A peek in the Past

Kazuma dragged his body through the freezing, stagnant water.

Every step was a battle against gravity.

His left leg buckled, but he caught himself with his katana, driving the carbon-steel blade into the cracked concrete floor like a crutch.

The subterranean tunnel widened. Ahead, a heavy steel blast door stood half-ajar, bearing the faded stencil of the Supernatural Security Division.

It was Sub-Level 3 of the Shibuya Vanguard Relay Station.

Kazuma stumbled through the heavy doorway, collapsing onto the dry, cold steel floor of the emergency bunker.

The heavy door slammed shut behind him under its own weight, sealing out the damp stench of the sewer.

Silence settled over the bunker. Not the oppressive, unnatural silence of the Colossus above, but the quiet of an abandoned tomb.

Kazuma lay on his back, his chest heaving in ragged, shallow gasps.

His sight flickered with dangerous dark spots. Blood loss was stealing his consciousness piece by piece.

His left shoulder was a blackened, mangled mass. The embedded silver splinters pulsated with a faint, toxic hum, poisoning his nerve pathways.

He forced his trembling right arm to move.

He reached into his inner tactical pocket, his blood-caked fingers searching for a small, heavy object.

His fingers closed around a tarnished silver pocket watch attached to a broken leather strap.

He pulled it out and held it up to the flickering emergency light above.

The glass face was cracked, but beneath the spiderweb fractures was a small, faded photograph.

A young girl with bright, defiant eyes smiled back at him from a sunlit park in old Shinjuku.

Yumi.

Kazuma’s younger sister. The one who had given him the katana handguard. The one who had been standing at Shibuya Crossing three years ago when the first minor dimensional rift tore open the sky.

He hadn't been fast enough then. He had been five blocks away, delayed by Vanguard bureaucracy and standard patrol protocols.

By the time he reached the crossing, there was nothing left to save. Just crushed glass, silent ash, and this broken watch lying in the rubble.

"I promised you," Kazuma rasped, his voice breaking into a dry, ragged cough. "I promised I wouldn't run."

Tears cut clean, hot tracks through the thick layer of sewage grime and dried blood on his cheeks.

The physical agony in his body was blinding, but it was nothing compared to the hollow, tearing hole in his chest.

For three years, he had lived like a ghost, hunting monsters in the dark, driven solely by the guilt of surviving while she didn't.

He clutched the watch against his chest, his knuckles turning white.

He couldn't die down here in the dark. Not in a sewer. Not like a cornered animal.

"I'm still standing, Yumi," he whispered into the silence of the bunker. "I'm still fighting."

He carefully tucked the watch back into his inner pocket, right over his beating heart.

He pushed himself up into a sitting position, leaning against the bunker's central control console.

A high-frequency ping echoed through the room.

Kazuma looked up. The station’s subterranean sensor grid was still operational, drawing passive power from Shibuya's underground ley-line conduits.

On the main tactical monitor, a holographic projection of Shibuya appeared, pulsing with real-time energy maps.

Hovering over the city center was the crimson energy signature of the Shiver-Colossus.

Kazuma’s eyes narrowed as he analyzed the data.

The giant had changed.

In the upper atmosphere, the Colossus had appeared as a dense, impenetrable mountain of trillions of vibrating silver needles.

But now, the holographic mass map showed massive structural voids across its entire outer hull.

The massacre in the sewer tunnels hadn't been in vain.

By slaughtering the splintered needle-hound packs, Kazuma had permanently severed over forty percent of the titan's aggregate mass from its central core.

The Colossus couldn't recall those shattered fragments. They were dead silver sand in the muck below.

Because of the severe mass loss, the titan was destabilizing.

To prevent its own gravitational collapse, the entity had descended from the sky. It was now hovering barely fifty feet above the ground, anchoring itself directly onto the Shibuya Ley Line Spire.

It was trying to siphon raw elemental magic from the city's power grid to forge new needles and rebuild its outer shell.

Kazuma stared at the glowing core on the monitor.

The outer shield of trillions of needles was gone, reduced to a thin, ragged curtain of shifting silver thread.

Inside that thinning shell, the primary magnetic core burned brightly.

It was exposed.

For the first time since the sky tore open, the monster was vulnerable.

"You're bleeding too," Kazuma said, a cold, ruthless clarity washing over his mind.

This was the window. The only window humanity would ever get.

If the Colossus finished draining the Ley Line Spire, it would regenerate its outer shell and become unkillable once more.

He had to strike now, before the siphon was complete.

Kazuma pulled open the bunker’s emergency medical cabinet.

He pulled out a heavy-duty Vanguard field cauterizer; a pneumatic torch designed for emergency wound sealing on the battlefield.

He looked at his shattered left shoulder.

He set the cauterizer to maximum thermal output.

Kazuma gripped a thick piece of rubber tubing between his teeth, braced his back against the console, and pressed the white-hot nozzle directly against the open wound on his shoulder.

HISSSSSS

The smell of scorched flesh filled the small bunker.

Kazuma’s eyes rolled back in his head. Every nerve in his upper body screamed in violent rebellion. His fingers dug deeply into the steel console, denting the metal face.

He didn't make a sound. He bit down through the rubber until his jaw locked.

The high heat burned the lacerations shut, instantly halting the internal arterial bleeding and searing the embedded silver splinters into inert slag.

When he pulled the torch away, his left arm was completely immobilized, locked tight against his ribcage by hardened, cauterized skin.

It wouldn't move, but it wouldn't bleed him to death either.

Next, he took his carbon-steel katana and slotted the hilt into the station's ley-line charging port.

HUMMMMMM

Raw kinetic energy surged from the subterranean power grid directly into the gravity stone.

The dark, faded gemstone erupted into a brilliant, blinding glare of cobalt blue, humming with intense kinetic pressure.

The weapon was fully charged.

Kazuma unhooked the sword and gripped it tightly in his right hand.

He turned toward the exit ladder that led straight up to the street-level access hatch near Shibuya Crossing.

Above him, the ground trembled as the Colossus siphoned the city's power.

The end was near. He could feel it in the air, in the heavy static charging his hair.

He had two choices left: die on his knees in the dirt, or carve his way into the heart of the storm.

Kazuma placed his hand on the rungs of the steel ladder and began to climb