Kaiju Omega

I never really had to ask the question before what a monster really was. To me, a monster was three thousand tons of silicon-based bone and muscle from another dimension hell-bent on wiping out humanity from the planet. I could never comprehend that there would be anything else like the kaiju in this world or the next. When the beast showed itself we ended up having to ask ourselves just who the real monsters were. Them . . . or us?

- Marshal Hercules Hansen, PPDC

Chapter 1

Fire Under The Ice

2040 A.D.

Undisclosed location in the Sea of Japan

Wind howled across the icy peaks of the snow covered island.

Tarou looked up, pushing his hood back a little to see better, and suppressed a shudder. It wasn't the freezing cold that was making him shake. To his ears the howl sounded more like a distant roar.

"Kichirou?" He called out to the man who tromped several feet ahead of him. "Are we really sure this is such a good idea?"

Kichirou Shoichi stopped and half-turned to look back at him. He was a head taller than Tarou and when he tromped back to get almost nose-to-nose with him, Tarou found himself flinching.

"What?" Kichirou raised his sunglasses to glare at Tarou directly. "Now you decide to ask this?"

"I just . . . I mean-"

"We paid those fishermen thousands to get us to a restricted island out here." He thrust a thickly gloved finger at Tarou's chest with each point he made. "We paid thousands more on the black market to pay for the equipment we're lugging around and we borrowed thousands from the yakuza to buy it all! So you decide now, when we're finally here, to question if we should do this or not?" The finger thrust became an open-palm push and Tarou was forced to take a step back. "You idiot!"

Looking down to the ground in shame, Tarou gripped to the handle of the case he carried and gulped. Kichirou was right. Asking the yakuza moneylenders for the funds was pretty much the point of no return. There would be no way they could pay back the money through just working it off at the blue collar jobs they had.

"Instead of questioning, you should be breaking out that portable detection equipment." Kichirou growled his words out and pushed his sunglasses back down over his eyes. The sun's glare off the snow was partially blinding. "We should be getting close."

He did as he was told and got down on a knee to put down the case and open it up.

"What's going to happen to us if the kaiju isn't here?" Tarou couldn't help but ask the question.

"If it isn't here then we have a pair of great-grandfathers who were big fat liars." Kichirou seemed to be glaring at him again through the mirrored shades. "I seriously doubt our separate families concocted a fake story of how they took out a kaiju back in the 50s with an avalanche just to look impressive to us kids."

Tarou noted that Kichirou's words didn't exactly answer his question. He had to stop a moment as the wind kicked up again, the chill and the beast-like howl sending shivers down his spine.

"What if the kaiju is here and it's still alive?" The scare made the words tumble out of his mouth. "There are no Jaegers anymore so-"

"You really are an idiot," Kichirou scoffed. "Eighty-five years under freezing cold ice and snow and you think it's still alive?"

He had no reply for him and just kept feeling that sense of dread in his stomach. Kichirou sighed, then put a hand on his shoulder.

"When we find this perfectly preserved dead kaiju body, do you know what gets to happen?" He got on a knee, getting eye to eye with Tarou. "We get to harvest every single inch of it. The eyes, the skin, the bones. Ah, Tarou, the bones alone. We are going. To. Be. Rich."

Tarou started to feel his resolve return, "Even one claw. That could make us hundreds of thousands."

"And this thing has more than one claw. Think millions. Tens of millions of yen."

"Millions," The thought of that much money brought a smile to Tarou's face. "There would be more than enough to pay back the loans. More than enough for the both of us!"

"You have that right, friend." Kichirou pat him on the shoulder once. "But we still have to find it so . . . "

"Right!" Tarou said excitedly, then got to the business of putting the equipment together with renewed eagerness. The potential danger temporarily drowned out by his greed.


As far as Kichirou was concerned, Tarou Ikeda was a moron.

It was only by chance that they were working for the same company and only by chance that they got to talking during a company party. Idle talk about their families dug up eerily similar tales from their respective great-grandfathers of a kaiju they supposedly killed back in 1955. Further digging in to old government records brought up more connecting dots and the likelihood of an impossible truth. They put together the notion that the body was still where they left it. It was on an island designated to be a nuclear waste dumping site, covered in ice and snow, never to be trodden upon by civilian feet.

