Chapter Text
Narumi Gen kills his first kaiju with a limb he haphazardly rips off another beast’s corpse in the midst of a large-scale outbreak when he's seventeen.
When the Force's soldiers show up, he intends on getting the hell out of dodge before they can berate him for something stupid like not being at the shelters when he clearly can handle himself.
Unfortunately, at least for him and his prospects of an escape, the soldiers that come to greet him are a Platoon Leader and the Captain of the First Division.
The Platoon Leader in question grabs him before he has a chance at taking out another kaiju and Gen kicks and screams until Shinomiya Isao comes crashing down from the skies and makes mince meat out of the remaining kaiju.
The two soldiers are impressed by his skills, if not slightly horrified by the fact that he can just.. do that. At least enough for them both to insist he should join the Force.
When Gen points out that he’s still a minor, the two convince him to at least come to the labs to check why he has such ease at synchronizing with unrefined kaiju cells.
He's apparently a bit of a freak of nature.
Captain Shinomiya once again urges him to join up when he’s ready, telling him that the First will welcome him if he makes it through basic training. The First Division doesn’t take new recruits, after all.
He doesn’t join up immediately.
Instead, as he ages out of the foster system with little belongings to his name, the orphanage asks him to stay as something of a janitor because the children love him, and their bleeding hearts probably want to give him a shot at not ending up on the streets.
His salary is probably considered shit, but he doesn’t complain when they provide a room and feed him.
During that year, he kills three more kaiju when he wanders around Tokyo prefecture on his days off. He finds that even though the most dangerous kaiju are drawn towards densely populated cities, there still are stragglers popping up all over the country. It makes sense. There’s a lot of forest in Japan, many wild animals that probably work as a sufficient diet for most low-fortitude kaiju.
He still finds it strange that the JAKDF isn’t dealing with them. It’s not like the fortitude will go down if they’re given time to eat and grow.
Then he sees a village in the mountains get leveled by a group of low-fortitude kaiju on TV. The Defense Force does its rounds of PR to cover up the miss, but Gen knows what happened. The village was too far out, right on the outskirts of the Fourth Division's jurisdiction, and the JAKDF rarely wastes resources on patrolling the less populated parts of their territory.
So out of curiosity, and probably part-spite, Gen enlists. He aces the written exam and when he’s invited to the physical exam, he can’t help but be baffled by the low standard of the batch he tests alongside.
It isn’t even hard to end up on top.
He does basic training as suggested, but then instead of getting picked up by the First Division like Shinomiya Isao had promised, he manages to piss off every single superior to the point that at the end of it, he’s given an ultimatum: Either step in line or walk.
Gen walks.
He also snags some equipment on his way out. None of the fancier stuff that they’d actually miss, like a rifle or gun, but a probably-not-very-legal copy of the Force's own kaiju monitoring system.
He has his own way of doing things and he isn’t going to let stuffy old people with outdated views on respect tell him what to do.
Instead, he decides to start travelling the country, picking up odd jobs on the way. He already has proof that the JAKDF isn’t extending their resources as efficiently as they should’ve been, and with the skills he has at hand, he wouldn’t be able to sit on his ass when he knows he could be doing something about it.
Maybe it isn’t much, but at least it's something.
***
With a kaiju head clutched in his hand, he slides off the back of the beast he just killed and walks over to squat down in front of his phone on its shitty tripod.
It's currently livestreaming.
“This thing,” he says, voice muffled behind the bandana he has tied over his mouth as he presents the head to the camera while poking at its jaw. “Has a bite force that lets it chew straight through metal. It seems to have split off from its group. I have no idea how the Force missed it slipping away from the outbreak a day ago, but this village just up the hill can consider itself lucky that my gut feeling said this area was at high risk.”
He pauses to read the chat a bit, chuckling at the praise and awe. Then he raises a brow at a question.
“Why I'm not part of the Force with my skills? Hah, I actually did basic training with top marks, but got booted for insubordination. They didn’t like that I had my own way of doing things.”
He chucks the head back towards the carcass, slaps his hands on his thighs and stands back up with a grunt. His hand goes to his side where a fresh wound throbs.
His hand comes back red and he sighs.
“Looks like we're adding another one to the collection,” he mutters and grabs his phone, angling it briefly to show the bloody cut in his side before focusing on his face. “I'm probably gonna have to stitch it up.”
