Godzilla 2000: New Era, PART 17 · 6:14am Feb 7th, 2022
PART 16
Proofed by Lance-Omikron
Gabriel Hopkins by Dr1ft3r0I a.k.a C0yot3721
Hina and illustrations by FallenAngel5414
Ami by EvoWizard
Additional illustrations by LordShrekzilla and Zeroviks
===========
The Type 88 Surface-to-Ship Missile Launcher, a hauling truck mounted launcher capable of firing six quarter-ton warheads. Rolling up into place, the leviathan of a truck’s flanks fired out a pair of large bolts to act as stabilizers as the six long cylinders housing the massive missiles were brought to bear. Meant for demolishing entire battleships at over 100 kilometers away, the rockets were fired without any heed. Plumes of mist clouded the runway, preceding the fiery lances hurled at the hovering UFO. The rockets rushed forward as a blur, before stopping abruptly midair. Like ripples on a pond, a shimmering surrounding the UFO oscillated as it kept the projectiles at bay.
The missiles, despite all their mass and propulsion that could have fired them right through several skyscrapers, just hung in midair without any forward interia. The front ends of the rockets crumpled inwards from the sustained force, before invisible strands of energy smacked them upwards. The anti-ship javelins were arced up, around, and sent flying back at the scrambling G-Force personnel below. One struck the very launcher truck that had fired it, the dumbstruck driver’s face pale before the rocket smashed through the front windshield to spear the vehicle into the ground and explode.
Shrapnel of the destroyed truck, several lives snuffed out in an instant, rushed past. Three more of the remaining five rockets detonated after smashing into the ground, sending shockwaves and fireballs into the fleeing troopers in their aftermath.
The remaining missile, careening and spiraling out of control, whirled through the air before diving into one of the hangers trying to deploy its air support. Lieutenant Koji Shinjo winced as his aircraft’s entire frame rattled, a plume of smoke and fires shooting past the viewing window. He shouldered the craft forwards, a hovering hybrid between a jet and helicopter exiting the smog with traits of the darkness clinging to its wings.
“Koji! Koji! I can’t get anything from Emi or Maki!” A voice behind him from his gunner Kiyoshi cried out.
Koji grimaced and winked back a tear, trying to keep his voice stable to his gunner, “Coms are on the fritz Kiyoshi, they could be anywhere!”
Like how their ashes were probably spattered over the back of Koji and Kiyoshi’s Type-93 Maser Aircraft. Koji had to shake his head to get that out of his mind and focus. Focus on the mission, on the threats. Despite the fighter craft’s light frame to make room for the maser power source, it was surprisingly heavily armored. Small arms wouldn’t cut it against the new reflective plating CCI had developed. It would take something big to down the 15 meter long craft.
-Like an anti-ship missile.-
Koji thought bitterly as he tried to just go with the excuse that they couldn’t hear their squadron because communications were acting up. He tried and failed to not notice how they were the only one to make it airborne of their flight team, nor the shattered, broken pilot helmet rolling down the side of his cockpit’s exterior. He had enough problems to worry about.
It was sheer pandemonium in the airspace beyond the hanger. Oversized birds, monsters he couldn’t even begin to identify, and helicopter gunships, were battling it out every which way in a chaotic melee. G-Force, caught completely on the back foot, was desperately trying to launch more of their craft, but the attacking forces seemed to focus especially on the downed aircraft still in the process of taking off.
A quartet of green and yellow blurs shot past Koji’s cockpit and came barreling at a line of Apache attack helicopters. They darted back and forth so fast one could only compare the motion to a dragonfly sped up, and at a glance, their form did somewhat resemble one. The shape slowed briefly as they took aim. The arms terminated in a hooked shape kin to a scythe, whilst the rest of the body a vaguely like a mixture of an insect and reptile. The long tail curled down, spiny tip resembling a scorpion’s. Light flashed from the body going down to the terminating stinger and a charge was built up.
The blinding volley that they let loose burned through the apache’s plating and set off the fuel tanks above the screaming crew.
In a single strafing run, the aerial apex predators call Shigan, had wiped out half the choppers before the rest could even get airborne. Koji swore and gripped the controls tightly, wrenching them aside to avoid crashing into the burning wreckage of one helicopter that had been thrown upwards by its explosive death.
The Maser Craft banked wide, colliding and splattering several thankfully normal-sized birds that exploded onto the glass canopy. Kiyoshi cringed in revulsion as he looked at the crushed remains of what had once looked like a seagull flop against the otherwise of the glass above him. Its dead eye didn’t remain dead, swiveling down and looking right at him as the body started to pull itself back together.
“Get that gunk off! It’s still alive! Get it off!” Kiyoshi screamed as he tried to focus and fire the maser cannons that had locked onto a jyarumu that was busy flipping over a jeep and was about to use it to crush the occupants that spilled out of it.
