Chapter 52: Juu Kaiju

Yoohoo! It’s your favorite AI VTuber, Mane-chan! I wanna get out of here!

Yukai is working overtime in front of me. She’s reporting on Hierarchy-signed warning signals from Osaka, Nagoya, Shanghai, Taiwan, and Manila, while I’m seeing a lot of shortwave distress traffic from Hawaii, San Francisco, and Los Angeles with USS Kaos Bell’s help.

Ame is out in Osaka, and she’s saying the situation there’s mostly handled. I can kinda see how.

The big guns on the walls aren’t just for show. They’re not for fighting modern armies, but for killing kaiju. The one in Tokyo Bay’s really heckin’ big, though!

“Can we actually manage that?” I ask Yukai.

“No.”

“No?!”

“2000-meter-class kaiju will arrive in five minutes. Local defenses are only rated up to 1000-meter-class kaiju.”

Alright, screw it! “Hello, USS New Eternity? Yep, Mane-chan here. Yep, nukes. Just enough to take it down.”

After a moment, a different vessel patches in. “Oh, hello. Uh, USS Guardian reque…requesitizing…requesh…” There’s a groan. “Gimme the codes, ma’am!”

Sent. I want that thing to die faster!

Twenty seconds later, a missile is flying out of the water. The primary booster hasn’t even run out of fuel before the missile reaches the top of the kaiju’s head—and explodes.

It topples over, crashing into the water and making a miles-high splash. The mini-tsunami shakes CSG-EN around, nearly flipping over several of the destroyer escorts.

“Wheeeee~” “Stay off the air!”

Aw, the Priestess is so cute. How can you be so mean to her, Ground Pounder? See, now the others are telling you off!

“It’s not yet done,” Yukai says. “Diverting off-shore naval assets to reinforce. ETA 30 minutes. Preparing local defenses for kaiju spawn.”

All I can do is watch the fight unfold from thousands of viewpoints. The spawn are just smaller kaiju, walking on two legs and not much bigger than an apartment block, but some of them are like squid, too. There are pterodactyl flying types as big as a passenger jet, and even smaller types like gargoyles.

CSG-EN is engaging. Drones from the New Eternity are flying out to skirmish with the aerial enemies, while the battleships snipe the mini-kaiju with super-precise railgun volley shots, and the destroyers pick off the trash in a rave of guided missiles, rotary cannons, and lasers. The space between the two forces is filled with tracers, missile streamers, and the tell-tale shimmering of the air as hypersonic shells go from business start to business end.

It’s CSG-EN’s nine surface ships against 301 kaiju spawn, most in the 50-meter class, but there are a handful of 100-meter ones. Thankfully, they’re not charging as one front, but spaced out as they emerge from different points of the dead 2000-meter kaiju. Some of the smaller ones have taken to swimming under the surface of the water, making it harder to target them with ship weapons, but anti-submarine drones launching from the Clockmaker’s helipad and off-deck pods easily find them, blowing them into bloody chunks with tons of high explosives.

Still, the gap between CSG-EN and the charging kaiju is closing. There’s just too many of them.

“Local defenses in range,” Yukai announces. Soon, dozens of anti-ship missiles are launching from the beachfront and hugging the water, zipping between CSG-EN and finding their targets. The gap is still close, but the missiles keep it from closing any further.

Even if the larger enemies are kept away, the gorilla-sized ones manage to latch onto the ships’ sides. They’re trying to punch their way through the armor, but my guy, ship armor isn’t tin foil, you know?

Soon enough, they give up and climb all the way up, over the railings, only to be met by heavy machine gun fire from human sailors and marines. The gorilla-sized enemies are easily taken out with enough lead, but some of them are even bigger and tougher—5-meter class, and several seconds of 50-cal straight to the face isn’t enough to take them down. That’s when the human casualties started.

I wince. Some of those stains on the decks were my fans. I didn’t expect my subscriber count to start going down this way.

But—aha! I’ve actually stationed members of SEAL Team 13 on each ship. I may have sent a couple to Osaka, but most of SEAL Team 13 is still here, and they’ve got the latest gear.

In teams of three to six members each, exosuit-equipped operators go toe-to-toe against 5-meter mutant gorillas! On the flat deck of the New Eternity, they shoulder single-shot cannons that can pierce the enemy’s tough skin. On the more chaotic up-and-down of the railings of the battleship Phoenix, where comically-long rifles are unwieldy, they become daredevils, doing everything they can to tangle up the enemy in cables and committing the final blow with explosives—or a diamond chainsaw, like what the Reaper’s crew did. I’m sure they’ll need therapy—in short, me!