He glances at the worried messages in his chat and raises a brow.
“Of course it fucking hurts, but if I couldn’t handle getting hurt I wouldn’t be doing this.”
Some people ask him why he's doing this and he shrugs a bit. He could talk about wanting to protect those that fall through the cracks of JAKDF's protection, but he's already implied it enough, and if he was just about the charity work he wouldn’t be streaming it.
He doesn’t think his steadily growing audience has realized yet that he doesn’t have anywhere to go, that he's quite literally homeless. That he’s got no one and nothing.
In reality, his streams are currently his lifeline. His audience is the support beam, making sure the loneliness doesn’t crush him. He doesn’t know what he’d do without them, at this point.
Obviously, he doesn’t say any of that.
Instead he chuckles.
“Well, would you watch my streams if I was just some gaming streamer? You freaks clearly enjoy watching me fight monsters every now and then between normal streams,” he points out.
He does a walk around the perimeter, watching out for random slabs of debris that could trip him up while keeping an eye out for any remaining kaiju activity.
The blood flowing from his wound is definitely getting uncomfortable as it soaks into his shirt and the waistband of his pants. He’d probably be doomed to constant traces of blood stains if he hadn’t taken to wearing mostly black these days.
With an annoyed click of the tongue, he fishes out a hopefully–somewhat-clean rag out of his cargo pockets, then a roll of bandages, before bunching up his shirt and getting a look at the wound. It’s a steady flow, but he’s definitely had worse. The bleeding even seems to be slowing already. So he unflinchingly presses the rag to the wound and quickly wraps the bandage around to get some pressure on it until he can stitch it up back at his current squat.
Another glance at his screen has him stumbling, breath catching in his throat at the donation pop-up window. That's.. definitely more zeroes than he's used to seeing.
“I'd still watch if you weren’t constantly putting your life in danger! Now please go to the hospital, that wound looks really bad!’ Haruka says with a donation of.. way too much,” Gen reads out loud. He angles away the camera, blinking rapidly and taking a couple of deep breaths. He’s not going to cry on stream like some loser.
“Shit, that's- Seriously, thank you,” he chokes out. “I don’t really do hospitals unless I absolutely need it. They ask too many questions, you know?”
Technically not a lie, he just hasn’t had any injuries so life-threatening that they have forced him to the ER. He has found that fractures and flesh wounds are manageable if he’s chugging questionable hard liquor he finds left behind in the ruined apartment complexes he squats in through the worst of it, then relies on his strong healing factor.
There have been close calls, probably. But, hey, he's not dead yet!
Now, his viewers ask him how a cut bleeding that much doesn’t qualify as an emergency, pushing on what his threshold actually is. He waves the worry off and jokes about having to keep his skills at stitching himself up fresh. From the comments, he can gauge that his viewers aren’t entirely sure if he’s joking or not. Many of them think he’s putting on a brave face and will head to the hospital the moment the stream is over, while some of the older ones, the usernames he’s starting to recognize as regulars, clearly remain worried for his well-being.
It’s definitely for the best that a majority is under the impression that he’s joking about these things.
When he at last shuts down the stream, his hands are starting to shake and cold sweat is gathering on his back. Before he walks further, he takes a moment to double over in pain with a wheeze. Then he moves over to the kaiju carcass, pulling out a knife to cut off some of the meat around its thigh.
He’d probably get called insane for it, but he hasn’t had anything proper to eat in days, and the more animalistic-looking kaiju are more inviting than starvation. He’s done this before, and he’ll probably do it again.
Unless, of course, this is the time he gets food poisoning and dies.
With the slab of gore in his hand, he slowly straightens back up, mindful of his injury. He’s got a ten-something minute walk before his current squat is in reach, so he just has to take a moment to catch his breath before soldiering on.
He makes the walk in double the time, mostly because he has to stop every now and then to catch his breath and drink from his bottle of water. The wound might be worse than he anticipated.
For once, he isn’t staying at an apartment complex, but rather an abandoned two-story house. He’s grateful for that, because he doesn’t think he’s got it in him to make any kind of climb at the moment.
The place still has running water and electricity. It hasn’t been abandoned for long, after all.
