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"Damn it, what are they trying to do?"
The heavily modified Osprey made a shaky emergency landing, scraping down from the sky in a crooked descent. Jared, rocking his best homeless-man hair, crawled out through the damaged cabin door and looked out at the town under the dying sun. Soldiers. A lot of them, dropping in from all directions.
He followed their line of advance and caught a blurry figure on a residential building in the distance.
This whole setup was aimed at Natsuki.
CRACK!
"Looks like they want to take him alive." Old De smashed the front windshield with a tool, hauled himself out through the gap, and squinted toward the building with a furrowed brow. "A living alien has way too much research value for them to pass up."
The thing was, Natsuki was a little too agreeable for a powerful alien life form. Old De was genuinely worried the guy might hesitate to fight back against those soldiers and end up getting himself caught.
The Ultraman old-timer was a strange one. But his moral standards? Through the roof.
"Catch!" Old De tossed a machine gun to Jared.
Jared caught it and started strapping ammo to himself. "What's the plan?"
Old De looked fierce, but the brain worked fine — smarter than Jared, at least. If Jared were calling the shots right now, he'd charge straight in, and that was not a plan.
"What else is there?"
"Charge in, clear a path, get him out." Old De's bald head caught the last of the sunset, the light haloing off it. He held a machine gun in each hand, ammo belts criss-crossing his chest in a big X. "Working both angles gives us a real shot."
Jared stared at him.
Right. Still reckless. This Russian isn't any more rational than I am.
He slapped his forehead. "Fine. I can't think of anything better anyway."
Natsuki was their whole plan against the Titans. If that guy got dragged away, their whole adventure was over before it really started. He'd already shown what he could do in human form , not as absurdly broken as when he went giant, but he wasn't going to get taken down in the first five minutes. He could hold out long enough for them to get there.
"GO!"
Jared and Old De grabbed their weapons, scooped up a few grenades on the way, and moved toward wherever the Ultraman old-timer was cornered.
...
"Squad One at designated position. Five hundred meters from target."
"Squad Two at sniper position. Seven hundred meters from target."
"Squad Three at designated position. Six hundred meters from target."
"Squad Four at designated position. Eight hundred meters from target."
"Squad Five..."
The encirclement was complete. Soldiers ringed the entire area, all of them armed with serious hardware, firing lines locked in from every direction. Sniper scopes were already trained on his head.
Further out, armored vehicles pulled in from Mexico formed a hard perimeter. Fighter jets circled overhead, ready. The scale of it said everything about how seriously the military took the Giant.
Beyond the standard guns and artillery, they had one final card: a miniaturized Oxygen Destroyer. The last resort. If things went completely sideways, they would level the target and this Mexican town together.
"Squad One, initiate contact with target."
"Attempt communication first."
Squad One was already moving. Twenty soldiers entered the residential building. The rest held the perimeter outside.
Civilians had been cleared. The battlefield was quiet in that particular way , tense, heavy, the silence before something breaks. These soldiers had seen what the Giant could do. Conducting an arrest operation on him was a different kind of pressure entirely.
But orders were orders. That was the iron law.
TAP TAP... TAP TAP.
Heavy footsteps echoed through the stairwell. The soldiers making contact could hear their own breathing. Command had said the target couldn't transform again for a while, but they kept their guard up anyway.
Top floor. A rust-stained rooftop door.
BOOM!
They shoved it open and swarmed out onto the rooftop, weapons up, scanning for the target.
He hadn't run. Or rather , with an encirclement this tight, there was nowhere to run to.
First step, smooth enough.
The man stood in the middle of the rooftop, short T-shirt under a floral shirt, hands shoved in the pockets of his baggy shorts. His eyes gave off a faint golden glow as they swept across the snipers aiming at him. He looked completely at ease.
You're surrounded. Could you at least pretend to be worried?
Squad One's captain stared at that calm, handsome face and felt his train of thought briefly derail.
"Ultraman, we have no intention of making you our enemy."
"But for national security reasons, we need you to come with us." The captain kept his voice level, standing a few meters away from the man in the floral shirt.
That was what his mouth said.
His other nineteen squad members had their semi-automatic rifles up, red dots sitting right on the man's head.
"Well..." Natsuki pulled his gaze away from the sniper muzzles and turned toward the soldiers on the rooftop. A smile crossed his face. "Now there's a situation I haven't seen in a while."
"Getting hauled in for experiments — that's basically a rite of passage for Space Garrison members, you know. When the rookies hit this for the first time, a good number of them just... cooperate. Hands up, go quietly." He laughed. "Every time."
He seemed to be drifting into old memories. Embarrassing ones, belonging to people who weren't here to defend themselves.
There was one junior named Max, for instance. Young guy, but he'd already seemed like an old man. All that caution had to come from somewhere , turned out he'd taken a beating on his very first solo mission after joining the Garrison. Learned the hard way.
"What?" The captain blinked. "What are you talking about?"
The military force surrounding them right now was Titan-scale. And this guy wasn't even slightly rattled?
Had he just... given up?
"Nothing." Natsuki smiled. "When you get old, you start reminiscing about other people's embarrassing moments."
Not that he had any room to talk. When he'd first joined the Space Garrison, he hadn't been much better than those rookies.
But that was a long time ago. After nineteen thousand years, this kind of thing barely registered.
Being strapped to a lab table for research? If something like that could actually happen to him, those nineteen thousand years would've been a complete waste.
"Skip the formalities."
"If you want to capture me, go ahead."
Natsuki said it without any urgency. Then he reached up and started taking off his floral shirt.
That answer , and that particular action — hit the comms instantly.
BANG BANG BANG.
Every soldier on the rooftop who had a bead on him pulled the trigger. A dense volley of bullets tore toward him.
Natsuki still didn't move to defend himself. He finished pulling off the floral shirt, folded it into his bracelet , and the bullets coming at him seemed to hit a slow-motion filter, their speed dropping to almost nothing.
Then the Ultraman old-timer reached into the bracelet again and pulled out a dark green uniform. Silver-white armor plating ran along the shoulders and shins.
➤ Next: Like a Body of Steel
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