I slowly climbed the stairs to my floor. Every step echoed hollowly in the empty stairwell. I wasn't tired—my muscles didn't even feel the strain—but it was terribly, unbearably boring. Life in this body sometimes felt like watching a movie on endless fast-forward.

  Ding!

  I flinched. What was that sound?

  Ding!

  The source was discovered in my pocket. My bezel-less "space-phone" had come alive, glowing with a notification. A message from Leon.

  "Listen, Arkgrim, drop the math homework if you did it."

  I snorted, my fingers quickly tapping on the glass:

  "What homework? I was officially allowed to sleep in class. I'm outside the system, Leon. Have fun yourself."

  The apartment was quiet. The old man hadn't returned yet—apparently, his "here and there" work dragged on. I tossed my backpack into a corner and collapsed onto the sofa, fishing the phone back out. Let's see what this world lives on.

  The newsfeed was speckled with headlines that made my eyes dazzle:

  "Third Legion successfully repels attack in Fukushima!"

  "Fourth Legion eliminates Snake-level specimen in Mito. No civilian casualties!"

  The whole world seemed to have gone crazy over these Legions and Kaiju. They shouted about them from every iron, plastered their emblems on cereal boxes, and experts with smart faces analyzed their tactics.

  I went onto a video hosting site. Top views: "Top 10 Most Epic Battles of Mon Fun", "How to Survive a Tiger Attack".

  Politics? Deadly boring. Old men in suits arguing about borders and taxes while creatures capable of devouring those very borders along with the offices crawl out from underground.

  I put the phone down. The screen went dark, leaving me in the twilight of the room.

  'What am I even interested in?' flashed through my head suddenly.

  Math came too easily to me to bring any pleasure. Food was tasty, but it's just fuel. The people around me seemed either fragile, or angry, or—like Leon—strange dreamers.

  I looked at the clock. Seven in the evening. The old man would come late, and sitting within four walls listening to the silence of my own mind was beyond my strength.

  "I'm going for a walk," I muttered to myself, grabbing my windbreaker. "After all, this city must look different at night. Maybe at least the neon signs won't be so boring."

  I slammed the door shut, leaving the empty apartment to wait for its owner. I hope the old man doesn't discover the disappearance of all his forks too quickly. Although... that was the only thing all day that made me smile sincerely.

  Chapter: Flash in the Night

  Walk down the stairs? No way. My limit of patience for today was exhausted back on the first floor of the school.

  "The shortest path is a straight line," I thought, walking up to the open window.

  One step into the void. The wind instantly hit my face, whistling in my ears, but I felt no fear—only a pleasant weightlessness. Right before the ground, I slightly reinforced my legs with mana, dampening the inertia, and landed softly on the asphalt. Not a single joint even cracked. Yes, this is definitely better.

  Nighttime Yokohama was alive. It hummed, glowed with neon, and smelled of cheap food. But even amidst this festival of lights, I felt some kind of falsehood. It was all too petty.

  I froze, listening to the vibrations of the earth. There, deep below, something was stirring. Heavy, angry, greedy.

  With one powerful leap, I flew onto the roof of the nearest high-rise, and from there—onto the spire of a skyscraper. The world below turned into a map of glowing dots. I felt the monster approaching. It was close. Another leap, this time several kilometers forward, a rapid sprint across the rooftops—and here I am, frozen on the edge of a concrete cornice.

  "Right below us," I whispered.

  At that moment, my "space-phone" in my pocket let out a desperate scream.

  [ATTENTION! THREAT LEVEL 5 DECLARED: SNAKE. WARD {CENTRAL}.]

  Usually, a "Snake" is a pack of medium Kaiju, but right now a single, solitary dot was pulsing underground. A massive one. A loner.

  "Well, come on, crawl out," I squinted. "Now we're gonna..."

  I didn't have time to finish. The roar of rotor blades sliced through the sky overhead. A blinding searchlight beam struck from above, flooding the roof and the square below with deathly-white light. Figures in black poured out from the belly of a heavy dropship—the Corps soldiers operated like a perfectly tuned mechanism.

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  But one silhouette stood out against the rest.

  A girl. She jumped without a parachute. Ari Nor. Commander of the Fourth Legion.

  She landed a couple of dozen meters away from me. For a moment, her gaze—cold, evaluating—slid over my figure, lingered on my black eyes, and then she turned sharply toward the epicenter of the underground hum.

  I froze, mesmerized by what I saw. My vision, capable of discerning energy flows, registered something incredible. Ari Nor wasn't just standing there—she was pouring colossal amounts of mana into her bio-suit. Her weapon, a massive, futuristic cannon, began to pulse with a bright blue light, charging the air around with electricity. The girl's hair stirred from the excess static.

  "Access granted. Power—ninety percent," her calm voice reached me over the radio.

  The ground erupted. With a deafening roar, the carcass of a thirty-meter Kaiju burst from under the asphalt. The monster, resembling a scaly worm with rings of sharp teeth, barely had time to let out its first roar when the air shuddered.

  KABOOM!

  The shot was of such force that the shockwave almost threw me off the roof. A blinding pillar of energy pierced the night fog, plunging precisely into the creature's head. The next second, the monster's skull simply ceased to exist—it exploded in a fountain of black slime and bone fragments. The massive carcass crashed onto the ruins of the square with a dull, bone-crushing roar.

  The smoke slowly settled. Ari Nor lowered her smoking weapon; her suit was still emitting a dim glow, "digesting" the remnants of energy.

