My dad dropped me off at school: the Hendrik Lorentz Academy of Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy. An independent and prestigious boarding school housing twelve hundred students. As a campus, it combined a primary, middle, and high school into a complex of interconnected and separate buildings surrounded by a twenty-foot wall. While most of the students lived in the dormitories, local students, such as me, can live at home and commute as if it were a traditional school.
Making my way down a walkway, I passed the bronze statue of Hendrik Lorentz sitting across a table with Max Planck as if in a conversation. The plaque for Lorentz quoted one of his letters to Einstein “A ‘World Spirit’ who, not being bound to a specific place, permeated the entire system under consideration or ‘in whom’ this system existed and who could ‘feel’ immediately all events would naturally distinguish at once one of the systems U, U′” while the plaque for Planck quoted, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Eventually I arrived at one of the language buildings, climbed up the stairs to the second story and entered the first class of my day, an advanced Spanish class. Everyone was talking both about the ‘dinosaur’ in Japan. Very few people seemed to talk about my escapades earlier that night, which was actually fine by me. I wasn’t doing vigilante work for attention. Of the people who were talking about it, no actual name had reached a consensus.
Despite the excitement, class went on as usual and the teacher, a short, fair skin redhead with freckles and green eyes, engaged the students’ attention by making the recent events part of the lesson. That was until a female staff member entered the room and interrupted the lesson.
“Oh, what brings you here, Mrs. Summers?” she responded in an anticipatory tone.
“I need to speak to Sakura.”
The class paused. Seated three rows back and farthest on the left-hand side, Sakura waited for Mrs. Summers’ nodded approval before she left the room with her chaperon. Mrs. Summers continued where she left off, but Sakura didn’t return.
This worried me greatly. It wasn’t like Sakura to skip a class, or to get in trouble with the staff. Something had to have happened; most likely a family matter. Once the class ended, the atmosphere of the entire school changed abruptly. The school went into lockdown mode, and local parents arrived to pick up their children.
I was no exception. As I waited for my father to arrive, I took out my phone and began scrolling through various live news feeds. A single event dominated the headlines: “Explosion Engulfs Japanese Province in Flames!” The news came from both mainstream and alternative sources.
When my father finally arrived, I got into the passenger’s seat and once outside of the school zone he told me, “There’s a Glock 17 under your seat”.
I reached under my seat and pulled the weapon out only enough to see it on the car floor in a holster, which I promptly put on.
As always, he had the radio on, which explained, “The explosion was 100 megatons. That’s twice the yield of the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. The zone of total destruction, that’s where the pressure is the same as the inside of a steam engine’s boiler, reached out 2.32 miles from the blast center. It left a crater 2,957ft wide and 1,400ft deep. The crater lip extends out to over one mile from the blast center.
“Exposing everything out to about 4.06 miles from the center of the blast to 5000 rem. That level of radiation exposure is absolutely fatal and death occurs within a few hours or days. At 4.26 miles, the radiation exposure drops to 1000 rem. This is still enough to cause acute radiation poisoning. Even if all these patients were to receive immediate medical treatment, there’d still be a 95% mortality rate within sixty days.”
“At 4.32 miles it drops to 600 rem, and at 4.34 miles it subjected everything to 500 rem. Now 460 to 600 rem will kill half of the people exposed to it within 30 days without medical treatment. Out to 4.92 miles is the edge of the Fireball, where during the initial moments of the explosion the atmosphere itself caught fire. It demolished even heavily built concrete structures within 6.28 miles. At 13.2 miles, most residential buildings collapsed. Out to 28.2 miles, the force was enough to shatter glass. That’s where the shockwave ends, but the real threat extends much further out.”
“At 31.5 miles out, the thermal radiation was as high as 35 calories of heat energy per square centimeter. Any wood within this range would’ve caught fire immediately. At 41.7 miles, people have suffered third-degree burns. Out to 50.5 miles, it afflicted people with second-degree burns. At 63.9 miles, the burns lessened to the first degree. It’s only when you get to 86 miles that there is no likelihood of a burn of any kind.”
