“Whoa whoa whoa,” the pudgy boy said, staggering back. “Keep your distance. I don’t know if you’re not Kosuke, but… shit I’m freaking out here—and that weird-ass ball of light isn’t making me any less wary.”

Hiro’s pants stank of urine. Worse, there was a faint musky odor that, somehow, Kosuke just knew meant that Hiro had jacked off sometime… late last night?

Kosuke’s brow furrowed in disgust.

Smells bombarded him, in particular, the fact that Aimi had just had her period.

He covered his nose with his hands before it got him into trouble.

“Ugh, Kosuke,” Koji groaned, “cover yourself, dammit!”

“Pff!” Hajime scoffed. He stabbed his thumb on his chest. “Out and proud, that’s what I always say.”

Rolling his eyes, Kosuke sighed. “I know you don’t believe me, but I don’t understand any of this either.”

And then Moriko screamed, and everyone turned to look.

“I did it!” she cried, shooting up onto her feet. “I’m in!” She thrusted her arms into the air.

Everyone except Kosuke gathered close, putting in suggestions for what to do first. Hajime lingered at a distance, halfway between Kosuke and the class. Kosuke watched from around the back of the bus.

“She’s accessing her Socialife account,” Hajime explained.

Then, in a matter of seconds, all the verve in Moriko’s expression drained away, until her hair looked like old electrical wires dangling out from beneath her green beret.

“What?” Aimi demanded, without any of her usual prickly tone. “What is it?” She was scared.

They all were.

Moriko looked up at the rest of the class.

“There’s… “ she inhaled, “the earthquake… it’s not just here. It’s happening everywhere. Natural disasters are going off all over the world. Tsunamis have struck northern Araka and western Tchwang. Tinesh has been devastated. Mu, Daxon, and Zid have been struck by massive earthquakes. Noyoko, Ediyaki, Elpeck, Stovolsk, Tvala, New Bazkatla. Everything’s fucked.”

“Are we going to be rescued?” Aimi asked. She shot a wary glance at Kosuke.

Moriko’s shoulders fell. “I don’t know. Skyscrapers are collapsing. Nuclear power plants are at risk of meltdown. Ravines are opening up in the earth. And us? We’re just a bunch of kids in the middle of the wilderness. We’re hardly a priority.”

Up above, the wine-drunk sky had distilled to ink and dying blue. The dark was rising.

“This is clearly not an isolated incident,” Osamu said. He looked back at Kosuke. “This comports with my theory of an alien invasion.”

“You… you really think that’s what’s happening?” Hiro asked, meekly.

Osamu looked down at the ground for a moment, clenching his fists with his arms at his sides. “Honestly, I have no idea…” he said. He spoke softly and hesitantly, like an injured bird.

Kosuke stuck himself out a little more from the back of the bus. “Can we use the satellite phone to call our families?”

“In general? Sure,” Moriko said, dripping with sarcasm. “But when the world is ending?” She shook her head. “No, you’ll have to wait your turn, which will never come, because there’s just too much traffic and not enough satellites.”

“How can there not be enough satellites?” Hajime asked.

“It’s not like every satellite up in orbit is gonna be compatible with satellite phones,” Moriko said. “And for those that are, they’re not gonna be of any help unless they’re sufficiently close to our position to pick up our signal, and, even then, they have to deal with any and all other communication traffic in this area.”

Koji stepped forward. “But we’re in the middle of—”

—Once again, the earth shook.

Hajime screamed: “Earthquake! Rock slide! Get behind the bus, now!”

The bus creaked as it slid across the rock, drifting deeper into the ravine. As it moved, the bus knocked into Kosuke, pushing him to the floor, and his light-sphere moved with him, rolling into the rest of the students. Kosuke pushed up with his arms, even as the earth shook beneath him.

People scattered and screamed, running off in separate directions, dodging Kosuke’s light-sphere. Aimi and Koji ran one way, further up the riverbed, while the rest of the group went the other way.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Kosuke looked up as he rose to his feet, craning his neck back. What he saw made his eyes widen in their sockets.

Oh my god…

It was an avalanche, but without the snow. Rocky precipices the size of cars broke free and tumbled down, triggering waves of debris that slathered down the ravine, felling trees in their path and pulling the wood into the falling tempest. One of the massive stones bounced off the earth and split into pieces, raining down a death spray of limb-sized shards.

Kosuke ran up to the base of the ravine, clearing the way for Aimi and Koji to cross without passing through his light-sphere. His two classmates scrambled across the rock as they turned around to head for shelter behind the bus, but the riverbed’s slippery stones stole their footing and sent them tumbling down.

No!

They weren’t going to make it.

Kosuke didn’t know what would happen if he exposed his classmates to the light-sphere’s touch. Between having their deaths on his conscience or turning them into monsters like himself, Kosuke knew he wouldn’t be able to live with the guilt of the former.

Sometimes, you just had to make the best of a bad situation.

Besides, he wasn’t about to let his best friend’s girlfriend just die.

With a wild scream, Kosuke pushed off the ground with all his might and ran like mad at Koji and Aimi. He was thinking on the fly, now, and hoped that it would be enough.

