Ebisugaoka.
After nightfall, the village was always quiet.
Past eight o'clock, most households had already put out their lights, leaving only a handful of windows still glowing dim yellow. The elderly turned in early, the few young people left gathered outside the convenience store to smoke and chat, and the children were kept indoors doing homework.
At the edge of the village, the izakaya still had a few tables of customers. The television was on, playing some dull variety show.
Everything was as ordinary as it should be — until the ground began to shake.
At first it was faint. The beer bottles on the tables trembled, and ripples spread across the surface of the drinks in the cups.
"An earthquake?"
A customer looked up at the chandelier on the ceiling; it was swaying slightly.
Before the words had fully left his mouth, the ground suddenly dropped.
"BOOM—!!!"
"RUMBLE—!!!"
A deafening roar exploded from somewhere behind the village, deep within the belly of the mountain!
The entire earth convulsed violently, as if seized in the grip of some unseen, enormous hand!
The violent quake struck without warning. The whole izakaya shook; plates fell from the shelves and shattered across the floor.
"Run!"
With a scream, everyone bolted for the door.
Throughout the village, the mud-brick houses groaned under unbearable strain. Walls cracked, roof tiles rained down, and many of the older houses collapsed outright, throwing up clouds of dust.
"It's an earthquake!! Run!!"
"The house is collapsing! Help!!"
In an instant, crying and screaming rang out across the whole village. Villagers grabbed the young and the old and fled blindly toward open ground, the entire settlement dissolving into chaos.
For the people of Japan, earthquakes were nothing unusual — but today's quake was unexpectedly sudden and violent.
"BOOM!"
Just then, a low, heavy roar rolled up from deep underground, as though something down there had turned over in its sleep.
The muffled rumbling from below came again and again, like the breathing of some ancient beast, each one shattering another layer of Ebisugaoka's bedrock.
What had only been violent shaking a moment ago now cracked open entirely.
A jet-black fissure tore straight from behind the village up to the mountain's peak, like a wound ripped into the earth itself, spreading through the heart of the village with unstoppable force. The road surface buckled, slopes collapsed, and even century-old trees were torn out by the roots and swallowed into the bottomless chasm.
The villagers froze in terror, watching helplessly as the river ran backward and the very shape of the mountains changed.
The stream at the foot of Ebisugaoka was no longer clear. It surged upward several feet, then churned with murky gray-yellow water, and the air was suddenly thick with a stench like rotten eggs mixed with choking sulfur.
The water foamed white. Wherever it passed, the grass wilted instantly to yellow, insects floated belly-up, and even the hard flagstones hissed and smoked as they corroded away.
"BOOM—!!!"
From deep within the fissure came a roar ten times more violent than before — not the cry of a beast, but something closer to the sound of bedrock shattering and water pressure bursting, a voice of heaven and earth itself.
The whole flank of Ebisugaoka began to glow, a pale ghostly light seeping out from the cracks in the rock, painting the black night sky a sickly bright white.
In the next instant, the earth split wide open completely.
A massive serpent, pure white from head to tail, rose slowly out of the ruptured mountainside and the gaping fissure.
It had none of the sheen of living scale and flesh — its surface looked instead like frozen cold rock, like cooled lava crust, bone-pale all over, its scales still dripping with undried venom and studded with broken stone. Every inch of its body seemed wrapped in the raw, violent force of tectonic upheaval.
The serpent's body was thicker than five meters around, coiling upward until its length matched the height of the mountainside. Its hideous head, eyes a murky ash-gray, gazed down at the village below with utter indifference.
In the village, hundreds of villagers stood frozen, as though bound by some spell, unable to move, mouths hanging open as they stared up at the giant serpent on the mountain, their eyes filled with terror and shock.
"BOOM!"
The serpent shifted its massive body again. With every movement, the surrounding rock shattered, trees were ground to powder, and a thick yellow-green mist billowed from its mouth, spreading forward in a widening fan.
Wherever the mist passed, the leaves of trees turned yellow, curled, and fell within three seconds, their branches turning ashen gray as though scorched dry. The grass withered instantly into blackish-brown dust. A few animals too slow to flee thrashed briefly within the mist before collapsing, motionless, white smoke rising from their fur as red-and-white muscle showed beneath their peeling hides.
This commotion finally jolted the people of Ebisugaoka fully awake.
"The Water Dragon… the Water Dragon really exists!"
An old man dropped straight to his knees, staring up at the giant serpent, his face full of disbelief.
According to legend, the severed head of Yamata no Orochi had transformed into the Water Dragon and fallen upon Ebisugaoka, bringing ruin to its people, until the fox spirit they worshipped sealed it away.
This was a myth passed down for who knew how many generations — even an old man like him had never quite believed it before, dismissing it as a story the shrine had invented for its own promotion.
But now that Water Dragon stood before his very eyes.
"Great Water Dragon, please forgive us!"
"Please, go back, Great Water Dragon!"
Several elders were already kneeling on the ground, foreheads striking the gravel until blood ran down their cheeks, their lips trembling, their voices shaking as they bowed again and again to the enormous white serpent.
