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CHAPTER 177 : Magician ( PLAT )
🕑 Added 2025-10-22 12:34:17 +0000 UTCThe command center had gone silent in the worst possible way—the kind of silence that comes when everyone's already writing the eulogy.
On the main tactical display, the water from Crimson Typhoon's impact was still falling in sheets, curtains of spray backlit by the city's neon glow. When visibility cleared, the view was nightmare fuel.
Crimson Typhoon lay on its back in the shallows, headless, the ragged stump of its neck trailing cables and hydraulic lines like exposed arteries. The once-proud red armor was shredded, crumpled, rent open in a dozen places. Seawater poured through the breaches.
Slattern towered above the wreckage, a titan among titans. Its tentacle-tails thrashed the ocean into chaos, creating whirlpools and waves that crashed against the distant Seawall. Bioluminescent blood—its own and Raiju's—painted the water in sickly colors.
And clamped between Slattern's jaws, still intact but barely, was Crimson Typhoon's head.
The Conn-Pod. The pilots. The Wei Tang triplets.
Metal screamed as Slattern's teeth ground deeper, applying pressure that would crack the armor like an eggshell any second now. Sparks fountained where teeth met metal. The sound—transmitted through underwater microphones and amplified across the command center—was the audio equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, except what was being destroyed was three human lives.
Striker Eureka was locked in a death match with Leatherback, too tangled to disengage. Cherno Alpha was half a klick away, sprinting toward the Seawall to intercept Scunner. Too far. Way too far.
Faces throughout LOCCENT had gone bloodless. Mako's hand covered her mouth. Tendo Choi had stopped calling out coordinates, just staring at the screen in mute horror. Even Pentecost's iron composure had fractured—you could see it in the tightness around his eyes, the white-knuckle grip on the railing.
They were about to watch three pilots die in real-time. And there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it.
"Sir, let us deploy!" Raleigh stepped forward, voice urgent. "Gipsy's ready. We can—"
Pentecost looked at him, then at Mako. The calculation was brutal and quick: untested pilot pairing versus certain death for the Wei brothers. Not much of a choice.
"Alright. Prep Gipsy for immediate—"
"WAIT!" Tendo's shout cut across the room. "What is that?"
Every eye snapped back to the main screen.
The sky above the battlefield had torn open.
Not metaphorically. There was a hole in reality—a massive circular portal edged in scarlet light, geometric patterns rotating within its circumference like the world's most advanced magic circle. Energy crackled around its perimeter, distorting the air, making the stars beyond ripple and bend.
Something fell through.
No—not fell. Descended. With purpose and control.
A mecha unlike anything in the Jaeger program dropped from the portal, trailing seawater from its frame. It was tall—maybe seventy meters—but sleek where Jaegers were bulky, elegant where they were brutal. The chassis was midnight purple, almost black, with luminescent lines running across its surface in patterns that looked more like circuitry designed by a mad wizard than engineering schematics.
Two swept-back pylons rose from its head, reminiscent of wings or horns—Asgardian aesthetic filtered through science fiction. A single crystal pulsed between them, amethyst-bright, like a third eye.
And gripped in both hands was a sword.
Not a plasma blade. Not a retractable combat knife. An actual sword—massive, proportional to the mecha's size, wreathed in flames that burned blue-white and left afterimages on the retina.
The purple mecha moved.
Fast. Inhumanly fast. The sword came around in an arc that seemed to ignore physics—too smooth, too precise, too clean for something that size moving through atmosphere.
The blade connected with Slattern's neck.
There was no resistance. No grinding of metal through flesh. The holy fire cauterized as it cut, flash-burning through vertebrae and muscle and alien biology in a single perfect stroke.
Slattern's head separated from its body, tumbling through the air in dreamlike slow motion.
The purple mecha caught it mid-fall with one hand—casual, almost gentle—before the massive skull could crash into the water. Slattern's body convulsed once, neural death-spasms racing through its tentacles, then went still. Dead before it even registered what had happened.
The jaws went slack.