When he shimmies in through the broken kitchen window, he sighs in relief to see that no one else seems to have been there and finds that the refrigerator he plugged in before leaving seems to have cooled down. He unceremoniously dumps the kaiju meat on one of the fridge shelves and goes to grab his bags that he has hidden away to set up camp in the bathroom.
Stitching oneself up never gets better, especially because he rarely manages to get his hands on any kind of local anaesthetics or stronger painkillers. He’s raided a couple of pharmacies and medical clinics that have gotten run over by kaiju in his days, but usually finds that the drugs are the first things that are gone. Needles and thread, however, are easier to stock up on.
He knows he definitely has a high pain tolerance, but even he gets squirmish at having to pinch his skin together to repeatedly pass through it with a needle and thread. At best he sometimes has some over the counter painkillers, but he barely feels any kind of effect from those anymore.
Tomorrow he’ll let himself rest and boil that slab of kaiju meat for so long that whatever parasites it might be carrying has to have died, he thinks. Then, if he doesn’t die from the meat and as long as the area doesn’t seem too compromised, he’ll spend a day streaming some game with his mobile hotspot.
***
Gen once again lives to tell the tale, streams a bit more and travels further across the country.
He encounters some small-fry kaiju that he disposes of before he even can think to stream it outside some farm lands, and immediately gets invited inside by the farmer that saw him fight.
There he stays for a week, helps a bit at the farm in exchange for lodging and food, before continuing his wandering.
He stops another kaiju attack right next to a village that he does manage to catch on a stream and lets one of the shop owners offer him a free meal as thanks before he’s once again on his way.
Now, he’s made it to the outskirts of Hokkaido. It’s summer, and probably the only time of the year he’ll dare traveling this far North with his threadbare clothes and meager supplies.
He’s been tracking the movement of a potential group of kaiju for several days and has finally managed to intercept it in a forest clearing near a small town.
The fight is going well and he’s got two more kaiju to go before he can leave.
But then Gen hears a helicopter approaching in the distance and grits his teeth in annoyance. He really has no interest in dealing with JAKDF soldiers that think they’re better than him just because they’ve got fancy equipment.
His wants and needs clearly mean nothing to the universe though, because as he drives the spiky spine he ripped from the back of the first kaiju through his current opponent's core and moves over to the last beast, he hears the unmistakable sound of a helicopter flying low. Then the sound of soldiers yelling and approaching footsteps.
He ducks under a clawed swipe. He can’t really afford getting distracted up this close and just steels himself for the undoubtedly annoying conversation that'll follow.
There's the sound of guns cocking, of someone yelling for him to move so they can get a clear shot.
It takes effort to not let his eyes roll into the back of his head as he swiftly gets in under the beast and drives his temporary weapon into the core in its chest. With another movement to get away from its collapsing mass, he decapitates the creature for good measure. A bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the soldier that told him to get away.
He gives the severed head a quick pat, ignoring the stunned silence of the soldiers that are watching him as he flicks off the gore running down the makeshift weapon in his hand, then starts walking off to where he’s left his phone rolling with a livestream.
“Hey, wait! Did you do all of this?! Who are you?” Someone calls after him.
He doesn’t wait.
“Hey, I’m talking to you! How the hell did you do this?!”
Footsteps approach him hurriedly from behind and doesn’t hold back the eye roll this time when a firm hand lands on his shoulder. He immediately grabs the wrist, ducking under the arm, then twisting and pinning it behind the man’s back in a steely grip, the other hand holding up the kaiju spike threateningly.
“How about you don’t touch me, yeah?” He suggests gruffly.
The man’s wearing one of the Force’s combat suits and Gen’s mildly surprised that the other doesn’t immediately power up and break out of the hold. Instead the guy grunts in pain, but makes no move to escape the hold.
“You’re right. I’m sorry for startling you,” the soldier concedes cautiously. “You’re moving like someone who’s been trained. Which division are you from? Operations weren’t aware that anyone else was deployed.”
Gen loosens the hold and backs off, chuckling.
“Do I look like I belong to a division? I’m just some guy,” he shrugs.
That makes the soldier falter. It’s an older man, probably a Captain or Platoon Leader from either the Ninth or Tenth, considering he’s currently in the countryside where their jurisdictions overlap. He doesn’t bother keeping up with every important face from every division when he’s doing his best at avoiding meeting the JAKDF.
