sky for one last time. Her midsection was an absolute mess. No way was she alive. With a sigh, I crouched and closed her eyes. I walked to the teenager. He lay unmoving. I knelt over him and held my hand above his mouth. His breath tingled my skin. I lifted him and threw him over my shoulder. It was a half a mile of walk to the nearest town, and he likely needed medical attention.

While I could call a chopper or something, I wasn't sure it would get here faster than I would get him to civilization. If there even were any medical choppers available around here. I stopped by the dead woman, crouched again, and quickly searched her pockets. I found her phone and wallet. A picture poked out of the wallet, a family photo of her, her husband, and the kid. The husband wore a uniform, and I instantly recognized the Kaiju Suppression Force insignia.

I stuffed the wallet and the phone into the kid's pockets and set off. He remained unconscious throughout the trip. And as I walked, I wondered, how dead inside was I? It had been a year since the last time I did anything. I had a bit too close of an encounter with demons in a dimension that didn't exist anymore, so I took a break. And I used that time to travel the world with Kallisto. It was fun and all, but the kaiju attacks started and weren't stopping.

They weren't supposed to be a big deal as the world's mage societies made sure to be very public about the threat being under control. No one from work wrote me either, so I took it as a problem contained, soon to be solved. The battlefronts were a bunch of flashpoints around the coast, from which there were, supposedly, no spills.

And the world functioned as before, the whole thing of magic becoming publicly known and kaiju coming out of the sea took people about a month of getting used to, and then it was back to business as usual. One could scroll on TikTok and worry about a possible apocalypse only for so long. And the scrolling won. But with a rogue kaiju in Delaware of all places, someone was fucking lying. This wasn't under control, especially since the closest flashpoint was in Atlantic City. That was like a hundred miles away.

The gas station appeared through the trees, fluorescent lights bleeding into the waning sunlight. I walked out of the tree line and across the parking lot. A woman getting gas saw me and dropped her nozzle.

"Call 911," I said. She stared at me, at the kid over my shoulder, at the blood soaking through my messed up hoodie.

"He's okay," I added. Probably. I carried him into the gas station. The owner glared at me from behind the counter. A picture of his squad from his time in the US Army hung on the wall behind him.

"What the heck is this about, Peter?"

"A rogue kaiju wandered in. I found the kid with his mum. He's alive, I think, she's not. He needs medical attention." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. The man rolled his eyes.

"Put him over here." He rushed by the counter to spread out a foldable chair. I put the kid down.

"Thanks, Frank."

"Meh, don't mention it." Frank eyed me for a second.

"You all right yourself, Pete?"

"Yeah. It barely scratched me." I headed for the exit.

"Wait, did you fight a kaiju?" I walked out and headed home. Being a mage of sorts was something best kept quiet. The organizations that governed magic and all its uses had stayed hidden from the general public for over five thousand years. That they became not-so-secret a year ago was unusual to everyone else, to say the least. On the way home, I felt a slight tremor in the ground. Argh, what was she doing, now? Our place had two distinct structures.

My grandma's cottage, which looked like every other cottage in Delaware, and Kallisto's attachment, which was a house made of pure, black steel, with as many demonic spikes as the building could handle. Her workshop, attached to the attachment, had HELLGEAR in big steel letters on top of it. I walked inside. All right, where was she? Most likely rotting in the bed upstairs, where she lay when she watched anime. She did that about ninety-nine percent of the time.

Our bedroom indeed had an anime playing on the TV attached to the ceiling, and played a re-run of an anime about a guy that got reincarnated as a vending machine. I headed downstairs. Another light tremor shook the building. Ah, so she was making it herself, not through some automated bullshit she made to not have to get her eyes off the screen. I descended the stairs, found a new flight of stairs that led two more floors down, and ran down those too. I reached a platform at an edge of a massive hole.

A steel arm held a screen by the wall, which played some roughly 1990s anime. Kallisto stood by its side, holding a pad with paper, a pencil tucked behind her ear. She looked as angelically beautiful as always, every detail of her perfect, even in the sneakers, torn jeans, and a t-shirt. Oh, how deceiving could a fallen angel be. Her brown hair fell beneath her shoulders now. She smiled as I emerged from the stairs.

"Sorry for waking you up."

"You didn't." I motioned to the hole.

"What is this?"

"Right, so the situation is critical. I've run out of anime to watch. New shows are coming up, but the frequency doesn't satisfy me. So, I need to make my own anime shows to watch, including seasons to shows that aren't finished, but should be." A heavy sigh escaped my lips.

"How does that relate to you digging a hole into the ground?"

"I'm getting to that." She smirked.

"The current AI could actually make me an anime season, if only it had enough computational power. I've calculated it, and at the current speed level of chips, I would need approximately a hundred and twenty-seven million of the newest GPUs to generate me an anime season over the time it takes me to watch one." Oh, boy, this was going to be a long one.

"Obviously, I can't get those. The entire world's production is insufficient. So, I need better GPUs. I could create those with my magic, but that's meaningless without electricity, which I cannot get in a sufficient amount, and wouldn't be willing to pay for even if I could purchase it." Right, invent a new GPU architecture to get herself more anime. She could actually do it though.

