Behemoth
When I was a kid, my eyes would light up every time I saw footage of giant monsters.
Giant monsters were terrifying, sure, and they carried an oppressive kind of menace—but for some reason, they also stirred something romantic in people. The overwhelming power to crush a city flat, the stylish, brutal silhouette modeled after dinosaurs from the Cretaceous. I was probably not the only one who felt that way.
Through countless anime and movies, the sheer popularity of giant monsters had already been proven. Some of them were more popular than the protagonist, and there were even works that turned the monster itself into the lead and kept spinning out sequels every few years.
Why did giant monsters ignite that sort of longing in men?
They were only villains, after all—brutes that smashed cities and tormented the hero.
I wasn’t even a kaiju fanatic, but I had once thought about it seriously.
And the conclusion I reached was this.
"The bigger it is, the cooler it is."
But even if giant monsters were cool and impressive, that didn’t mean you wanted to become one the way you might want to become an athlete you admired.
No matter how huge and magnificent a giant monster might be, I had no desire to experience that life for myself.
"We have no hope. No future either. Every living thing ends here."
"Even the Sword Master's blade can't pierce those thick scales? Damn it... Even those standing at the summit of humanity are nothing but frail creatures before the strongest beast!"
"He is a destroyer who cannot be avoided and cannot be broken."
"The end of all things... Is he the great cataclysm itself?"
"I suppose I'll be the one to watch the end of the world with my own eyes...."
The tower lords who led the seven magic towers feared him.
And if even they quailed before Behemoth, the mighty beast said to be able to swallow Mount Tai whole, then I wanted nothing at all to do with that life.
I was a small, ordinary nobody who liked ordinary things.
Even after reincarnating as a giant monster, all I had done was live an utterly ordinary life in the mountains.
How had things gotten this tangled?
People always said that human life could not be predicted even a step ahead, that human existence was the greatest mystery of all.
But to me, monster life seemed even harder to predict.
One advantage a monster’s body had over a human body was that if you slept on a cold stone floor, you didn’t wake up with your mouth twisted crooked.
When I got to my feet and stretched, a low ku-gung rumble shivered through the cave.
Droplets falling from the ceiling tapped against my scales.
Staring at the stalactites that dripped cold water, I let out a long sigh.
"So this wasn't a dream after all...."
A roar beyond comparison with a tiger’s shook the entire cave, a sound so fearsome it made my knees go weak.
In the gloomy cave lived a giant monster.
That giant monster was covered from head to toe in black scales and weighed eight tons.
He stood about five meters tall, roughly the height of the second floor of an apartment building.
It might have seemed a little underwhelming for a giant monster, but on nights when the full moon hung overhead, he grew more than thirty times larger, so by my standards, he was definitely a giant monster.
If anyone asked how I knew that enormous beast so well, I would answer like this.
That monster is me, you bastard.
I had once joked that in my next life I wanted to be born as a cute, pretty girl, or maybe as a handsome guy with a few buildings in Gangnam, Seoul.
No matter how impossible my wish had been, being reincarnated as a reptilian monster that looked like it could easily eat two hundred cute girls and pretty boys a day was just too much.
Honestly, this was way over the line....
After a week of denying reality and holed up in the cave, I had no choice but to accept it.
Grrr-
A thunderous growl rolled up from my stomach.
It was as loud as a ship's foghorn.
The cave was cold and damp, and with nothing around, it was about the dullest place imaginable.
A shut-in at least had a computer for company, but I had nothing.
Even sleeping all the time had started to hit its limit, and if this went on, I might go insane and become a giant monster that invaded Earth.
I had no intention of getting myself killed by a superhero.
I didn’t know what this place was, or why I had ended up looking like this.
But for now, I figured I should at least try to live like a person....
Even if I’d become a monster, I hadn’t lost my human dignity.
I had grown a little bigger, that was all; I still had ten fingers between both hands, and I could still talk, couldn’t I?
"All right."
First things first, I should fill this starving belly.
Instead of staying in some dark, damp cave, I should go somewhere the sun shone, feel a little breeze, and maybe even meet someone if I could.
With that, I stepped out of the cave.
The great bird that could blot out the sun with the spread of its wings was called Ziz by God.