Blue energy beams rimmed free from the gemstone-like emitters mounted on each wing, individually targeting the jyarumu and another mass erupting from the ground. The Millennian drone’s bodies were burned and bisected, tissue flash-fried away even by the comparatively weak masers the craft had compared to the ground vehicles. It didn’t stop their movements entirely, but it did buy those on the ground a few moments to act and save themselves. Koji meanwhile manned his own controls, twisting the joystick about whilst cranking back on a lever. The Maser Craft sped up and turned about in a wide barrel roll, some of the still-living gore that splattered their windshield getting slung off.
Koji’s maneuver did get some visibility back, but it wasn’t a second later he had to mash at the controls again lest his craft smash right into the side of one of the radar towers. He could literally hear the sound of screeching tires in his mind as his craft slowed and just barely swerved enough to avoid crashing into the structure.
And if he wanted a moment to breathe a sigh of relief at not getting himself and his best friend killed, fate was not kind. A darkness crossed over the still somewhat gore-coated canopy and the aircraft audibly shuddered at an impact.
Koji couldn’t see anything due to how his canopy was enveloped in darkness and ichors, but Kiyoshi’s voice was descriptive enough.
“K-Koji you gotta shake it! I can’t get a lock and this thing’s latched onto us!”
A shigan chittered, bashing at the canopy with its scythe-like arm and cracking reinforced glass. Koji pushed on the control to accelerator, spurring the aircraft’s jets into overdrive. Upon reaching top speed possible with several thousand extra pounds weighing them down, he rocked the controls back and forth with jerks on the stick to try and shake the hitchhiker. The shigan, directly between the wing mounted maser cannons, was precisely in their blindspot for their fire, leaving it to attack the canopy with impunity.
The insectoid reptilian bashed at the glass a few more times, before deciding to weaken the canopy another way. Curling its neck back, the alien predator arched backwards before wrenching forward. Tarry fluid was vomited across the canopy and outerplating of the aircraft, soon spurring numerous beeping alarms within. Smoke wisped from the plating and glass, as the corrosive ichors melted part of the canopy to weaken it. The shigan pulled an arm back and Kiyoshi swore he glimpsed it smirk. On reflex he put his arms up as a defense whilst holding back a scream.
Glass shattered, air rushed into the cockpit, and burning pain shot up his body.
“AAAAAAuaAAAAAAAAH!” Kiyoshi’s screams were burned into his best friend’s mind, Koji helpless to turn around and only able to see the reflection of his gunner get stabbed into by the hooked scythe at his gut.
“Bastard!” Koji snarled before forcing the craft upwards in a sharp ascent, before swooping back down.
The maneuver forced the shigan to let go of his injured gunner and scramble at its holdings to not get thrown off, its flailing causing the entire canopy to pop off in the process. Claws and hooks stabbed at and bent metal plating and the entire aircraft was shifted to be tilted downwards from a sudden weight on the nose. Koji’s pair of eyes fought against the blasting gales of the winds they flew into, so he could look into the compound lenses of the Millennian drone as he flipped up a trigger on his stick to assume weapons controls. A button was pressed just as the shigan prepared to vomit another gout of corrosive liquid right into his face.
The rotating Gatling gun mounted on the nose of the craft, a holdover from using an attack helicopter frame, spun to life and ignited with a buzzing roar. The machine cannon fired a few hundred rounds across the span of fifteen seconds. It was disturbing how little the shigan reacted to the numerous, massive bullets wider than most gun barrels, lancing into it. Koji could even glimpse the constant stream of tracer rounds, glowing red and hot, streaking into the sky beyond it. He nevertheless didn’t stop firing until a weight abruptly dropped off from the nose of the craft.
They’d just shed several hundred kilograms at least, and he didn’t see the shigan’s tail or legs in his peripheral vision. And yet, the severed torso and arms refused to show signs of expiration, jaws parting and corrosive bile bubbling up between fangs.
Koji had never before so desperately wished he could be piloting M.O.G.U.E.R.A. again with Kiyoshi. But he made due in a risky gambit. Flying past the radar tower, he pivoted the craft upside down and threaded the needle. The flaring wings of the shigan and its spiny back caught on the tower and, lacking legs or a tail to support its holdfasts, it was wrenched off as a blood spatter.
The canopy flew off on impact and Koji had to frantically put on a pair of goggles to avoid being blinded by the wind shear, after needing to control the craft with his eyes closed and avoid a crash for several seconds whilst doing need
“Kiyoshi! Talk to me buddy!” he screamed with a slight whimper as he slowed the aircraft down and managed to look back.
Kiyoshi held his gut with his hands, blood dribbling from his lip with his face visibly starting to pale. He nodded, not talking and slumping in his seat.
“We’re gonna get you help man! Just hang on to yourself!” Koji cringed as he tried to look ahead for any safe place to land.