“But- the combat suit. Your movements are enhanced,” the man says, baffled, turning to look at him.
Gen raises his brows, which probably isn’t very visible behind his bangs and the ball cap sitting low. He lifts the bottom of his shirt pointedly, showing off a strip of his stomach. Clearly bare. It’s obvious that he’s not wearing a kaiju-enhanced suit underneath his clothes.
“Which suit?” He asks, amused. “I’m not part of your organization, man. I’m working solo.”
The man’s breath catches and his eyes go wide. Gen thinks the man’s started by the lack of equipment, but the shock might also be due to the pretty gnarly semi-healed scars. Or the way his skin clings a bit too tightly over his bones in some places. He doesn’t exactly have a regular diet, considering his whole.. broke and homeless situation. He lets the shirt fall back in place and uses the momentary surprise as cue to start walking away.
“Are you saying you’re drawing all that performance out of that kaiju spine?” Even when Gen isn’t looking directly, he can hear the growing disbelief in the man’s voice. But, well, he doesn’t really give a shit if the guy believes him or not.
“Yup,” he calls over his shoulder, and waves a little with his makeshift weapon.
“Hey, what’s your name?” The man calls after him, following cautiously.
“What’s it to you?”
“I have to know who to thank for killing this flock of kaiju,” the man insists. “Also, would you like to join the JAKDF? I know we’re not doing recruitments at this time of the year, but we can make an exception for the exceptional. We could get you fitted with gear to make all of this even easier, yeah? What do you say?”
“Nah, I’m good,” Gen shrugs.
At this, the man almost stumbles in surprise.
“You’re good? Do you even understand what you’re turning down? It’s an opportunity of a lifetime! You’re clearly something special if you can synchronize with unrefined kaiju cells. We really need that strength.”
Gen turns around, walking backwards to give the man a searching look. The soldier actually looks sincere, and isn’t that hilarious? First they kick him out, and now they want him back. His grimace luckily isn’t visible behind the mask he always wears when he streams.
“Yeah, yeah, they said that the first time as well. I’ve already gotten kicked out once and I’m not interested in playing by your boring game rules,” he sneers. “Besides, I’ve been managing just fine on my own for the past years.”
And with that, Gen snatches up his bags and tripod, then leaves hurriedly. He’s glad that the soldier knows better than to run after him, but he has a sneaking suspicion that the Northern Divisions soon will be briefed to keep an extra eye out for him. He can’t stay up here anymore.
He had just found an old abandoned cottage that still had a working water pump in the yard, but there’s no way he can head there now that they’ll probably be trying to track him. Ugh. It had been nice to sleep under a proper roof for a couple of nights.
It’s at least good that he brought all of his shit this time, he thinks. He’d been unsure if his hunt for these kaiju would take him too far away for it to be feasible to return to the cottage anyway. So, at least he has all his things when he heads off into the woods and steels himself to sleep under the stars for a couple of nights before he can get to a train station. Hopefully he can at least find a cave mouth to seek shelter in, or a particularly nice tree.
As he walks, he takes his phone off of the tripod and finally holds it up to look at the chat. His battery is unfortunately starting to run low and the wilderness tends to come with questionable connectivity, so he’ll have to turn it off soon anyway. He’s lucky he at least has one charged power brick.
The comments are going wild about his successful hunt and the JAKDF immediately headhunting him. There are a couple of new donations that come as a blessing.
“Do I know who I just turned down? Nah, I don’t really keep up with all the faces in the Force,” he laughs. “My answer would’ve been the same even if I knew who he was.”
A few comments supply him with the name and title. Apparently it was the Captain of the Tenth Division. He nods along to that.
“I’ll give them credit where credit is due. They actually intercepted this kaiju group earlier than usual. They actually would've handled those in time even if I didn’t,” he muses. “You don’t think the Force has started keeping tabs on my streams?”
The chat points out that his kaiju neutralizations have been going viral for the past year, that the most recent one even was covered by news and all. He’d been close enough to a town that several civilians had actually watched his fight and praised him when the media later made their rounds to ask around. It had given him a slew of new subscribers and curious audience-members.
His inboxes are full of people trying to recruit him to the Force. Even internationally.