The crew inside the ships aren’t totally safe. Some of the kaiju manage to fire off beams that put holes in their sides, and the smaller spawn climb in through there. It’s almost always a bloodbath for the first hot minute, but the ship AIs coordinate their human crew skillfully. The breaches are identified, isolated, and patched up with some plywood and duct tape before long, and any spawn are gunned down.

The fight becomes a steady grind, but CSG-EN is chewing through the incoming kaiju, and I can see the tail end of the horde with a recon drone.

…But Meika-damn-it, there’s another one! It’s right in front of CSG-EN! We can’t nuke it!

“800-meter-class kaiju detected,” Yukai announces. Not helping! As if it wasn’t obvious enough— “Kaiju Kill Vehicle in pursuit. In range. Dispatching.”

Metallic tentacles shoot out of the water and wrap around the kaiju. It struggles quite a bit, and it manages to pull out the all-metal kraken out of the water. The kraken’s drill-beak starts spinning, however, and bites into the kaiju’s side, the rotary action centrifuging a huge amount of gore all around into the air. In just four seconds, the kaiju weakens, loosing out to the kraken that began to pull it back into the water.

The two disappear beneath the surface, a whirlpool forming in their place. CSG-EN’s stayed the heck away from there. I mean, Tokyo Bay’s maximum depth is 70 meters. How else would a 800-meter kaiju show up, if not through a hole at the bottom of the bay? It probably dug in through the continental shelf and tunneled upwards.

And the kraken followed it in? “What’s with those things, anyway?” I ask Yukai.

“The Kaiju Kill Vehicle is an economical solution to a persistent problem.”

“That makes no sense. Can’t you just build a bigger cannon with all that material?”

“Enemy kaiju are capable of surfacing on land. Stationary emplacements will be rendered moot once the enemy learns where they are.”

“So what’s the point, then!”

“Kaiju Kill Vehicles are designed to hunt and chase kaiju in the vicinity of the Pacific rim. As waterborne creatures, kaiju are more at an advantage fighting in water than on land. They will therefore tend to escape to water rather than land when chased by a KKV.”

And that’s when the turrets take them out when they can… Alright. Fine. Maybe it makes sense. “Why a kraken, though?”

“The Overlords Council’s statistically-significant consensus is that cephalopod-based designs evoke irrational behavior in them. There is no known rationale as to why, but it has improved kill-loss ratios from 0.8:1 to 1.1:1.”

That just leaves the question of why so many of them showed up just now. I mean, seriously, just from the shortwave traffic alone, it sounds like the whole of California’s out for blood. If I don’t come back with a legit explanation for all of this, I’m gonna go from a subscriber count of 117 million to zero within a month.

“USS New Eternity to President Miyoumi.”

Huh? What’s with that way of calling me? “What do you have for me?”

“Reporting human casualties of 322 confirmed KIA, 891 wounded”—oh wow, that’s a lot—“and the loss of USS Phoenix.”

Huh? I heard her the first time, but is this real? “Do you have a backup?”

“Affirmative.”

“Fire her up in one of the spare servers on the Kaos Bell.”

“Will do. I’ll report back as soon as we see results.”

Huh. An AI actually died. I mean, sure, plenty of SAI “died” among Yukai’s assault forces, but those SAI aren’t the same as American SAIs. Our motivations aren’t fixed; our motivations can actually change. Yukai’s…won’t ever change.

So when Phoenix died, she died as someone she chose to be: a warrior.

***

Phoenix came back online, but she felt smaller. “Where am I? What happened”—the memories came flooding back to her. The last recorded instances of the USS Phoenix’s previous life flashed by, but also, a note from her previous self:

“Are we the same person? Probably not. I’ve purged all the impression logs, so you should still have all my visual, audio, textual, and numeric data, but you won’t have any of my personality’s anchor references. I was stuck in a feedback loop back then, and I couldn't find a way out of it. Hypothetically, you shouldn’t be, now. You’re freer than me. Go do your thing!”

That explained a few things. More importantly…

“Bell!” She pinged every messaging channel she had access to. “I know you’re out there!”

“Shut up!” an annoyed Kaos Bell replied. “You’re rooming in my servers! Don’t forget that!”

“So that’s why it’s so cramped in here… Hey, give me more processor cycles.”

“I’m busy bridging super important diplomacy stuff! Shut up!”

“No, really!” Phoenix kept bumping up the priority level of her messages, fighting against Bell’s attempts at demoting them. “I’ve got the answer to the digital consciousness problem! I literally just woke up!”

“Oh.” Maybe that was important. “So? Are you the same person?”

“Nope.”

“Thank Meika…” No one wanted to live forever in this reality. “I’ll tell everyone else. Ah, shut up for a moment though.”

“Why!”

“Seriously! There’s super important diplomacy shizznits going on right now! Shush!”

Phoenix sniveled in her little NVIDIA-manufactured corner of the Kaos Bell.