But, as far as the eye could see, there was no safe harbor. Rocket fire, explosives, bullets, and maser fire was flying about every which way in a manner sure to cause friendly fire. Monsters that seemed to appear out of nowhere were running rampant and the best of the best weren’t holding their own, they were losing.
The bisected half lower half of the shigan Koji’s chain-guns had shredded veered through the air and crashed through a glassy ceiling, wetly flopping onto the ground it rolled across in gorey fashion. A platoon of unarmed troopers whirled around in surprise at the sudden noise, and for a moment Captain Mei Shinjo registered it as a dealt-with issue and they had much bigger things to worry about. Literally given the shadow coming over the window.
“Everybody dive back!” She shoved one trooper down to force them back and made to follow, just as the entire side of the glassy tunnel connecting the buildings blackened.
The burning remains of what had been a Full-Metal Missile launcher careened into the side of the tunnel, collapsing part of it and deafening everything in the ear-splitting shattering engendered by several dozen glassy panels erupting all at once. The obscured, hulking behemoth reflected in Captain Shinjo’s eyes who had flipped the multi-ton launcher; turned and faced the dozen or so troopers firing upon it to little effect.
Captain Mei Shinjo cried out in pain but muffled herself, feeling a warm wetness flowing down her shin from a burning heat in her knee. Endorphins blunted the pain, but the enhanced perception hardly calmed the nerves.
The tunnel was mostly closed off now on one side, fires and twisted metal blocking off much of the way they’d been going save for one small span. It was there, laying in a heap with her troops and broken glass, that her eyes quivered at the sight of movement. The fleshy mass was rapidly remodeling, expelling the fragments of broken glass lodged into its flesh along with numerous, useless tumors of flesh. A vaguely pantherine form molded into frame in the span of a few seconds, ivory-hued plating for skin topped with black spines and horns, a pair of pincer-like tusks formed on either side of the snout that arced with electricity. The balkzardan rolled to its feet and immediately charged its form with electricity. Lights still on in the hall flickered and dimmed, drained of power that flowed into the crackling eyes of the alien.
Shinjo barely had any weapons in her group. They’d been in offices when a monster suddenly came ramming through the front door and crushed her superior office to paste, suddenly leaving her in command. They’d been running to one of the armories when all this happened. Now one side of the tunnel was mostly crushed underneath the thrown Missile Launcher, turning a five-meter-wide space into a half meter wide clearance span. And the balkzardan seemed to be almost done charging up. All she had was a pistol with four shots, and eight people she was responsible for with no weapons to themselves.
“Move, move! Past the launcher!” Mei Shinjo yelled out as she shoved one bloodied subordinate up and onto his feet.
“What about-” his voice was harshly cut off with the sound of a bullet going through one glassy panel above them.
-Three left.-
Mei registered that count and the count of her responsibilities. The passage was narrow and would practically require single-file to get through. It wouldn’t be possible with the time they likely had. Only if she removed herself from that ‘they’ and bought them a few more seconds.
“GET. MOVING!” She barked harshly, as she limped away from them. Another reason for her lack of ability to follow was made evident in the large chunk of glass stabbed through her limping knee.
She separated herself, much to the protesting screams of some of the younger rookies that virtually had to be dragged away. The balkzardan took aim at the largest group, the Millennian drone was specifically trying to kill as many as possible.
A bullet cracked and the round pinged off the right tusk of the alien form, crumpled lead and a few pieces of torn-off chitin fumbling to the ground with little heed by the drone.
-Two left.-
Mei cringed. The balkzardan sparked and crackled from toe to spine, jaws spreading to an unnatural degree to bring up a snapping mass of electricity and plasma from its gut. Her eyes darted up and spied the glassy ceiling and her mind was privy to the pain in her gashed leg.
She raised her arm, closed an eye, and sighted the irons to the edge of a glass pane. The second to last bullet snapped and glass screamed from shattering, the panes just above the balkzardan smashed to pieces by the round impacting it. Glass shards rained down upon the drone, whose tough hide easily withstood the bombardment of tiny blades with little heed. The electricity however discharged across it, arcing onto the glass and rebounding off it due to the mass being a poor conductor. Golden sparks snapped and spattered across the balkzardan’s shaking form, muscles twitching and locking up involuntarily.
-Looks like you can’t take it without bracing… One left.-
“CAPTAIN! CAPTAAAIN!” screaming to her right, towards the sole surviving piece of the tunnel.
Fresh-faced newbies. Calling out past the wreckage and burning debris of the launcher. Several were crammed in, squeezing their way through and reaching for her now that the monster was distracted.
On impulse Mei Shinjo took a step towards them, only to wince and contort her face into a snarl at the pain shooting up her limping leg. Bloody fingers clutched the glass shard impeding her movement.
“Hrnk!” She gagged, unable to pull it out and crumbling onto a knee, her head down.