  "Wow..." I exhaled into the emptiness, and a smile appeared on my lips all by itself. "Holy crap."

  I thought that only weaklings were left in this world, capable only of shuffling papers and playing basketball. But this... This was real power. It seems this humanity still has hope after all. Or, at least, worthy opponents.

  Ari Nor lowered her massive rifle, which was still radiating heat and the acrid smell of scorched metal. She took a few steps toward me, and her gaze, which had just been striking with cold and death, suddenly warmed. A soft, almost maternal smile played on her lips.

  "Well, hello," she said quietly. "How did you manage to end up right in the center of this chaos?"

  "I... I was just taking a walk," I muttered, feeling strangely unarmed under her gaze.

  "Just taking a walk on a roof during a 'Snake' attack? I see," she laughed softly.

  Ari walked right up to me. Her hand, encased in the high-tech glove of the bio-suit, touched the top of my head. And in that very second, the world around me ceased to exist.

  She began to lazily and affectionately run her fingers through my hair, scratching the back of my head, and I... I just "melted". My legs turned to jelly, a blissful emptiness reigned in my head, the kind not even the strongest pills could provide. It was so right, so necessary, that I almost started purring. I had never felt anything like this, but at that moment it seemed that my entire existence had been striving for this exact touch.

  "Ari, report your status! Ari, respond!" the radio crackled in her helmet. Headquarters' voice sounded insistent, almost angry.

  She reluctantly removed her hand, returning to reality.

  "Everything went smoothly. Threat neutralized," she dropped into the microphone, but her gaze was still fixed on me.

  I was almost lying at her feet, feeling completely helpless, but strangely happy. The mask of her helmet slid to the side with a quiet hiss, revealing her face. She was beautiful—that stern, sharp beauty that belongs only to those who are used to winning.

  "What's your name, miracle?" she asked, leaning in.

  "Arkgrim..." I barely managed to say, still trying to gather my thoughts.

  "I see," she smiled again. "Well, Arkgrim, you have very soft hair."

  At that moment, cleanup soldiers began jumping onto the roof. Heavy boots, the clank of weapons—the magic of the moment crumbled to dust.

  "Commander, we have an unauthorized person here! Civilian in the blast zone! Remove him immediately!"

  Ari Nor straightened up, her face once again becoming a mask of discipline.

  "Alright then, Arkgrim. See ya. You don't belong here."

  She turned to walk to the helicopter, and I felt a prick of genuine, almost childish resentment. I looked at her back, unable to move. But suddenly she stopped.

  "Oh, wait, almost forgot," Ari walked quickly to the side of the helicopter, took a small plastic card from a pouch, and returned to me.

  She held it out. It was that very collectible card from the Legion series that Leon collected so fanatically. "Ari Nor. Commander of the 4th Legion." But on the back, right over the glossy coating, was a bold flourish in black marker—her personal signature. An ultra-rare artifact that collectors would tear throats out for.

  "Keep it as a souvenir of your walk," she winked.

  The next second, two burly soldiers hoisted me up by the armpits like a sack of potatoes.

  "Hey! Easy there!" I protested, but they were already dragging me toward the stairs, away from the cordoned-off zone.

  I looked back, clutching the card in my hand. The helicopter began to rise, blasting the roof with a whirlwind of cold air. Ari Nor stood by the open hatch and looked down until her silhouette dissolved in the night sky of Yokohama.

  'Suicide soldiers, huh?' I recalled my own words, looking at her flourish on the plastic. 'Well, if they are all like this, then maybe this world isn't so bad.'

  Chapter: Echo of Tenderness

  When the soldiers set me outside the cordon, I didn't argue. I just turned around and trudged toward home. The city around me hummed just the same, but now this noise didn't annoy me.

  In my head, right where Ari Nor's fingers had just been, a strange, pulsing warmth still lingered. It was damn weird. I, Arkgrim, who had just cold-bloodedly offed three men and burned a car, was now walking down the street smiling stupidly, remembering being scratched behind the ear. All the weight, all that eternal tension in my muscles and the hum of mana in my head—it all seemed to have evaporated. I felt light. So light that I even forgot I hate stairs.

  I climbed up to my tenth floor, not even noticing the ascent. My step was light, almost weightless.

  The clock in the lobby displayed 23:00.

  'Yeah,' I thought. 'Looks like I'll oversleep tomorrow.'

  I opened the apartment door. The light in the kitchen was on—the old man had already returned. He was sitting at the table, propping his head on his hand, looking exceptionally puzzled.

  "Oh, Arkgrim," he looked up at me. "Why are you so late? I was starting to think a Kaiju snatched you on the way. And anyway... have you seen where all the forks went? I've been trying to eat rice with sushi chopsticks all evening, and it's some kind of torture."

  I didn't answer. I didn't even want to make a sarcastic remark. I just walked past him into the room, feeling a sudden, heavy fatigue crashing down on me.

  Before reaching the bed, I simply collapsed onto the floor right in the middle of the room. The cold linoleum pleasantly cooled my cheek.

  "Hey, kid, what's wrong? There's a bed right there," the roommate's voice called from the hallway.

  I couldn't hear him anymore. I closed my eyes, clutching the autographed card from Ari Nor in my pocket. Before completely falling asleep, I caught myself thinking: tomorrow there will be math, Leon will whine about homework, and the old man will most likely try to eat soup with a comb... and for some reason, that didn't seem boring to me at all.

  The world around me slowly quieted down, leaving me alone with the warmth of a stranger's palm that still warmed the top of my head. There had been enough adventures for today.