Chapter 320: Army of One (Patreon)

The demon god tilted its head back, opened its split jaws, and let out a violent roar.

The roar went beyond hearing and struck straight at bone and viscera. Every glass window in the village shattered in the same instant, and shards sprayed in all directions.

Roof tiles were shaken loose, cobweb cracks spread across walls, and several wooden houses nearby collapsed outright, throwing up huge clouds of dust. The villagers who had just regained their senses were hit by the shockwave, clamped their hands over their ears and dropped to their knees, blood seeping from their noses and mouths.

In the control room, Haiyama howled with glee.

"Did you see that, Ultraman?! This is true power! This is something you can never reach—"

In an instant, the silver-and-red figure vanished from the sky.

One second later, he appeared right in front of the Demon God Cruffith, less than ten meters away.

The demon god's roar was cut off. The approaching silver-and-red silhouette was reflected in its murky yellow crystals. Its split jaws tried to close and its arms had barely begun to rise, but everything was too slow.

Amamiya Rin's arms were already crossed into an L shape.

Dazzling light burst from his right arm, and the energy gathered to its limit at the elbow with a high-pitched hum.

"Wide Shot!"

Thousands of arrows of light surged from the edge of his right arm and poured into the demon god's chest at point-blank range. The dark gray rocky scales evaporated the instant the light touched them, the dark red veins burned to charred ash, and the demon god's torso began to disintegrate from the center.

Cruffith let out a short, shrill cry. It had no time to dodge, no time to defend, not even time to realize what had happened.

The arrows of light pierced its body and exploded out of its back, blasting the whole form to pieces. Dark red flesh and chunks of rock flew in every direction, and the residual light energy vaporized them in midair into gray-white smoke and dust, until nothing was left.

From the demon god's appearance to its destruction, less than three seconds had passed.

Clearly, for all its immense power, the demon god was nowhere near Amamiya Rin as a warrior.

In the control room, Haiyama stood frozen, his whole body trembling violently.

Four hundred years of knowledge, five years of scheming, all his ambition and obsession, had been ground to dust in a mere three seconds.

Fear! Indescribable fear!

Haiyama felt a terror unlike anything before, especially when those golden eyes turned toward him.

"No! Don't! I surrender!"

The Giant of Light burst through the clouds and vanished into the sky, four thousand meters up.

Then he turned his body over, head down and feet up, his right leg thrust forward, the power of light gathering around it into a searing blade.

The light patterns of the Wings of Wind unfurled fully behind him, trailing two long cyan tails of light, and his whole body became a silver-and-red streak of radiance driving from the sky straight down to the ground.

Seven Flying Kick!

A sonic boom exploded within the clouds.

Shockwaves rolled out in every direction as his speed climbed to its peak, and the ground below swelled rapidly in his vision. The outline of the steel tower went from blurred to sharp, and the little concrete cage of the control room quickly filled the center of his sight.

Haiyama raised his head and watched the light descend toward him. The expression on his face went from terror to blankness.

That moment stretched long, long enough for him to make out the giant's silhouette within the pillar of light, to see his own reflection in those golden eyes, to hear his heart beat one last time in his chest.

Then the light touched down.

"BOOM!"

The Tower was kicked in two. Its upper half tore free of the base and toppled to one side, its twisted metal frame and shattered speaker array crashing into the ruins and throwing up dust that filled the sky.

The instant the light touched him, Haiyama's body turned into a mist of blood. The crimson fog was swept outward by the shockwave in every direction, like a silent red drizzle.

The magic circle on the ground was crushed by the impact of the giant's landing. The edges of the deep pit collapsed completely, and the dark red liquid poured back into the bottom of the pit, drowning every trace.

Amamiya Rin slowly straightened, pulled his right leg out of the ruins, and swept his golden eyes over the scene below.

The villagers stood dazed beneath their eaves, on the ridges between fields, at the mouths of alleys, staring up at the Giant of Light who had just fallen from the sky.

Some stood with mouths open, unable to speak. Some rubbed their eyes, thinking they were dreaming. Some crouched on the ground, clutching window frames whose glass had been blown out, lost in a daze.

Amamiya Rin checked over the village once more. The women who had been turned into demons had all recovered, the hypnotized had awakened, the demon god's altar was destroyed, and Haiyama was annihilated. The infants collected from all over were wailing at another location.

Amamiya Rin spread his Ultra Psychokinesis outward, and the invisible force field, like an enormous hand, gently enveloped the crying babies.

Their swaddling was stained with dark red marks. Some were still struggling inside it, and some had cried themselves hoarse and could only manage broken sobs.

He confirmed the infants' vital signs. Then the Wings of Wind shook out once more, and the silver-and-red figure rose from the ground, left the sky over Shirobe Village, and sped toward Tokyo.

In less than five minutes he touched down in front of the largest general hospital in the city.

On the streets below, pedestrians stopped in their tracks.