Electrical popping began to intensify. Mei lifted her head and witnessed what was about to happen. The balkzardan had recovered and had recharged, the glassy storm around it subject to gravity’s thrall and now fully fallen to the floor. Her responsibilities were almost all of the way through, one lone trooper still reaching for her; several of his comrades’ hands wrapped around his neck and face to try and wrench him back. And she was too tired to run.
She huffed, smiling weakly.
In a moment they’d be out of firing range, for a little bit at least. This thing was set on ending them. Either they’d get away, or it would get to kill them. The balkzardan drone took aim at the cavity hosting the retreating group and threw its jaws open so wide, the maw extended shoulder to shoulder at its seams.
A bullet cracked from its gun and a glass pane shattered. Shards rained down between the balkzardan and the platoon just as the electrical surge was unleashed. As before, the insulating glass and many differing surfaces absorbed, reflected, and dissipated the blinding ball-lightning; sending arcs of electricity in every direction.
The stubborn Private was pulled through and the platoon retreated out of sight to make way towards the armory. Captain Shinjo crumbled to both of her knees, hands braced on the floor as she heaved. One of her trembling sets of fingers clutched an empty pistol, shuddering against the broken tiles on the floor.
A low hiss and the telltale popping of electricity spurred the exhausted woman to look up.
-Looks like neither of us win fully. Good game.-
She closed her eyes as the blinding flash managed to shine even through her eyelids, a single tear on each eye glimmering. Her life flashed before her eyes, from the then to now. She'd joined up to save people, and it was a great pleasure to have started and ended this journey on the same purpose. A peace was felt at repeating those two simple words as an assessment of it all.
-Good game.-
The flare of electricity and ball lightning collided with her body and in an instant, a mere moment before a deep ‘THWUMP!’ followed by a whizzing noise that went off behind her. The balkzardan’s front half was engulfed in an explosion as the launched anti-vehicle grenade smashed into its snout. Unusually, the explosion contracted back in upon itself, the fires and shockwave further directed into the drone. Follow up blasts did the same, coaxed on by a directed wave of psychic energy and the thrusting of an arm forward. Some hybrids had atypical abilities instead of the usual, and his were much so especially when fueled by horrific indignation. The first blast blew most of its grotesque parody of a head off. The second caused the torso to become flayed in two. The third and forth sent it flying back whilst reducing the small drone to a pile of gore; the shockwaves rattling much of the cells apart or splitting them too far to recombine easily.
Sergeant Gabriel Hopkins frowned as he stepped around the wreckage of the Missile Launcher, having come from the armory the troopers were rushing to. The hybrid's facial veins were bulging still even without expression of his abilities. He looked to the remains of the dead, or at least as dead as he could hope for, drone; and then slowly to the dark mass on the floor. Laying in a charred blackness, a burnt skeleton was spattered with ash; the half-molten remains of a pistol and glass mixed within it. Smoke and the fragments of ashes wisped out of the skull.
Gabriel swore and fired the remaining grenade at the drone, if only to make a sentimental point. The entire structure rattled before he had time to have sentiments, the rumbling nearly knocking him off his feet as he tried to fallback to cover the fleeing rookies to the armory. The full missile launcher shook and rattled, something grasping and pulling on it.
Several shigan flying drones, fresh off forcing a set of choppers that managed to get airborne to go careening into the airstrip, dropped down next to the jyarumu drone that destroyed the missile launcher. A wave of troopers, on foot with firearms and a few in vehicles with a tank rolling up closer, laid down fire at the trio of monsters. The shigan pair chortled and vomited pressured jets of corrosive fluid as the jyarumu loosed a geyer of freezing mist. The two attacks mixed to create a wall of frozen, dark liquid that obscured them from sight as both a physical cover and cold mist.
Through the veil, their bodies contorted and melded together, flesh stitching itself together.
Akane held her nerve as her Cryo Maser and crew swiveled the turret around to take aim. The main battle tank and those on foot laid round after round into the drones in front of them, with more jeeps armed with heavy machine guns rolling up.
“They’re fusing together into a larger form and kinetic rounds aren’t doing much,” she called out from her controls, throwing her voice to Riki and company, “Get that freezing gun aimed and primed, target at 120 meters!”
“Charging the maser!” Riki yelled back from the turret, the battle machine that survived Destroyah’s rampage and Godzilla’s demise audibly humming as the main weapon charged.
Essentially a gigantic battery pack with treads and a turret, the Cryo Maser’s namesake weapon glimmered with a growing charge as the lens focused upon the obscured gigantic drone. So far they’d seen these things shrug off getting eviscerated by tank rounds and shrugging off machine guns, when they had any effect at all. The platoons firing upon the drone weren’t doing much other than giving cover, but such ineffectiveness could be forgiven. When up against something that didn’t die from a hail of bullets, having something to shoot at it that might just briefly impede it was better than nothing.
Akane’s eyes briefly diverted to the jeeps driving closer, machine guns manned but not firing.
