Inception

Chapter 14: The Fungi Kaiju

 The horror call of the kaiju alert jerked Lena awake. Her body went on auto-pilot, her brain still one foot in an old nightmare of driving without any brakes or getting to where she needed to go. All her siblings had been inside the car, which made crashing over and over so much worse, as their blood would splatter over the seats and dash.

Blood still painted the back of her eyes when she stumbled into the operating room and took her assigned seat in the back. Each operator had their own screen that displayed two to five defense force officers vitals, location, and the incoming data of the kaiju. Being the most junior of the operators, Lena always got whoever was in the back of the operation, in the least amount of danger. It varied depending on how Okonogi and the Captains decided to take on the kaiju.

Lena got a few precious minutes to finish waking up before her brother was sent to her screen. Whatever sleep still lingered vanished in a zip of electricity. She hardly paid the other two profile, and their following vitals and locations, slid across her screen.

For once, her least favorite job was going to pay off. She'd be the one to watch over her brother.

The great screen that took up the entire front of the operations rooms filled her world with interchanging blue and orange.

Somehow, she felt like she hadn't woken up from her dream. Even as she had her hand on the figurative wheel with Leno on her screen, she could still see the blood and feel the helpless space where the brakes should be.

"Fungi type honju spotted in sector delta. Yoju have already been spawned and are filling the streets. Evacuation in process."

"Vice Captain Hoshira on route. Company six supporting."

It took a few more names being juggled back and forth from the front for Lena to catch on that something was wrong. Not much could shake up the operating room, as it was their jobs to stay cool in every situation so they could keep communications open between the officers. But there was a distinct tension in the air that Lena finally caught on to.

Captain Ashiro was away.

Her stomach cramped up into a rock. She minimized her three soldier's windows to scroll through the drone visual feeds. The kaiju that came upon screen made her suck in a breath. It was a hellish combination of a turtle and a mushroom and huge, absolutely monstrous, with several trunk like legs as big as skyscrapers. If that wasn't bad enough, streams of truck-sized yonju bubbled up form where its spores had congregated in the street. They'd already reached the hundreds.

She struggled to breathe. This was Leno's first mission. Why'd it have to be this? Why?

She pulled down her assigned officers, but her hands hand gone cold and clammy and her mouth as dry as though she had eaten tissue.

The reason Lena hated this job wasn't because it was hard. No, it was painfully easy. An AI could possibly do it. It was a simple data processing and decision making duty. It took simple, if not very strict training, and it was only ever when kaiju appeared.

She hated it because of this: this weight of lives upon her hands. She hated watching the kaiju, listening to the thin, forced calm voices, hearing the screams over the intercoms, watching the blinking warnings inevitably fill the room with red. Seconds passed like hours. Her heart thrummed somewhere in her neck and wrists.

Kafka Hibino's voice didn't even register over the many other voices. Only his words, which painted the situation even worse as each yoju had their own ability to proliferate by the thousands. The question Lena had about how kaiju haven't taken over the world was soon to be obsolete, as sheer billions of yojo that would soon explode across the land would make short work of the world before whatever finished them off. If they were finished off.

Just as she thought she might not be able to do it, that she'd have to flee the operations room for a dark corner or else faint, Captain Ashiro reappeared on the scene and blasted the honju onto its back. She didn't stop shooting until it was but a few hanging trunks.

Lena breathed. She spared a second to rub her eyes. Her soldier's vitals were good. It was all clean up now. And all three of her men were newbies, watched over by the veterans. Leno was going to be okay.

Then she opened her eyes and his vitals had vanished off the screen.