Ultraman Legend of the Light Chaser

Fujisawa Sosuke comforted himself like this: if all else fails, go back and take a cold shower to scrub off your cold and successfully skip class, chat with the doctor, and don't have to face the rough men in the team. Wouldn't that be wonderful!

He was accompanied by Yota Watanabe, who kept saying things like "You can't break the rules" and "You'll get a beating if you do," but he still kept up very closely. Sosuke Fujisawa knew that he also wanted to chat with his teammates.

Five people joined the air force in the same year. On the day they agreed to take to the skies together, the team was torn apart. Only two of the five remained, along with three veteran members and a former captain.

“I was the one with the worst grades, and I could only stay home back then,” Watanabe Yota said, looking down at the two shadows swaying back and forth. “I thought it was the legend of the Bermuda Triangle coming true, or I thought it was the ground crew’s carelessness. When you came back… I searched through the records inside and out for any oversights, but I found nothing. It turned out to be a ‘special life form’.”

"Sosuke, are you talking about monsters like Golza or Lightning Man, or aliens?"

“There’s no difference,” Fujisawa Sosuke’s voice turned cold. “The captain was sitting right in front of me when a beam of light shone down and sliced ​​off the front half of the plane. He was gone. I didn’t even have a chance to parachute. All I heard him shouting for me to run away.”

Yota Watanabe knew that the "captain" he was referring to was the former captain, the one who had truly guided them from complete novices to the newcomer.

That was the first time a newcomer had flown an airplane. Although it was a mentorship program, it was still a historic moment for the newcomer. Fujisawa Sousuke learned the fastest and was taken on his first flight by the former captain. The newcomer watched his seniors operate the plane from the back seat and experienced the feeling of flying and landing. Watanabe Yota remembers the former captain jokingly saying, "I'll take you on a devil's roller coaster."

Then the former captain and the old team members all disappeared, along with the good student Fujisawa Sousuke, leaving behind a rookie whose heart rate would spike to the warning line as soon as he sat in the cockpit.

He shouldn't have stayed with the air force, but he promised, "I'll adjust," and the police gave him two weeks, which he managed to do, at least on TPC-β, to stay calm.

“Someone saved me.” Fujisawa Sousuke walked ahead, and Watanabe Yota suddenly looked up, because the other party had never mentioned any deeper details before, and was finally willing to speak today.

The light and shadow of the branches and leaves flowed under their feet. Fujisawa Sousuke looked up at the spots of light that leaked through the gaps, just like looking into a pair of molten gold eyes that day.

“I’ve been incredibly lucky,” he said. “I feel like he was saying ‘sorry’ to me because he was late… Sometimes I think, if I had that power, why would I need to wait for anyone to lend a helping hand?”

"The captain is right. A teru teru bozu (a type of Japanese doll) can't protect you. What you hold in your own hands is what's real."

Chapter Fifty-Four: The Walking Dead

In the vast darkness of night, all was silent.

From the mountains, one can see the lights below; the shrine's lanterns hang alone in the silent forest, like a pavilion in the air.

It shouldn't be night now.

Aiba Yu followed the plump shrine caretaker to the house behind the mountain. When they looked back, the path they had come from had disappeared. They had only walked for less than ten minutes, but the sky had changed from noon to late at night.

"You don't seem surprised?" said the gray-clad guard.

"You stink too much," Aiba Yu said without changing his expression.

The guard stretched out his bread-like hand and lifted the hem of his clothes. He remembered that he had washed his clothes and trousers very clean. Children always like clean and friendly adults, so he washed these old clothes until they were white.

It turns out that the kids really liked him. Who doesn't like an adult who turns a blind eye to their homework, never rushes them, and occasionally gives them snacks to "go along with" them?

The guard exclaimed, "You have such a keen nose, I can't smell anything!"

“You’ve gotten used to it, or rather…” Aiba Yu glanced around at the surroundings. “You’re dead. Dead people can’t smell anything.”

These simple words enraged the other party, and the guard glared at him again: "You're talking nonsense! Kirieloid gave me new life! Are you talking to a dead man?"

The room wasn't spacious, but judging from the toothbrush cup on the windowsill, there were definitely two people living there.

The shoes were also a pair, each in a different style. The guard's were more conservative, with a pair of polished leather shoes next to his old cloth shoes. A wide-brimmed hat hung on the coat rack; few people would wear a cowboy's wide-brimmed hat while dressed as Jinbe, especially since the hat was too small for the fat man in front of him.

