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akinoameI need to reorganize a little bit. These are some beautiful scenes, but I need to trim stuff down. Figured I'd put them here for safekeeping.
In the beginning, Astra could hear moans, cries, and screams. They faded quickly.
He did not learn the names of his captors. When they spoke, it was usually among themselves while beating him, and so he was never able to decipher their words. So in his mind, he referred to them as the Brother, the Sister, and the Brute—although, that was not entirely fair, given that all of them were cruel, not just the big one with the armor and poisonous fists.
After they had chained him and the Brute had battered him until he was nearly unconscious, the Brother and Sister stripped him of all his jewelry and melted it down in front of him—the bangles he’d been given at birth, his ring…
…The Sister had taken a liking to his ring, identical to Leo’s, with a rare gemstone given to them by their father. That was the only time Astra had cried, pleading with the Brother no, clenching his fist tightly, and feeling a blade threatening to slice off his finger to get it.
The Sister stopped the Brother before he could, however, and instead broke Astra’s finger cleanly, sliding the ring off in the same motion. As punishment, she broke his remaining fingers and then admired the gleaming jewel while the Brother sliced into his body over and over with the knife.
Astra stopped bothering with tears and pleas for mercy after that. The Alien Magma had no hearts to move, and he only wasted his energy.
Today, though, he felt close to crying and screaming with rage at the strange new Ultra who had broken apart the asteroid that they had all tried so hard to deflect in one piece.
He flew up to the newcomer, fist clenched and shaking. The other warrior seemed unsure of how to respond, whether he should defend himself or take the hit. But before he could decide, King flew in-between them.
“Astra, there is no time for this,” he said sternly. “Leo and Zero are still on the planet’s surface. This is a danger to them as well.”
Astra forced himself to calm down, relaxing his hands with great effort. Reminding himself that Zero and Leo were more important than his anger, he nodded.
King nodded back gratefully, then turned to the stranger. “Will you help us?”
The third Ultra tilted his head to the side. Astra recognized that response; their words might as well have been gibberish to him. Astra sighed and gestured at him to follow before flying down toward the asteroids.
~~~
The being codenamed Ultraman Blazar knew he had messed up.
His consciousness wasn’t fully…together, he knew. His…holder? Partner? What word existed in his language or the human’s to convey a brave soul that had resonated with yours? A courage that reached across galaxies and took your hand? A heart that beat as yours?
Gento.
Gento and Blazar existed both side-by-side and together in their own mind when they were in Blazar’s body. It was like a wild enthusiasm for battle awoke inside Gento and a cool and intelligent sense of tactics did for Blazar. But it wasn’t quite like they were one. After all, Blazar had hauled them bodily out of danger against Nijikagachi when Gento was too stubborn to retreat.
This time, Blazar had been the one to hesitate, when he saw the red being, the one that the silver had called Astra. It wasn’t just the surprise of seeing other beings that resembled him, but the realization that Astra too had scars on his face and tribal markings on his body and nobody seemed to understand him. It was like what he’d felt when he connected with Gento three years ago. Like he’d crossed the universe to find another part of himself on the other side.
Gento deduced that the asteroid Astra was on was about to collide with the planet below, and he acted quickly, inserting the Nijikagachi stone into his bracer and summoning the Rainbow Slash. Blazar tried to warn Astra to get out of the way, but as with the humans, Astra hadn’t understood a word he said. It was only when Astra was about to punch him, and the other—King, he thought he heard at one point—indicated that he wanted help, that he realized the asteroids could not be allowed to enter the planet’s atmosphere at all.
Blazar/Gento felt a brief flash of shame for making their work harder. But he knew well that the only way to make up for it was to move forward, so he followed their lead and spread out. King fired beams at the asteroids, breaking them up even further. Astra called heat and energy into his feet, glowing bright red as he came down onto these in a kick; then caught the broken pieces with energy bolts from his hands. Blazar summoned the Spiral Burrade and used it to hook onto several of the pieces and fling them back out into deep space.
