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"We're almost there."
"The entrance is inside the glacier ahead."
After a long voyage, the ship arrived in the waters near the South Pole. Large stretches of glacier, shattered in the fighting that had come before, were already visible from the deck. Dr. Ishiro Serizawa stood inside the captain's quarters in a heavy snowsuit, addressing the group.
Soon they would reach the Hollow Earth and find out exactly what kind of anomaly was unfolding inside it.
The South Pole's Hollow Earth entrance had originally been a steel fortress nearing completion. The aftermath of the battle had brought the glacier down on top of it, burying the unfinished structure in ruins. The passage itself, though, remained mostly intact. Traversing the wreckage would still get them through.
"The Hollow Earth." Jared held a small bottle of whiskey and gazed through the window in the direction of the passage. "Now this is an adventure worth remembering for the rest of your life."
The hollow Earth hypothesis hadn't been widely accepted yet. The number of humans who had ever set foot down there could be counted on one hand.
"I hope it looks like what Jules Verne described." Old De stood beside him with his arms crossed, drifting back to a science fiction novel he'd read years ago. Journey to the Center of the Earth — published in 1864, a story about exactly this kind of adventure.
"Jules who? Versailles?" Jared asked.
"Verne. Jules Verne." Old De shot him a look. "Never mind. Talking to you about literature is like playing music to a cow."
"The Hollow Earth..." Natsuki held an oversized orange from Skull Island and took a bite. "I've been somewhere like it before. Wasn't particularly impressed."
The dimensional rift spaces from the Kaiju No. 8 world technically qualified as Hollow Earths, in a loose sense — except every single one of them was just a damp underground cave stuffed full of kaiju.
"Are there planets like Earth elsewhere in the universe?" Old De asked, genuinely curious.
The universe was incomprehensibly vast. Humanity hadn't even managed to leave its own solar system. Planets similar to Earth existing out there was entirely plausible.
What he hadn't expected was for Natsuki to shatter another established theory entirely.
"It was another Earth. A parallel universe version."
"No Titans over there, but they've got their own group of kaiju." Natsuki took another bite of his orange.
Everyone who heard that — Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Vivienne included , went still for a moment.
"Parallel universe?"
"Wait." Dr. Serizawa's voice was carefully measured, but the disbelief bled through. "The parallel universe theory is actually real?"
It was a widely discussed hypothesis, but never once proven. This man, Natsuki, was beginning to feel less like a person and more like a walking heavyweight scientific discovery.
"Didn't I mention it?" Natsuki looked genuinely puzzled. "I came from another universe."
"You only ever told us your home was the Land of Light in the M78 Nebula." Dr. Serizawa said it with complete certainty.
Natsuki paused. "...Fair enough."
"I'm getting old. Cut me a little slack."
---
Soon, the convoy was moving across the Antarctic snowfield.
Several off-road snow vehicles ran point, with the massive Kong trekking behind them, snowflakes collecting across his shoulders and arms.
He's cold. Can we give him something to wear?
In the rearmost vehicle, Jia sat in the backseat. She glanced at Kong shivering in the wind, then turned toward Natsuki.
Her voice landed directly in his head through telepathy.
Natsuki wasn't confident he could cure her congenital condition, not yet, but during the days at sea, he'd noticed something. This Iwi girl had real mental aptitude. He'd spent time teaching her how to use telepathy to actually communicate with people.
As an Iwi, Jia had always carried a faint, instinctive telepathic ability. It was how she and Kong had managed to understand each other , faint impressions supplemented by sign language. After Natsuki gave her proper instruction, the kind backed by a few thousand years of Ultraman-civilization expertise, her ability had jumped dramatically. She was holding full conversations now.
He hadn't been idle during those days at sea, either. He'd kept up training with the bracelet, though the sessions had been unremarkable. His body had recovered to a solid level, and the era of casual training producing dramatic leaps was over. The Gauss situation hadn't repeated itself.
He'd started to suspect the bracelet had some kind of crisis-detection mechanism built in. No real danger, no real reward. It simply wouldn't let him coast.
He wasn't particularly bothered by it anymore. When he'd first taken the assignment, he might have been angling for an easy run. Now that he understood what was actually at stake, easy wasn't an option. He'd give it everything he had, every last bit of this old Ultraman's remaining fire.
A coat that size doesn't exist.
But I have another way.
Natsuki smiled at Jia, reached his hand toward the rear window, and let a scattering of golden light drift from his palm. The specks floated through the glass and drifted toward Kong.
Kong hesitated, watching them come.
Then they sank into his body.
"ROAR!"
The warmth hit him all at once. Kong's posture shifted, energy flooding back into him. He raised both hands behind him and signed: Thank you.
Last time he'd encountered those golden specks, they'd come with an Ultraman slap attached. His hesitation had been reasonable. But this time , just the warmth. No slap. He seemed pleasantly surprised by that.
For all the stubbornness he showed when his temper was up, the big guy was gentle most of the time, and he understood more human speech than most people expected.
"Thank you." Irene turned from the passenger seat, watching the exchange, and said it to Natsuki.
Partly for Kong. Partly for Jia. There had always been a wall between this girl and the rest of the world , anyone who didn't know sign language simply couldn't reach her. Being that isolated at her age was its own kind of cruelty. Natsuki had found a way through it, and as the person who had become Jia's guardian, Irene was genuinely, deeply grateful.
"Don't thank me. She did the work herself." Natsuki said. "Telepathy doesn't open up for anyone without real aptitude. It doesn't matter how good the teacher is."
"The passage is directly ahead." Dr. Serizawa's voice crackled through the convoy's comm. "We'll need to clear the blockage before we can proceed."
Collapsed ice, snow, and twisted steel had sealed the entrance. Something needed to break it open before the vehicles could get through.
Natsuki was about to step out and take a look when the ground shook beneath them.
Kong was already at the front. He raised his fists and went to work, THOOM THOOM THOOM, hammering through the debris in steady, thunderous strokes until he'd carved a path wide enough for the convoy. Together they pushed through and entered a corridor of ice and snow, and there it was , the Hollow Earth passage, pulsing with that strange, deep blue energy.
Kong stopped at the edge. Two seconds. He looked down into it.
Then he jumped.
His kin were somewhere on the other side of that passage. He'd waited long enough.
What he didn't know was that on the other side, his kin were already in chains , enslaved by the Titan great apes, and on the verge of launching an invasion that would tear through both the Hollow Earth and the surface world above.
➤ Next: Journey to the Hollow Earth
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