Chapter 151: Clues

It took Zero only a day and a half to set off in search of X and Daichi and return.

Naturally, he successfully brought back the monitoring records of the Space Beast vibration waves. Fortunately, the timeline of X's universe was quite close to Taiga's universe; not many years had passed, making the data relatively easy to retrieve.

A small episode had occurred during the trip as well. Zero had brought along various common storage media used on Earth in Taiga's universe—meaning various portable hard drives and USB flash drives—to copy the data. However, upon arriving at the XIO data center, he unexpectedly discovered that not a single storage medium could be read successfully. Even though the port designs looked somewhat similar, and a few of the storage drives even had matching pin counts, they simply refused to read.

Rui carefully inspected the storage media and told Zero with great confidence that if she and Dr. Gourman worked hard on it, they could probably build a data converter in about a week. Zero had no choice but to decline with a helpless smile; he only had three days in total, so a week was definitely out of the question.

Right as they were talking, Daichi, who had helped run the data application process, walked in holding a bulging, pure black document folder.

Since it was impossible to use storage media to save the data, they decided to just print the data out directly. Daichi dug up the records he had monitored back then of what were suspected to be Space Beast vibration waves. There were only a little over six seconds of data in total, which amounted to no more than two hundred pages when fully printed. Daichi had deliberately sought out a special document folder adapted to space-faring environments, capable of withstanding cosmic radiation and protecting the documents within. If Zero were to take these printed materials back, only to pull them out and find that the ink had been destroyed by cosmic rays, turning them into a stack of blank sheets with only faint traces left, it would have been a major hassle.

Therefore, after thanking the members of XIO for their help, Zero immediately embarked on his return journey.

Watching Zero's retreating figure fly away, Rui gazed abstractedly into the horizon. "How nice... I've never seen a data application get approved so quickly."

Hearing this, Daichi chuckled. "That's because Deputy Chief Tachibana helped out. She happened to be attending a meeting at headquarters, so she went straight to the Commander to get special approval."

As for what happened off-screen—where Deputy Chief Tachibana drove her car in pursuit of the Commander who was heading to the airport, resulting in a chase sequence so spectacular it could have drained the entire season's budget of the Tsuburaya special effects team—that would be temporarily left unmentioned.

Upon returning to the base of the Special Operations Unit for Foreign Affairs Defense Investigation, the data brought back by Zero was immediately scanned and entered into the database. Since they were neatly printed pages, the computer's recognition speed was extremely fast, and the accuracy was remarkably high; out of more than two hundred pages, only a dozen or so characters had errors. Zero and Merika scanned and proofread the materials together, and soon, a waveform dataset was completely reproduced. Merika immediately took this file to the technical team and used this waveform as a template to match against the aerial monitoring records of recent days.

The matching process did not take much effort. Sure enough, once the progress bar reached the end, several waveform peaks appeared on the display screen.

There were waveform records suspected to be Space Beast vibration waves. They occurred frequently between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM the following morning, while irregular occurrences were also recorded at other times, though they were fewer in number and inactive, lacking the intense concentration seen between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM.

Indeed, night was a time suited for Space Beasts to hunt. With the exception of nocturnal animals that relied on the cover of night to seek refuge and avoid the fierce daytime competition for survival, shifting their activities to the night, night usually meant danger to all other creatures. That was a fear deeply engraved into their DNA, a fear that prevented these creatures from moving about at night, leaving them no choice but to hide in their dens and wait for the sun to rise again.

Naturally, Space Beasts that wished to devour "fear" would choose to terrorize diurnal creatures at night. After all, diurnal creatures were both numerous and of good quality.

By finding the decay pattern of these fluctuations, one could easily trace back the exact location where each wave segment had occurred. Consequently, after marking the locations with red dots on the map, the local area map instantly looked like a face covered in smallpox, making one's hair stand on end.

"So many?"

Merika gasped at the sight, and Zero furrowed his brow tightly. Was this the kind of commotion a single Space Beast could cause? Or were there more than one?

So many... and all of them hiding within densely populated cities.

Merika also felt lingering fear. Fortunately, the Department of Foreign Unknowns had recently made monster-related information public, no longer keeping citizens in the dark through a mechanism that acted like a cognitive filter, and had implemented numerous measures to help citizens gradually get used to monsters as a natural disaster. Otherwise, if the news that "our Earth is being invaded by monsters, and it was only covered up due to various considerations" had suddenly broken out without any preparation, wouldn't it have caused a massive social panic? Wouldn't that be serving themselves up directly to the Space Beasts on a silver platter? A full-course banquet, no less.

Therefore, after uploading the data analysis results to the data center, both Zero and Merika fell into deep distress.

Zero was troubled over how to handle these dozens of Space Beasts. If Hiroyuki were here, he would tell him to rest easy; the entirety of the *Ultraman Nexus* series didn't even feature dozens of Space Beasts, and this number was simply exaggerated.

As for Merika, her heart ached over some inexplicable emotion she couldn't analyze. As an android, she couldn't figure out what this bizarre feeling was all about, and could only continuously run self-diagnostics on her code, desperately wanting to know which block of code or logic had malfunctioned to cause such an inexplicable palpitation that left her entire body tense.

"Are they really there?"

The Captain muttered to himself as he looked at the contents of the PAD screen.

"Really? Space Beasts?"

At this moment, Hiroyuki also tossed and turned, sitting up abruptly from his bed.

Over the past two days, the amount of time he spent fast asleep far exceeded the time he was awake, and in his dreams, he was continuously dragged by the Captain to cram for exams at the eleventh hour.

His mission this time was very simple. Since Uncle Oda's "immobile" condition in the dream realm was extremely bizarre—he experienced no abnormalities other than the inability to move his own body—someone else needed to enter his dream to see what was actually going on from a different perspective.

And what Hiroyuki needed to do was prepare some self-defense measures to ensure he could safely infiltrate the dream realm used by Noa to select Dynamis candidates, and then make a safe exit.

Hiroyuki didn't possess the ability to fall asleep at will, so he appropriately used some sleep-aid medications. These medications carried some degree of side effects, but short-term use posed no major problems, considering they were only needed for these two days.

As of now, the greatest training achievement Hiroyuki had attained through the Captain's guidance was materializing the Nebula Particle Converter—the Taiga Spark—within his dream.

...However, he couldn't transform.

No matter how Hiroyuki pressed the Taiga Spark Key against the Taiga Spark, there was zero reaction. The Taiga Spark showed no inclination to read the Nebula Particles stored within the Spark Key.

Surely it couldn't be because his transformation pose wasn't standard enough, could it?

Looking at the white orb on the Taiga Spark Key, Hiroyuki didn't hold much hope in his heart. For all he knew—no, very likely—Taiga wasn't inside the Spark Key at all, which naturally meant nothing could be read.