Free Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) by K. H. Koehler Page B

actually destroy the monster with my puny little weapon, but because I was following a predetermined pattern, carving a complex symbol into the aim before me, even though I had no idea what I was doing. But my hands knew, even if my brain was too numb to understand what was happening.
    Two signs. Characters. Kanji. They seemed to take on a glow in the very air before me. I knew what they meant. I knew what they said. I knew from the dream. I had seen the same characters carved into the book.
    What am I doing? I wondered. But, somehow, I knew. I raised the burning sword in a salute to the night sky painted with a billion ancient stars, and I thought, for no apparent reason at all, Come . Then I swung it around so the blade was pointed toward the ground and drove it into the asphalt between my feet with all of my strength. Logic stated that the blade should have broken on contact, but this was obviously no ordinary sword. The sword and the ground were now fused, as if they had always been one. I held the hilt, feeling the vibration of the impact all the way up to my aching shoulders.
    Come , I thought, as the wind picked up around me, spilling my hair all over my face. The night was full of the stink of blood and fire. “ Come!” I screamed. “ Come now !”
    The asphalt under my feet split as a fork of lightning struck the sword, making me blink and shudder. I felt a wave of heat so intense it made my skin tighten and crawl; the spit in my mouth dried up and my hands felt like they were burning. With a cry I released the hilt of the sword and stumbled back.
    A column of flame burst from the crack I had made in the street, growing larger by the moment, until it was a full-fledge bonfire so tall it could lick at a ten-story building. I fell back in the gutter, shielding my face from the intense, scalding heat, and watched the air shimmer around me like it was coming off a desert deadpan. Something within the flames roared. It sounded like a train when you’re so close to the tracks you can feel the noise vibrating in your bones. Above, the stars seemed to go out and blood red veins of forked lightning snaked outward across a pitch-black sky, followed by an answering roar of thunder. A storm without rain, I thought. It felt like I had been transported to some remote bowel of hell.
    Maybe I’m dreaming all this, I thought. Or maybe I was crazy. There was no other reasonable explanation.
    I had thought nothing stranger could happen this night, but it turned out the thing that sounded like a derailed train was taking form in the flames. I hissed between my teeth at the deathless brilliance of it. I decided that the old artists who painted wall scrolls and shoji screens that adorned so many traditional Japanese homes really had no idea what they were doing when they depicted the holy Kami—the gods of ancient Japan. They had never seen one with their own eyes, that was for sure. They based their artwork on something earthly, tangible, something that could be understood with human eyes and grasped by a human brain. A dragon or tiger or crane, that type of thing. This went beyond all that.
    This was made of nightmare fabric. As it came into clear focus, I saw scales and fur and feathers all at once, at every point of its body, something like a lion but also like an armored dragon, with a face both bestial and strangely human, and a massive head crowned with a myriad of curling horns that extended all the way down its back and the long line of its serpentine tail. All of it was on fire, crackling with the power of a sun gone supernova. It set its giant, iron-clawed feet on the ground before me and flicked its tail, a wall of sulfuric heat so intense it was like standing before a blast furnace. The eyes, I thought, raising my arms to shield my face from the intense, baking heat. The eyes are human…the eyes are blue .
    It growled softly, a sound that slowly escalated into that train-wreck noise I had heard earlier, a noise that