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"SCREECH!!"
"AWOO!!"
Rodan took the full brunt of the Spacium Beam head-on. Waves of agony rolled through its body like it was about to burst apart. It beat its wings furiously, trying to flee into the distance , but the giant's beam tracked every movement with tiny, precise adjustments. There was no dodging it.
When the beam finally cut off, Rodan's will to fight had collapsed by a wide margin. It dropped from the sky in a natural free fall.
Air screamed against its body at high speed, generating scorching heat. Its consciousness blurred at the edges. Everything streaked past in flashes. The volcano below swelled larger and larger in its vision.
Then its heart lurched to a dead stop.
The eerie giant was right beside it.
Rodan was in free fall. The giant stood perfectly upright, descending at the exact same rate to hold eye contact, completely unbothered by air resistance or gravity.
"Return to the volcano. Do not harm humans wantonly."
"Otherwise, the battle between us will continue." The voice resonated inside its skull , faint, low, and utterly calm.
The memory of that Spacium Beam hit it all at once. Its entire body shuddered.
"Awoo awoo awoo!"
Rodan shook its head and cried out.
Faster than it could fly. Tougher than it was. And that beam , something it couldn't endure even for a moment. Faced with something like that, Rodan made the only reasonable choice.
It submitted.
Can't win. It really, truly cannot win.
"Good." The giant gave a slight nod.
It extended one hand. A wide expanse of dazzling light particles bloomed outward, enveloping Rodan completely, guiding its descent toward the volcano's crater with steady, controlled precision.
...
Rodan sank back into the volcano and went dormant with it.
The giant descended to the ground at the edge of the city.
A setting sun dropped slowly behind its back, pouring a golden halo across the entire city. The crystal on its chest pulsed with steady red light.
"He... saved us?"
"Both Titans. Both of them driven away."
"This feels like a dream."
"Alive... we're actually alive."
The crisis was over. The chaos had stilled. The people of the city had watched the giant's every move with their own eyes, and they understood exactly what had happened.
This giant had pulled them out from between two Titans.
Ordinary people had no way of knowing what the Titans were actually after. They didn't know that Godzilla, in its own way, stood on the side of nature , that it too was a kind of protector. What they knew was simple: if two Titans had fought here, the casualties would have been catastrophic. Countless lives, gone.
San Francisco five years ago had already proven that. The people who died directly or indirectly in the battle between Godzilla and the MUTOs , there were too many to count.
A being of that size, that power, caring that much about whether ordinary people lived or died. They had never seen anything like it.
This giant had walked out of the light as if it came for one reason only: to save them.
It watched the survivors for a moment. Then its body dissolved into scattered points of light and drifted away on the wind. No further action. No lingering. The crisis was resolved, and it simply vanished.
Everything felt like something dreamed and half-remembered.
"Ultraman... a being that fights to save lives..."
Aboard the airborne carrier, Ishiro Serizawa stood motionless, staring at the scene below.
Less than three minutes. In less than three minutes, the giant had defeated Godzilla and Rodan in sequence, ended the battle between them, and saved countless people who should have died today.
"If he truly came here to save lives..." Serizawa said quietly, "then humanity might actually survive this chaos."
He turned to his assistant. "Do you think so too?"
Dr. Vivienne Graham nodded slowly.
"I don't know how to explain it," she said, "but the moment I saw that giant, I felt... calm. Inexplicably calm." She paused, searching for the right words. "Like he would fight with everything he had for lives that no one else would even notice."
It sounded absurd, even to her. But that was exactly what she felt.
"A woman's intuition." Dr. Serizawa smiled.
...
The battle was over.
Natsuki stood on the roof of a residential building at the edge of the Mexican city, floral shirt catching the last of the evening light. He looked out at the enormous setting sun, at the city slowly pulling itself back together, and stretched — arms wide, back cracking — then worked a fist into the knots along his spine.
"Every world's got a planetary guardian with its own attitude, huh."
"Still. At least it can't fly."
The old Ultraman smiled, a sly curl at the corner of his mouth. He turned the Godzilla fight over in his mind. That one detail — that Godzilla couldn't get airborne , had been the lever he'd used to pry the whole thing open. Saved him considerable trouble.
The Titans of this world were meaningfully stronger than the monsters he'd run into before this assignment. He'd give them that. But they still weren't in the same league as some of the heavy hitters he'd faced back in his younger days. His strength was sitting around seventy percent right now , roughly even with Jack, give or take.
High stats without his kind of toolkit. Strong toolkit without his kind of stats. Either way, in this world, the old Ultraman was still the old-man hot-blooded protagonist.
Jared and Old De's helicopter wobbled down from the sky in a graceless descent, aiming for a flat stretch of ground about a kilometer outside of town.
"But... Antarctica."
Natsuki rubbed his chin. He kept turning over the two words Godzilla had thrown at him before leaving. It wasn't ambiguous , the Titan had been pointing him somewhere. Telling him to go look.
He'd need to make that trip.
He was still working through it when ,
WHOOSH ,
The military carrier that had been circling overhead during the entire fight began deploying troops. Soldiers dropped in large numbers. Transport planes broke from altitude and angled toward the ground. Fighter jets carrying micro-oxygen destroyers locked onto his position from above.
The sudden military mobilization sent a ripple of confusion through the citizens still stumbling out of the disaster. The Titans were gone. The giant had disappeared. So what exactly was happening now?
Parachute soldiers hit the open ground across the city in rapid succession, landing clean, moving immediately. Full tactical gear. Weapons up. Advancing toward the coordinates pinging in their earpieces.
A massive encirclement was closing in.
The center of that encirclement: one ordinary residential building. More specifically, one man in a floral shirt standing on its roof.
"Target is currently in a weakened state."
"Capture operation is a go. All units, prepare for engagement." The order came through their comms, flat and certain.
The calculus was simple. Compared to a Titan, Ultraman's value was in a completely different category. The giant had just demonstrated in real time that its power exceeded even Godzilla's , the King of the Monsters had come out on the losing end.
And the most critical piece: after Ultraman dropped its transformation, it entered a window of vulnerability. Completely exposed. Unable to resist.
They were not going to let this opportunity pass.
➤ Next: Did I Live These Nineteen Thousand Years in Vain?
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