The planet had a series of rings that almost seemed like layers—smaller meteroids farther out, with larger ones closer to the planet, mounted by weapon turrets. It didn’t seem—and probably wasn’t—natural, but it provided a good sense of where the line was. No asteroids could be allowed to get past the final ring. Astra stopped on one of the large meteroids to prepare his beam attack when he suddenly felt a terrible pain in the center of his forehead, in his beam lamp. Near Blazar, King brought a hand to the side of his head, feeling it as well, although not nearly as debilitating as Astra was feeling.
The turret closest to Astra suddenly powered up. Its weapon began to glow, and Blazar realized with alarm that although it had the power to shoot, it was aiming at whatever set off its sensor—in this case, Astra. With both him and King distracted, Blazar acted fast and hurled his Spiral Burrade at the turret, startling Astra to awareness as it clattered to the ground behind him, deactivating. He looked up in surprise at Blazar.
“Astra, are you hurt?” King asked.
Astra shook his head, gesturing to Blazar, then turning to him and bowing slightly, his hand on his color timer. Blazar nodded back, Gento’s influence the only thing keeping him from jumping up and down in excitement at Astra’s gratitude.
“We must hurry,” King warned. “Something has happened to Leo. We must stop this asteroid now.”
Astra nodded back, but the sound of engines caught his attention, and they all looked over to see a spaceship approaching them. Blazar tilted his head, observing a gold flame-wing pattern painted on the silver and blue exterior. Then, to their surprise, a voice called out to them all, speaking in Japanese:
“Ultraman King, this is Captain Aihara with the Earth Spaceship Dragon. It looks like you guys could use a little help.”
For a moment, Blazar started to point in surprise at hearing a language he understood. But then King switched to Japanese as well, confirming, “Ryu, we would appreciate it,” and he whipped around to look at him in shock as well.
Aboard the Dragon, Aihara Ryu grinned and zipped up his jacket.
“You heard him. GUYS, sally go!”
“G.I.G.!” his crew responded immediately as they manned all weapons systems.
“Anti-asteroid cannon armed.”
“Wyvern missiles ready to deploy.”
“C’mon, people, we can do better than that,” Ryu insisted, taking out a keycard. “This isn’t the first time GUYS has faced something like this, so we’ve got a reputation to think about. Don’t let a single piece get past us. This thing already withstood the Ultras, so it’s time to bring out the big gun.”
He inserted his keycard into a reader near his seat, releasing the safeties.
“Lifting the ban on the Hyper Omega Cannon,” he said. “Haruzaki, bring us into position. Akari, take aim. Pedro, full power.”
“G.I.G.!”
As the Dragon maneuvered itself between the Ultras and the asteroid fragment, Ryu called out, “You guys got anything left for some beam attacks?”
“They are requesting our assistance through energy attacks,” King translated to Astra.
Astra nodded and raised a fist, coated in fiery red energy. At the same time, unseen, Gento re-inserted Nijikagachi’s stone into Blazar’s bracelet. This time, though, Blazar could not afford to break apart the asteroid; thus, he clapped his hands together twice to duplicate the Rainbow Slash, spinning both energy rings in his hands rapidly.
Rings of energy charged around the Dragon’s three main guns. Blazar could feel his Rainbow Slash rings almost being absorbed into it, and he realized what he needed to do. He threw the bladed rings, digging multiple fracture points along the asteroid’s surface to minimize the size of any fragments. Astra aimed a ball of compressed energy and fire that burned along the grooves. King followed with a blast of gold energy that exploded in the fault lines, then waved his hand to move the Rainbow Slash and Astra’s energy sphere. These, he broke down into pure energy and fed into the charging cannon.
“Captain, the Ultras—we’re at full gauge,” Pedro stated.
“Thanks for the assist,” Ryu said. “Hyper Omega Cannon, fire!”
A massive beam of spiraling charged particles fired from the main guns. It drilled into the asteroid, collapsing it along its fault lines; and as the asteroid crumpled in on itself, the beam continued to burn it away. In the end, it wasn’t so much destroyed as much as it was disintegrated—reduced entirely to dust, and decidedly no longer a threat to the planet behind them.
And yet the Ultras couldn’t let themselves feel that relief. King turned to Astra and said, “That gun turret activated in response to you.”
