Below, soldiers fought back.
They wore a fusion of old and new, layered samurai armor reinforced with tactical gear and modern plating. Some carried katanas humming with energy, others fired rifles built onto traditional frames. Even the tankers were hybrid war machines, part wooden armored carriage, part modern artillery.
From up close, the battle felt desperate.
Blades clashed against alien flesh. Energy rounds and explosive shells struck the creature, but with every hit, its body only grew larger.
The parasite had reached a 40 mile radius.
Soldiers had reached their limit.
Then the hero of Shogun appeared, Toshi Zenko
His face was broadcasted throughout Moochi city.
The soldier felt relief.
Commander Zideff "It's about time you arrived Toshi Zenko."
Toshi "My bad, I Iv'e been training this entire week so my Abi hasn't fully recovered."
Up close it was worse than the screen suggested, not just large but dense, the kind of parasite that had learned to absorb kinetic force and redistribute it as structural mass, which meant everything the soldiers had thrown at it was now part of it, their weapons' energy calcified into the creature's body. It moved with the particular confidence of something that had recently discovered it was difficult to hurt.
It looked at Toshi.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
Toshi looked at it.
"All right," he said.
The parasite slammed the ground.
The impact wasn't aimed at Toshi specifically, it was aimed at the physics of the situation. The strike traveled through the stone and fractured the earth in a wide radius, and the fractures forced loose rock up from beneath the surface, chunks of it, some the size of furniture, some larger, rising in a ragged field of debris that the creature immediately began to move.
It threw them.
Not one at a time. All of them, in a continuous acceleration that turned the debris field into a sustained barrage, rocks moving at velocities that would have ended most engagements immediately, each one carrying the creature's amplified force.
Toshi moved through them.
Not around, through, the gaps between the projectiles being navigated at a speed where the gaps were wide enough regardless of how fast the rocks were moving, his body reading the trajectories and finding the spaces between them the way water finds the spaces between stones. He didn't deflect. He didn't stop. He just moved, and the barrage moved around him, and he closed the distance.
His saber cut through debris like paper.
The parasite swung.
The arm came down with the force of everything it had absorbed, soldiers' weapons, shockwaves, its own accumulated mass, and it was a genuine threat, the kind of strike that would have leveled a building.
Toshi ignited his Lumen Saber.
The blade caught the arm.
Not blocked, the light abi in the saber found the creature's mass and worked against its structure rather than its surface, the way a key finds a lock, the specific frequency of the Lumen Saber designed to cut through things that had absorbed too much rather than bounce off them. The arm divided cleanly.
The parasite screamed and tried to regenerate.
Toshi was already at the head "Lumen Bull, King Blitz."
He moved faster than light x500,000,000 breaking reality.
One strike. Clean. Precise. The Lumen Saber burning at a concentration that didn't leave room for regeneration, that found the creature's central structure and removed it completely.
The parasite collapsed inward.
The absorbed mass, freed from the creature's organizing force, fell as debris, harmless now, just rock and dust and the residue of a thing that had been dangerous and wasn't anymore.
Toshi stood in the settling dust with his saber at his side.
The Shogun soldiers stared at him from behind in utter shock.
He looked at what remained.
Then he looked up, past the rooflines of the Shogun District, past the fog that had mostly cleared now in the morning heat, at the sky above Dragon Hive that hid the wall beyond the wall and the surface beyond that and everything Joy had said was coming.
"I remember the promise Joy made to us," he said quietly, to no one who could hear him. "The promise to save the surface. To put an end to the Parasite King and free the people of Dragon Hive, this is not where our journey ends Burajiru, this is the beginning of the many skylands we must liberate."
He sheathed the Lumen Saber.
"I remember. The times we sat on the Moon with Joy."