Father told me, “If this escalates, we’re fast tracking it to Roy’s.”
I noted, “Even if he’s got enough firearms and ammunition to host a minor war, it doesn’t seem like that will help against a kaijū.”
Father agreed. “He’s got a bomb shelter on his ranch.”
The radio explained, “The cloud’s head measured 668,720ft across, and obtained a height of 37,480ft. In fact, the cloud top reached 173,370ft above the ground! Much of that material condensed into black rainfall about an hour after the explosion.”
When we arrived home, I walked out with the Glock holstered to my leg. We sat down our things, kept the firearms next to us, and watched the news. It was horrendous. In the dead of night, people were desperate to escape an unseen horror in regions that appeared untouched.
The news anchor asked “… we’re going to put up a map. Could you please sum this up?”
It was worse than I thought, as the guest expert explained, “These are the overpressure, burn, radiation and projected fallout zones. Everything in this region caught fire, and that is still ongoing. The fire fighters are not adequately equipped to deal with the inferno and are still struggling to put it out in some places. There’s not enough EMTs and doctors to treat the wounded, and to top it all off, there’s not enough NBC gear for the rescue efforts. Rescuers, including JSDF members, American soldiers, and volunteers, are dutifully risking radiation injuries.”
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The anchorwoman asked, “What can you tell us about the fallout?”
The guest explained, “The key elements associated with nuclear fallout are Strontium-90, which has a half-life of 28.79 years, and cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years. See this region on the screen? This is the projected fallout from the explosion. Most of it is over the ocean, but it covers most of Shikoku, Honshū, and half of Hokkaidō.
“We can divide the projected fallout zone into multiple regions. Take this region. The 1000 rads per hour zone extends 376 miles downwind. Anyone caught here will get sick within 6 minutes and within an hour will suffer acute radiation poisoning and almost certain death.
“This outermost region is the 1 rad per hour zone. It extends to 1,022 miles downwind. In this area, it takes approximately four days for people to fall ill, and those who remain for 33 days will meet a fatal outcome.
“Therefore, the farther you are from the source of the radiation, the more time you have to evacuate. However, there are still many individuals living within the 1000 rad zone. Kyōto, on its own, contains 1.5 million people. The streets were not designed to accommodate that many people trying to evacuate simultaneously.“
Another station reported, “Soldiers stationed in Camps Foster, Courtney, Gonsalves, Hansen, Kinser, Lester, McTureous, Schwab, and Fuji had been deployed to assist in the evacuation effort. The Misawa Air Base is itself within the projected 10 rads per hour zone and so the soldiers have suited up for CBRN operations.”
What we saw horrified my father and I. I went up to my room, opened my laptop and plotted a course to the disaster zone, but I couldn’t leave yet. In the meantime, I looked up videos of the incident. In the first video I clicked was an archived livestream of the beast, which had come to be known online as G². The appearance of which was strikingly different from in the videos from earlier that day. Its plumage was gone, replaced by what appeared to be keloid scars covered by tightly sealed scales. It was jet with a head and neck of crimson, and it just stood there for a moment. An ear-splitting, building-rattling, droning bellow overwhelmed all with a sense of dread. Its armor glowed a bright blue, almost white, and then the video ended in a flash of white.
The next video had GPS co-ordinates showing that this video was taken in the city of Satte (幸手市). It seemed fine on its own, just a Let’s Play of a girl on PUBG when, suddenly, there was a thunderous bang. The air raid sirens immediately came into use.
“Eh! Nani nani!?” there was a ring on the phone.
“Hiiragi-chan!” she cried, “Un, watashi mo ima mi teru yo!”.
“Kyaaa! Nani!? Nan’na no yo ittai!! Nē, daijōbu!? Ima notte moshikashite bakudan…? Kono machi, kōgeki sa re teru no!?”
Another video, this one taken from a mobile phone, in the same city recorded the mushroom cap visible over the horizon, though not the stalk. Some unidentified videographer, likewise far away from the blast, in Ōzu, took the fourth video and caught something in the distance.