“Shit, you’re right,” he sighs. “Well, I luckily didn’t take any damage this round. Which is good, because to shake their tail, I’m going to spend my coming days taking the long scenic route back to civilization. I won’t stream until I’m back, because my connection is already dodgy out here and I can’t waste battery-time.”
The chat turns worried and he waves them off. “Don’t forget I’m used to this lifestyle, guys. And! Thanks to all of the donations this time, I’m going to treat myself to a night at some inn with running hot water when I’m back on the grid. Maybe I’ll finally get to charge my laptop enough to play something on it. I’ve been craving to sit down and game a bit. Send me some recs, maybe I can set up a game stream if I find a place with reliable wi-fi.”
With that said, he swiftly wraps up his stream. He thanks for the donations one more time, thanks his viewers for sticking around and turns it off. He immediately sets down his bags to dig into his collection of random shit, plugging his phone into a power bank as he pulls up a map and gets a good look at the distance to the next town.
It’s doable. Definitely not comfortable, but doable. He grabs his analogue compass from the bag and gets himself a good grasp on the direction, then hangs the strap around his neck. He grabs a bandana and makes a makeshift holster for his most recently acquired kaiju weapon to attach to his belt with a secure knot and shoves a knife into his waistband.
He breathes a sigh of relief when he sees that he still has a good amount of water in the backpack, as well as two lighters.
Alright, time to do this.
***
When Gen finally re-enters civilization, he makes a beeline for the first ATM he spots, and withdraws enough to last him a night to sleep under a proper roof.
The inn he finds is nestled into a back alley and the elderly woman looks shocked at his appearance. He can assume that he definitely looks like he’s been sleeping in the woods for several days straight.
Gen makes some half-assed excuse about being a solo hiker, asking how much they want for a night and a warm dinner, watching apprehension turn into a warm welcome as he pays upfront. He finds that they do have wi-fi as he gets led to a room down the hall, then asks if there are any laundromats nearby.
The woman waves him off and insists that he can use their machines for no extra charge, taking a short detour to show him to the laundry room. The host asks what he does for a living, and Gen explains that he livestreams and films his adventures to his audience. She asks what his account is called and he cheekily says that he might tell when he’s leaving.
When he finally shuts the door behind himself, he unceremoniously dumps his stuff on the floor with a groan, shedding his grimy layers of clothes on his way to the connected bathroom.
He stays under the warm shower spray for a long time, watching the water slowly start running clear. Getting to wash his hair with proper products is a treat he once wouldn’t have considered a luxury, but knows better these days.
He makes sure to look over each and every scar and bruise, making sure none of the more recent wounds have re-opened or started looking bad.
When he finally steps out of the steamy bathroom, he grabs the only somewhat clean t-shirt and shorts he has left in his bag, then bundles up his grimy clothes to get a load into the washer immediately. When he’s back in the room he plugs in every electronic equipment he has, making sure he’ll leave with fully charged power bricks.
He wraps himself up in a blanket, opens his shitty little laptop and lays down on the futon. He withdraws the donations, sending them over to the one card he owns. The bank has asked about his income several times, and he’s lucky that Twitch and the donation platform at least has proper papers he can submit. He operates.. mostly legally.
His next stop is Twitter, where he finds thousands of new notifications and followers. He winces at the realization that he probably once more has gone viral.
It’s good for his income, yeah. If he grows even more, maybe he’ll even be able to get a rental at some point. The problem is just that the JAKDF are going to get nosier with each passing day, and he’s going to be under more scrutiny than he’d like.
He makes a short status update. “Back on the grid after my hike,” he writes with a tree emoji and a thumbs up, then adds that he’ll get a stream going a bit later into the evening. Responses immediately flood the post, his followers excited to hear from him, voicing their worry and their relief at him being okay.
With that dealt with, he can’t be bothered to look too much into what exactly the internet and media has to say about him just yet. Instead he closes the laptop again, stretches out on the futon and promptly falls asleep.
He wakes a couple of hours later when the hostess knocks on his door with his load of clothes and invites him to their dining room for dinner. He may be a bit of a bastard, but not even he’s strong enough to say no to a well-meaning old lady.
