Ultraman Legend of the Light Chaser

Samuel raised his free right hand, conjuring a lightsaber to strike, when the brown Gob suddenly raised its still-functioning claw and severed the arm Samuel was holding. Skin, flesh, and bone were swiftly and precisely cut apart, blood splattering everywhere. It quickly retreated, then turned and pounced on the white Gob.

The lightsaber's momentum showed no signs of abating, tearing through the blood mist as easily as slicing through cloth, leaving a long, narrow gash behind it.

Samuel hadn't expected the monster to make such a move. He saw Brown Gob swinging its severed arm, roaring as if in pain or anger. Its pounce was clumsy, but it landed on its knees, using its only remaining intact claw to support itself.

The Falcon Squadron's machine guns slammed into the back of the brown Gobu, while the white Gobu beneath him remained unharmed. The two Gobu roared hoarsely, seemingly conversing, their yellow eyes meeting in a human-like manner, casting a faint light on each other's faces.

After the Falcon Team unleashed their first wave of ammunition, they circled again. Everyone who saw the monster move was stunned. Samuel's lightsaber gleamed with silver light, and tiny barbs pierced the air with a crackling sound.

The night breeze suddenly quieted down, and everything seemed to freeze in time.

Brown Gob shielded White Gob beneath him, while White Gob turned his head to look at the giant. Its eyes were long and narrow, like snakes, appearing especially terrifying in the night. It was ferocious in appearance, but for some reason, Samuel...

I saw a weak emotion of "begging" in his eyes.

"What is your purpose in coming to Earth?" Samuel tried to communicate again, conveying his question to the strangely behaving monsters through telekinesis.

"Hiss?" The white Gob answered him. Samuel couldn't understand what it was saying, but he could sense Gob's confusion.

……confused?

"You don't know why you're here either?"

The brown Gobu shifted its body. In the spatial passage, it had appeared panicked and agitated, but now it seemed to have calmed down. It moved its position to cover the white Gobu even more completely.

The stubble on its arm healed very slowly, and the moonlight made it look like it was covered with droplets of liquid mixed with diamond powder. Samuel smelled a sweet, metallic scent in the air.

Gob's roar was less ferocious. It stayed where it was, its enormous and awe-inspiring size making it look like a domestic fowl awaiting judgment.

Samuel recalled his time as Fos-001, working as a henchman for the Yapools.

Back then, there were also many primal monsters looking at him pleadingly. They had little intelligence, only strong biological instincts, and knew how to seek advantage and avoid harm. Seeing that Fos-001 was powerful and that they couldn't defeat it, they tried every means to escape.

Fos-001 knows no mercy, only how to complete tasks. Occasionally, monsters will rush up to their deaths as if their brains are on fire, and Fos-001 will laugh and say, "Keep them safe, they're free test subjects." Estend will secretly tell him that they are giving their kind a chance to escape.

Now that they've encountered such a monster again, Samuel withdrew his lightsaber, and stardust-like particles of light slowly drifted into the sky.

That spaceship... might not be a spaceship at all, but rather an egg case, like those made by insects on Earth, to house their offspring.

The brown gob is probably the mother of that egg case. It and its offspring inexplicably ended up in an unfamiliar place and were attacked. It is protecting them.

The knocking sound inside the egg case was continuous, like spring rain awakening all things from hibernation.

The unhatched eggs were exposed to the air, and if Samuel wanted to destroy them, it would be a simple matter of a single burst of light. Gob's mother was injured and her reflexes were impaired; the white one was clearly still not fully conscious, and its reflexes wouldn't be any better than the protective brown one.

They appeared on the outskirts of Tokyo, right next to a human city. Samuel glanced back at the "meteorite" that had crashed in the city; the temperature there was extremely high. The Seagull Team was still organizing a rescue operation, and the Lightning Team's fighter jets, armed with missiles, were on high alert. He looked away and gazed into two pairs of bright yellow eyes.

"If we can find its anomalies in the spatial passage, and ask it a little more questions..." Samuel thought, the telekinetic amplification brought by the armor should have enabled him to do more.

Fortunately, the spatial distortion in the sky has not been completely corrected, giving Samuel a chance to salvage the situation.