The fourth video, likewise taken far away from the blast, in Ōzu, and the video recorder caught something in the distance. Before the cloud completed its ascent, something utterly massive seemed to escape the devastation. Moving with such speed that was created a sonic boom, shattering windows, rolling over vehicles, and tearing apart buildings. It did not stop until it reached the city, where the Leviathan went berserk; tearing down, smashing in, and toppling every building in sight. There was no time to evacuate. The cameraman fled the building. All the while, the devastation was audible even above the terrified masses. He tried to flee on his Vespa SS 180 scooter.
No one came to engage the beast. Everything happened so fast that neither the JSDF nor the Americans had any time to prepare a response, let alone get the response. Thinking he had escaped the monster by driving away in the opposite direction, the cameraman made the fatal decision to document the monster’s devastating rampage. The beast spotted an aircraft flying overhead and opened its mouth towards it, then its eyes seemed to bioluminesce blue while an unholy high-pitched almost mechanical shriek no animal of that size has any right to make screamed from its mouth.
The interior of its mouth illuminated an incendiary white just before emitting a high-energy beam of light with such intensity as to cause the surrounding atmosphere to breakdown into a thunderous plasma with an azure hue. There was no time to react and the aircraft, along with its occupants, were vaporized on the spot. The beast stopped with the beam attack and winced as if in severe pain, complete with a roar. Smoke from its charred tongue and burned palate escaped from its mouth, but this did not deter it, so it immediately resumed the ethereal attack. Carving into the ground and cutting clear through fields of skyscrapers with that ionizing fire which would cremate the cameraman in an instant. Crushing cars, smashing in buildings. Every action seemed to be intended to kill as many people as it could. A sign of intelligence.
I put on one more video titled “G² Man-eater” in English.
A news helicopter filmed as G² spotted something in the crowd. It chased after it with a relatively slow walk. That helicopter’s spotlight revealed two girls running as fast as they could, but slower than the beast. Audibly panicked, the reporter witnessed the eldest girl, holding the younger by the hand, dart in between two buildings. Hoping that there would be a way out. The beast turned to look at them. Placing its jaw on the ground and staring down the opening, they ran into.
The sounds of death from above drowned out the girls’ screams of terror as military forces arrived with air support. Paralyzed by panic, the girls witnessed the horrifying sight of the monster lunging at them, its teeth tearing through concrete and its head demolishing walls before swallowing them whole. The beast then made its way to the Bungo Channel, all the while it ignored the US Military and JSDF as they tailed it. When it finally reached the sea, it disappeared beneath the waves; the water boiling on contact with its superheated armor.
Around 10PM, I prepared for bed. I closed my curtains and stood in the center of the room. The soft orb of light came forth from my brow and the woman reappeared before me. My Gothic Lolita knew what to do. When I turned off the light, my giant alter ego used her telescopic clairvoyant vision to make sure the coast was clear, then escaped out the window.
I made my way away from the house through the city. Once out of the range of any residential area, I accelerated to Mach 10. Any time I came too close to an area with people, I slowed down for the sake of their safety. As I ran, the surrounding air ignited with perturbations so violent that it propelled proximal rocks, dirt, and sand into projectiles. I could see the magnetic fields and had an instinctive knowledge of my exact location on Earth. So, as long as I knew the coordinates and checked a map, I could intuitively navigate to any desired destination. I ran until I reached the Alaskan shore in the Bering Strait, at which point I dove into the water.
At 276 knots, I swam 23 miles to reach Little Diomede. My wet clothes were almost weightless to me. Once more, I swiftly moved to the opposite end of the island, swimming a distance of 2.5 miles to reach Big Diomede Island. Then, without hesitation, I plunged into the sea again, this time on the other side of the island, and swam a remarkable 35 miles to reach the Russian shore.
I ran from the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, through Magadan, the Khabarovsk Krai, then swam five miles to Sakhalin, 26.5 miles to Hokkaidō, and 12 miles to Honshū, and crossed the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge. Refusing to stop until I arrived at the crushed in or burning houses.