The food is heavenly. It’s home-cooked and hearty, something that is a rarity in Gen’s life. The husband is a white-haired man who clearly delights in telling stories about their inn and the many exotic guests that have visited. Gen thinks he’s probably going to become one of those stories after he leaves, especially if they realize he’s the mysterious man the media is currently raving about.
He thanks them both, accepting the tray of tea and snacks pushed into his hands despite his sheepish protests, and slinks back to his provided room.
He sets up camp by the little tea table and bundles himself up in a blanket, then steels himself to look into what people have to say about him today.
It’s initially praise and awe at him being a civilian capable of fighting kaiju at the level of JAKDF soldiers. Then the conversation steers into the many times he’s mentioned that he has been part of the Force briefly and then, of course, his latest stint of turning the Tenth Division’s Captain down. He gets called arrogant and naive in a quote by a JAKDF-spokesperson, where they then say that they’ve got the resources to help him develop his skills much further, making him roll his eyes.
When he finally gets his stream going, he’s got a bandana tied over his mouth again, and his ball cap sitting low. The viewership count shoots to the skies almost immediately and he waves with a grin that they probably can tell is there from his eyes.
He starts by answering some questions about his supposed hike, where he explains that he spent one night in a cave mouth, and the rest of his nights in trees, which really wasn’t doing his back any favors. Sleeping in a tree seems like a moronic idea when spoken out loud, but he explains that the risk of falling is better than the risk of being caught unawares by a bear or something.
His viewers mock him for being scared of bears, pointing out that it’s silly when he’s known for killing kaiju with minimal equipment.
He bristles, pointing out that bears are native to the forests and generally unaggressive unless aggravated. “Listen, I try to keep my hunting to creatures that are actively endangering people. I have no ill-will towards a bear minding its own business when I’m the trespasser,” he insists.
He gets called cute, which makes him groan in exasperation before steering the topic towards games and the many recommendations that people sent him. He explains that he downloaded one of the suggested games, and boots it up to play.
The stream goes on for hours, with him keeping running commentary as he plays through the game and cursing his viewers out when they accuse him of being bad at the game. Some even send their ribbing in small donations, making it impossible for him to ignore as the pop-up plays a little jingle.
When he finally signs off, it’s past midnight and he takes a long moment to stretch out his aching limbs, brushing his teeth intensely, then tucking himself into the bedding with a sigh of relief.
***
Gen leaves the inn the next morning after a breakfast that the elderly couple force him to sit down and eat, feeling more energized and well-rested than he usually does. It’s fascinating what rest and proper nutrition does to a person, he thinks.
He gets on a train that takes him out of the Hokkaido region and gets a few more hours of rest there, before he switches over to the bullet train that gets him to Tokyo. It’s expensive, but the previous night’s donations makes him feel less bad about the choice of saving several hours of travel time, especially when he still has to make his way out to the outskirts of Tokyo prefecture to his next haunt.
Time moves quickly when he busies himself with mobile games, and soon he’s on the last leg of a train ride that’ll take him to a station where he can walk the rest of the way to an apartment block that got heavily damaged by an attack a couple of months back.
An alert pops up on his kaiju monitoring software, warning about a mole type with higher fortitude than usual. He realizes it’s right where his pin is at the same time the train lurches to a stop.
There’s a shriek of metal as a clawed paw bursts through the train floor and makes a gaping hole, followed by the entire train getting torn off the rails and toppled over to the side.
Apparently, Gen can’t get a moment of rest in this fucking country, as he braces himself for the impact while digging into his bag for the kaiju’s spine from a couple of days ago. As it mostly seems to be a material similar to a nail, it hasn’t started going bad by being kept wrapped up in a shirt for a couple of days, compared to the fleshier bits he sometimes gets his hands on. It doesn’t boost him as efficiently as said fleshy bits, but it’s a better weapon than nothing.
He doesn’t have time to cover his face or arm himself further than that, doesn’t really think about doing it in this situation. Instead he climbs through the fallen train with ease, jumping out of the hole torn through the side. He appreciates the high ground giving him a decent overlook of what he’s up against, because the moment his eyes land on the kaiju he can’t help but wince.
There’s more than one.
The fortitude is higher than he usually deals with, and they just had to come in a group.
“Yay me,” he mutters and takes a deep breath.
One at a time, careful and calculated.
Mole-types usually have their core somewhere in the neck.
