The screaming only stopped once Kosuke had stepped far, far away. He knelt on the ground, naked and afraid, covering himself with his hands to protect what little modesty he had left. Nearly all of his clothes were gone, littering the area in the form of rags and shreds. His privates had gone somewhere else when he was bigger, but now that he was smaller again—though still not back to normal size—they’d returned. The now-smaller light-sphere had followed him as he’d moved, confirming Kosuke’s suspicions. It wasn’t “following” him; the light was coming from him. It had grown when he had grown, and shrunk when he had shrunk. The two had to be connected.
If only he knew the right order.
Kosuke’s classmates emerged from the bus one by one. They staggered out of the emergency entrance woozy and weary, having had to crawl above or below the severed tree trunk that impaled the bus like a spit through meat. The other students’ legs trembled as they stood up on the ravine floor. At first, they gazed up at the rising dusk, not quite believing they were alive, but then, without fail, their eyes would turn to Kosuke and they’d gawk and whisper and stare. Now, nothing he did would be beneath their notice.
After Aimi had yelled at Kosuke to get away before the light-sphere turned the rest of them into monsters, too, as he’d stepped away, Kosuke had noticed an object abandoned on the ground amongst the stones, within the light-sphere’s periphery, near to the sphere’s edge a couple meters away. At first, he’d thought it was a small, misshapen boulder, or perhaps a giant, sand-smoothed seashell. But as he stepped away and got a better view, he realized he’d recognized it. He’d seen it in the mirror. It was one of his horns.
It must have broken off when I was… bigger—when the bus struck my head.
“Get back!” Hiro had said, raising a trembling arm—and Kosuke had complied, even as he raised one of his own, still-inhuman hands to feel where the horn on his head had chipped off.
The fallen horn hadn’t shrunken along with him. That was a mystery. And then one mystery became two when the horn dissolved into nothingness when the light-sphere left it behind. Kosuke took a step back, half-expecting it to reappear, and it did, only not in the way he’d expected.
It was Hajime who had pointed it out: the horn had disappeared, only to reappear on Kosuke’s head, his broken horn having magically repaired itself. Osamu stared at Kosuke for a good while after that, muttering something about “energy conservation”.
Hajime had been the last of them to emerge from the bus, and when their eyes met, Kosuke had given up on fighting back his tears.
Kosuke felt like a zoo animal, and his classmates’ stares only made it worse. He looked down at them from a body that, even on its knees, had his eyes two meters in the air. Soft, bristly golden fur dusted his trembling limbs, sprouting up like weeds from patches of dull cyan scales. Running his hands over his changed skin was an unreal experience. Innumerable pinpoints tugged at his skin as his fingers passed through his fur. The scales were smooth and dry. They were kind of like calluses, especially with the way they numbed his sense of touch. His shell had shrunk, now covering only his upper back. The spikes were little more than lumps on the bone. And if he focused, he could move his short, stumpy tail, whisking it across the silty earth.
Kosuke was keenly aware of the power within him, seething away in the pit of his stomach, hungering for… something—though what that something was, he wasn’t sure. Looking back on it, he realized it had been there ever since the crash.
No, not just the crash, he thought. That sound. It had planted a seed in him. But what was its purpose? Was it good? Was it evil? Kosuke didn’t know, and it scared him that he didn’t know. He was also pretty sure it would have scared his classmates, though, to their credit, they were already scared of him. They’d huddled up by the back of the bus, all except Osamu and Hajime, who kept watch on him for their own reasons.
Eventually, the silence became more than what the boy could bear.
“It’s me! I’m Kosuke!” he said, in a deep voice. A wolf’s voice. “I’m still me!”
A weeping wolf.
Koji stepped out from the group with a stomp of his foot on the rock. “Then why did you hide it?!” He’d puked all over himself after the crash. The stains of vomit on his blazer had only just begun to crust and dry.
Hajime glared at the Vice-President of the Student Council, and then walked up to Kosuke, and the sight made Kosuke fur stand on end, only for his hope to die as Hajime stopped short of crossing through the light-sphere.
Hajime held his hand up to the sphere, but then stepped back.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m scared, okay!”
“It’s alright,” Kosuke said. He tried to stop crying, but he couldn’t. “It’s alright. “Hajime… I…” he gulped, “I don’t know what’s happening to me…”
Yet there was a brightness in Hajime’s eyes. “I…—wait a minute!” His eyes widened. He glanced back at the bus. “Of course! Why didn’t I see it before!” Hajime slapped himself on the forehead.
All eyes turned to Hajime. Hiro looked at him as if Kosuke’s friend might burst into a kaiju at any moment.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
“I bet this is some kind of conspiracy—maybe a DAISHU experiment gone wrong,” ” Hiro said. “There are stories of rabbit-men wandering Mt. Aoi, escaped from a DAISHU lab.” His eyes narrowed. “You two have always been at each other’s sides. Maybe they cooked you guys up in a lab.”
Moriko looked Kosuke in the eyes, her caution writ plain on her face. “I always thought you were kinda weird.”
Osamu stepped toward Hajime and then pushed his glasses up his nose. “Please, Hajime. If you have a theory, I would like to hear it.”
“If you ask me,” Aimi said, “I think we’re all dead, and this is Hell.”
“Aimi, Hell is not a testable hypothesis,” Osamu said.
“Who the fuck cares?” Hana griped.
Koji’s head drooped as he threw his hands in the air. “Maybe we should all just step through the swirling light and turn into monsters and be done with this already.”
Aimi narrowed her eyes. “You’re just saying that just because you want my clothes to fall off so you can look at my boobs!”
