Your Kaiju — Chapter 301 - Isn't This Way Beyond the Syllabus?
"That's right!"
"Gamu Takayama-sensei is a genuine hero — he saved the entire world!"
"Ultraman Gaia!"
The guy beside him, a kid with glasses and a bowl cut, turned to Natsuki with barely-contained excitement.
Twenty years ago in this world, entities called the Radical Destruction Bringer had descended from space, declaring humanity a cancer of the universe and throwing everything they had at destroying both the species and the planet itself. In the end, two heroes named Gaia and Agul had saved them.
And one of those heroes was standing at the front of the room right now, teaching their class.
"I heard that twenty years ago, when Takayama-sensei threw himself into that fight, he was about our age. Just a university student." The bowl-cut kid clenched his fist, voice full of pure, uncomplicated awe. "Someday I want to be a hero like him. Someone who actually saves the world."
"Ah..." Natsuki nodded, a little blankly.
Unfamiliar ceiling. Unfamiliar classroom. Unfamiliar faces in every direction. The only thing even slightly recognizable was the man at the podium.
Ultraman Gaia.
So he'd landed in a world Gaia had protected. A lecture hall at some Japanese university.
He did know a bit about Gaia. On his last infiltration of Ultraman Hikari's lab, he'd come across some files on the warrior, plus a Gaia Ultra Medal still in the calibration phase.
Unlike Ultra Warriors from the Land of Light, Gaia and Agul hadn't been born there at all. They were warriors born from the Earth's own radiance , living expressions of this planet's will.
The Earth of this universe had never been under Land of Light protection. It had defended itself through a combination of human resolve and the planet's own strength.
The biggest practical difference between those two and someone like Natsuki came down to energy. Land of Light Ultras had hard limits on how long they could operate on Earth. Gaia and Agul had no such restriction. The planet itself fueled them. As long as their body and mind held out, they could keep fighting indefinitely.
Hikari's evaluation of Gaia had been high , genuinely high. He'd called it power that surpassed any individual Ultra Brother.
"So what am I actually here to learn?" Natsuki rubbed his chin, eyes drifting down to the bracelet on his wrist.
[Skill: Earth's Protection (Not Yet Mastered)]
Natsuki: "???"
Wait.
Hold on.
This is a learnable skill?
Holy Babar — did he just hit the jackpot??
He stared at the notification. Full Moon Rect had already seemed completely broken when he'd picked that up, but at least that made a certain kind of sense. This was something else entirely.
Earth's Protection. The power that let Gaia and Agul fight without limits, drawing energy from the planet itself.
And the system was just... handing it to him?
Alright. Alright. No notes. Absolute legend, that old man. His stuff never disappoints.
"Now, I'd like a student to answer the following question." At the front of the room, Takayama set down his textbook, tapped the surface of the white lectern a few times, and a full three-dimensional holographic projection of the Earth bloomed into the air above it. He turned to look out at the tiered lecture hall.
In any normal university class, the moment a professor asks a question, a quiet wave of evasion rolls through the room , eyes drop, heads lower, the suddenly very interesting desk becomes everyone's focal point, and absolutely nobody volunteers to be the poor soul who gets called on.
This class was different.
Hands were going up everywhere. A few students had actually half-risen from their seats, practically vibrating with the need to answer. Which made sense, because this was Gamu Takayama.
Even stripped of the Ultraman Gaia context, the man was remarkable. He'd earned a PhD in quantum physics at seventeen. He was the developer of the anti-gravity system. His academic output had pushed the field a full era ahead of where it should be, and he was already laying the groundwork for humanity's first steps toward interstellar civilization.
This elective course had been something of a whim. He was already stretched thin managing his doctoral students. But recently he'd had a strange pull toward bringing in more fresh minds , a feeling, hard to explain, that something would happen if he did.
"Everyone is enthusiastic today." He smiled at the students who'd literally gotten to their feet, then let his gaze sweep the room.
He knew a lot of them were here for his reputation as Gaia rather than for the subject matter. That was fine. If the fame got them through the door and into a lab eventually, it served its purpose.
"Let's have... this student."
"By the window. The one in the floral shirt." His eyes settled on a figure near the glass. He gestured for the student to stand.
Universities had no uniform policy; the room was a mix of everything. There were actually several people wearing floral shirts. What drew his attention to this particular one wasn't the clothing.
It was instinct. Something he'd learned to trust a long time ago.
"Huh?"
"Me?" Natsuki surfaced from his thoughts, found the entire room looking in his direction, and scratched the back of his head. He pointed at himself with visible uncertainty.
A little sudden.
He'd been graduated for over ten thousand years, and now he was getting called on by a teacher again. Strange how familiar the feeling still was.
Not that he was nervous. For one thing, he'd lived too long to be rattled by a question in a lecture hall. For another, he'd been a genuinely exceptional student by Land of Light standards , the kind who was talented enough that he'd made others miserable trying to keep up.
"That's right." Takayama smiled and nodded.
He reached toward the holographic display and plucked the projected Earth from the air, holding it in his palm as he spoke. "I know most of you find pure theory tedious. So let's start with something you actually care about."
"In quantum physics, there's one concept we can never fully step around. Parallel universes."
He looked directly at Natsuki. "Do you think parallel universes are real? Put another way — do you believe there's another version of this Earth out there somewhere?"
Starting from genuine curiosity was something he'd learned through years of teaching. Lead with theory and you'd lose half the room in ten minutes.
"Parallel universes are real," Natsuki said.
Nothing surprising about that. The theory had been circulating for years, and Takayama himself had spent considerable time developing the underlying framework. He'd planned to build on exactly this point during today's lesson.
What he hadn't planned for was what the student said next.
"One approach to reaching a parallel world is to accumulate a critical mass of Spesium fusion-state energy and use it to exceed the speed of light, forcing a breach through the boundary of the universe. The theoretical threshold is roughly..."
"That method carries extreme energy costs and is only practical when you have a specific target and very little time. The more common method uses star gates distributed throughout the universe to bridge adjacent realities."
"Then there are special cases. You can take a specific type of energy and use it to shift the quantum frequency of a region of space until it matches the target universe's frequency, which forces a channel to open between the two. The energy required for that typically has the following properties..."
Gamu Takayama: "???"
Every student in the room: "???"
Natsuki wasn't a scientist by any stretch. As a member of the Silver Tribe, hard science had never been his strongest subject. Plenty of the finer details had blurred over the millennia. But the fundamentals had stuck, and apparently the fundamentals were enough.
A cascade of technical terminology, specific values, and cross-dimensional mechanics poured out of him and washed over the entire room.
Nobody said a word.
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Thank you to [Chen Is My Wife] for the top-tier donation , bonus chapter unlocked, +1.
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➤ Next: Plan Works — Face to Face