Chương 24: Chapter 22 - Blindmaw, round 2

The alarm caught me on my bunk with the phone six inches from my face, halfway through explaining to Ophelia that me not having overexaggerated reactions over her pictures didn't mean I hated all of them. Red light swallowed the barracks and the siren went off directly above my head, which meant whoever installed it had chosen my corner specifically. Manuel made it off his bunk without falling this time. Nobody had the spare attention to congratulate him.

By the time I got ready, changing from leisure clothes to the crusader suit underarmor, Liam stood already at the door. We filed out. The armory had the standard sense of chaos to it. Reaper Squad was gone, their lockers hanging open with the gear cages swinging. A tech was arguing with Luca's suit while Luca stopped nearby, waiting for it to finish happening. The overhead speaker kept repeating a sector designation nobody had time to look up. I pulled my combat uniform on and worked the gauntlets over my knuckles.

"Reaper deployed forty minutes ago," Torres said, reading his wrist display.

"That's before the alarm went off."

"The alarm is late," Liam said. He came down the row at speed with a tablet in one hand.

"The wave made landfall twenty-two minutes ago. Normally, the alarm is an hour in advance. Reaper Squad was deployed on an unrelated task that happened to coincide with the attack." Nadia stopped with her helmet half-sealed.

"That's a massive time gap."

"It is." Liam handed the tablet to Torres without slowing.

"The forward array in our sector went dark at some point in the last three days, and nobody upstairs noticed until the Big Red emerged from the water. We're the only squad still on base, so we get the errand."

"Which is?"

"Ramp Four." He tapped past a map onto a photograph of a parking structure with its top two floors caved in on one side.

"Among other things, we need to secure the sensors that were supposed to detect the incoming kaiju."

"So we're the maintenance crew," Manuel said.

"Maintenance crew on a roof with a good angle on the chokepoint. Get your ammunition." I reached for a rifle and changed my mind mid-move. I would only be wasting ammo, anyway. We were still short of the doors when Ashworth came onto the squad channel himself, which he had not done once during the first deployment.

"Wharton Squad, this is the commander. The southern flank is currently blind and the flank is where the swarm is going. Ramp Four is your only objective. You are not to divert for contact, you are not to divert for civilians, and you are not to divert for other units." A pause landed in exactly the wrong place.

"Reaper is already committed. Ghost is not answering." The channel closed. Nobody said anything for the length of the corridor.

"He listed civilians second," Nadia said eventually.

"That's better than not listing them at all," Torres said.

"Keep moving." We went out into the last hour of daylight, which was the first thing that felt wrong. The first deployment had happened in that grey nothing before dawn, and I had assumed, without ever putting it into words, that kaiju were a morning problem. Now the sun sat low and orange over the mainland and threw the whole coast into long shadow, and the ruins came at us out of the window looking like a completely different city. Then the horizon moved and I stopped worrying about the light.

The Big Red had already advanced into the bay, the water barely high enough to reach halfway up his crab legs. He looked even bigger up close, shoulders high above the highest of buildings. His right claw alone was bigger than a twenty-story building. Liam leaned toward the window.

"It has never left the waterline. In a hundred and twelve attacks it made it to the bay only twice." Well, the third time today as the alarms didn't go off. Francesca said nothing at all. She had her forehead almost against the glass. The angels only now started descending from the sky. The kaiju stopped, turned, and fired. The crab section of its body shivered and threw a barrage straight up, hundreds of spikes going nearly vertical and spreading as they climbed. The angels dodged them with ease.

And the spikes soon started falling, a rain of massive spikes that covered the city. Our helicopter banked, aiming to land outside the perimeter. Well, getting shot down wouldn't help, so I appreciated the decision. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I lost sight of the fight. But a hypersonic boom thundered through the city, announcing that the fight between the kaiju and the angels had started. The chopper touched the ground, and we rushed out.

Liam took the lead.

"We're a mile off our intended landing zone. Fast advance." We ran onto a street I had never seen before, between two office buildings that had been gutted and then left alone long enough for weeds to come up through the lobby floors. The chopper was gone before Luca's boots touched pavement. The rotor noise vanished in the next hypersonic boom, followed by the sounds of explosions that came from the port. Liam picked the turnings with surety. He most likely had a map in his crusader armor interface.

"Hostiles around the corner." He slowed down a bit. We quickly fell into formation, splitting into two squads of three, Francesca at the rear, and me running in alone. A group of seven tiny kaijus roamed the street around the corner. They broke into already destroyed storefronts, flipped a couple of cars, and broke into a shuttered store. They were looking for something. Well, they found me as I dashed to the closest one, a crab-type, and punched it head-on with the weight of my run behind it.

The crab lifted off upon impact, flipping in the air. Rifle fire roared behind me. Bullets tore it apart and dug into the other kaiju. They tried to rush at us. They got shredded before they even got to me. Hmph. That went pretty well. They didn't even manage to hit me, which was unusual, to say the least.

"Clear," Torres said.