Hiro lowered himself into a squat. Wrapping his arms around his body, he rocked himself back and forth while muttering, “We’re all going to die. We’re all going to die…”
Sighing, Hajime turned away from the others and looked Osamu and Kosuke in the eyes.
“It’s your drawing, Kosuke.”
Kosuke’s fur stiffened, as did his ears. “What?”
“Your latest kaiju. You…” Hajime took a deep breath. “When you got big, you were turning into that creature.”
Kosuke’s mouth dropped. He gave his partially transformed body another good look-over, only this time, with a sense of hindsight almost as singular as the power knotted in his belly.
Hajime was right.
Osamu’s brow flattened, as if to crush his eyes. “His drawing?” The ace-student stammered. “Tha—that’s… how would that even be possible? Did the aliens scan his brain?”
Hajime blinked. “Aliens?”
Crossing his arms, Osamu nodded vigorously. “The earthquake might very well be some kind of superweapon meant to debilitate, confuse, and frighten our planet’s populace!”
“Isn’t it easier just to say we’re in Hell?” Aimi asked.
“Hell isn’t scientific,” Osamu said.
“And aliens are?” Hana said.
Kosuke spoke up while Osamu was mid-nod. “How is any of this possible?”
“What are you talking about?” Koji said, wringing out his arms. “This is crazy talk. All of you are crazy!”
Hiro covered his head with his hands while he continued muttering, “We’re all going to die,” over and over again, under his breath.
Hajime turned around and glared at the Student Council Vice-President. “It’s not crazy.” Then, with determination stern in his eyes, he ran over to the pile of broken bags that littered the ground where the corpses of their driver and Yamago-sensei had fallen.
“Ha-Hajime?!” Kosuke reached out with his arms.
Moriko screamed.“What the fuck are you doing?!” She started to run after Hajime, only to slip on the stones underfoot, though Aimi managed to grab her before she hit the ground.
“It’s alright,” Hajime yelled back, “I know what I’m doing.”
Meanwhile, the sound of Osamu and Koji groaning and Hiro and Hana snickering alerted Kosuke to the fact that he was no longer covering himself. The parts of his face that weren’t encrusted with scales burned with red hot embarrassment, like chakras dancing in his cheeks.
None of this felt real to Kosuke.
Maybe we really are in hell…
A moment later, hopping away from the glass, Hajime scampered back across the ravine’s floor, carrying something in hand. Kosuke instantly recognized it as his tablet computer—or, well, what was left of it. A vicious crack shot down the middle, turning half the screen into a psychedelic collage. Amazingly, the other half still seemed to work, because, even at a distance, his eyes could make out the details of his drawing on the other side.
Hajime passed it around to the other students, starting first with Osamu. Hiro got up from his squat once he noticed something happening and went to go see for himself.
Moriko handed it to him.
“Holy shit,” Hiro said, “Hajime’s right.”
A passing breeze tugged at Kosuke’s fur. Night was near, and the temperature was dropping rapidly, yet Kosuke didn’t so much as shiver. His inner heat kept him warm.
Kosuke didn’t know which made less sense: that he was turning into a kaiju, or that his drawing seemed to be to blame.
“How could my drawing have turned me into a kaiju?” he asked.
Osamu stared at Kosuke. “For all that DAISHU’s biotechnology research can do, I doubt something like this is within their capacity.” He pushed his glasses up again. “I think the aliens scanned your brain. You were thinking about the kaiju when the earthquake hit, correct?”
“I… I mean… I guess so?” Kosuke replied.
“You started screaming before the earthquake even happened.”
“Yes,” Kosuke said, “it was because of that weird sound. It was so loud.”
“I heard that… that noise, right before the quake,” Hana said. “Was that the sound you meant?”
Kosuke shook his head. “No. It was the one before it.” His tail drooped over the dirt. “None of you heard it?” His ears fell.
Osamu furrowed his brow. “Weird sound?”
Kosuke nodded. “It went mwirr mwirr mwirr mwirr over and over again, quiet at first, then louder, then quiet again. It got so intense in the middle that I couldn’t breathe.”
“Well, I didn’t hear anything,” Aimi said.
Osamu nodded. “If my theory is correct, the sound was their scan, and, perhaps, a feeling of suffocation was just a side-effect of their scan.”
Kosuke clenched his fists. His claws scraped through the dirt. “It wasn’t a feeling, Osamu. I couldn’t breathe.”
“Of course.” Osamu nodded again, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Though their motives are inscrutable—possibly even unknowable to beings such as ourselves—perhaps they did this to you because they are preparing to terraform our world and remake it in their image.”
Hajime pursed his lips in confusion “You think the aliens are kaiju?”
“Kaiju would have a better chance of surviving the eons it would take to travel however so many lightyears they needed to cross to get to our planet.”
“Osamu,” Aimi said, “when you talk, half the time I think you’re just making it up as you go.”
“Your point?” the boy replied.
“Well,” Aimi said, “now, I’m almost certain you’re making it up as you go.”
Kosuke went back to staring at his hands while his classmates continued to debate the impossible. About ten minutes passed, and then—in the dying light—Aimi yelled, and the sound made Kosuke’s ears twitch.
“Moriko, where are you going?” she asked.
Looking up, Kosuke saw Moriko walk off toward the satellite phone where he’d left it by her bag. Mercifully, he hadn’t damaged any of Moriko’s technology.
Despite all that’s happened, Moriko is still trying to get shit done.
Kosuke wished he had her resolve.
Taking a deep breath—and pausing this time, to make sure that he didn’t start growing again (and he didn’t) Kosuke crawled across the slick, stony riverbed on his hands and knees to get closer to his classmates, but then gave up and stood up.
Hiro was the first to notice him.