Aiba Yu continued searching and found some brown spots on the shoe rack near the wall.

"You just painted your shoe rack?" he suddenly asked.

The guard's facial muscles twitched. He had indeed painted the shoe rack with an antique wood color, carefully maintaining stylistic consistency—to conceal the bloodstains that had oxidized to brown.

“Your eyesight is excellent,” the guard chuckled. “I didn’t turn on the lights. Does this mean there are messengers within the TPC who rely on the god Kirieloid and have been granted the power to wield it?”

“I do have a nephew, I’m being honest,” he continued. “He did come into contact with Aum, but when he found that God wasn’t giving him bread, he ignored the doctrine—how could he do that! That’s blasphemy against God! Bread is just bread; the body perishes, but the spirit lives on! How can someone who doesn’t even have that much awareness be called a believer?”

“So you killed him,” Aiba Yu said, “and then you converted to Kyrie Eloro?”

The guard rubbed his bald head. If you ignored his words and actions and only looked at his appearance, he was clearly just an approachable fat man who smiled like Maitreya Buddha.

"Of course I still firmly believe in Om, but since the god Kirieloid has given me extraordinary power, it wouldn't hurt to share a little bit of faith with him."

"You just said that your nephew's behavior was blasphemous."

“I know I am absolutely loyal to any god!” The guard spat. “My stupid nephew is different. He doesn’t believe in anything. He only believes in the guy who can give him a meal. He came back and tried to persuade me to go work too!”

The guard seemed to grow angrier with each word, his bulging belly trembling. He fiercely rolled up his wide sleeves, saying, "What does he know! I was granted the title of 'messenger,' I am the right-hand man of the god Kirieloid! I told him about the greatness of the god Kirieloid, and all he wanted to do was run away!"

Jinbe's sleeves were wide enough to cover most of his arms. The guard rolled up the fabric, and by the moonlight, his dark skin underneath was finally exposed.

The guard had indeed been dead for some time; what was now moving was merely a rotting corpse. No living person's limbs would be in such a state, nor would a living person's belly be blackened and bulging high—filled with putrid gas and entrails.

He probably wasn't fat when he was alive; what's moving now is actually a giant whose face has been "repaired."

The nephew must have been terrified when he saw that he was talking to a living corpse, so he tried to escape but was killed by the guard. There are still some splattered bloodstains in the house to this day.

Aiba Yu decided to go back and report to the police department to investigate missing persons cases in various places. Kirieloid had actually infiltrated such a small island. They had not attracted attention, so they must have been hiding in several layers of disguise. Perhaps the local police just thought of them as an ordinary new religion.

After all, even corpses know how to disguise themselves as friendly.

In the blink of an eye, the guard pounced, wielding his most handy axe. He used the wood-chopping tool to chop off heads, and after one practice, he became increasingly adept at it.

Aiba Yu did not retaliate. He dodged and weaved, constantly avoiding the powerful axe that couldn't even touch a corner of his clothes. He only wanted to observe for a while longer and remember the energy fluctuations driving the corpse. Although it was the power of a Kirieloid, it was slightly different from the one he had encountered on the rainy night in Silizan, indicating that it was not the same individual.

“Kirieloids, I know you must be watching from somewhere!” A hand wrapped in silver light suddenly gripped the axe handle, and no matter how hard the guard tried, he couldn’t move it. Aiba Yu stared at the guard’s head, his gaze going through the other’s turbid pupils and settling on the core inside.

Remotely controlling a puppet always requires a medium.

For example, this core buried in his head—perhaps that's why the guardian's face still appears relatively normal. Aiba Yu discovered it, and those watching from the shadows felt a chill run down their spines.

"You have violated Chapter 10, Paragraphs 3 and 4, Chapter 13, Paragraphs 2 and 17, and Chapter 14 of the 'Special Lifeform Management Regulations,' as well as the regulations for the management of extraterrestrial security! On behalf of the TPC Police Department, I urge you to surrender as soon as possible." Flames burned along the axe handle onto the guard, the high temperature instantly drying out the moisture. The latter barely struggled before carbon powder began to fall down in a rustling sound, only the core controlling him remained completely still.

Before it self-destructed, Aiba Yu reached out and grabbed it, his senses sweeping down the mountaintop and through the lush forest to the stream near the mountain pass.

A gust of wind blew, and carbon powder fell onto the two tooth mugs placed side by side. The room was now empty.

