Chapter 307: When I First Saw an Ultraman, I Thought (Patreon)

I met God.

The voices on the [Tomie Network] grew more and more frantic. The idle amusement of spectators was gone.

(Enough. Stop.)

(Your soul is already cracking. Keep this up and it'll shatter.)

(A broken body can be mended with life force. A broken soul isn't so easy to recover, and you know that.)

(Are you really going to throw your soul away for a few hundred people you don't even know?)

(Don't be stupid. If you die, what are we supposed to do?)

(Dear, please. Come back.)

The clamoring thoughts surged through the [Tomie Network] like a tide. There were sharp curses, anxious pleas, even begging choked with tears.

The Tomies rarely agreed so completely on anything.

But Amamiya Rin answered not a single word.

He couldn't hear any of it. At this moment, only one thought remained in his heart: stop this plane.

Saving innocent lives needed no reason, and no weighing of gains and losses!

"Not enough… not nearly enough."

He clenched his teeth. His penetrating psychic force passed through the thick alloy fuselage unobstructed, and laid the entire interior of the cabin bare before him.

Passengers packed the seats, old and young, men and women, all of them swallowed by thick despair.

In the pitching, tilting cabin, luggage, cups and loose items flew everywhere. Children's heart-rending wails, the muffled, breaking sobs of adults, and screams rising one after another pierced the metal walls and poured into Amamiya Rin's senses.

A white-haired old man gripped his wife's hand tightly, eyes shut, waiting for death to come.

A young mother held her sleeping toddler in a death grip, shielding her child with her own body.

A young boy stared out the window at the clouds rushing upward as they fell, his eyes full of bitterness and terror.

The crew braced against the violent turbulence and did everything they could to calm the passengers, but despair they couldn't hide trembled in their voices.

Hundreds of living souls, hundreds of whole families, all hanging by a thread.

They had done nothing wrong. They'd simply been dragged by Babirus into the battle between him and the demon, caught up in a catastrophe.

To let these innocent lives be trampled because of him—how could he ever allow that?

Unforgivable. Intolerable!

A fierce will ignited in his chest, blazing hotter than the light of a Soul Gem, purer than the ether energy of the Underworld.

"Aaaaaah!"

From deep within the giant's chest, a soundless roar exploded like a volcanic eruption. Raw emotion burst out of Amamiya Rin's heart.

His body of light was on the verge of breaking, its dim golden lines flaring with a brilliance never seen before, burning into a blazing halo against the dusk.

The wind wings surged outward, their span doubling. The wind wall, on the brink of collapse, abruptly froze, then gathered itself anew in a far more violent form, the airflow compressed into a buffer layer nearly solid.

Layer upon layer, Ultra telekinesis pushed outward, patching the cracked barrier again and again. Like clear amber solidifying, it grew a hundred times stronger and wrapped the airliner in a seamless shell.

His burning will pried open a deeper layer of his soul, and he turned the light of his heart into tangible force, holding up hundreds of tons of fuselage with all he had.

The plunge was checked inch by inch. The airliner's headlong dive, a violent free fall a moment ago, slowly eased into a gentle, low glide.

And this staggering sight played out in full view of everyone in the district.

In the city under the low-hanging dusk, the lights of ten thousand homes were flickering on. Countless citizens heading home, resting, or working lifted their heads to the sky at the same moment.

Pedestrians on the streets stopped in their tracks, staring upward, forgetting to walk or talk.

On the busy roads, cars slowed to a halt. Drivers rolled down their windows and gazed at the colossal silver-and-red figure high above, faces full of disbelief and awe.

The last light of the evening fell across the body of the Giant of Light. Its sacred radiance overturned the dusk and shone in the dim sky, the only light in the whole city.

Everyone saw it clearly: that godlike giant spread his arms and embraced the out-of-control airliner, gently and firmly.

A steel behemoth weighing hundreds of tons lay in his arms like a swaddled infant. A hopeless situation that should have ended in a fiery crash had been forcibly reversed by this giant of light who had appeared from nowhere.

"What is that?!"

"A giant… it's really a giant! Ultraman, like on TV?!"

"Oh my god! That plane was about to fall just now! But he caught it!"

"So Ultraman really exists? The Seven Armor in Nerima Ward wasn't just a rumor!"

"He's so tall… I've seen it on TV, but he really is this huge."

"It doesn't look like Ultraseven, but it feels a bit like him. Is it a different form?"

"Catching a falling plane is a classic Superman scene. I never thought an Ultraman, whose whole job is fighting monsters, would do something like this."

Cries of amazement rose one after another, spreading down the streets until they merged into the shock of the entire city.

He saved a falling plane like Superman. It was nothing like the rumors of destroying vengeful spirits and monsters, and to ordinary people, this was a true miracle.

Inside the airliner's cabin, the violent turbulence, the dizzying weightlessness, and the suffocating dread of near-death slowly faded. The fuselage no longer tilted wildly or plunged.

The passengers, who had sunk into despair, felt only bewilderment at the change taking place.

The flight attendant reacted first. She pressed her earpiece and asked urgently, "Captain, this is the cabin. The turbulence has stopped. What's the plane's status?"

The earpiece stayed silent for two seconds.

Then the captain's voice came back, tinged with a dazed quality she had never heard from this veteran pilot.

"…It's Ultraman."

"What?"

The flight attendant was completely lost.

"Ultraman, it's Ultraman! He's holding up the plane."

"Captain? Are you sure you're not hallucinating? Are you on something?"

she asked in disbelief.

The captain didn't answer.

In the cockpit, his gaze was fixed on the scene ahead.

Through the windshield he saw no clouds, no dusk, and no city lights drawing closer below. He saw an enormous face.

It was the face of a Giant of Light, an Ultra Warrior!

The silver cheeks had hard, strong lines, and the golden flame on the brow shone bright as a star. It differed somewhat from what he'd seen on TV, but it was unmistakably Ultraman's outline.

The moment that face appeared before him, the airliner's descent was checked, as if it had sunk into a soft sponge, and all the impact vanished.

There was no doubt. Ultraman had used Ultra telekinesis to save this falling plane.

At that moment, his eyes grew hot, beyond his control.

Not from fear, but from being moved.

He suddenly remembered how he'd felt as a child, in church, looking up at the murals on the dome.

So that's what it was!

In that instant, he fully understood the line Captain Iruma Megumi had spoken in Ultraman Tiga.

"When I first saw Ultraman, I thought I had met God."