"It's an Ultraman?!"

"What's he holding?!"

"Babies! Those are babies! He's got so many babies in his arms!"

"What's going on? Why would an Ultraman be carrying babies?!"

At the hospital's main entrance, the security guard stood rooted to the spot, radio in hand, watching the silver-and-red giant land on the plaza out front, his huge body nearly level with the third floor of the outpatient building.

The infants were cradled between the giant's arms in a pale silver halo, like lamps floating on his palm.

Amamiya Rin lowered his head slightly. His Ultra Psychokinesis became a fine telepathic wave that carried straight into the hospital.

(Is anyone there? These babies need treatment. Please send people to receive them.)

Inside the hospital, the doctors who weren't in surgery all looked up, their faces uncertain and startled.

"Did you... did you hear that?"

"I heard that voice too."

"An Ultraman! It's an Ultraman!"

The medical staff stared at one another, until someone spotted Ultraseven through a window.

The head of emergency medicine was the first to snap out of it. He shouted to his colleagues, "What are you standing around for? Everyone, get the baby carts! Incubators! Ventilators! Hurry!"

The nurses reacted at once, and the wheels of the carts rattled urgently along the corridor floors. Orderlies rushed out the side door pushing several infant carts, each with fresh blankets and warming covers laid in.

With his Ultra Psychokinesis, Amamiya Rin lifted the infants from his arms one by one and settled them in the carts.

The nurses picked the babies up carefully, checked their breathing, wrapped them in blankets and attached labels, while the head of emergency medicine stood at the door directing the effort.

After the last cart was wheeled into the building, Amamiya Rin nodded to the doctors.

"Thank you for your hard work."

He left that brief word of thanks, kicked off the ground, and shot upward.

The Wings of Wind spread out behind him, and the silver-and-red figure became a streak of light that vanished at the edge of the sky. A few seconds later the sonic boom cloud arrived, late, drawing a white trail across the heavens.

"Thank you, Seven!"

The crowd at the hospital gate gazed up at the receding trail of light, waving their arms in excitement to thank the Ultraman.

Flying among the clouds, Amamiya Rin could no longer hear their cheering, and the success of the rescue did nothing to lighten his mood.

That deep pit, the congealed dark red liquid at its bottom, the broken bones settled beneath it... Within several hundred meters of Shirobe Village, who knew how many corpses were still buried in the earth, and how many babies had not been saved.

At three in the afternoon the sun had slid west, and its light had turned soft and slanted. The jeep pulled right on time onto the quiet tree-lined road outside the east gate of Aoba University.

Amamiya Rin parked at the roadside, switched off the engine and got out. Kirisaki Suimei was already waiting at the door of the White Whale Café.

"You don't look well."

"I'm fine. Let's go."

Amamiya Rin shook his head and answered curtly.

Kirisaki Suimei didn't press him. He only nodded and turned toward a silver-gray station wagon parked at the curb.

Just then, a low engine roar sounded overhead.

Rin looked up. A small plane passed beneath the clouds, several black canisters slung under its belly. The canisters' bottoms opened and dozens of flyers drifted down, spinning in the afternoon wind and scattering toward both sides of the street.

Amamiya Rin reached out and caught one.

The paper was thin and the printing crude, the lettering large and eye-catching, the edges of the dark ink bleeding slightly.

"Gather round! Everyone, gather round! Being alone is too lonely. We are all friends! Let's join hands and open our hearts to one another."

A line of smaller print ran beneath it: Army of One.

Amamiya Rin's gaze lingered on the page, and he frowned.

He sensed something abnormal, a faint but distinct spiritual residue clinging between the ink and the paper fibers, like a very thin film of vapor that condensed and dispersed.

It was an organization that had appeared only recently.

Kirisaki Suimei leaned over from the driver's seat and glanced at the flyer in Amamiya Rin's hand, his tone flat.

"It's a grassroots movement to deal with the disappearances. Surveys show most of the missing are people who live alone and have thin social ties, so someone started this group activity, urging everyone to join a community, live together and look out for one another. It's been spreading fast through Tokyo lately."

He paused, the corners of his mouth turning slightly downward into something close to a sneer.

"If you're alone, you vanish, so if you gather together, you won't vanish. That logic is far too shallow. There are plenty of people who feel out of place even standing in a crowd. If a group just crams people together without addressing the real loneliness deep inside anyone, then that so-called gathering is nothing more than another form of dilution."

Amamiya Rin folded the flyer and slipped it into his pocket.

"Let's go."

He pulled open the door and got into the passenger seat. Kirisaki Suimei started the engine, and the station wagon rolled smoothly out of the tree-lined road, merged onto the main avenue and headed for the expressway ramp.

Outside the window, another batch of flyers rained down from another plane, white scraps of paper whirling through the air like snowflakes out of season.

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Walnut’s Note: This was the last chapter published.