My Hero Automata

Chapter 52: I didn't sign up for a Kaiju movie!

Summary: Wait...I think we accidently stepped in the wrong genre!

Chapter 52: I didn't sign up for a Kaiju movie!

The horrific shriek of tearing metal woke Izumi from a dead sleep. Despite 2B's own activity meaning that her brain never really, fully, shut down anymore...there was still several seconds of utter disorientation as the world seemed to violently shift and twist around her. It was only when she instinctively caught a half-terrified, half-disoriented Jirou who was falling toward her, that it clicked for Izumi that the world really was violently lurching. Even as it finally processed that the entire ship was being shaken about like a ragdoll, the sounds and sensations got much worse for a few moments that seemed to last forever. Then, the compartment they were in ripped in half and Izumi found herself free falling through open sky.

Despite her continued confusion and disorientation, the adrenaline surge triggered by the sudden fall finally caused her battered mind to fall into hyper cognition mode. Until that moment, even 2B had been so hammered by the confused environment and horrific sounds being reported by Izumi's senses that she'd been rendered unable to react as she scrambled to pull her own consciousness from the deep net where she'd been working. Given they'd been sleeping on an armed and armored Coast Guard ship, surrounded by heroes and paramilitary personnel, neither of them had thought any sort of watch had needed to be kept...and they were apparently paying for it now.

As hyper cognition fully activated and time slowed to a crawl, Izumi finally got some idea of just what in the unholy hells of H.P. Lovecraft's nightmares was going on. When she did, she almost wished she hadn't, because apparently All for One must have been one of that author's fanboys. At least, that's the only reason she could think of for coming face-to-torso with a 30-meter-tall monstrosity with a dozen spiked tentacle arms thicker than buses, and the distinctive exposed brain of a Nomu resting over the face of a squid. The pulsing blackened skin, entirely too similar to the Nomu from the USJ, didn't make things better. Though the fact that it was holding the ripped in half pieces of the Cost Guard Training Vessel Nagura in half a dozen tentacles certainly explained what all the shaking and noise had been about.

Worse, Izumi's rapidly-coming-online transformation was already telling her that they were dozens of kilometers out to sea, rather than just barely off the coast. So the initial shaking must have been the monstrosity grabbing them and heading away from the coast at its best speed. A little detail that likely explained why the Oki Mariner was no where in sight. Hopefully, it hadn't destroyed Selkie's ship. Of more immediate concern...she was falling in midair, with a dazed and confused Jirou held to her chest by instinct. And her rapidly transforming body most certainly wouldn't be able to swim.

Cursing internally, Izumi shifted her transformation mid-process. She spent a single heartbeat sending a mayday directly to Nedzu, complete with snapshot of what she was seeing, then cut most of her ECM/ECC systems out of the transformation. There was, ironically, no time to use shortcuts here. None of her current partial transformations were properly suited to the horrifying situation in front of her. Instead, she ruthlessly and rapidly hacked together a minimally augmented body, 2B lending her aid as she realized what Izumi was doing. Speed augmentations, all of them. But absolutely nothing for strength, damage protection, electronic warfare, Pod support, and so on. Only those alterations necessary to keep her body from breaking down under the stress she was about to put on it were allowed through the brutal weeding process...even as she split off a fraction of her mind to start summoning a full Flight Unit.

This was not the stripped-down version of a Flight Unit she'd summoned during the UA invasion. This was a full-blow YoRHa military model that, even with the stripping-down of her transformation, Izumi wouldn't be able to keep summoned for more than twenty minutes. Maybe thirty at best. She didn't know, since she was making this shit up on the fly. It was also, for all intents and purposes, a mini-mecha. Which meant that she needed to do something with Jirou before it crushed the girl while it was forming. Tossing her friend up, even as Izumi continued to fall, was the best solution Izumi could come up with, as overtasked as she and 2B were at the moment. The smaller girl screamed, the few seconds since they'd started to fall finally having gotten her brain working...but Izumi was there to catch her in armor-encased arms moments later, burning hard upward to arrest their fall.