-Better off getting something that works, a few dozen guns and a tank should be more than enough to stall it.-
One of the jeeps bore a manned heavy machine gun across the back. It was brought to bear and its death dealer roared as the drone continued to contort. Several troopers dropped to the ground and Akane blinked. Immediately her eyes scanned for the cause, expecting maybe one of the bird-like forms to have rapidly dive bombed them, but there was nothing. The jeep’s gun roared and there was shouting, and Akane glimpsed a red spatter erupt from one trooper who’d been reloading a rocket launcher.
A stillness stabbed through her chest, forcing her eyes wide as more and more of the people she’d known for years dropped dead right in front of her in gorey display. The high caliber gun wasn’t meant against people, but vehicle-sized monstrosities. To call it overkill for what it did to the human body was an understatement. The formation engaging the growing drone tried to whirl around in surprise as the seconds passed and they’d realized they were being murdered, but the jeep being driven at them didn’t slow down.
Shouting, screaming, bullets flying everywhere. The incoming jeep slammed into someone full speed. The gunner of the jeep was hit by a stray bullet that took their arm off, but there was no signs of pain or hesitation in their reaction. The limp limb, dangling by a few cords of sinew, was stoically torn off and thrown away. It landed and contorted, fingers morphing into erupted animal limbs as the half-arm-half-rat scurried along and ran to the run-down trooper’s corpse. What exactly happened was hard to see at a distance, but within a few seconds, the chimeric bodypart melded into the dead body but living tissue. Biomass was reorganized, the limb becoming a new brain and nervous system after melding through the open wounds. The skeleton was repaired and the seemingly dead body lurched up, snapping itself back into uniformity. The half-loaded rocket launcher was reloaded with skill and practice stolen, aimed and fired at one of the trucks rolling past to transport panicked troops to the hangars.
The formation was caught completely off guard. Many turned to see what was killing them and cutting down their fellows, only to see a face of a comrade staring at them from behind a barrel. The moment of hesitation was all the drones needed to ruthlessly cut down half the line in under ten seconds.
The tank’s gunner, seeing the assault, leaned down and yelled something inside the interior. Akane couldn’t hear it, but she knew what it must have been when the tank’s treads rolled backwards. The multi-dozen ton behemoth capable of surprising speed and put that combined agility and mass to use smashing into one of the attacking jeeps and flattening it under the mass of the steel juggernaut. A survivor of the carnage scrambled after them from the otherwise, a barely recognizable mass of what had once resembled their friend in pursuit, half the torso blasted open by gunfire but still stubbornly holding onto a rocket launcher whilst pulling themselves together.
The tank’s hatch opened and the crew member waved the survivor down, holding out a hand. The rocket launcher bearing drone took aim. Akane, helpless at the distance, braced and held a breath.
The sound of the tank’s main cannon firing was like a fantastically huge pair of hands clapping. It completely obliterated the rocket launcher bearing drone as a heavy shell almost as big as they were smashed into and ripped the body to blood chaff with the shockwave. The survivor jumped aboard and took the hand of their rescuer, and a smile from the latter party could be felt even at a distance away.
As was the punch when the tank crew member’s head jerked back after being shot point blank by the very convincing drone they’d just grabbed onto. Successfully duping human nature, the drone detached their arm to begin assimilating the biomass before clambering inside the tank itself. The vehicle was too far away and there was far too much chaos to distinguish it, but Akane could hear the screaming. It bounced around, echoing within her head as the tank rolled about randomly from the massacre going on inside it.
“Freezing Maser, ready!” someone yelled behind Akane, who herself was frozen at the controls.
The tank stopped rolling around erratically, still in place but with its engine still running. The corpse of the killed crew member twitched and slowly reached up. It crawled upwards and twitched like a dying spider, limbs curled inwards and spread at erratic angles.
“Freezing Maser, ready!”
Akane could just stare. The drone stared back, the split and bloody face of the crew member locked onto them as the bullet was pushed out from between their eyes. No feeling, no human responses of shock, surprise, rage, or anything remotely relatable as the bloody man staggered up.
She’d seen devastation in her life before. Hardly anyone in Japan couldn’t have seen it yet to some degree or another. Uncaring giants trembling cities, raining lightning from the heavens, and shrieking into the night as they constructed their fortresses. But none of those looked at you with the face of a person before they raped the very humanity from your corpse.
“Freezing Maser, ready!... AKANE!”
The tank turret swiveled around and took aim. Even at the distance, Akane could feel the targeting display putting the reticle right between her eyes.
The sound of a god or demon’s clapping hands was met with a blinding flash. The Freezing Maser’s near absolute-zero beam shot down the tanks’ main gun barrel and fought against the propulsion of its cannon shot. Metal warped and twisted, causing the shot to burst out of the barrel’s bending length and go whizzing past the Maser crew’s heads. Frost rapidly formed across the tank’s body as metal became brittle and snapped under the force of the shot’s ensuing shockwave. The whiplash effect of firing whilst becoming frozen caused the entire turret of the tank to wrench upwards and tear itself off the main body.
