Chapter 113: Humans and Monsters

Standing at the forefront of the command platform to instill confidence in his team, Rando Ushiguchi now felt deep regret. It wasn’t about his position; unlike typical bureaucrats in Japan, he did not think it inappropriate for a minister to face death before his subordinates. Rather, he was anguished that during such a critical operation, sabotage had infiltrated the security detail.

Although the fully armed Self-Defense Forces downstairs were swiftly wiped out, the group upstairs—those “security guards” who had shown up merely to pad their resumes—were utterly unarmed. They were utterly useless.

If only they had been granted a little more time...

As the demon lunged from above, its razor-sharp claws poised to tear through Ushiguchi’s neck, his eyes squeezed shut, his heart filled only with regret.

“Thwack!”

The sound of flesh and bone colliding rang out.

Realizing he was not dead, Ushiguchi opened his eyes in disbelief.

Before him stood a man, so burly and powerful that even encased in a hazmat suit, he looked like a bear. With a classic karate block, he deflected the demon’s claws.

A wave of displaced dust erupted at their feet as the man shifted his stance multiple times, barely managing to halt the claws mere millimeters from his skin.

“Minister Ushiguchi, please regroup. Leave this fiend to me,” came the gruff voice of Gensai Kuromoku from inside the protective suit.

Even facing an opponent unlike any he had encountered in decades of martial arts training, his tone remained calm and unwavering.

Ushiguchi, watching the silhouette that intercepted the demon’s claws, felt an inexplicable sense of safety welling up inside him.

“Even now, Kuromoku Gensai is truly a formidable man,” remarked Saeko, pulling out a Murata sword from a bag behind her with a smile.

“Indeed,” nodded Hakudō Kagami, stretching nearby.

Both noticed that Kuromoku’s right arm, shattered by a sonic punch, and the right side of his upper body had yet to fully recover. Yet relying solely on the strength of his left side, he was still able to keep the monstrous creature—spawned from Godzilla’s tail tip—entangled.

“Watch out! There’s more than one!” Wakatsuki shouted sharply, alert.

In the next instant, another humanoid monster climbed over the rooftop’s edge and tore a hapless victim in two at the waist.

“Damn it!”

Wakatsuki sprinted forward, but even as he covered mere strides, the tail whip decapitated another person.

“Explosive Core!”

Finding his distance, Wakatsuki launched a reverse thrust punch with all his might, leaving no room for error.

But as expected, when his fist struck the exposed junction of the monster’s tail vertebrae...

Wakatsuki’s eyes suddenly widened.

“It’s so heavy! And... so hard!”

For a superhuman with fifty-two times normal muscle density, the concept of “heavy” had long vanished from his life.

And with a lifetime of hard-hitting karate training, “hard” should have been a familiar sensation.

Yet Wakatsuki could swear he had never struck anything so solid and weighty before.

*Guardian on site.*

“Thwack.”

A strike powerful enough to send a hundred-pound person flying several meters hit the joint connection and yet failed to even push it back.

Seemingly unaffected, the razor-sharp claw snapped down again with a harsh whistling sound.

That such a lethal weapon could whistle like that suggested the monster’s raw, unrefined power.

But perhaps technique was of little concern to such a creature.

In a flash, Wakatsuki discarded his distracting thoughts, slipping inside the monster’s arm range to evade the most lethal swipe.

He raised his blocking arm to intercept the opponent’s forearm.

“Thwack! Huh?!”

Wakatsuki felt a crushing force, nearly matching the tremendous power Hakudō Kagami had wielded in their tournament days, slam straight into his arm.

Though the block could not fully absorb the blow, it diverted the strike’s trajectory slightly.

The claws scraped past, leaving a long blood streak across Wakatsuki’s temple despite his efforts to duck away.

“Even its strength is this immense?!”

He had assumed the creature’s emaciated limbs lacked muscle, and thus power would be limited.

Now he understood.

Godzilla was a god-like entity beyond ordinary comprehension, and its derivatives naturally defied conventional logic.

Ducking another low tail whip, Wakatsuki broke into a cold sweat, knowing any misstep would result in gutted carnage.

Now he grasped what it must have felt like for his past opponents—dodging every one of his attacks in the ring, fearing even a single hit.

If he, a top-tier fighter in the Kengan Association, struggled this much, what of the others...

Had they all been wiped out?

Tensing, Wakatsuki quickly scanned the rooftop.

To his shock, despite the monster’s brutal efficiency leaving pools of blood and scattered limbs, most battles had already been resolved except for a few pockets.

Gensai Kuromoku, relying solely on his left side, dodged every attack with surgical precision.

Whenever the monster tried to break free, Kuromoku used simple, precise leverage strikes to unbalance it, sending it crashing down.

Unable to escape or defeat Kuromoku, the creature opened its tooth-filled maw in a hoarse howl—the only monster on the rooftop to make a sound.

Kuromoku’s composed demeanor left no doubt in Wakatsuki’s mind: this man was a pioneer, walking the pinnacle path of martial mastery.

While the monsters’ physical prowess far exceeded human norms, Kuromoku’s technique rendered him the more “monstrous” combatant.

But what of the others?

Naoya Okubo and Ryo Himuro sat atop a fallen monster, their hazmat suits rising and falling with heavy breaths.

The corpse beneath them was mostly intact, though many joints were violently dislocated or broken.

Judging by the twitching, it was not dead but had its neck broken.

Kaneda Suekichi’s battlefield was similar.

Obsessed with Godzilla’s power, Kaneda knelt before a monster, examining it closely.

“Chokeholds? Jujutsu? Or... joint destruction?”

As the Kengan Association’s most experienced and victorious fighter, Wakatsuki quickly pieced together the general flow of the battles and distilled their key elements from these two scenes.

“Hah—”

The claws swept again with a whistling roar.

This time, Wakatsuki met the strike head-on.

Without the grappling skill of Kaneda or Okubo, nor Himuro’s joint-breaking Jeet Kune Do techniques, Wakatsuki chose to leverage his own strengths.

Diving low, he charged forward and toppled the beast.

“Thwack!”

The towering, bony frame was heavier than expected.

Even Wakatsuki had to commit his full weight to slam it to the ground.

The blond giant then slithered like a snake up the monster’s back.

One hand gripped the tail tip to prevent a whip.

The other grasped the chin, pulling fiercely backward.

“Ugh! ...Crack!”

Teeth grit, the creature’s sharp dorsal fins scraped and cut into the hazmat suit, but with a crisp snap, Wakatsuki broke its cervical vertebrae.