GA: Chapter 123: A Massive Shadow in the Ocean — The Beast Tide Triggered by Mutated Sea Creatures
Kamen Rider Kabuto World.
Tendou Souji watched the Kabuto Zecter circling through the air beside him, expressing its affection, and quietly made up his mind.
The chat group offered all manner of cultivation paths — but none of them were what suited him best.
What suited him best had been decided from the very beginning.
In the myriad worlds ahead, he would walk his path as a Kamen Rider.
Real World. Haicheng.
This was a city in Huaxia situated close to the sea.
Before the spiritual revival, the city had enjoyed tremendous prosperity because of the ocean. Its people had always felt an intimate bond with the sea, and every year an endless stream of tourists came to vacation here, to see that vast, boundless expanse of water with their own eyes.
But in the age of the spiritual revival, this city had become genuinely dangerous.
The ocean covered a far greater portion of Earth's surface than land ever could, and the mutated sea creatures within it were beyond counting. If they ever set their sights on the shore, Haicheng would be where the war began.
Interestingly, while the second spiritual tide had triggered beast tides across every part of Huaxia, Haicheng had been an exception.
The occasional mutated domestic animal appeared, but the death toll was far lower than any other city.
Even so, because of its unique geographical position, some of Huaxia's higher leadership had been pushing to evacuate Haicheng's population to other cities.
But an evacuation of an entire city's worth of civilians wasn't something that could be accomplished overnight, nor was it a decision one party could simply propose and see immediately carried out.
Besides — in the current climate, was there any city in Huaxia that could truly be called safe?
There wasn't.
So the discussions dragged on and nothing was ever firmly decided.
As a precaution, however, Huaxia's leadership had constructed dedicated fortifications along the city's edge — towering walls built specifically to separate the ocean from Haicheng.
The purpose was to hold back any incursion by sea creatures.
Or more precisely — the hope was that such defenses might buy them enough time to hold on until reinforcements arrived.
The people of Haicheng had no particular objections. When your life was on the line, only a few among the older generation who'd long held a reverence for the sea would argue that the ocean mattered more than staying alive.
That day, evening had arrived.
The fading glow of sunset cast a quiet, peaceful warmth across everything.
A gentle breeze carried a touch of cool freshness through the air.
Along the outer walls of Haicheng, a line of soldiers stood at attention — expressions resolute, postures straight — their eyes fixed on the ocean, alert to any movement.
When the shift change came, they handed off their posts to their replacements and headed to the mess hall for dinner.
Over their meal, they kept their voices low.
"The spiritual tide hit hard, sure — but it's not like it can give sea creatures legs and teach them to walk on land."
"It's not like they're amphibians."
"This isn't a novel. Even if something actually evolved legs, who knows how many years that would take."
"Reality's been more interesting than any novel lately — the spiritual revival happened, didn't it? Nothing's impossible anymore."
"Maybe someday they'll turn into people. Who can say."
"Just do your job and stay in your lane. If nothing actually happens, that's better for all of us, isn't it?"
"..."
As time passed, night descended fully, and Haicheng blazed with light — like a lighthouse, pouring brilliance out into the surrounding dark.
And beneath that light, unseen by anyone, countless crabs and lobsters swarmed up from the depths of the sea and began crawling toward the shore.
Perhaps the night was simply too dark. Perhaps their bodies, even after the spiritual baptism, were still small enough to go unnoticed. Either way, no one saw them coming.
Then, deep in the water, something enormous moved — a vast, whip-like shape of pure black sweeping through the ocean. Under the threat of that black tentacle, the crabs and lobsters on the shore kept multiplying.
CRASH.
A crab the size of a small car — over four meters in length — was hurled onto the shore by the force, a long dent pressed into its hardened shell on impact. It picked itself up, shot a wary glance back toward the ocean, then fixed its gaze on the city ahead.
There was curiosity in those eyes. As if it were gazing at a world entirely unlike anything the sea had ever shown it.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
More impacts in quick succession. One after another, massive crabs and lobsters were driven up from the ocean onto dry land, exchanged a brief, wordless look with each other, and began advancing toward Haicheng with grim determination.
Out in the water, the surface was alive with ripples. Several black tentacles coiled above the waves.
An enormous shadow moved through the depths — drawing close to the shore, then hesitating, as if weighing something it hadn't yet decided.
Instead of coming ashore itself, it drove more and more sea creatures to the water's edge, pressing them toward land with threatening force.
Mutated crabs, mutated lobsters, mutated sea turtles, mutated sea serpents...
The threat of death left them no choice. They abandoned the ocean and moved toward dry ground.
This territory had been claimed by something terrifying. No living creature could defy its commands.
Better to march toward a human city than to die here so easily.
Under the command of something none of them dared disobey, they had one chance of surviving — and this was it.
The crashes kept coming, one after another. A tide of mutated sea creatures this enormous — even hidden in the dark of night — could not go unnoticed by the soldiers guarding the walls for long.
"Sea creature incursion!"
"All units, sea creature incursion!"
BOOM.
That cry stripped away every last trace of drowsiness from every soldier on the wall. Eyes tight with tension, they stared at the approaching mass closing in from the outer edge.
The sheer number of them made more than a few pupils contract involuntarily.
This was unlike any beast tide they had ever seen. Even compared to what other cities had faced, the scale here was incomprehensibly larger.
In an ordinary city, even accounting for rats by the thousands, mutated birds, mantises, and zoo animals combined — the number of mutated creatures might reach a few thousand, ten thousand at the outside. But what they were looking at now had to number well above a hundred thousand.
Because this was the ocean.
And now, having left the sea behind and escaped the threat of whatever lurked in its depths, the creatures seemed to decompress — the tension releasing into something else entirely. What replaced it was hunger, and hostility toward anything outside their own kind.
Crashing and colliding against one another in the chaos, the tide merged into a single deep, churning black.
Everything in its path was scoured clean.
Then it became a black wave, and that wave rolled toward the city of humanity.
Wuuu — wuuu — wuuu —
The warning horns rang out across Haicheng — the sound of danger announced and undeniable. Countless people were jolted awake from sleep, fear rising on their faces before they'd even fully opened their eyes.
They knew what those horns meant.
They just hadn't expected this day to arrive so soon.
"What's happening — why are the horns sounding?"
"Did those things actually come out of the ocean?"
"Damn it, I should have left for another city when I had the chance."
"In this day and age, nowhere is safe. You could run all the way to the capital and it still wouldn't help."
"Trust the country — they'll protect us. They have to."
"..."
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