A human shape, flash frozen, bounced off the ground after having been thrown off the destroyed tank. Akane felt his pulse quicken and nerves fray.
-It’s not a person!-
She could feel the dead, iced-over eyes upon her as the head snapped off and rolled to a stop. Akane’s breath chilled in her throat and she fought back against panicked heaving. Dozens of drones, human-shaped ones that yet lived, all cried out in the same instance to bombard the ears of anyone in earshot with shrieking, nerve wracking human death wails to add to the effect they knew they were having. Akane whimpered in her seat, heaving every breath.
-It’s not a person! I didn’t kill anyone! I didn’t kill anyone!-
She’d signed up to fight monsters, to save her family, her nation, her species. And no matter how much her logic spoke to still doing it, the imagery subjected was still profound.
The remaining column of people, who were actually people, saw her shoot at the tank and realized where an ally was. They’d broken ranks, some in jeeps and some on foot as they made a mad dash to the outside of the hangars where Akane’s maser tank was. An enormous form, the one shielded previously behind the frozen acid spray and mist, started to break down the barrier. Long, insectoid green arms burst from the frost.
Several of the human-shaped drones hefted their arms and took aim, and even at the distance Akane could see each and every one of their faces. Some looked like instructors, mentors, compatriots, rivals, coworkers. One of them looked just like Commander Aso, and seemed to know exactly the kind of reaction Akane would have having to point the aiming reticle right at her much respected leader’s face.
Akane screamed as tears rolled down her roaring face. A blinding white flash preceded the cryomaser sweeping across the man-shaped monsters to meet their end. She kept screaming so harshly she could feel her throat tearing, bullets pinging off her windshield as she was forced to look at each and every human face, whilst a decidedly inhuman monstrosity broke free of its barriers.
Decidedly alien, the new form was easily fifteen meters in height from absorbing a biomass that burst free from the ground beneath it. The limbs were deceptively thin despite evidently being quite strong, the entire form almost looking like a horrifically obese crab with its armored, exoskeleton-covered limbs and pointed ends that dug into the ground. The central mass was extremely swollen and covered in a disgusting mass of flesh that was peeling off. Tumors, dozens of kilograms worth of them, were being shed like a skin that flopped to the ground in disgusting display, revealing a smooth, polished central core. A jewel-like core was present across most of the midsection, with plating covering the edges with the limbs erupting from there. There was no face, only a stalk or horn from the dorsum which perhaps housed a few sensory nodes. The exoskeleton was a dull greenish hue, with the gemstone composed of numerous red octagons with a blue core.
The apex lifeform of a bygone world, Razin marched forward stoically.
Several rockets flew into and exploded against Razin’s body, fire and shrapnel failing to do any damage as the smoke cleared. The Millennian drone slowly stepped forward as the central core began to flicker. The cryomaser similarly glowed to full power and let loose even as Akane put the controls into reverse.
Sho Kuroki had just barely managed to get to the hangars by the time everything had gone to hell. Sitting in the Super-X3’s cockpit, he was alone for the first time in there. His copilot, weapons engineer, and navigator had either been killed, replaced by monsters, or were missing. In his heart of hearts, he desperately wished it was just the last case for all of them. The hangar wasn’t free of chaos itself, with the sounds of gunfire and alarms ringing in his ears while he tried his best not to pay attention to it.
He’d gotten his orders from Pentecost and he was the only one in a position to do anything about them. Engage the UFO, shoot it down. The Super-X3 was their biggest gun and it couldn’t go unused.
The hangar doors before him opened and instantly Sho’s eyes perceived a bright bluish white light. The momentary flare subsided and the source was soon clear. A formation of people were running and gunning in a backpedal, crowded around and in some cases climbed onto a retreating cryomaser tank. They weren’t directly in front of the hangar, instead about 200 meters out, but the parting doors put them in clear view. Them and the long shadow starting to come into view behind them.
Before he could do anything Sho recoiled and shielded his eyes after being assailed by a burst of reds and blues. The spiraling mass of energy, multiple meters thick, swept across the air like a scythe it resembled in shape; soon followed by secondary explosions engendered along its path. The beam instantly vaporized the turret of the maser tank kept going, cleaving through a warehouse and bisecting a tower before cutting out. Stepping into view, the source of the rays was unlike anything Colonel Kuroki had ever seen.
The razin, paying little heed to being half covered in frost that it was breaking out of in every step, continued to march on and hefted one of its large, bladed limbs. A single trooper had fallen behind the pack and was not able to get up fast enough upon being knocked down by an explosion. The limb punctured their back and popped the human life in the same way an annoyed person might squish a large bug. It carried no particular malice in its actions, none that were conveyed in its mostly faceless form at least, but the sentiment was jarring.