"Moving." We moved. That was the rhythm for six blocks. The tiny kaiju lingered around, as if searching for something, and they were in small enough groups to be easy for us to dispose of. One last sonic boom came from the Big Red, after which a cluster of missiles descended from the sky. The rockets hit together with the angels, blowing up the core hidden in the kaiju's shoulder and triggering the despawn. The angels flew off afterward, so it was us against the rest of the kaiju.

To my eyes, the missiles were an emergency measure the army didn't want to use. Unlike mages, missiles could hit anywhere almost instantly, so teaching a titanic kaiju to resist them wasn't useful, even though missiles couldn't destroy a kaiju this big entirely. Well, nukes could, but those weren't exactly usable in our own cities. Then the street geometry turned against us at a five-way intersection where three buildings had come down into each other.

We switched to the alternative plan we'd come up with, which was that I went first with a noticeable distance gap, and they shot what came after me. That got me a bunch of hits from the kaiju pouncing at me from behind rubble. Finally. Nothing really hit me all that hard, so we continued advancing. Francesca switched to the flanks. We saw Ramp Four ahead, a street with not that much rubble and no kaiju in the way. I led the way, the others thirty feet behind me.

The storefronts and houses all looked mostly devastated on both sides of the street, so the kaiju had nothing to search. The wall next to me exploded. A massive mouth with teeth, open wide, burst at me. I instantly recognized the six rows of teeth. The blind piece of shit I despawned with the Ford had come for round two. I bent my legs to dodge, but then straightened, spreading my arms. I wasn't fighting alone this time. The mouth snapped at me, and I caught the jaws. The teeth cut my arms and reached my sides.

They pierced the skin, drawing blood. My arms screamed, but I held the jaws in place. Rifle fire exploded from behind me before Liam even shouted into the comms.

"It's the one from the billboard!" he shouted.

"Cores are in the throat and left shoulder." From inside its mouth, I couldn't see much of the kaiju. It shook as the bullets tore into it, trying to close the mouth completely. With a smirk, I held still. When it turned to do a crocodile roll, I caught two teeth by their bases. It rolled, and I with it. Its massive tail whipped through the air, smashing into buildings around us. One slash flew at Liam's squad. Francesca jumped into its path, six spectral blades forming a block.

The tail hit, knocked her to the ground, making shields flash around her, but it bounced off. The kaiju opened the mouth. I held the teeth. It opened anyway, leaving me with two torn-out teeth in my hands. It rolled onto the street. It looked about the same as last time, about ninety feet long from snout to the end of the tail, a third of its body a massive skull, the rest of it sinewy, covered with grey hide, holding itself on four thick fins with finger bones.

This time, it had extra barnacles on its shoulders and collarbones, effectively evolved plating. I glared at it. The instinctive solution was to use Asura and try to destroy it completely. The problem was I wasn't sure my squad could survive with me fighting like that. Since Asura blocked most of my regeneration, I would have to dodge, which meant I wouldn't be able to tank everything. I stepped toward the kaiju.

For a second, I wanted to taunt it, but that would announce to the squad that I was the guy in briefs from the billboard. With a click from its jaw, it sprang after me. I stood my ground, bracing for impact. It twisted in front of me, slashing with the tail. The tail tore apart a building to the side and struck me in the ribs. I caught it upon impact. It still knocked the air out of my lungs. But I held on. Rifle fire opened from the squads, hitting the skull.

The bullets bounced off that, so they refocused on the body. The kaiju barrelled toward the squad. Each team jumped to a side, fast in the crusader armors. The kaiju passed between them. Francesca slid under it, spectral blades slashing its belly, drawing blood. It smashed me into a building with the tail. Steel and bricks shattered. But I got a foothold, not letting go. As it tried to withdraw the tail, I braced myself by a support beam and pulled. The kaiju stopped, thrown a bit up with its own strength.

Liam and Francesca bolted into the opening. They got under its throat. Francesca slashed with all six spectral blades at once, cutting apart the skin and muscles. Liam fired on full automatic into the opening. He hit the core, shattering it. The kaiju rolled up.

"All right," Liam shouted into the comm.

"Get the core in the shoulder." The kaiju turned black and started decomposing. Once again, it had a tiny smirk on it. I let go of the tail. This blind piece of shit was really starting to get on my nerves. It decomposed, vanishing.

"That was too fast!" Liam half-shouted into the comms.

"The data had only the titanic kaijus despawning at this speed." The data was wrong. Or this kaiju had evolved the ability to despawn instantly in its earlier almost-deaths. It had two cores, so it must have been almost killed before. And quite a few times too, since as far as I understood, mediums started as tiny. We regrouped. But Manuel was limping. Nadia was at his side the second he took a weaker step.

"Are you okay, Manuel?" she asked through the comm, voice heated.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm fine, thanks."

"You don't walk fine."

"A launched steel beam hit my side when it smashed Peter into a building. It just rattled my ribs a bit. I don't use those, anyways." He glanced around, all of us focused on him.

"We need to complete the mission, so please all stop looking at me." Liam turned for our target.

"Let's move." We continued through the street.