In the woods, there was a woman squatting down, seemingly picking wild vegetables.

Resources are scarce on the island, and a lifestyle of part-time work and part-time farming is common for its residents. No one would notice an ordinary housewife carrying a basket up the mountain, even if the place she's going to isn't exactly a prime picking area.

The woman looked down as if she were really focused on her work, but she suddenly froze, because a new shadow had appeared on the ground.

The shadow's hand hanging by his side had sharp points. He held up an energy object in his other hand. The woman felt the hot wind blowing from behind and heard the low hum of scales rubbing together.

The owner of that shadow seemed to be laughing: "But surrendering won't reduce your sentence. Your crimes will be dug up by TPC one by one. This is not your 'breeding ground,' it wasn't before, it isn't now, and it won't be in the future."

Chapter Fifty-Five: The Hunting Game

"Scared me!"

An apartment building in Beichuan City.

The man, who was snatching a toy from his son, suddenly clutched his head and yelled. His son, who couldn't yet stand on his own, grinned and said, "Daddy, hug me!"

"Hug my ass!" The man shoved the toy back into his silly son's hands and decided to go back to his room to calm his pounding little heart.

He reached for the Starlink exchange on his desk, opened the page, found his friend, and started typing furiously: "Damn it, it really is that monster! Now I finally know why you guys who were secretly working on TPC's core members always failed!"

An upside-down question mark appeared on the other side of the screen.

"You've gotten along well with Earthlings and even learned their symbols?" The man twitched his teeth. "I have serious business to tell you! One of my subordinates was building a base on Miyagi Island, but that monster hiding in TPC discovered it! He vanished without a trace!"

"I sent a message back at the last moment before I went offline and then blew up the communicator, otherwise they would have traced me sooner or later, you know what I mean?"

A line of text appeared on the other side of the screen: "Hahahaha".

The man's eyebrows shot up in anger: "Don't blame me for not warning you, you'd better leave no trace. Being discovered is a small matter, being captured alive is a big deal!"

A period appeared in the dialog box, meaning it was seen.

“No,” the man said, “Wooden alien, are you fucking listening?”

Finally, the other end replied with two meaningful words: "Busy."

The man stared at the screen for a moment, then quickly crawled under the table and began disassembling the computer. He skillfully removed the cover, pulled out the memory sticks in a few quick moves, and crushed the brick-like mechanical hard drive into a flat disc in his hands. Then he pried the motherboard off like a thin biscuit, and the monitor went black instantly.

The son crawled from the living room to the door and knocked with his soft fingers. The man yelled at the door, "What are you knocking for! I'm running away, so here's your dad back! Happy now?"

"Daddy, hug me~" came the silly son's call from the doorway.

The man forced out a breath, staring at the remaining parts of the mainframe burning as he said, "You reckless Muzhen aliens, luckily I was quick-witted and ran away, otherwise you would have dragged me down sooner or later... And those trashy Reicuran aliens, damn it, don't you have any smarter allies?"

Purple wisps of smoke rose from the man's head.

A few minutes later.

The man stared blankly at the computer case, now a mangled lump of metal. Only the power supply was intact. He then looked down at the mechanical hard drive in his hand. It was sculpted quite meticulously, each of his five fingers imprinted on it. Half of the rectangular hard drive had been crushed into an ingot.

The world froze at that moment, and the man's mind went blank. He was just sleeping a moment ago... so why was he now disassembling his own computer? Oh, it looks like he's already done.

Did the 1TB of inventory vanish into thin air? Should he be glad the power supply didn't explode?

His son's knocking reminded him that this was neither sleepwalking nor a drill.

In Beichuan City, a piercing scream echoed from an apartment building: "What's going on?! Am I dreaming?!"

……

The Muzhen aliens always treated civilizations they looked down upon as mere dust beneath their feet, while showing some respect to those they admired.

So when he replied to the Kirieloids that he was "busy," he really was busy.

It requires complete focus and concentration.

"Who is it that's been bothering you during the hunting game?" A man with slicked-back hair glanced at his companion with disdain.

Hunting games, a favorite pastime of the Wood-Pure Star People, involve letting the prey escape and then enjoying the thrill of the chase and the prey's constant fear. For the Wood-Pure Star People, this is an indispensable diversion from their monotonous lives.

The woman in the suit and skirt concealed the machine, and when she looked up, her eyes glowed with a blue light.