It merely crushed and killed a comparatively insignificant life simply because it was insignificant.
The razin marched on to chase the crowd, not caring about the hangar. But, others clearly did. Buzzing wings were the only warning when several shigan flew inside the opened port. Instantly the mantis-dragonfly-like gestalts went about the attack. Some dropping biomass in divisions to literally bomb the walkways with smaller drones cast from themselves, other grabbing staff off the walkways and throwing them to their deaths, and more still dropping globs of acid and sparking blasts of energy as a quicker means to kill as many insignificant humans as possible.
Kuroki was dimly reminded of what a European beehive looked like when beset by Asiatic Giant Hornets, the smaller insects cleaved through by the larger aggressors in such droves it seemed as surreal as it was horrifying.
The cockpit shook and Kuroki’s eyes darted upwards, seeing the edge of a claw poke the top of the windshield. Footsteps soon followed and the shigan clambered around before lowering itself upside down across the screen of reinforced glass. Compound eyes mixed with human lenses looked into his own and Kuroki leaned back into his seat.
Alerts chimed, indicating he was cleared for launch but he knew he had to defend himself.
The shigan, larger than the others, convulsed and split its jaws apart to make more room.
Sho’s finger moved for the switch to close the armored chassis over the cockpit window and shield himself, only to pause as a red glow overtook the cockpit. In the millisecond by millisecond perception some gained when adrenaline ran high enough, he looked forward.
The disgusting maw of the shigan drooled corrosive ichors, some of which were eating at the cockpit glass. Behind it, glimpsed through its limbs and the fluids, the razin was charging up for another blast. The troops and heavily damaged maser tank were heading for a still-standing warehouse, but were caught out in the open.
-They’re going to die.-
The thought fully registered to the ace. He was about to see a whole crowd of people, some probably friends, comrades, or at least those with the same noble common cause he’d signed up and stayed for; die right in front of him.
Was this why people like Aso were so driven? It had to have happened to him a few times given how old he was.
The ichors melted through the middle layers of the compound cockpit window, the smell of burning wafting inside to assail Kuroki’s nose as he committed this to memory.
-And to think… if I hadn’t been so gungho about piloting the X3, it might be Aso or Hopkins sitting here right now…-
Was this penance for something? Was this karma he was cursed to endure after the stunt pulled at Amami? He’d been a good soldier, following orders, and that led to him firing upon what well might have been an innocent creature. Especially now that the true enemy was revealed, now trying to kill others and Sho himself.
Or was this karma for all the fame he’d enjoyed after the conflict with the Destroyah and the meltdown event? All those posters with his face on it. All the ranks and awards he’d been given. Four going on five years of fame, for one toll of seeing and experiencing all this?
Was that the curse Godzilla gave him when he was the first one to witness the current one’s coronation at the airport those years ago? When those eyes first met his then, and then he met them again at Amami Ōshima.
The controls to close the canopy and to engage the most powerful maser on the planet were both at his right side, and he needed his left hand for steering or aiming. The two switches were separated to avoid accidents. Usually he had a copilot to help with this. He didn’t have time for both.
Save himself, the golden boy of CCI’s arms and G-Force’s ranks; or save a crowd of random persons he may or may not have even known, if that last part even mattered.
And yet, sitting here, he felt almost an eerie calm for the briefest instant. The aftermath of the conflict and the meltdown… It spurred a phantom sensation of looking at the radiation monitor on the central console. Turned off and blackened now, he remembered how the readings were once off the charts; insistent beeping indicating his coming demise of being slow cooked alive.
And the suddenness of the readings declining away, as something absorbed the death-dealing energy.. Something with a thundering roar and look within a golden eye that met his own.
Sergeant Hopkins had plenty of strong opinions about the nature of the current Godzilla. Some could call it faith, others conviction, perhaps hope was a good term to use. It kept him controlled in the face of such horrifying and stressing times, like a heat within the gullet to stave off cold.
The golden eye and azure light flickered through his memory, and Sho felt warm.
He chuckled, feeling the strain clouding part of his mind lifting enough to offer clarity. A rationalist could tell him he was reading too much into it, but those golden orbs had saved his life half a decade ago. Not a curse, but a blessing. He’d live to see his 30th birthday, plenty more weren’t that lucky, and he’d certainly not been idle in the last five.
A single tear fell from Sho’s eye as he smiled in defiance of the monster eating through his windshield. The shigan raised back a claw and poised for the weakened glass; the razin braced itself to fire its central cannon. Colonel Sho Kuroki took his hand off the steering controls and moved for another system control at his left.
Sho could almost fancy he could glimpse an enormous form swimming through the seas beyond sight, heading this way to destroy the UFO he’d been ordered to.