"Want to go home?" he said. "I'll take you back into the passage. Don't go astray again and end up on Earth."

……

Paleontologist Mirai Asano has her own views on the monster, and XIG once again connects to an emergency communication from Mirai Asano.

“Monsters are just like ordinary animals. If they are suddenly thrown into an unfamiliar place, they will become irritable and easily angered in order to protect themselves,” Asano Mirai’s face appeared on the screen. “Gob’s behavior fits my guess perfectly. They come out of the distorted space. If they land in a city, they will attack the city. But if they are given enough space to calm down, they can return to normal.”

“We can’t let it hatch here,” said Akio Ishimuro.

Asano Mirai stopped explaining, and Ishimuro Akio calmly said, "It may be understandable, but we cannot expose citizens to the monster's feet—not even the monster's larvae."

"That's right, I understand, I just..."

“Heat source detected again!” Atsuko Sasaki’s voice ended their conversation: “Ground imagery accessed at the same coordinates where Gobu appeared.”

Everyone in the command room turned their gaze to the screen, where a vortex reappeared where the silver giant and Gob were fighting, and the claws of the beast emerged from it.

The owner of the giant claw landed with a thud, lightning flashed, and Gob's scream was instantly drowned out by the cacophony of sound.

Chapter Sixty-Four: The Weak Earth

[A monster has appeared near Tokyo. GUARD is actively responding. This is the second monster disaster tonight, after the "meteorite." Citizens are advised to follow the evacuation broadcast instructions. Listen...]

"Hey, what's going on?" KCB TV cameraman, Inoue Rinbun, suddenly put down his camera, and Yoshii Reiko interrupted her broadcast, confused.

"What are you doing?" Yoshii Reiko walked over and put her head behind the camera lens, where all she could see was a field of static.

Kenji Tabata yelled and took off his headphones. It was as if he heard Sadako calling him to play cards through the headphones. The headphones crackled, and he rubbed his aching ears frantically.

"Signal interference!" Inoue Rinfumi complained. "What's going on? Did a monster smash the signal tower? Don't do this at such a crucial time for the broadcast!"

It was the middle of the night, and the conditions for broadcasting from the outside were very poor. Yoshii Reiko and her colleagues crawled out of their warm beds at home, drove their broadcast van to the nearest place to the "meteorite" where the streetlights were still working well, and made their on-site reports.

Halfway through the report, three more things suddenly fell down from the outskirts: a giant, a monster, and a spaceship. They changed the camera angle, and the news topic became the big guys that appeared in the suburbs.

The theme will probably have to be changed again.

The "meteorite" acted strangely again, causing an unfamiliar plane to sway and appear to be trying to crash into the building in front of it.

Meanwhile, a familiar vortex appeared in the sky over the suburbs, and an unfamiliar monster fell down. It had curved horns, and when it roared, its horns released lightning, and the night was suddenly illuminated by lightning and fire.

When it appeared, the broadcast signal was severely interfered with, and calls were interrupted. The brightness of the lightning cast a new shadow on Reiko Yoshii. She and her colleagues exchanged a glance, then grabbed their eating utensils and rushed to the broadcast van.

"Go to the western ring road! We'll talk about the broadcast later, let's get the video footage first!" Kenji Tabata ordered. "The terrain there is high, we should be able to find an excellent filming location—what just fell down? A lightning monster?"

……

Kinoshita Kei didn't know whether he should barge in.

He reached the cordon and asked the GUARD evacuation staff if they had seen Hiroshi Hirakawa, but all he received were negative answers.

"Huh? I have no recollection of so many people running out. Don't linger here. They'll definitely contact you by phone if there's nothing else." The staff member shooed him away, speaking at a rapid pace like a machine gun.

Do you remember the people who ran out of the office building that was damaged by the meteorite?

"Office building? There's no one there... Oh, it seems there was a report of two employees working late into the night. We've already sent people to rescue them. See that floating machine?"

Kinoshita Kei suddenly had a bad feeling: "Is there anyone with the surname Hirakawa among them?"

"How would I know... I only know it's a small company that makes monster disasters or something."

