Chapter 153 - The Seventh Gate — One Punch Destroys the Titan
Shibuya Center-Gai. Reeking acid rain mixed with mud battered down onto the scorched black armor of Ultimate Mechamaru. Inside the cockpit, Kokichi Muta stared at the blood-red warnings flickering across the holographic screen. Cursed Energy Reserve: 0%. Engine Output: 0%.
"Damn it." Kokichi's fingers slammed into the control panel. The buttons clicked back with a stiff, dead sound.
The machine sat like an iron corpse drained of every drop of blood. Utterly unresponsive. Enough. Kokichi peered through the cracked monitors and looked back. At the far end of the empty street, the last evacuation bus packed with civilians had just turned the corner and vanished into the dark.
If those tens of thousands of lives were safe, then this broken body had at least died for something. A deafening roar of engines split the sky. Three attack helicopters swept over the rooftops in a triangle formation. The Hellfire missiles slung beneath their hulls dragged lines of flame and came pouring down like a storm.
On the ground, the treads of Type 90 main battle tanks ground through the asphalt, and their 120mm smoothbore cannons roared in unison.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A wall of overlapping explosions swallowed the hundred-meter nuclear-contaminated behemoth whole.
"Did we kill it?" came the military commander's hoarse shout over the comm channel.
"Don't hold fire! Keep shooting!"
It's useless. Kokichi knew exactly what conventional physical weapons could and couldn't do. They couldn't even scratch that thing's skin. The smoke hadn't cleared before a massive arm sheathed in pale-green bone armor reached out from the inferno. The behemoth didn't so much as glance at the missiles detonating across its hide.
It let out a low rumble, swung one palm, and sent a tank that had just finished ejecting its shell flying through the air. The dozens-of-tons steel war machine tumbled end over end, punched through the glass curtain wall of an office building, and detonated into a blinding fireball. The behemoth raised its head. Clouded slit-pupils locked onto the helicopters hanging in the sky.
It drove force through its legs. That massive hundred-meter frame wrenched itself upward seventy or eighty meters in a single surge. An enormous bone claw tore through the air, reaching for the Apache at the front.
"Pull up! Pull up now!" The pilot's desperate scream burst across the open channel.
There was no dodging it. Kokichi clenched both fists. Fingernails dug into the palms, and blood trickled down between the fingers.
"Move! You pile of scrap metal!" Kokichi's eyes burned red, voice shredding into a raw roar.
Just one more scrap of Cursed Energy. That was all it would take. Ultimate Mechamaru's right arm let out a tooth-grinding shriek of warping metal, managed to lift a few inches, and reached to block the behemoth's descent. That feeble motion was enough to send it over the edge. In midair the behemoth wrenched its entire body around, abandoned the helicopter, and came crashing down onto Mechamaru.
BANG!
The thirty-meter mech was slammed flat. The asphalt beneath it caved into a massive crater. Six malformed arms pinned down Mechamaru's four limbs and torso. Every alarm in the cockpit merged into one continuous shriek.
"Warning! Armor integrity below 15%!"
"Warning! Life support system offline!"
The violent impact shook Kokichi hard enough to send blood flooding from the mouth. Vision started going dark. It's over. Kokichi stared through the screen at the terrifying void filling every inch of sight. The pale-green bone spines along the behemoth's back lit up one by one. Blinding radiation light blazed across Shibuya's broken night sky.
It opened its cavernous mouth. Deep in its throat, a mass of sickly-green acid breath so dense it had nearly solidified began to gather. That superheated, high-concentration acid could reduce the entire mech to molten iron in seconds. The shadow of death came down overhead. Kokichi closed both eyes, resigned. Miwa... I'm sorry. I couldn't make it back alive to see you.
CRACK!
A shattering sound rang out across the night sky. Shibuya's edge. The rooftop wind went abruptly still. Toji Fushiguro was sitting on a water tank, digging at his ear out of boredom. His hand froze. The dark-red barrier that had been keeping him out this whole time dissolved without warning, breaking apart into a sky full of scattered motes of light and vanishing completely.
Toji's mouth split open. A wild, unrestrained grin spread across his face. His sharp white teeth caught the moonlight and threw off a cold gleam.
"Finally..."
Toji stood up. His neck cracked out a rapid-fire string of pops.
"Little rats, hide-and-seek is over."
His broad chest expanded hard, and that reckless laugh rolled straight over the distant artillery fire.
"The stage of youth has finally thrown open its doors!"
BANG!
The rooftop beneath his feet shattered. Steel-reinforced concrete crumbled like tofu. The building lurched. His silhouette vanished. All that remained was an afterimage the naked eye couldn't track, shooting in a straight line toward the heart of Shibuya. Completely beyond any physical limit a human being should possess. Shibuya Center-Gai. The behemoth's breath closed in on Mechamaru's cockpit. Extreme heat and acid warped the air black.