"Great Fox Spirit! Where are you, Great Fox Spirit?! Please, show yourself!"
Someone cried out toward the shrine on the mountain, but the sound was swallowed by the rumbling from below.
Even more people were simply running for their lives.
Young parents scooped up their children and fled the village, not daring to look back even after losing a shoe. A few young men half-carried elderly villagers with weak legs, stumbling through the rice paddies. Someone was knocked down in the chaos and swept along by the crowd, with no chance even to get back up.
"Run! This way!"
"My child! My child!"
Screaming, wailing, and the crash of collapsing houses blended together — the whole of Ebisugaoka had become a boiling pot.
The Water Dragon slowly turned its head, its murky gray eyes sweeping over the scattering crowd below. Its gaze was utterly indifferent, betraying no emotion at all, as though the scene before it were nothing more than an ordinary view it had seen a thousand times.
The yellow-green mist pouring from its mouth grew thicker, flowing down the mountainside like an invisible river of death.
The houses closest to the mountain were the first to suffer. The mist licked across their wooden walls; the paint blistered and peeled away, revealing pale wood beneath that soon began to rot, and even the stone foundations turned gray.
"Mom—!"
A child's cry rang out from within the mist, sharp as a needle. The child's mother went half-mad trying to rush inside, but two men held her back with all their strength.
"You can't go in there! That mist is poison!"
"My child is in there! Let go of me!"
At that moment, the sky lit up.
A beam of light burst from the horizon in the northwest.
It wasn't lightning, nor starlight — it was a light pure enough to blind, as if a newborn sun had torn open the night.
The light trailed a long tail of flame, streaking across the sky faster than sound, compressing the air before it into a cone-shaped shockwave that roared with a deafening boom.
"BOOM—!!!"
A silver-and-red giant, in a full flying kick, slammed solidly into the Water Dragon's neck!
The force of that single kick was almost unimaginable — the Water Dragon's massive body was flung sideways off the mountainside like a discarded sack, crashing into the cliff face opposite. Rock shattered, the entire mountain trembled, and dust and debris shot skyward, blotting out half the heavens.
The giant flipped in midair and landed firmly, planting both feet on the shattered rice paddies, sending out a ring of shockwaves.
The silver-and-red giant spread both arms wide, blue-white light gathering in its palms. It swung its arms, and a spiraling beam of light roared out from between its hands.
"Wide Shot!"
The beam twisted like a taut rope, wrapping a violent vortex around the yellow-green poison mist. The mist was drawn into the spiral, compressed, gathered, growing thinner and thinner.
The vortex of light spun faster and faster, and within moments it had swept up every last trace of the toxic substance in the area, without leaving a single wisp behind.
Then, at the tip of the beam, a fine crack in space tore open, and all the gathered poison gas and harmful material was blasted violently into another dimension, vanishing completely.
Within seconds, the choking poison gas that had blanketed the skies over Ebisugaoka was cleared away entirely!
The sulfurous, rotten-egg stench was gone from the air, replaced by the fresh evening breeze of the mountains. The withered, yellowing edges of the plants that the poison mist had corroded slowly stopped their decline, and the air itself, once polluted, returned fully to purity.
Every villager in the settlement froze in place, utterly dumbstruck.
People who had just been wailing and collapsing in despair now stood with mouths agape, eyes wide, staring blankly at that silver-red giant figure on the mountainside. Fear and despair on their faces gave way entirely to overwhelming shock. The whole scene fell dead silent — no one even seemed to breathe.
The old men who had been kowtowing for mercy stayed frozen mid-bow, their clouded eyes brimming with disbelief, their prayers cut off mid-word, leaving only shock and blankness in their gaze.
No one had expected that, at this moment of impending doom, instead of the fox spirit they had always worshipped and prayed to, what came to save them was this towering silver-red giant — who had knocked the unstoppable, world-ending Water Dragon flat with a single kick!
That divine beast, which had terrified them to the very core, seemed so utterly powerless before the giant.
"Ul… Ultraman?"
A young man murmured, his face full of dazed disbelief.
First the Water Dragon from legend, and now an Ultraman straight out of a tokusatsu show — was he dreaming?
"It looks like… Ultraseven! Hahahaha, a giant monster shows up, and then an Ultraman shows up too — I guess that's pretty normal by now. Go get 'em, Ultraseven!"
Another young man's mind had practically fried, a foolish grin spreading across his face as he raised a fist and shouted toward Hinako Shimizu.
"I remember Ultraman Joneus mentioned Yamata no Orochi too — are we actually living inside the Ultraman universe or something?"
The young man speaking looked both startled and delighted, all the fear the Water Dragon's appearance had caused now completely gone, swept away by the shock of seeing an Ultraman.
Hinako Shimizu could of course hear the discussion among her fellow villagers, even her classmates, and inwardly she rolled her eyes.
These people relaxed way too fast. Did they honestly think nobody died in the Ultraman universe?
She looked up toward the distant Water Dragon, her expression growing heavier.
Even an Ultraman had enemies it couldn't easily beat.
____
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