The mecha reached into the open mouth with its free hand—fingers designed for precision rather than crushing grip—and carefully extracted Crimson Typhoon's Conn-Pod. The module was intact. Lights still blinking. Life support still active.
The Wei Tang brothers were alive.
For five full seconds, nobody in the command center breathed.
Then everyone tried to talk at once, creating a wall of overlapping voices and half-formed questions. Tendo was frantically typing, trying to get sensor locks. Mako had both hands pressed to the tactical display like she could reach through and touch the impossible thing on screen. Pentecost just stared, his tactical mind trying to process what he was seeing and failing completely.
The purple mecha set Crimson's Conn-Pod gently on the water's surface where it would float, then straightened to its full height. In the light from the city, every detail became clear—the strange bio-mechanical construction, the flowing purple lines that pulsed with internal light, the way it moved with fluid grace instead of hydraulic precision.
This wasn't a Jaeger. This was something else entirely.
The comm channel crackled to life.
"LOCCENT, this is Dr. Parker." Aidan's voice, perfectly calm, like he hadn't just dropped out of a hole in space and decapitated a Category-5 in a single strike. "I'm here to provide tactical support."
"Dr. Parker?!" Multiple voices shouted the name in unison.
"Codename: Magician," Aidan continued, almost conversational. "Three years in development, full combat deployment as of right now. Sending IFF transponder codes to your systems."
Beneath Magician's feet, another portal irised open—scarlet light spilling upward, geometric patterns rotating in impossible dimensions.
"Dispatching rescue for Crimson Typhoon's pilots. I'll handle the remaining Kaiju." Matter-of-fact. Professional. Like this was just another day at the office.
Then the portal swallowed him, and he vanished.
Striker Eureka was in trouble.
The Australian Jaeger's power reserves had hit critical. Every warning light in the Conn-Pod was screaming for attention. The reactor was overheating from sustained combat. Missile reserves: depleted. Plasma charges: down to emergency levels.
And Leatherback just kept coming.
The Category-5 had regenerative abilities that bordered on obscene. Herc and Chuck had put everything they had into the bastard—missiles, plasma casters, even the chest-mounted turbines—and the damage kept healing. Burn wounds sealed themselves. Cracked armor regrew. It was like fighting a biological tank with a built-in repair system.
"Maintaining range!" Chuck growled, backing Striker away from another charging ram. "We can't let it close!"
"I know!" Herc's hands flew across the controls. "But we're running out of room and ammunition!"
Leatherback's fan-shaped head plates flared wide, and it bellowed—a sound that rattled Striker's frame and set off new proximity alarms.
Then the sky above Leatherback split open.
The scarlet portal materialized without warning, geometric patterns etched in light against the night sky. Magician dropped through like a purple meteor, seawater streaming from its frame in glittering arcs.
It landed directly on Leatherback's back.
The Category-5 barely had time to register the weight before Magician's flaming sword plunged straight down, driving through the skull plates and into the brain with surgical precision. The holy flames burned from the inside out, cauterizing neural tissue faster than regeneration could compensate.
Leatherback took three more steps on pure momentum, its body not yet realizing it was dead. Then the signals stopped reaching the limbs, and the massive Kaiju crashed forward into the shallows like a felled tree.
Magician rode the corpse down, pulled the sword free with a shower of sparks and bioluminescent blood, and turned to face Striker Eureka.
Inside Striker's Conn-Pod, Herc and Chuck just stared.
"Well," Chuck said after a long pause. "That was new."
"Come on." Aidan's voice through the comm was almost cheerful. "Let's go help the Kaidanovskys with their turtle problem."
Magician gestured toward the Seawall with his head—eerily human body language from something decidedly not human—and started walking through the water toward Cherno Alpha's position.
Striker Eureka followed, still processing what they'd just witnessed.
By the time they arrived, the fight was already over.
Cherno Alpha had Scunner in a headlock that would've made a professional wrestler proud. The Russian Jaeger's massive fists rose and fell with piston-driven force, turning the Category-4's armored head into increasingly abstract modern art.