Kichirou didn't believe it to be a waste site, but a graveyard. Kaiju parts still sold on the black market which was why it was being kept quiet. They had a potential goldmine, but they had to claim it. Was it risky? Yes, but if they worked fast and cleared the corpse out before the government knew then they'd be rich.

There was also the chance of Tarou meeting with an ugly accident while they harvested the parts. Kichirou wasn't keen on sharing and Tarou wasn't the one who risked going to the yakuza for funds. Kichirou had risked more and deserved more. He deserved it all.

And Tarou was an idiot.

He'd almost gone to a government official to track a lead and nearly gave everything away. Luckily, through some fast talking on Kichirou's part, they passed the inquiry off as just an oddball curiosity and a five thousand yen bet. After that he couldn't trust Tarou with any other prodding.

Speaking of trust . . .

Just as Tarou finished putting the scanning equipment together and turned it on, he snagged it from his hands. Typical "No Backbone" Tarou didn't even so much as peep.

The device, as far as he understood it, was supposed to be able to detect any kaiju-like signals and put it on a simple read-out display. Apparently, some of the helicopters that used to haul around the Jaegers had these devices and it helped them keep track of kaiju that had dived under water. They were expensive to make and long after the end of the kaiju war only a dozen or so were left. Kichirou used some of his shady contacts from his youth to find one. Something that cost him a lot of yen and a few rounds of beer.

Turning one of the dials, he held the devise up to look through the screen. It was doing its job and giving him a digital layover that outlined the land he saw through it. Ahead and high above him he saw the tallest peaks of the island, dark grey rock protruding where the snow didn't cover. If those were the ones that great-grandpa Tsukioka told him about, then . . .

He panned the devise downward, his heart beating a little faster. The outline shifted to match what he pointed at. A frown started to appear on his face as nothing registered.

"You sure you put this thing together right?" He asked after pointing it another direction.

"Yes, I did," Tarou replied. "Are you using it right?"

"Of course I'm using it right!" He shook the devise and turned more dials. "It might be defective."

"W-what do we do if it is?" That irritating panicked tremble entered Tarou's voice again. "Can we exchange it?"

"Moron," Kichirou didn't bother looking at him. "Like we have a damn receipt for this thing."

He smacked the side of it with his hand and started to walk while Tarou started to ramble.

"But, Kichirou, if it's broken how are we supposed to find the kaiju? We don't find the kaiju then we don't get the money. We've already spent too much as it is. My girlfriend keeps asking when we're going to go out next and the landlady knows I'm trying to avoid her! I don't want to go back to living with my mother especially if the gangsters come around looking for-"

"Shut up!" Kichirou hollered and he heard Tarou clamp his own mouth shut.

In the ensuing silence he held his breath as the device gave another soft pinging sound. He'd thought he'd heard it before, but Tarou's blathering had covered it. Walking faster, he kept going in whatever direction that would make it ping faster and louder.

He was scrambling through the snow as fast as his thick boots would allow him to when the ping became a beep. Coming to a stop, he raised the device and saw upon the screen a hazy blue indicator noting something under the ice. Kichirou moved it about, trying to get a sense of its size. It was massive. So massive that he really couldn't get a solid outline on it.

"I found it," he whispered. "It's here."

"Kichirou?" Tarou came scrambling up the snowy incline. "What is it?"

Kichirou paused to smooth out his features before looking back at him. "We found it. Here!" He pointed at the ground in front of him. "Get the marker out quick! I'll tell you where to hammer it into the ground."

That idiotic wide smile of Tarou's appeared again and he shrugged off his pack to get out the metal spike with a bright red flag at the end. Kichirou directed him where to go and let Tarou do the grunt work of pounding in the marker with his climber's pick. He had to make some use of Tarou while he had him, after all.

Inwardly, he gloated about all the money he was about to make. He was so busy imagining the wealth he'd be able to lord over everyone that he didn't notice his fiddling of the dials set the devise to find one thing and one thing only.

Nuclear energy.


Tink. Tink. Tink.

The sound was new.

The sound was . . . annoying.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

Sleep. Sleep in the cold.

But this noise . . .

Tink. Tink. Tink.

Just wanted sleep.

Sleep meant no light. No sound.

No feeling hungry. No feeling alone.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

Should move. Should move to stop the noise, but . . .

So cold. Can't move. Just sleep.

Tink. Tink. . . . .

Noise is gone.

Good.

Sleep.


A/N: Last Edit 1/13/2014