A kaiju ate me alive. I felt my ribs go one at a time. 

Then something in the dark of its gut decided I was not finished.

It started my heart with a hand that was not mine, and I walked out of the corpse on my own two feet, the only person who ever has. That was the night she bought the rights to whatever I had become.

One screen. One subscriber. The screen is my life, live and uncut. 

The subscriber is her, and she pays whatever it costs to keep the feed running: every fight, every wound, every hour I lose to the thing growing up the inside of my spine. 

When I run, the money finds me. When I bleed, the bid climbs.

The Defense Force has me filed as a contaminant. 

The corporations want me as their next headliner. 

She understood the part both of them missed: the stronger the parasite makes me, the less of me is left.

Every night, behind one glowing screen, the woman who calls herself my sponsor watches me turn into the thing that killed me. She has never once looked away.

They cleared his arm on a Tuesday. Iris had him in armor by that night.


"You're not ready," she said, walking him down to the staging bay. "I know you're not. The arm's held together with new bone and good intentions, and you've got no business in a hot sector."


"We're also down four bodies, and there's a Class-Six in the Verrin overpass eating a transit station. So your readiness is a luxury I filed a complaint about and then ignored. Suit up."


The Seventh hadn't changed. Same warzone, same understaffing, same gallows quiet in the bay while people checked harnesses they didn't trust. Caleb pulled the suit on one piece at a time and the old weight of it settled, the dead weight, because the suit had never once worked right for him.


[SEVENTH DIVISION / JAEGER-CLASS / OPERATOR: MERCER, C.]


Chapter 152 - One Viewer