At the temporary research facility in the Outer District, a reconnaissance aircraft belonging to Shiba Heavy Industries was transmitting footage from the front lines.
The naval fleet had opened fire on the legendary Stage V Gastrea, Scorpio, but its attacks had accomplished almost nothing.
They didn't even seem to qualify as an itch. At most, they were irritating flies, annoying enough to make it slow its advance a little.
Several smaller monitors around the main screen displayed footage of other battles.
The appearance of a Stage V seemed to have emboldened the other Gastrea. They were converging on the Tokyo Area.
They would gather near the Monoliths and wait for Scorpio to destroy them. Once the magnetic field they found so repulsive disappeared, they could invade in force.
Part of the military was already working to drive off the Gastrea gathering around the perimeter.
Another feed showed several Civil Security officers fighting a masked man.
Unfortunately, almost none of them could hold their own against him.
"His unaided body can already stretch a normal person's second of perception into two thousand. With equipment like that, just how much further can he push it?"
Miori heard Sumire, the woman once hailed as a miracle doctor, murmuring to herself.
Did that mean Mr. Kain could perceive the world as though it had slowed to one two-thousandth of its normal speed?
In other words, his thought processes accelerated two thousandfold.
That had to be how he could shoot bullets out of the air.
But could an unmodified human really process visual information that quickly, using natural eyes instead of mechanical implants?
No.
The doctor had said so herself.
Sumire had worked with Shiba Heavy Industries to develop an artificial eye capable of accelerating perception two thousandfold. Any more than that would destroy the user's brain.
If Kain could do it naturally, could his body even be called human?
Had he been a Cursed Child, it would have made sense. Perhaps the Gastrea virus had enhanced some animal's natural ability to that extraordinary level.
But Sumire had confirmed that his body contained neither the Gastrea virus nor any mechanical modifications.
She had even said that, physically, he was almost indistinguishable from an ordinary human. The only anomaly was something within his genes, something even smaller that she couldn't comprehend.
That incomprehensible element seemed to lock his human genetic makeup firmly in place.
In theory, no virus could alter his fundamentally human nature. Even if a temporary change occurred, the human form encoded in his genes would act like shape-memory metal, restoring him to his original state.
Even a lost limb would grow back exactly as it had been.
"Kisara, where on earth did you find someone like him? His body is too perfect. Only a god could create something like that."
"A god? Maybe."
Kisara's response sounded almost like a joke.
But it might actually be true.
His body could very well be the product of technology on par with a god's power.
After all, the world he came from had every sort of monster imaginable.
To fight daemons, and even evil gods, humanity might truly have pushed the development of the human body to its absolute limit, stepping into the realm of the divine.
It was here!
Everyone's attention snapped to the largest screen.
The Stage V Gastrea had finally reached the coast and was coming ashore!
Comparing Kain to an ant standing before an elephant might have been an exaggeration, but a mouse before an elephant was entirely fair.
One stood a little over two meters tall.
The other was a mountain of flesh more than four hundred meters high.
A creature that enormous could hardly be agile, but its sheer size compensated for its apparently sluggish movements.
Besides, only its larger limbs seemed slow.
The countless tentacles and other bizarre appendages covering its body moved with terrifying speed.
Huh?
Scorpio suddenly stopped.
It seemed to have recognized that the tiny figure before it posed a serious threat.
Its mismatched eyes swiveled to fix on him.
An instant later, it unleashed a roar powerful enough to drive the ground downward.
The battle had begun!
The area around Kain's original position sank under the impact, as though an immense gravitational force had slammed into it.
Nearby trees were blown away like scraps of paper, then shredded into countless fragments.
But he had moved before the shock wave reached him.
So fast!
Miori couldn't follow him at all.
By the time she caught sight of him again, the mass of tentacles that had tried to skewer him had already been severed.
She hadn't seen them lash out.
She hadn't seen him cut them down.
It was like watching a film with frames missing from the middle of the fight.
Their movements had already exceeded what her eyes could track!
When she next spotted him, he was running sideways across Scorpio's thigh.
Behind him, the flesh began to swell grotesquely. Bulges rose from within the leg like bubbles, bursting through the skin and leaving rounded cavities exposed beneath.
Miori reached for her tablet and replayed the footage in slow motion.
Only then did she understand what had happened.
As he ran, his sword sliced open Scorpio's thigh.
Before its molecular-level regeneration could close each wound, he pressed his gun toward the opening and fired, sending rounds through the breach in its tough hide and into the flesh beneath.
Those swelling bubbles and the cavities they left behind had to be the work of his special ammunition, the kind that could melt an armored vehicle in an instant.
With that mystery solved, Miori looked back at the live feed.
She froze.
Analyzing the footage had cost her only a few seconds, yet in that brief interval, the enormous Gastrea had already begun to topple.
Apparently, he had pumped more of those rounds into something resembling a knee joint, riddling it with holes.
Even its terrifying regeneration couldn't repair the damage before the weight of its four-hundred-meter body crushed the weakened joint.
It lost its balance and fell.
The impact of that colossal mass seemed powerful enough to send tremors all the way to the research facility.
Yet almost as soon as it collapsed, it began to stand again.
Its leg had already regenerated completely, restoring its ability to support that mountain of flesh.
At the same time, something erupted from its back like water spouting from a whale's blowhole.
But it wasn't water.
It was a highly corrosive toxic fluid!
In an instant, it became a torrential downpour, blanketing an area several kilometers across. Everything it touched dissolved as though drenched in concentrated sulfuric acid.
No, judging by how quickly things were breaking down, sulfuric acid couldn't compare.
Its corrosive power was probably closer to aqua regia.
Kain vanished behind the curtain of black rain.
Dark, foul liquid inundated the surrounding kilometers of land.
The ground sank at a speed visible to the naked eye.
A crater several kilometers wide was taking shape!
(End of Chapter)
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