Even if he hadn’t been able to fully lift the bus in his current, partially-changed state, the fact that he’d been able to bear its weight at all told him that his current form was as inhuman as it looked.

Will it be enough to survive a rock slide?

He didn’t know, but he was about to find out. But, really, what did that matter? All that mattered was his certainty that Koji and Aimi wouldn’t survive, because they couldn’t.

Something something great power, great responsibility.

Kosuke ran. The seething debris gushed down the ravine in an all-devouring torrent, casting dust and wood into the fledgling night, but still, he ran. Up ahead, Koji had bent down to help Aimi get up off the ground. The two of them looked up, and for an instant, their eyes met Kosuke’s. The expressions on Aimi and Koji’s faces were poetry. They spoke of death and regret; of mistakes and second chances. He hoped they would trust him.

Kosuke was pretty sure they were too afraid to feel any more fear. He certainly knew he was.

Crashing mountains and storming forests roared like the beastly seas.

In between the split seconds, Kosuke flung himself into the space between his two classmates and the deluge, bringing them into his sphere of light. He knelt into the riverbed with his back to the cliff, curling his arms around Koji and Aimi.

“Kosuke!?” Koji gasped.

And in that moment, Kosuke felt something. It was almost familiar, now; this was the third time he’d felt it. It was like something clicked into place. The seal on the smoldering chakra came undone. Power flooded into him, led into his body by the plights in his classmates’ eyes. He saw himself reflected in those eyes, eyes that widened as he seethed, burned, and grew.

Fur thickened. Scales rippled. The diminutive shell on Kosuke’s back swelled to full size, its spikes popping into place, crashing into the oncoming rock. His tail lengthened and swept as his stance widened and widened. He grew until he was as large as he had been when the second quake had struck. The full force of the rock slide crashed into his shell and piled high. It weighed so much. Kosuke’s thighs buckled as the debris pushed him down onto all fours. The smooth river stones crunched like sand beneath his spiked, scaly knees. He spread his arms wide, terrified of injuring the people he was trying to protect, pushing his padded hands into the riverbed to make a roof of his chest. But still, the rocks piled high, heavier and heavier, flush with the heat of the day.

Kosuke’s arms trembled. The weight was crippling.

He groaned.

“No… I—I can’t…”

“You can do it!” Aimi said. Compared to the tumult, her voice was like a whisper, even though she yelled at the top of her lungs.

Kosuke felt something stir within himself. More power poured into him. The energy within did not relent, but burned fiercer and brighter, like the flames of a thousand suns.

He grew.

Kosuke gasped in shock and disbelief as his transformation sent him skyward, its vigor redoubled. Everything shrunk. The passing rock slide tousled through the feathery red mane that he knew was sprouting on his head and neck.

He was a titan. His growth brushed the rock slide aside as the last stones tumbled down his snout and off his nose. In moments, Koji and Aimi were little bigger than kittens at his feet, frail and vulnerable.

Looking down between his knees, it was pitch black beneath the cliffs of his scuted chest, yet still, somehow, he could see, pale and colorless. He saw Koji and Aimi kneeling on the riverbed with their hands over their heads, cowering over the stones. They were panting and shaking and they were roughed up beyond measure, but they were safe.

They were alive.

With his knees, Kosuke pushed against the debris piled on his back. It was like sitting up in a filled bathtub. Rock and wood spilled down his shoulders and the edge of his shell. He held it back with his arms, keeping it away from Koji and Aimi.

His two classmates craned their heads up and up.

Bits of rock tumbled off Kosuke’s shell.

“Please, move to safety,” he said, softly. His voice was distant thunder rumbling in his throat.

Slowly—disbelievingly—Koji and Aimi staggered off, heading toward the bus. In a moment, they were out of Kosuke’s shadow.

Kosuke’s light-sphere had grown with him—exponentially. If he had to guess, it was the better part of a kilometer in diameter, more than enough to contain the bus and all of his classmates. It glistened in the dark, casting faint shadows.

For a moment, Kosuke started to panic. His heartbeat was audible. It shook the air like a passing subwoofer.

Below, Koji and Aimi looked at the light-sphere’s distant edge, and then at their classmates down by the bus, and then at one another, and lastly, at themselves.

“I… I don’t see any changes,” Kosuke whispered.

They looked up at him.

“Are you sure?” Aimi asked.

“Do you feel anything?” Kosuke asked. “Like you’ve been plugged into a socket?”

They shook their heads.

Carefully, the boy-turned-kaiju turned around, pressing his weight against the rockfall. He stepped away from the ravine wall as cautious as possible, gripped by uneasiness until he was certain the last bit of the rocky heap settled onto the ravine’s floor.

Turning his head, Kosuke saw his classmates clustered by the bus, staring up at him with gazes struck by horror and wonder.

“Now what do we do?!” Hiro yelled, catching everyone’s attention.

And then, they heard a voice. It was the same as the voice he’d heard right before the first earthquake. All of them heard it.

Only this time, it spoke.

Who wakes me?