Ziz's ankles touched the earth, and Ziz's head reached the heavens.
Ziz's eggs were as enormous as Ziz itself. If a swordsman tried to scrape every last bit from one of them, it would take seven years, and when one burst, the water inside would unleash a flood that swept away sixty cities.
If Ziz was the king of all birds, Leviathan was the king of all sea creatures.
The seven-headed dragon Leviathan was the equal of Ziz in size. Every time it swam, the sea overflowed into a tidal wave that crashed down on cities, and the whales and sharks caught in that surge swallowed everything in the world.
Angered, God created three beasts of calamity to destroy the world.
And among them, the greatest of all was Behemoth.
Behold Behemoth.
The one that tore at the earth like an ox—God made that creature along with you.
Look at that sturdy back, that strength surging from the skin of its belly.
That tail stretched like a giant serpent, those thick legs like the tallest, mightiest tower.
A dragon walking the wastelands, its frame like steel pipes, its ribs like iron bars.
Everything about it was wrapped in black steel.
That was Behemoth.
The first work God ever revealed. It was made to destroy everything.
Even if a tidal wave crashed over it, it would not budge; even if lava from a volcano poured into its mouth, it remained calm.
Who could possibly stop Behemoth?
— Apocalypse —
The mages of the Wood Magic Tower in the Gehenna Great Forest had not slept for three days.
They had been entrusted by the Helios Empire with the vital duty of watching the demi-humans who had made their home in the Great Forest and of studying the ecology of the monsters that lived there, so they were busy even on normal days. This time, though, a suspicious disturbance had been detected in the Great Forest.
"Where on earth is the source of that mana eruption!"
"The monsters we captured as samples are panicking and running wild!"
"What in the world is the search team doing? With a disturbance this massive, how have they still not found the cause?"
A week earlier, a huge mana eruption had slammed into the Wood Magic Tower.
A mana eruption was an invisible disaster.
It disabled magic circles and magical tools, inflicting the bane of nullification upon every creation mages had designed and brought into being. It was a terrifying phenomenon.
The barrier set up along the border between the Great Forest and the Empire had collapsed, and monsters had begun to invade imperial territory, with damage piling up everywhere.
It was the collapse of the Wood Magic Tower's management system for the Gehenna Great Forest, a system built over roughly one hundred and fifty years.
The Empire held them responsible, and the other magic towers hurried to support the Wood Magic Tower in cleaning up the disaster.
While the mages within the tower rushed about gathering the damage caused by the mana eruption, the Wood Magic Tower Master sat quietly in his office, reading a single book.
We must always prepare for calamity. Understand? The gods are never friendly to us. One day, they will raise a blade against us humans who have come close to the truth, and when that day comes, humanity will stand at a crossroads: kill the gods, or accept the end.
We must be ready to kill the gods. Even if your station was lowly and you lived as a slave until you met me, your talent surpasses that of any mage I have ever known. You are someone I can trust. Please protect humanity from calamity.
The Wood Magic Tower Master fell into thought as he recalled the moment his master had died.
Had the first sign of the calamity my master spoke of finally appeared?
Mana eruption was not a phenomenon that could ever be caused artificially.
It was a theoretical concept that had only ever been proposed in scholarly circles, a phenomenon said to occur only with an astronomically tiny probability.
When some concept carrying mana passed from nothing into being, an immense overflow of mana would surge forth and take on form in the world.
It was similar to the birth of monsters, but even if the strongest of monsters—dragons themselves—came into being, a mana eruption would not occur.
It was no exaggeration to say that this was the first mana eruption to occur since humanity first left its mark upon this land. If that was the case, then the most likely answer was the beast of calamity foretold in his master's prophecy book.
"Aileen."
"Yes."
Aileen, who stood beside the Wood Magic Tower Master, responded at once.
She was his assistant, his secretary, and the person he trusted most.
"Who in the Empire has the sharpest nose?"
Aileen understood what the Wood Magic Tower Master meant and slowly nodded.
"I'll request assistance from the Rangers right away."
The Wood Magic Tower Master looked out the window.
A foreboding feeling crept over him.
He could almost see a future in which humanity itself might be brought to an end.