Chapter 145: Light is the Bond

Over there, Uncle Oda was basking in the warm regards of the entire team, including Little King Gesura, while Hiroyuki had retreated to the edge of the crowd.

Strictly speaking, he had promised Uncle Oda just moments ago that he wouldn't tell the Captain. However, having heard Uncle Oda inadvertently complain several times about how his frequent dreams were ruining his rest, Hiroyuki couldn't stop himself from messaging the Captain to secretly report the matter.

You couldn't blame Hiroyuki for becoming increasingly suspicious. With the Taiga series not yet concluded, he could not afford to let slip even the slightest disturbance. As the protagonist holding the script, if he were to crash and burn simply due to a moment of carelessness and complacency, wouldn't that be utterly foolish? Therefore, no amount of sensitivity could be considered excessive.

Hiroyuki felt immensely grateful that he hadn't played dumb in front of the Captain, but instead had laid everything out on the table early on. Much of this was thanks to Tsuburaya’s exceptional casting, coupled with Captain Sakurazaki's truly noble character, which made Hiroyuki hesitate practically not at all before entrusting him with his deep-seated secrets. Aside from certain metaphysical aspects that Hiroyuki himself couldn't quite articulate—which he glossed over to avoid complicating things—he hadn't intentionally concealed anything.

Consequently, the reward he received in exchange for his trust was that the local defense force and he were pulling in the exact same direction, assisting him, and even taking the lead in assaults so he could safely provide support.

Recalling the defense forces commonly seen in past Ultraman series—the ones that often held back or even inflicted friendly fire—which could make his blood boil just watching through a screen, the defense force in the Taiga series, the "Unknown Affairs Division," though practically serving as background noise at times and occasionally committing the foolish act of provoking friction between Earth's natives and aliens, at least never showed off their presence or hindered E.G.I.S. when Hiroyuki and the others stepped up to solve problems. For that, he could only thank the heavens.

The feedback from the Captain came quite quickly as well. Unable to spare himself in person, he could only hold a remote conference from the island research facility, while the participants on the ground at the main headquarters consisted of three people and one little monster.

Hiroyuki, Zero, and the protagonist of this meeting, Uncle Oda. Little King Gesura had followed them in on its own; by now, it had completely lost interest in Zero and was clinging to Uncle Oda as usual—something that made Zero suspect it had to do with his change of clothes, wondering if his trench coat had picked up some strange scent.

Aside from Hiroyuki, none of the others knew why they had been called into this impromptu meeting. Even Uncle Oda, the focal point of the gathering, was completely in the dark; he didn't even know the meeting was held on his account, assuming instead that there was some mission to discuss.

Before long, the screen currently displaying a standby graphic flickered, and the Captain's image appeared. He smiled and greeted Hiroyuki and the others, then turned serious and said to Uncle Oda, "Oda, tell us about your dreams lately."

Uncle Oda looked somewhat bewildered at Hiroyuki, then at the Captain on the screen, and finally realized that they seemed to have gathered because of his poor sleep. He felt rather confused—surely he was just too tired and stressed lately, which was why he couldn't sleep well. Was something like that really worthy of such serious attention from the Captain?

Despite his confusion, Uncle Oda began to describe the identical dream he had been having for days.

Dreams were the kind of thing most people forgot the moment they woke up, and Uncle Oda was no exception. For the first few days, he hadn't noticed anything unusual and had simply gotten up for work as usual. However, after experiencing the exact same dream for five consecutive days, he finally regained a clear, conscious awareness within the dreamscape.

Only afterward did he wish he hadn't woken up at all.

That dream wasn't particularly bizarre or fantastical; it was simply...

Sunset, a forest, and nothing else.

There was no thrilling or exciting plot, nor any monster-fighting scenario that Uncle Oda had initially guessed might stem from thinking about things by day and dreaming of them by night. It was just a quiet, silent woodland bathed in the setting sun.

And Uncle Oda himself merely stood in the exact same spot—perhaps on the edge of a precipice, or atop a small hill—observing this utterly unremarkable scene from the exact same angle.

He couldn't move freely, nor could he even shift his gaze, as if he had been nailed firmly to that very spot, feeling time tick away second by second.

Literally second by second.

Whatever happened to the notion that time usually flew by in dreams?

It was absolute torture.

He would lie down in bed at 1:00 AM and be jolted awake by his alarm at 6:00 AM. For a full five hours, he was forced to stand there doing penance, watching the sunset, unable even to twitch a muscle. Such a bizarre phenomenon had initially led Uncle Oda to suspect that he was simply exhausted from recent battles and overwhelmed by stress, prompting him to try his best to regulate his mental state. Yet every night as he lay in bed praying for a sound sleep, he would still find himself standing at attention in his dream until dawn, with no improvement whatsoever—until...

Until the headquarters grew lively again and his colleagues returning from field operations successively reported back to the base. He had merely muttered a passing complaint about having "too many dreams at night," only for Hiroyuki to catch the hint and drag him into a small meeting with the Captain.

Could it be that something genuinely troublesome was happening to him?

Uncle Oda couldn't help but grow nervous.

After finishing his account of that uneventful yet excruciatingly torturous dream, he fell silent, having nothing more to contribute in terms of details or clues.

The room remained still. The Captain appeared to be deep in thought, Hiroyuki was waiting for the Captain to speak, and Zero had no idea why he had been summoned to this meeting, so he kept quiet.

"Hiroyuki," the Captain finally broke the silence. "How high do you think the probability is?"

Hiroyuki thought for a moment and replied cautiously, "Originally, it would have been fifty-fifty. But considering Uncle Oda's special circumstances, I'd say the probability is at least eighty percent."

What probability? What special circumstances?

Uncle Oda felt a bit bewildered. He glanced at classmate Moroboshi Dan beside him, who wore the exact same look of incomprehension, confirming that he wasn't the only one out of the loop and clueless. Then he looked at classmate Hiroyuki, the master of riddles. Whether it was his imagination or not, he felt that Hiroyuki's gaze toward him was brimming with profound pity—much like a doctor holding a late-stage cancer diagnosis report, about to tell him, "You have three months left..."

Involuntarily, he swallowed hard out of fear.

Right at that moment, another figure wearing a dust-proof, antistatic white lab coat appeared behind the Captain. He leaned close to the screen and eagerly interjected, "Hiroyuki, did you say that Nexus's Dynamis-bearers all possess specific genetic expressions?"

Hiroyuki nodded at the newly appeared genius scientist on the screen. "That's just my hypothesis, though I'm not sure which specific gene locus differs from ordinary people. It's also possible that it's the concentrated accumulation of a certain substance within the biological body; once it exceeds a certain threshold, one might become a potential Dynamis-bearer. That phenomenon is called R7, but I'm not certain what it actually is."

Nexus?

Hearing this name, Zero was also taken aback. He hadn't expected to hear this name mentioned here, and by these two individuals, of all people.

Meanwhile, the voice on the screen continued.

"That's fine. Uh, Mr. Oda, right? Find some time to visit the island. Captain, could you help arrange that?"

The Captain nodded. "Will do."

Uncle Oda looked completely lost. "Eh?"