He can work with that, he thinks, as he crouches, feels the tingle of power from the severed spike in his hand flooding his body and sets off with a leap when the first kaiju swipes its clawed paw at him. It tears another chunk off of the train, but doesn’t seem to have caught more than the exterior.
Gen takes the offered ride and swiftly sprints up the arm to get close to the neck.
The good thing with these kinds of larger mole-kaiju is that they’re not very fast. Their limbs are long, their claws are deadly, but they sacrifice speed with a reach like that. It gives him enough time to get to its neck and drive his weapon right into the spine.
The creature screeches once more, then slumps forward. He slices up the neck a bit more to get a look and quickly confirms the shattered core right where he expected it to be.
He can’t relax though, not when the dying call clearly aggravates the rest of the group.
Gen swears under his breath as he cuts a gash across his forearm and plunges it into the kaiju’s open wound.
The thing with fighting kaiju alone with lacking equipment and only a freakish constitution as aid is that it has forced him to experiment. Sometimes unwillingly.
He has found that eating some kaiju meat leaves a lasting strength and boosted healing factor, but only after a night of agonizing pain crawling through his body, as if his very body tries to reject the foreign substance.
He has learned what kinds of body parts sync better with his constitution when brandished as weapons.
He has also learned that mixing kaiju blood directly with his own makes his veins burn, but also comes with a lasting boost of strength. It comes with the caveat of risking infected wounds and, naturally, searing pain as the kaiju cells ravage his lesser human ones.
It has taken some time to realize that he probably has gained a bit of kaiju strength in his body from just being willing to experiment with things that probably should’ve killed him long ago. He probably has his odd constitution that initially had caught Shinomiya Isao’s eye to thank for still being alive.
As expected, the burn in his arm is intense as the kaiju’s blood mixes into his gash, but his body immediately feels lighter.
So he’s off to the next one, disposing of it with brutal efficiency. The third creature is so far away that he has a moment to drop down to one of the corpse’s paws and sever one of its fingers. The oversized claw has the potential of being a fine weapon, but difficult to hold in its size. But, just as he hopes, he finds that the finger bone is slim enough that he can get an okay grip around it by shoving his hand right into the gore.
These are things he definitely doesn’t do on stream. Not that his followers realize that he encounters many more kaiju attacks than the ones he actually catches on his streams.
In reality, most of his streams consist of him walking around areas destroyed by kaiju, exploring nature or of him gaming somewhere vaguely suspicious. The streams where he fights are, all things considered, quite rare.
Without his audience, he allows himself to focus on brutal efficiency over showmanship. Especially when there’s a train filled with people behind him that deserve better than to go down by these ugly fuckers.
He meets the third kaiju headfirst and delivers a devastating gash across its torso with his just-acquired claw sword. It doubles over, and swiftly meets its end when he takes the opportunity to behead it.
He’s starting to sweat and his breath is turning ragged, but he’s got several more to go and no option to stop.
After dispatching the fourth, he stumbles at the fifth and gets caught by a tail in his stomach and flung across the field. He lands several paces away with a wheeze, the air fully knocked out of his lungs. He turns over to spit out bile and the metallic taste of blood. He must’ve bit his tongue on the landing.
Getting up hurts like a motherfucker, but he has no time to rest and sets off in a painful jog towards the kaiju. There’s still three more to go. He picks up his fallen claw sword on the way, feeling the boost enter his body when his hand closes around the bone and is off in another burst of motion.
This time the kaiju falls after he manages to shove the claw through its thick throat and hit the core in the neck.
He grunts when he lands from that jump, hand coming up to clutch at his side. Shit. His ribs.
He inhales with a bit more difficulty, then readies himself to go after the next one.
Before he has the chance, though, someone vaults over the overturned train and with movements almost too fast to catch, delivers a slash that promptly cleaves the kaiju in two. The last kaiju gets treated with just as much prejudice, diced up with efficiency that Gen can’t help but find impressive as he leans heavily on the claw he’s holding on to.
The man, the JAKDF soldier, then comes running towards him. Gen has a moment to think that the guy’s bowl cut is a little dorky, followed by the realization that the guy also is hot as hell.
Gen spits out another glob of blood, grins a probably fairly unhinged smile. “I had ‘em,” he insists, then promptly collapses. He feels strong arms catch him and then the world is gone.