Anticipating a Kaiju incursion, every sizable city in Japan has been evacuated. Those who could not get inland have found space in the island nation’s numerous Kaiju shelters, said to be able to withstand a pressure of ten thousand tons and offer accommodations to nearly five million people just in the greater Tokyo-Osaka area alone.
Information from the site of the Kaiju landfall is scarce, though it is known they have destroyed parts of the Rainbow Bridge and numerous other structures at the edge of Tokyo Bay. Jaegers from the Moyulan Shatterdome, the nearest PPDC facility with active Jaegers after the devastating Drone failure, are said to be deploying soon, but observers in the area report none have arrived so far.
It is reported that the Kaiju have inflicted widespread damage on the city center and are moving to the southwest, but due to the mandatory evacuations, reliable information from the area is difficult to find.
Where the Kaiju intend to go—or whether they have any intent at all—remains to be seen.
Raijin, Hakuja, and Shrikethorn rampaged through Shibuya. Behind them, a path of destruction a half-mile wide stretched back to the famed Rainbow Bridge, its curling approach ramp collapsed into the bay where they had come ashore. A thousand fires burned in the crushed remains of buildings. Near the Kaiju, those who had not yet gotten to a shelter fled in desperate throngs through the streets; in the wake of their passage, rescue operations were already beginning.
Raijin paused and reared up on its hind legs. It roared, drawing the attention of Hakuja and Shrikethorn. All three Kaiju swung around and saw the white-capped peak of Mount Fuji looming in the distance to the west. They changed course and plowed forward, destroying whatever was in their path.
“Did you see that?” Gottlieb said over the comm. “They are communicating. Raijin spotted Mount Fuji and relayed that information to the others. This is extraordinary.”
“Extraordinary, got it.” Jake was looking down as Gipsy Avenger streaked toward the Kaiju. They were nearly close enough, and closing in fast.
He took the brief moment they had to get a visual sense of the three Kaiju and how they moved. The images Gottlieb had captured from their individual Breach passages were sketchy, and didn’t show much about how they moved. Now Jake soaked up every detail he could, knowing any one bit of information could mean the difference between victory and the end of the world. This was part of Ranger training, to study Kaiju and draw terrestrial equivalents as a way of anticipating how an individual monster might fight. It was an inexact science, but Jake knew of cases from the Kaiju War where it had saved Ranger lives.
Raijin was the biggest of the three, and Jake thought Gottlieb was right that it was intentionally leading the other two. At a glance Jake pegged it to be a hundred meters tall or so, but that was hard to guess with any precision because of the bony plates on its head and the way it leaned forward as it ran. It was bipedal, with heavy bony structures at its hips and a long tail that balanced the weight of its head. Its paws, each with two fingers and a hooked shorter thumb, were tipped with claws that glowed blue even in the bright sunlight. Whenever they touched something else, some kind of destructive energy flared. But its head was the unusual thing about it. Heavy armor plates tipped with spikes ringed its face and jaws, but the spikes faced inward. Between the plates, its brain glowed an angry red over an interior bony structure including fanged jaws big enough to swallow a school bus. There were rows of bright blue eyes on both the outside armor plates and the central face, under the infernal glow shining through the top of its head.
Just behind it, Shrikethorn was nearly as tall, but more massive and with two tails curling up over its back. The tip of each tail bristled with long spikes, and heavier spines grew from its arms and neck. The front of its head was a flat, bony projection similar to a hammerhead shark’s, with a row of eyes at each end. When it opened its mouth, blue light glowed from inside, the same color as Raijin’s eyes. That thought gave Jake an insight: All of Shrikethorn’s spikes faced forward, on the front edge of its bony head. That might be useful to know. He filed it away for the fight to come. He also noticed that some of the spikes from its tail were embedded in nearby buildings. Jake couldn’t tell if this had happened while it dragged its tail along the front of a building, or if Shrikethorn could somehow fire the spikes. He had a feeling he might learn for certain sooner rather than later.
Unlike the other two, Hakuja was comparatively low to the ground, with squat heavy legs and thick segmented armor plates running down its back from the back of its head to the base of its tail. The tail was armored too, and shorter than either Raijin’s or Shrikethorn’s. Its head was flat, with flaring bony protrusions on either side and pointed jaws. Three small eyes on either side of its snout burned a deep orange. Two spikes jutted up from the tip of the lower jaw, and when it roared Jake saw its tongue was bifurcated. Its claws had a different design than the other two as well, with three clawed fingers evenly spaced instead of the shorter opposable digit Jake saw on Raijin and Shrikethorn. The claws were long and hooked, and also thick. They put Jake in mind of a badger or a bear.
He absorbed all that in the seconds between Gottlieb’s observation and the chime from