Kinoshita Kei thanked him and took out his phone to look up information about companies related to monster disasters in the area.

He quickly learned the answer: it was the only one in the vicinity, so small that it was practically nonexistent, with only two registered employees, Hiroshi Hirakawa, who was both the owner and the employee.

His name appeared on the homepage of a website that clearly deserved to have its programmers sacrificed, accompanied by a photo of him wearing thick-rimmed black glasses, perfectly matching the mother's description.

"Found him! He must be inside!" Kinoshita Kei said to the staff. "How's the rescue going? The flotation device is still there. They haven't come out yet?"

The staff member looked displeased: "If you linger any longer, I won't just verbally ask you to leave. We have a professional team responsible for rescuing trapped citizens. Please pull your legs back and don't cross the warning line!"

"Yes, yes, yes..." Kinoshita Kei apologized repeatedly and retreated, moving out of his sight. He immediately turned and squatted behind a building, hesitatingly looking at the place where the "meteorite" had caused damage.

If Hiroshi Hirakawa hadn't been so unlucky, the mother's request would have been a task that was basically unnecessary to complete. Unless one was lucky enough to bump into Hiroshi Hirakawa on the spot, who would remember a person dressed so ordinary in a yellow shirt and glasses in a crowd?

If nothing bad happens to Hiroshi Hirakawa and he really does lose his phone, he can just find a convenience store and call his family.

Kinoshita Kei agreed to come, but only because he didn't want the mother to get close to dangerous places; his casual question was just a matter of doing his best and leaving the rest to fate.

Little did anyone know that he would be so unlucky as to be buried underground.

"Pito, can you find Hirakawa Hiroshi's location?"

The muscular hunk who had been following him around as a mobile mascot smirked: "I used to be able to pinpoint people precisely, but now I can only sense things with strong energy reactions."

"what?"

The muscular hero, holding his beloved knife, said, "I've given all my strength to the children. Although I always say that when Father Earth gets angry, there will be earthquakes... but actually, I don't have the strength to get angry anymore. All I can do is perform magic tricks."

"What--?!"

Pito muttered to himself, "If I weren't really desperate, who would resort to desperate measures and cross the universe to ask for help? Maybe I'd attract kind people, maybe I'd attract bad guys, I'm just lucky."

Not only did he not receive the support he wanted, but he also heard bad news, leaving Kinoshita Kei speechless with astonishment.

The muscular man patted him on the shoulder: "Earth's power is immense; how much you can harness depends on yourselves."

"Didn't you leave any for yourself?!"

"I kept some. When I gave my power to Gaia and Agul, I actually kept a portion, but Uranus was recovering too slowly at the time, so I..."

The muscular man spread his strong arms and made a circle: "I put so much energy into helping him. Do you remember when you were a kid and you always had a fever?"

Kinoshita Kei exclaimed in realization, "My grandmother thought I was dying after I had a fever for a month. It was you?!"

“It was me, and then I emptied my savings for my wife… It will probably be another billion years before I recover.” Pito nodded.

“It sounds like ‘it’ll only take the time to drink a cup of tea,’ and besides, you’re just a ball, where would you get a wife to save up for?” Kinoshita Kei tried to pull his hair, but found himself looking like a stunted bean sprout in front of the two-meter-tall giant. He changed his approach and started pulling his robe instead: “Can’t you pull back a little?!”

“What we gave to Gaia and Agul is the power that constitutes them. Taking it back would be like tearing down their foundation. Successful planets with high qualifications and high intelligence wouldn’t do something so foolish,” Pito said. “As for what we gave you… it’s not that I don’t want to take it back… it’s that I can’t.”

"???"

Pito whispered, "Then I realized, the sky is all-encompassing, especially... all-encompassing."

"You don't know your own child's characteristics?!"

"Well, actually, it was found."

"what?!"

"...in short"

"Exactly, I can't help you with things like finding ordinary people. Just think of me as a weak Earth father who's a little stronger than the average person. Whatever you want to do, cheer yourself on. If you need it, I'll sing for you to keep you motivated."

"No need! Don't ask me for help when we're on the same side! Now I know why you've been bothering me—it's a sunk cost of emotions that can't be recovered, you damn Earth!"