Chapter 161: The Nukes Land in Japan
In an apartment in Tokyo, a young man named Yoru Higurashi was having the best morning of his life.
On his monitor: a foreign livestream. Title, in aggressive capital letters: WATCHING PEOPLE DIE IN A NUCLEAR BLAST LIVE.
The streamer was a Black man broadcasting from somewhere in New York City, skyscrapers visible over his shoulder. He was grinning at the camera with the particular energy of someone who has decided that today was the day to either go viral or die trying.
"Yo, what is UP, bro! This is New York City and you are NOT going to believe this — three nuclear warheads are inbound RIGHT NOW! I will be here for the WHOLE THING! Donations appreciated! I am literally risking my LIFE for this content!"
The chat moved too fast to read.
This is clickbait, there's no way.
Who would nuke America lmao
This guy is unhinged. First rule of going viral: don't actually die.
Current streamers will do ANYTHING for views, remember that one guy who spread rumors about a kid losing his homework?
Americans finally getting what they deserve lmaooo
That last sentiment was particularly popular in the Japanese chat section. The atomic bombings had a long memory, and the opportunity to watch America receive a fraction of what it had delivered was drawing a certain kind of viewer.
Higurashi gripped his mouse. He didn't think twice. He sent the most expensive donation the platform offered — a full month's living expenses — and typed into the comment field with both hands:
THEY DESERVE IT. DIE, AMERICA. DIE.
He leaned forward in his chair, practically vibrating with anticipation.
The chat was still arguing about whether it was real.
Then the camera shook hard, swung skyward, and everyone in the stream went quiet at the same time.
Three mushroom clouds were rising over New York City. Enormous, white, climbing against the blue — not like anything any of them had seen outside of archival footage.
The streamer's voice cut off mid-sentence.
When the camera found his face again, he was crying. No words. Just tears running down his face, and the particular expression of a man who had gone looking for content and found his own mortality instead.
Nobody in the chat mocked him for it. There was something about watching a person confront the real thing that made irony impossible.
Higurashi, on the other hand, was laughing so hard his chair creaked.
"YES! FINALLY! AMERICA IS GETTING WHAT IT DESERVES!" He slammed his palm on the desk. "Too bad it's not hitting China while they're at it—"
He stopped.
A figure had appeared in the livestream footage — moving fast through the upper air, circling the descending warheads. Something formed below the first one: a ring of golden light, wide and bright, snapping open like an iris.
The warhead fell through it and was gone.
The second ring opened. The second warhead vanished.
The third — the figure handled differently, something else, and then it was gone too.
Three warheads. Three and a half seconds.
Higurashi's laughter died in his throat.
"What — who — BAKA!" He shot to his feet, chair rolling back and hitting the wall. "Who DARES stop this?! If that man were Japanese he'd be OBLIGATED to disembowel himself for this! This was their PUNISHMENT—"
The shockwave hit his apartment.
He had no time to understand what had happened. The warhead had to go somewhere. Ethan's portal had opened to a destination his instincts had supplied in a fraction of a second, and in a fraction of a second it had closed.
Higurashi did not finish his sentence.
His final conscious image was a flash of light through the window, and the dim, uncomprehending thought: why is it here?
He never worked out the answer.
Back in the stream — which was still somehow running — the chat went into a state that had no good name for itself.
Can someone explain what just happened
Is this real? Is any of this real?
THERE ARE ACTUAL SUPERHEROES IN THIS WORLD WHAT
I'm IN New York I can confirm the nukes were real I watched them go over my building
Why do WE not have one of these, WHERE IS OUR SUPERHERO
Is that God?
High above the city, Ethan exhaled.
That was close.
He'd managed two portals — big ones, bigger than he liked, and they'd cost him. The third warhead he'd handled differently: magnetic force and chaos magic working together, enough to redirect the trajectory, push it up and out of the atmosphere and into a decaying orbit. It would burn up on reentry somewhere over open water.
The portals he'd aimed fast, on instinct. Two destinations had come to him in the half-second he had to decide: Japan, and a stretch of Mediterranean coastline where satellite feeds had been showing active conflict for weeks.
He hadn't deliberated over it.
He wasn't going to lose sleep over it either.
Ocean had been the obvious alternative, but ocean meant contamination — and Ethan had a fairly clear personal hierarchy in which marine ecosystems ranked significantly above human beings who had spent the last several weeks trying to kill him. The math was the math.
That should be the last of it, he thought, beginning his descent. They'll be too busy with the aftermath to come at me again. And technically I just saved the entire federal government from a radioactive crater where their most important city used to be. Hard to spin that as an attack.
He was halfway down when he noticed the crowd.
Hundreds of people, moving toward his landing point. New Yorkers — his city's residents and a great many others who had been in the wrong or right place at the wrong or right time. They'd watched something happen in the sky above their heads, and now they wanted to know what it was.
Behind them: cameras. Journalists. Phones held up. The particular hungry forward lean of people who had a story and needed to name it.
Ethan kept descending.
Of course.
He'd saved tens of millions of lives on a global livestream and there was no version of the next five minutes that didn't involve somebody pointing a microphone at him.
☆☆☆
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