At that razor's edge — A black bolt of lightning split into the battlefield. No flashy jujutsu light-show. No earth-shaking surge of energy. Pure, absolute violence.
BOOM!
A single dull impact detonated at the behemoth's lower jaw. The titan's eyes bulged from their sockets. Its hundreds-of-tons body wrenched clean off the ground and went flying backward. The sickly-green acid breath lost control, firing straight up into the sky and burning a massive hole through the cloud layer above.
The behemoth slammed down at an intersection several hundred meters away and plowed a gouge several meters deep into the earth. Kokichi's eyes flew open. Still alive? The dust settled. A tall, powerfully built silhouette stood in front of the mech. Black short sleeves. Fitted athletic pants. Muscles straining across a broad back, radiating an unsettling heat.
"Kid, not bad at all."
Toji Fushiguro turned his head and gave a thumbs-up toward Mechamaru's monitor.
"Holding a chunk that size at bay for this long — you just gave a perfect demonstration of what it means to burn your life for youth!"
"From here, leave the rest to the adults."
Kokichi's mouth opened and closed. Tears fell for no apparent reason. That reckless bastard of an uncle. Still making the most flamboyant entrance possible. But genuinely reliable. Far away, deep underground. Megumi Fushiguro had been moving through the tunnels when he suddenly stopped and looked up.
Above his head was a thick load-bearing concrete wall. But in his sharp senses, something monstrously powerful had just awakened on the surface. Not a single trace of Cursed Energy. That pure, physical pressure — the kind that makes your bones ache — was radiating down through dozens of meters of solid earth. Megumi's expression went dark. The corner of his eye twitched. That unhinged old man had arrived.
That completely unrestrained, savage presence could only be him.
More than the Cursed Spirits, Megumi was now worried about whether that idiot father of his was going to tear all of Shibuya apart. After all, the words "contain the damage" had never once appeared in that man's vocabulary.
On the surface.
ROARRR!
The behemoth hauled itself up from the rubble. Its lower jawbone was shattered completely. Blue-green blood poured out like a waterfall. It plunged into a full frenzy. The bone spines along its back grew wild. Its thick tail slammed the ground. It fixed its gaze on the insignificant human standing before it.
Toji stood where he was, dug a finger in his ear, and flicked the dust from his fingertip.
"Getting angry already? Big Lizard."
He lowered his stance and settled into a textbook fighting stance. His eyes turned instantly, sharply dangerous. The look of an apex predator sizing up what's on the plate.
"To celebrate finally getting on stage."
"I'll use your radioactive carcass to set off some fireworks."
Toji's chest rose and fell. His blood and vital force shattered through the walls of his veins. His heart thundered like a heavy-duty engine. His body temperature spiked to an inconceivable height. The veins beneath his skin stood out one by one, turning a deep, terrifying crimson.
"Eight Gates..."
Toji's voice dropped low, pressing down on everything around him.
"Seventh Gate..."
BOOM!
Sweat vaporized in an instant, merging with his surging blood and vital force into a solid curtain of energy steam that fired straight into the sky and tore open a vortex of air above Shibuya. The surrounding air compressed past its breaking point and cracked apart with a sound it could no longer contain.
"Gate of Wonder, open!"
BANG!
The ground beneath Toji's feet caved three meters down. Every glass curtain wall within a hundred-meter radius shattered at once. One moment he was standing still. The next, he had flashed to the behemoth's face.
"Watch closely, kid."
Toji's savage voice detonated in midair.
"This is what a real Fist of Youth looks like!"
His right arm pulled back. Every muscle clenched to its absolute limit. Blue steam surged madly toward the point of his fist.
ROAR!
The behemoth's instincts screamed at it. It spread both arms and tried to clap them shut and crush Toji. Too late. Toji threw the punch. The air exploded outward, forming a massive ring of white sonic boom cloud. The high-pressure shockwave condensed into something solid and drove straight into the behemoth's chest.
BANG!
The detonation swallowed Shibuya. The bone armor over the behemoth's chest didn't last a millisecond. It turned to dust. Then came the flesh. The organs. The spine. The shockwave punched clean through the body, burst out from the back, and without losing a scrap of momentum, reduced every building across three full city blocks to rubble. The behemoth didn't even have time to scream.
Its massive hundred-meter frame, like a watermelon struck head-on by an invisible sledgehammer, disintegrated in midair. A sky full of blood rain mixed with shredded organs poured down. Inside Mechamaru's cockpit, Kokichi sat with mouth hanging open. Completely stunned. What kind of monster. What in the hell kind of monster is this?!
A Special Grade mutant behemoth that an entire armored brigade couldn't break through, and he turned it into a sky full of blood mist with a single punch?! Is this really a power that any human being could possess?
➤ Next: Jogo: I Only Play High-Stakes Matches