My Kaiju Parasite Revived Me, But a Yandere Bought My Streaming Rights
Chapter 152: One Viewer
They cleared his arm on a Tuesday. Iris had him in armor by that night.
"You’re not ready," she said, walking him down to the staging bay. "I know you’re not. The arm’s held together with new bone and good intentions, and you’ve got no business in a hot sector."
She shoved his helmet into his hands.
"We’re also down four bodies, and there’s a Class-Six in the Verrin overpass eating a transit station. So your readiness is a luxury I filed a complaint about and then ignored. Suit up."
The Seventh hadn’t changed. Same warzone, same understaffing, same gallows quiet in the bay while people checked harnesses they didn’t trust. Caleb pulled the suit on one piece at a time and the old weight of it settled, the dead weight, because the suit had never once worked right for him.
His HUD booted as the visor sealed.
[SEVENTH DIVISION / JAEGER-CLASS / OPERATOR: MERCER, C.]
[KINETIC SYNC RATE: 1.2%]
[STREAM: LIVE / VIEWERS: 1]
There it was, the number that had followed him since the academy. One point two percent. The chat used to ask how he could even walk in the armor, and captains had looked through him at the draft like he was furniture.
And under the number sat the viewer count, holding at one as it always held, the same one who’d owned his feed since the night he should have died on a kill floor.
He hadn’t thought about her in weeks. There had been a father, a mentor, a woman on a forty-second floor, an old man on a porch, and underneath all of it the feed had stayed open, locked, single-viewer, as it had stayed for three years.
***
The Verrin overpass was already gone by the time they got there.
The Class-Six had come up through the old transit tunnels and folded a station platform around itself like a coat. It was big, low, plated in gray, six limbs and a head that was mostly mouth. It had eaten nineteen people getting out of the eight o’clock train before anyone with a weapon arrived.
"Mercer, Okonkwo, you’re left flank," Iris said in his ear, command voice flat. "We hold it off the second platform until heavy support lands. Eleven minutes out. Do not engage the head. Nobody engages the head."
Caleb went left with a heavyset Jaeger named Demir, a man he’d never worked with, who took one look at his sync readout on the shared squad display and said nothing, which was its own kind of comment.
For four minutes it went like these things always went, suppress and pull wounded, while the thing roared and swung and Caleb’s suit lagged behind his body like every one-point-two suit did, every motion a half-beat slow, fighting him.
Then the head came around faster than a thing that size had any right to, and it took Demir.
Caleb saw it happen from ten feet away. The big man went under a limb and didn’t come back up.
The kaiju turned its mouth toward the knot of wounded civilians pinned against the dead escalators. Support was seven minutes out, and there was Caleb, alone, in a suit that didn’t work, standing between the mouth and the people.
There was no deciding in it. He moved, and the silver moved with him.
It came up out of his ribs like heat through water, and there was nothing of the old key in it. The key was gone. This was the thing that was his, quiet under his coat through a hundred conversations, waking all the way up because he’d put himself in front of a mouth.
His HUD lit red and then stopped making sense.
[KINETIC SYNC RATE: 1.2%]
[LOCALIZED SYNC SPIKE / LEFT SIDE]
[SYNC RATE: 41% / CLIMBING]
[SYNC RATE: ERROR]
The suit stopped lagging. For once the armor caught up to him, then fell behind the other way, struggling to keep pace with a body that had gone faster and stronger than the machine around it.
He hit the kaiju’s foreleg with a spreader bar. The impact landed wrong, landed like he weighed twice what he did, and the plating that should have shrugged off a Rank-C cracked.
The thing screamed and pulled back. Caleb went with it and climbed.
He’d spent two years climbing dead kaiju in a disposal yard. He’d never climbed a live one.
His hands found the seams like they always had, except now there was something behind the grip that hadn’t been there before. He went up the gray scales fast, faster than the head could turn.
He got to the soft place behind the jaw hinge, the place every disposal worker knew, and put the bar through it.
The Class-Six dropped. The whole station shook when it came down.
Caleb rode it to the ground and stood up on the dead thing’s neck in a suit reading errors, his own breath loud in his helmet, the silver singing under his ribs and starting, already, to burn.
That was when she spoke.
[??? : There you are.]
He went still. He hadn’t seen those brackets in a long time.
[??? : I have waited so very long to see it wake. The little key was never going to give you this. You know that now. This is yours. I am the only one who ever believed it was in there.]
"Stop watching," Caleb said, under his breath, to one viewer.
[??? : Never. Do not be dull. They are all watching the public feeds tonight, the prodigies with their clean armor and their honest little sync rates, and not one of them did what you just did. You carved a Six off a one-point-two. With me.]
The burn was getting worse. The silver had given him the four minutes, and now it wanted paying for it. It was pulling something out of him. This was the thing Marek had described, the old man’s piece eating Marek over twenty years, except now it ran in real time, and he could feel the floor of it.
[??? : Yes. That is the cost. Stop now.]
The voice changed when it said it. Less amused. Something underneath the elegance that he had never heard from her before, sharper, almost afraid.
[??? : Stop, Caleb. You will spend the whole reserve on a corpse and there is so much more I want to watch you become. I did not keep you breathing for three years to lose you to a Class-Six and a crowd of strangers. Sit down. Let it close.]
He sat down on the dead kaiju’s neck because his legs were going anyway, and he let the silver close. It sank back under his ribs and banked itself, and the burn pulled back to an ember.
His HUD steadied.
[SYNC RATE: 1.2%]
[STREAM: LIVE / VIEWERS: 1]
Like nothing had happened. Like the number had never moved.
Heavy support landed ninety seconds later. Six Shinigami-class operators dropped out of a gunship onto a kaiju that was already dead.
Their captain walked the platform, looking at the body, at the soft kill behind the jaw, then at the Rank-C sitting on the neck of it. Caleb watched the man’s face do the thing he’d seen on Okafor and Aldric and a dozen others now.
The thing people did when they understood he was not what his file said he was.
***
Demir lived. Broken in four places, but breathing, which on a Seventh deployment counted as a good night.
Caleb sat in the back of the medical transport with his helmet off and the ember still warm under his ribs and let the noise of it all wash over him, the wounded, the cleanup crews, the highlight techs already arguing over whether a soft kill on a Six counted for a Danger Class clip multiplier.
Iris found him there and didn’t say anything for a second. She’d seen the squad feed, watched the readout go to error along with the rest of the division.
"That was the thing on the rooftop," she said, and she wasn’t asking.
"Yeah."
"And it’s yours."
Caleb looked at his hands. "Yeah."
She sat down across from him, and she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the deployment.
"You know the whole division saw your sync hit error. You know that’s in a file by morning. The Guild’s going to want to know what a Rank-C is doing carving Sixes, and they’re not the only ones who’ll be asking."
She rubbed her face. "You had a quiet thing going. Quiet’s over. You went and did it on a feed."
"It was one viewer, Iris."
"It’s never been one viewer." She looked at him. "Whoever that is has been buying your survival since the night you signed your broadcast away, and tonight they got to watch you turn into the thing they’ve been paying for. You think that was an accident? You ending up in front of that mouth?"
Caleb didn’t answer. He was thinking about a dead man in a yard saying *she’ll send for you when it’s time, and it’ll come too easy.* He was thinking about a voice that had gone afraid when he started to burn, afraid of losing him, like someone afraid of losing a thing they’re not finished with.
He filed it next to the rest.
Outside, the city kept being the city, sirens and rain and a million people who’d watched a public feed tonight and never once knew that the most interesting thing that happened in the Verrin overpass went out to an audience of one.