Astra nodded reluctantly and made his way toward the ruins, Blazar following closely behind in case something else decided to attack. While Astra could appreciate the help, he couldn’t deny that he’d prefer to be alone right now. He had a strong suspicion he knew what he would find, and he didn’t know how he could possibly explain any of it.
There was no number, no calculation, no way to quantify the immense loss that Astra had experienced. A beautiful, thriving planet full of millions, billions of lives—gone in a devastating, unprovoked attack. His family, pets, friends, everyone Astra had ever loved, save for his brother and Ron, dead. His face broken, his brain cells dying, his wounds festering, his body chained and anchored to his own leg so that he was forced to stand the entire time he was held captive. There were no words that could depict it all, and some days Astra was relieved that he’d never been any good with them anyway. It was one less thing that Magma could take away.
But the weight of it—it was deceptively light. Only about 110 tons, if that—nothing.
When Astra had first been brought aboard the Magma’s flagship, he’d heard the moans, cries, and screams of his fellow survivors. But they’d soon turned to silence, and not just because the Magma could not be moved by the sound.
And now, Astra didn’t even have the tears to cry for them.
Blazar tried to see what it is that Astra had knelt down and picked up. It was some small, round object that seemed vaguely like a domed hockey puck, but whatever it was, Astra was clearly upset to have found it.
“Astra,” King called out gently. Astra didn’t respond, cupping his hands around the disc. “You know what that is.”
He said this in their language, but Blazar could understand the idea of what they were saying. He tried again to get a look, but Astra seemed completely shut down, keeping it out of sight.
“Astra,” King tried again. “There is still much more that we must do.”
Astra nodded silently and stood, still holding the disc protectively. Something about it seemed familiar, but Blazar couldn’t quite make sense of it.
“King, Astra, everything okay down there?” Ryu called down.
“We will be coming aboard,” King warned, switching to Japanese. “Us, and a friend.”
He glanced at Blazar as he said this, and Gento had the strange feeling that King knew exactly who he was, somehow. As if on cue, the merge between them began to come apart, much to their alarm.
“Not a problem,” Ryu agreed. “See you aboard.”
In the beginning, Astra could hear moans, cries, and screams. They faded quickly.
He did not learn the names of his captors. When they spoke, it was usually among themselves while beating him, and so he was never able to decipher their words. So in his mind, he referred to them as the Brother, the Sister, and the Brute—although, that was not entirely fair, given that all of them were cruel, not just the big one with the armor and poisonous fists.
After they had chained him and the Brute had battered him until he was nearly unconscious, the Brother and Sister stripped him of all his jewelry and melted it down in front of him—the bangles he’d been given at birth, his ring…
…The Sister had taken a liking to his ring, identical to Leo’s, with a rare gemstone given to them by their father. That was the only time Astra had cried, pleading with the Brother no, clenching his fist tightly, and feeling a blade threatening to slice off his finger to get it.
The Sister stopped the Brother before he could, however, and instead broke Astra’s finger cleanly, sliding the ring off in the same motion. As punishment, she broke his remaining fingers and then admired the gleaming jewel while the Brother sliced into his body over and over with the knife.
Astra stopped bothering with tears and pleas for mercy after that. The Alien Magma had no hearts to move, and he only wasted his energy.
Today, though, he felt close to crying and screaming with rage at the strange new Ultra who had broken apart the asteroid that they had all tried so hard to deflect in one piece.
He flew up to the newcomer, fist clenched and shaking. The other warrior seemed unsure of how to respond, whether he should defend himself or take the hit. But before he could decide, King flew in-between them.
“Astra, there is no time for this,” he said sternly. “Leo and Zero are still on the planet’s surface. This is a danger to them as well.”
Astra forced himself to calm down, relaxing his hands with great effort. Reminding himself that Zero and Leo were more important than his anger, he nodded.
King nodded back gratefully, then turned to the stranger. “Will you help us?”
The third Ultra tilted his head to the side. Astra recognized that response; their words might as well have been gibberish to him. Astra sighed and gestured at him to follow before flying down toward the asteroids.
The being codenamed Ultraman Blazar knew he had messed up.
