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"We're just going to drive straight in?"
"And you're sure none of us end up as paste?"
Jared leaned out the window of the lead SUV and called back to Natsuki, who had just stepped out of his vehicle.
Five cars, front to back. The moment they entered the Hollow Earth passage, they'd be doing over a thousand miles in two seconds. The passage energy would provide some protection, sure , but two thousand times the speed of sound wasn't something these vehicles could handle. And if they hit the bottom at full speed with no deceleration, every single one of them would be smeared across the ground.
"That's nothing to worry about."
"Relax." Natsuki gave him a look that said trust me, then walked to the front of the convoy.
He raised his right arm.
Light blazed. A roar shook the air. And then he was standing eighty meters tall, red and silver against the sky.
"Never gets old," Old De said, grinning as he watched the transformation. "No matter how many times I see it."
"Who could ever get bored of that?" Jared agreed completely.
Every Monarch member in the convoy watched as the giant reached out toward them. All five SUVs, supplies and all, lifted off the ground and floated to his side. Then red light poured out from the giant's body and gathered into a massive orb, folding the vehicles and himself inside it.
The orb surged toward the Hollow Earth entrance. The instant it touched the passage energy, gravity seized it and yanked it down into the dark.
Kong could make this trip with nothing but his own body. Natsuki could do the same. The orb was entirely for everyone else.
The underground rock layers blurred past like scenery through a train window. One second they were on the surface. The next, they weren't.
The giant's energy held the pressure at bay. By the time the convoy passengers recovered their senses, they were looking at the passage exit , white clouds stretching out below them, and beneath that, a world that seemed alive in every direction.
The Hollow Earth.
Kong had already gone through ahead of them.
"ROOAAR—"
The gravity here was strange. Under normal physics, Kong should have dropped straight to the ground. But not long after he came through, he felt the pull reverse. His body swung, his head spun, and suddenly he was falling the wrong way , back toward where he came from.
"CRASH!!"
Reversed gravity caught him again. He plummeted, grabbed at the cliff face on the way down, slowed himself, and finally hit the ground in one piece.
He looked around.
Solid earth under his feet. Rolling peaks in the distance. Thin streams threading between them. He looked up , and the same landscape was there too, above him, another continent hanging overhead with its own gravity. Light from the passage entrance and the distant lightning storms lit everything up like an overcast morning on the surface.
Two worlds stacked on top of each other, each pulling things toward itself.
"Rooaar?" Kong scratched his head, looking around at a place that felt oddly comfortable and completely bizarre at the same time.
It looked like the world above. It wasn't, at all. He'd been bracing for a fatal drop. Instead, the gravity had flipped and broken his fall. He wasn't sure what to make of any of it.
He was still working through that when the crimson orb came down behind him and settled on the same continent. The passage exit was here with them.
"This is..." Ichiro Serizawa pushed open his car door, stepped onto the muddy grass, and stared out at a space that simply did not end. He pressed his fingers to his temple. "Unbelievable."
The giant had already set the vehicles down gently.
Up near the gravitational boundary, a vast flock of creatures swept across the sky — enormous, winged things that moved like pterosaurs, calling OOO— OOO, into the open air. Not a single trace of human presence anywhere. No roads, no structures, nothing. Just raw, ancient world as far as the eye could reach.
"Absolutely worth it." Old De had his recorder out before the car door even finished swinging open, and he was shooting everything. The mountains, the sky, the creatures, the overhead continent. He couldn't stop. He had the feeling that if he ever wrote a journal of this place, Jules Verne wouldn't even come close.
"Most of our electronics are still running." Dr. Vivian moved through the instruments on the vehicle, checking one by one, and found surprisingly little interference. Communications were live. "This world doesn't seem hostile to human technology."
With a bit of adaptation work on the passage energy, contact between Hollow Earth and the surface outposts might actually be possible.
"This one's a lot more manageable than I expected." Natsuki dropped his transformation and took his own look around, comparing it against the cave world from the Kaiju No. 8 universe. Night and day.
He turned and looked down. "Can you sense which direction your people are?"
Finding Jia's people was the priority. The prophecy's window was closing. They had maybe a week left, and every hour that passed meant one less.
No one here felt it more sharply than Jia did.
She looked at this world , one she'd never seen before but that felt, somehow, like she had , and she let go of Irene's hand and walked a few steps forward. She turned slowly, scanning the horizon. Then she closed her eyes.
She stayed like that for a long time.
Nothing came. No pull. No call.
She opened her eyes. They were lost.
Had they already been killed?
The thought rose before she could stop it, and grief rushed in to fill her chest before she could push it back down.
"No." Irene was already crouching in front of her. "They're going to be fine."
"We still have time. That's why we're here." She held Jia's gaze, steady and warm. "I'll be with you until we find them. All of them."
She meant every word. This little girl had been through too much for someone her age. Irene had stopped pretending that wasn't true weeks ago.
Jia caught the meaning through the silence between them. She rubbed her eyes. She nodded.
Kong had been watching. Then, quietly, something shifted. He turned his head toward the left, and his whole body followed a beat later , drawn by something he couldn't name, some pull from that direction that felt less like instinct and more like recognition.
"ROOAAR!"
He called back at the group, already moving. His stride said: follow me. Or don't. I'm going.
His people might be that way.
---
"Kong's life signature confirmed."
"Distance: two hundred kilometers."
Somewhere else in the Hollow Earth, a cluster of aircraft locked onto the signal , sleek, black, built for this world. The pilot's voice came through the comm, flat and precise.
From the rear of the lead craft, Simmons' daughter didn't hesitate.
"Pursue. It will head straight for the highest concentration of Hollow Earth energy. Don't let it out of range."
➤ Next: Prophecy — A New Beginning
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