Your Kaiju — Chapter 319 - Who's the Hostage Now?

"Ultraman..."

"Switch the feed over there." Maia Simmons kept her eyes on the giant who had stopped Mechagodzilla and spoke to the technician beside her.

The technician obeyed, projecting the camera footage onto the face of a building outside. Maia Simmons' face filled the screen.

Both the giant and Mechagodzilla saw her.

Jefferson watched with interest, curious what she'd do next. Simmons' daughter. Loyal to the old man, through and through.

"Ultraman — if you try to stop Mechagodzilla, we will detonate the bombs we've already placed."

"With your abilities, I'm sure you can sense exactly what that bomb is capable of."

Maia Simmons addressed the giant through the broadcast.

A Micro-Oxygen Destroyer had been positioned at the center of the city. Countless civilians were still sheltering there. Once detonated, the casualties would be impossible to calculate.

The moment she finished speaking, Natsuki had already pinpointed the bomb. That thing was a genuine extinction tool for anything that breathed on this planet.

Threatening me with hostages...?

Cute.

After this many years in the Space Garrison, he'd seen this move so many times he'd lost count.

Any halfway well-informed organization in the cosmos knew about the Ultra Race's notorious sense of justice. When the Space Garrison came knocking, this was practically standard procedure , use hostages, threaten an Ultra Warrior into standing down. Against younger warriors, it worked almost every time. Even when it didn't fully stop them, it opened cracks. Hesitation. Guilt. Exploitable gaps.

Natsuki had fallen for it himself, once. After thousands of years steeped in the culture of the Land of Light, the first time he walked into that situation, the conflict was real. He'd gotten lucky , Zoffy had pulled him out of it.

What happened after that... was that many of his Space Garrison comrades noticed this particular Ultra Old Man had quietly started grinding Ultra Psychic with a dedication that bordered on obsessive.

Everyone knew the Spacium Beam. They respected its power. What they tended to underestimate was Ultra Psychic , and how absurdly, almost unfairly useful it was in practice.

Did anyone seriously think an Ultra who'd been alive for nineteen thousand years would have slower reaction times than a human's nervous system?

In the seconds it had taken Maia Simmons to finish her speech, Natsuki could have already yanked the bomb into the air with Ultra Psychic and compressed its blast radius down to nothing. Her threat, against him, was child's play.

He didn't act right away only because there were other options in play.

Trust your comrades. That was something he knew how to do.

...

"Didn't he understand?"

The giant had ignored her completely. He was still locked on Mechagodzilla, already settling into a combat stance. Either he hadn't understood a word she'd said, or he simply had no intention of acknowledging her.

"Or did he not sense the bomb?"

His reaction was nothing like she'd anticipated. An Ultraman who could take human form not understanding human language was extremely unlikely.

She was about to try a different language when ,

BOOM!!

An explosion tore through the mountain base. Violent tremors followed. Rolling smoke poured into the technical department like a flood.

"What was that!?" Maia Simmons froze. An explosion. Inside the base.

The technicians erupted into chaos. The thick smoke gave them cover, and several immediately bolted for the exits.

Maia Simmons got her breathing mask on just in time. But before she could bring the room back under control, two figures in full tactical gear came bursting through the smoke, heading straight for her.

THWACK!

She'd assumed they were guards. They weren't. One closed the distance and drove a fist directly into her face.

"Ngh—!" She grunted in pain, head snapping back.

Years of training kicked in before the pain did. She caught her balance, retreated a few steps, used the edge of a table to launch herself into a leap, and drove both boots into her attacker with everything she had. The force was real. The figure had to throw both arms up to absorb it, sliding back two feet.

Her hand was already at her hip. She drew her sidearm and raised it.

She never pulled the trigger.

BANG. BANG.

Two shots cut through the smoke. Precise. One punched into her gun arm. The other hit her thigh. Blood flew. The weapon dropped from her hand, and she went down with it, crashing to the floor through a wave of pain and sudden imbalance.

It had all taken maybe four seconds. One figure peeled off to engage the remaining guards. The other walked toward her.

"Ngh..." Maia Simmons forced herself to breathe through the pain. She checked the wounds , no arteries. She reached her other hand toward the pistol on the floor.

Stay calm. Crisis response. You've trained for this.

"Second time we meet, Miss Maia."

"Hope you liked the fireworks I arranged for you." That voice. Low, rough, heavy with tobacco. Jared walked forward at an unhurried pace and stepped on her outstretched hand, pinning it to the floor before her fingers reached the gun.

He still hadn't forgotten what she'd pulled on him in the Hollow Earth.

He'd finally got her.

"You..." She coughed. The moment she heard that insufferably smug smoker's rasp, she knew exactly who it was , Monarch. Rage surged up from somewhere deep.

She had swallowed her pride and made humiliating compromises with this man to get what she needed. And now this bastard was here to wreck it all.

She wanted to tear him apart with her bare hands.

"Thought you'd use hostages to threaten my old buddy?"

"Well. Now you're the hostage." Jared zip-tied her wrists with a pair of cuffs he'd helped himself to along the way, then pressed a rough field dressing against her bullet wounds.

The smoke had been deliberate. Maximum confusion, minimum reaction time , engineered specifically to get them to Maia Simmons before anyone could respond.

Under her furious, humiliated glare, Jared hauled her upright and pressed his pistol against her temple.

The smoke thinned. The technicians and guards still standing got a clear look: their boss, cuffed and held at gunpoint. And beside Jared, Old De, soaked in blood, a machine gun resting against his shoulder, standing over a body at his feet.

"Everybody put your weapons down."

"You , over there — get ready to shut that tin can off."

"Because if your boss doesn't make it out of here, she can't sign your paychecks." Jared smiled, easy and threatening at once. "And honestly? What they're paying you is not worth this."

Old De shifted the machine gun lazily onto his other shoulder. The body beneath his boots and the blood coating most of his torso told the whole story , here was a man who had shot his way through this building room by room without once hesitating, and still had plenty left.

➤ Next: Head-On Clash — Steel and Blood