His consciousness wasn’t fully…together, he knew. His…holder? Partner? What word existed in his language or the human’s to convey a brave soul that had resonated with yours? A courage that reached across galaxies and took your hand? A heart that beat as yours?
Gento.
Gento and Blazar existed both side-by-side and together in their own mind when they were in Blazar’s body. It was like a wild enthusiasm for battle awoke inside Gento and a cool and intelligent sense of tactics did for Blazar. But it wasn’t quite like they were one. After all, Blazar had hauled them bodily out of danger against Nijikagachi when Gento was too stubborn to retreat.
This time, Blazar had been the one to hesitate, when he saw the red being, the one that the silver had called Astra. It wasn’t just the surprise of seeing other beings that resembled him, but the realization that Astra too had scars on his face and tribal markings on his body and nobody seemed to understand him. It was like what he’d felt when he connected with Gento three years ago. Like he’d crossed the universe to find another part of himself on the other side.
Gento deduced that the asteroid Astra was on was about to collide with the planet below, and he acted quickly, inserting the Nijikagachi stone into his bracer and summoning the Rainbow Slash. Blazar tried to warn Astra to get out of the way, but as with the humans, Astra hadn’t understood a word he said. It was only when Astra was about to punch him, and the other—King, he thought he heard at one point—indicated that he wanted help, that he realized the asteroids could not be allowed to enter the planet’s atmosphere at all.
Blazar/Gento felt a brief flash of shame for making their work harder. But he knew well that the only way to make up for it was to move forward, so he followed their lead and spread out. King fired beams at the asteroids, breaking them up even further. Astra called heat and energy into his feet, glowing bright red as he came down onto these in a kick; then caught the broken pieces with energy bolts from his hands. Blazar summoned the Spiral Burrade and used it to hook onto several of the pieces and fling them back out into deep space.
The planet had a series of rings that almost seemed like layers—smaller meteroids farther out, with larger ones closer to the planet, mounted by weapon turrets. It didn’t seem—and probably wasn’t—natural, but it provided a good sense of where the line was. No asteroids could be allowed to get past the final ring. Astra stopped on one of the large meteroids to prepare his beam attack when he suddenly felt a terrible pain in the center of his forehead, in his beam lamp. Near Blazar, King brought a hand to the side of his head, feeling it as well, although not nearly as debilitating as Astra was feeling.
The turret closest to Astra suddenly powered up. Its weapon began to glow, and Blazar realized with alarm that although it had the power to shoot, it was aiming at whatever set off its sensor—in this case, Astra. With both him and King distracted, Blazar acted fast and hurled his Spiral Burrade at the turret, startling Astra to awareness as it clattered to the ground behind him, deactivating. He looked up in surprise at Blazar.
“Astra, are you hurt?” King asked.
Astra shook his head, gesturing to Blazar, then turning to him and bowing slightly, his hand on his color timer. Blazar nodded back, Gento’s influence the only thing keeping him from jumping up and down in excitement at Astra’s gratitude.
“We must hurry,” King warned. “Something has happened to Leo. We must stop this asteroid now.”
Astra nodded back, but the sound of engines caught his attention, and they all looked over to see a spaceship approaching them. Blazar tilted his head, observing a gold flame-wing pattern painted on the silver and blue exterior. Then, to their surprise, a voice called out to them all, speaking in Japanese:
“Ultraman King, this is Captain Aihara with the Earth Spaceship Dragon. It looks like you guys could use a little help.”
For a moment, Blazar started to point in surprise at hearing a language he understood. But then King switched to Japanese as well, confirming, “Ryu, we would appreciate it,” and he whipped around to look at him in shock as well.
Aboard the Dragon, Aihara Ryu grinned and zipped up his jacket.
“You heard him. GUYS, sally go!”
“G.I.G.!” his crew responded immediately as they manned all weapons systems.
“Anti-asteroid cannon armed.”
“Wyvern missiles ready to deploy.”
“C’mon, people, we can do better than that,” Ryu insisted, taking out a keycard. “This isn’t the first time GUYS has faced something like this, so we’ve got a reputation to think about. Don’t let a single piece get past us. This thing already withstood the Ultras, so it’s time to bring out the big gun.”