"Which has left me with only a single reasonable option, to come up with a geothermal powerplant design. I have drafted that, so now need to dig deep enough to get to the heat of Earth's core."

"So, you're digging to the Earth's core to invent a new power plant, to power up new GPUs that you'll invent afterwards, to generate yourself new anime seasons. There are literally thousands of shows you haven't seen."

"I've seen everything worth seeing, and I will watch everything else, including everything new. But even with hentai included into my playlist, I will completely run out of stuff to watch within a year. Plus, Claymore's not getting new seasons no matter how long I wait, so I need to make my own. This'll take a while, but I need to start to know how long the project will take in the first place."

Well, out of all the things she could be doing, this was in the better range, because the logical alternative step would be to conquer Japan, and enslave its entire population to make anime for her. Or try to finance more anime being made, but that would be too slow and indirect for her unholy majesty. I smiled.

"I think I'll go do something about the kaiju."

"Okay. Good luck." What did she mean, okay? I narrowed my eyes. Now, we weren't officially together, or well, it was complicated between us because her fallen divinity wasn't exactly the relationship type… but still.

"Just… okay?"

"Yeah." She shrugged.

"We're done travelling the world, so that's accomplished. Now, we each need something to do. I've got my project." She motioned to the hole.

"This will entertain me for a while, but you've got nothing going on. Plus, there's no bad outcome on the menu for me." She finally turned to me with a bit of a smirk.

"If you get yourself killed, then I'll take your soul and make you mine forever. It's win-win really, if you think about it." Hmph. She could be less utilitarian about the whole I want your soul thing. But I did have nothing going on. I didn't feel like returning work and, at the same time, I felt even less like finding a new job.

"Well, have fun with your project." I turned, heading back upstairs.

"You too." I walked up back to our room, and found my old work phone. Hadn't turned the damn thing on in over a year. I stared at the damn thing for a moment. The black screen offered back my reflection. I looked rough, with an unkempt stubble, a mess of a hair, and face that was supposed to look a whole lot younger. I looked mid-thirties in my mid-twenties already. Hmph, I needed a shave. The phone still had eighty percent battery, and I didn't remember recharging it.

Pissed off at something I couldn't name, I found the company app, Lucielle Legal internal messaging system, now named the lChat. Whoever got that name past the senior management deserved a trophy. I stared at the icon for a moment. I didn't miss working for the corporation. But I wasn't naïve enough to think I could go rogue and achieve anything. Whatever power one might have got multiplied ten times over when it was backed by a large organization's resources. Damn, I didn't want to return to work.

But I remembered the man from the photo. He, a commoner, was out there fighting monsters he had no business facing. And I, an actual battle-focused mage, was sitting around, unsure if I should open an app. Pathetic. With a frown, I pressed the icon. My profile shone at me. Peter O'Connor, New York Interventions department senior agent. Current status: on a personal leave. Ha, so they had promoted me and reassigned me from Philadelphia to New York.

I changed my status to active, switched to the department chat, and typed:'We doing something about the kaiju?' A reply instantly popped up.

'Welcome back from your vacation. Shall I take it that you are returning to duty?' The icon of the person was a mark of red lips, with a single letter for the name, V. I typed back.

'Somewhat. Who're you?'

'New head of the interventions department. Call me V.' Hmph. Never heard of her.

'Congratulations on your promotion. Got anything for me to do? In relation to the kaiju thing, ideally.'

'We need an insider at the Kaiju Suppression Force. Join them at their Philadelphia branch. They have recruitment tryouts tomorrow morning with registration open till the end of today's business day. Do you need company suits delivered?' I glanced at the long wardrobe by the side. About forty black suits, shoes, and white shirts awaited there.

'I'm well-stocked. What do we want to know from them, anyway?'

'The real state of the war against the kaiju, and the status of their internal kaiju research, with complete detail.'

'Have we tried sending them an email?' V replied with a laughing emoji, and:'They reply to all inquiries, calls, and meetings, and lie in all the answers. Our intel has confirmed they do have a kaiju research, the existence of which they have been stonewalling, and you have been inactive for just about long enough for your name to not appear on any agent list.' Hmph. I had expected mockery, or at least sarcasm. The new department head either had no sense of humor or actually did her job.

'Don't we have our own kaiju research?'

'Since we are not a military organization, our access to kaiju corpses is second hand. That is after KSF takes all the interesting pieces.' And distributed them to their closer allies, which our corporation wasn't. As far as I understood the five largest organizations of the supernatural underworld, ours didn't bother with military beyond nukes and mages. That made us financially efficient, and also uniquely unprepared for a kaiju apocalypse.

With our corporation's founding owner being obsessed with real estate, we were the one organization that wanted to stop the kaiju invasion with no ulterior motives. I imagined Lucielle watching footage of kaiju stomping her beachfront properties, seething while her super-AI ran the numbers on nuking the Atlantic Ocean out of existence, and I chuckled. Yeah, I could get in on this.