There was a phone call. Priority.

The woman on duty, the sole operative present in the morning, answered.

"Vaucanson here, what happened?" she asked.

It was an emergency, the other end replied.

"Shionomisaki?" she repeated.

Where it had happened, the other end explained.

"On its way here?" she said, horrified.

Long before even dawn, the other end confirmed.

Another calamity was coming. The woman frantically sought the last known sightings. Her face grew weary with each piece of news. The fax to headquarters was made. An answer returned minutes later. She scurried for the intercom. And her voice, urgent but clear, rang out across every inch of the Great Fortress of Vaucanson.

"This is Piloqutinnguaq! We have a Code Red! A monster is currently on its way to Tokyo! I repeat, a monster is on its way to Tokyo! Its arrival time is very soon! All MAX FIRE operatives must attend to their stations! Deployment has been approved! Command has been transferred to Drs Meredith and Kougami! All MAX FIRE operatives must attend to their stations!"

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The waters of the inner sea were foaming.

Long ago, in a more naive time, those who made their living off the shores of Edo would have found such an occurrence merely strange. The rippling of the great blue bay could have been chalked up to the sunlight, an illusion brought about by interactions between the life-giving rays and the water. The frothing nothing but the migratory birds, the churning of the water a result of their wingbeats as they hunted for food. The bubbling would not have been noticeable, not by vessels on the surface of such a large gulf. But together, in this terrible time for humans, it was clear what their presence spelled.

A disaster.

From the surface of the cold sea came a head - large, dark-coloured and with immense, reptile eyes - and then a neck, dripping with streams of saltwater. And then, not a body, but more neck. And more! The head rose and rose and rose, ascending towards the Japanese sky on a slender, beautiful neck. Only at a full forty feet did it stop, and only then did the body, a great island of obsidian scales, dead white coral and shells and rotting fish, burst free of its subterranean home. Its tail thrashed. The seas were parted. Vessels were crushed and sunk beneath its weight.

From tip to tail, swimming slowly through the bay with the bearing of a king, it measured two hundred feet and more.

And like a king, its monster eyes bore upon the Capital. A silent, dinosaur-like beast from the tribes that lived in a time immemorial. A creature from the Deeps, hidden deep down in the coldest, darkest parts of the world. A king of the dead, called by Gaia to judge her wayward children.

They met it with planes.

And the king answered.

A scream that crossed millennia of fog and darkness. A violent, furious scream that shuddered across all of Kanto. It screamed at the planes. The planes fired. The beast screamed again. The planes fired. The king opened its gaping maw, the weapons of the planes plinking uselessly off its forest of great teeth. And it screamed again.

It was the sound of the ocean depths. Of twenty thousand fathoms of water weighing upon its shoulders for eternity.

Not only the sea, but the air churned.

And the planes churned with it.

With eyes of fire and ice, the king had made its verdict.

It proclaimed us guilty.