He inserted his keycard into a reader near his seat, releasing the safeties.
“Lifting the ban on the Hyper Omega Cannon,” he said. “Haruzaki, bring us into position. Akari, take aim. Pedro, full power.”
“G.I.G.!”
As the Dragon maneuvered itself between the Ultras and the asteroid fragment, Ryu called out, “You guys got anything left for some beam attacks?”
“They are requesting our assistance through energy attacks,” King translated to Astra.
Astra nodded and raised a fist, coated in fiery red energy. At the same time, unseen, Gento re-inserted Nijikagachi’s stone into Blazar’s bracelet. This time, though, Blazar could not afford to break apart the asteroid; thus, he clapped his hands together twice to duplicate the Rainbow Slash, spinning both energy rings in his hands rapidly.
Rings of energy charged around the Dragon’s three main guns. Blazar could feel his Rainbow Slash rings almost being absorbed into it, and he realized what he needed to do. He threw the bladed rings, digging multiple fracture points along the asteroid’s surface to minimize the size of any fragments. Astra aimed a ball of compressed energy and fire that burned along the grooves. King followed with a blast of gold energy that exploded in the fault lines, then waved his hand to move the Rainbow Slash and Astra’s energy sphere. These, he broke down into pure energy and fed into the charging cannon.
“Captain, the Ultras—we’re at full gauge,” Pedro stated.
“Thanks for the assist,” Ryu said. “Hyper Omega Cannon, fire!”
A massive beam of spiraling charged particles fired from the main guns. It drilled into the asteroid, collapsing it along its fault lines; and as the asteroid crumpled in on itself, the beam continued to burn it away. In the end, it wasn’t so much destroyed as much as it was disintegrated—reduced entirely to dust, and decidedly no longer a threat to the planet behind them.
And yet the Ultras couldn’t let themselves feel that relief. King turned to Astra and said, “That gun turret activated in response to you.”
Astra nodded reluctantly and made his way toward the ruins, Blazar following closely behind in case something else decided to attack. While Astra could appreciate the help, he couldn’t deny that he’d prefer to be alone right now. He had a strong suspicion he knew what he would find, and he didn’t know how he could possibly explain any of it.
There was no number, no calculation, no way to quantify the immense loss that Astra had experienced. A beautiful, thriving planet full of millions, billions of lives—gone in a devastating, unprovoked attack. His family, pets, friends, everyone Astra had ever loved, save for his brother and Ron, dead. His face broken, his brain cells dying, his wounds festering, his body chained and anchored to his own leg so that he was forced to stand the entire time he was held captive. There were no words that could depict it all, and some days Astra was relieved that he’d never been any good with them anyway. It was one less thing that Magma could take away.
But the weight of it—it was deceptively light. Only about 110 tons, if that—nothing.
When Astra had first been brought aboard the Magma’s flagship, he’d heard the moans, cries, and screams of his fellow survivors. But they’d soon turned to silence, and not just because the Magma could not be moved by the sound.
And now, Astra didn’t even have the tears to cry for them.
Blazar tried to see what it is that Astra had knelt down and picked up. It was some small, round object that seemed vaguely like a domed hockey puck, but whatever it was, Astra was clearly upset to have found it.
“Astra,” King called out gently. Astra didn’t respond, cupping his hands around the disc. “You know what that is.”
He said this in their language, but Blazar could understand the idea of what they were saying. He tried again to get a look, but Astra seemed completely shut down, keeping it out of sight.
“Astra,” King tried again. “There is still much more that we must do.”
Astra nodded silently and stood, still holding the disc protectively. Something about it seemed familiar, but Blazar couldn’t quite make sense of it.
“King, Astra, everything okay down there?” Ryu called down.
“We will be coming aboard,” King warned, switching to Japanese. “Us, and a friend.”
He glanced at Blazar as he said this, and Gento had the strange feeling that King knew exactly who he was, somehow. As if on cue, the merge between them began to come apart, much to their alarm.
“Not a problem,” Ryu agreed. “See you aboard.”