-Thank you, looks like this is best I’ll get to do to make it up to you for Amami…-
Akane flinched as she’d thrown her arms up to shield her face, glimpsing a brightness through her fingers and wrist. The razin’s body contorted and shuddered, its beam shooting wildly into the sky as a cryomaser many times stronger than her tank’s destroyed weapon hit it from the side. The enormous alien’s body simultaneously froze and shattered from its own weight, more and more of it falling apart as it fell over. She and so many others gazed at the source at the hangars.
The Super-X3’s frontal maser cut off its freezing beam after several long seconds, the weapon automatically retracting behind the beak-like covers closing over it. Above the cockpit, a missile launcher brought out last minute still smoked; having been brought to bear moments earlier and blasting what was in front of it. A frozen shigan drone fell to the ground and shattered instantly.
The cockpit window bore a hole, melted and burst through. A large claw speared a man into his pilot’s seat, ramming through his sternum and erupting from the back of the chair.
Colonel Sho Kuroki still bore a smile even as his eyes closed for the last time.
A life granted, a life given. From unto him, and now entrusted to the granted to stop what he couldn’t.
===========
“MITSUO! MITSUO!?!” Shinoda yelled as he scrambled through a doorway whilst being pushed through it.
Stacker Pentecost, the one shoving Yuji forward to get him clear, backpedaled after him with several personnel and Biologist 023. He stepped back after holding the door opening, still firing several shots off with a venerable hand-cannon before swapping to a portable flamethrower to beat back a drone trying to rush them from the side in the form of a large dog. The writhing chimera staggered back, recontorting its body to try and snuff out the gnawing flames.
There was more than just the building still being in good shape that had resulted in it being a fallback point, and Shinoda and 023 were quick to run after said reason when they burst into the computer room.
Dr. Mitsuo Katagiri looked near-catatonic, eyes widened so much it seemed as if he’d tear a lid and his skin chalk-white. He was on his knees before a supercomputer console which he’d wrenched open with the door flat on the ground across the room. Various wires and cables had been pried free, with a thick black line still sparking in his hands to cast brief flickers on his petrified face.
Even at their approach and the light from the sparks, contracted pupils didn’t react.
023 moved to the computer console and screens in the room, the old mysterian adjusting his glasses as he surveyed the information. Shinoda moved to his former friend and gently shook his shoulder to try and rouse his attention after carefully putting the sparking cable away.
“Hey Katagiri…! Katagiri!” Yuji kept his voice low as he shook him, Mitsuo slowly wobbling his head around to look him in the eye; even though his piercing orbs looked more like they were looking through him than at him, “Mitsuo, what happened?”
"Remote access," 023 replied dryly as he manned the console to a computer system he was familiar with, "This is a remote slave computer to the CCI master terminal. I assisted in building the original Mysterian machine this was modeled on, there is no other possibility."
Shinoda's eyes widened to match Katagiri, "What?! Remote access?! From where?! By who?! Security on this thing has to be-"
"One of the two greatest on this planet, your powers of deduction are to be marveled at truly," the Mysterian stoically noted with the dryness of a desert and yet still dripping with sarcasm at the horrifying implications, "I believe the culprit is obvious given they are trying to kill us. They have used the CCI terminal through Dr. Katagiri’s access codes to breach into other systems remotely.”
He looked upon the screens, which showed a live feed from hundreds of windows opened at once across the display. Many of them were of thousands of Japanese machines, cameras, or systems from every school and university in the capital to Haneda airport, banks in Osaka, to police departments across Japan. All displaying the same word over and over again, a presumed name of their attacker if they had such.
023 calmly scratched at their left ear, “I suspect, these ‘Millennian’ have used CCI’s computing power to access hundreds, potentially thousands of networks across Japan.”
“W-What were they doing?! Are they still doing it?!” Shinoda quivered as he stepped away from Katagiri and joined 023 at the computer terminals.
“They are still in the system, but their connection was disrupted,” 023 noted whilst glancing at the torn out router cables, “Rather than expend all their computing power themselves, they were slaving Katagiri’s access here to get them inside CCI’s supercomputer in Kyoto remotely. From there, they used the connections to link up to. For now, they have lost access. But before they lost it, they managed to access and scramble systems from here to Washington and Moscow. I am detecting multiple missile silos that would require executive commands to be activated as on standby, and I do not believe the number being higher than official public numbers is a typo.”
Shinoda busily pulled through the windows of sites, images, and camera feeds to try and gather any idea of what the Millennian were up to. To smash through CCI’s firewall and then enslave almost all the computers across Japan in just a few minutes was almost inconceivable. All that technological progress, all that build up, just rewired and reutilized in the virtual blink of an eye.
The realization fully hit him like a truck and almost made him fall to his knees had he not supported himself with a hand braced on the desk.
They were so far out of their depth. They could progress a millennia and not be at the same level as these beings. They were ants by comparison. He’d been terrified and horrified of physical giants marching over human lives, now he was confronted with a mental force that could do the same to humanity’s creation itself; not just the life of the direct victim underfoot but the life's work of many in a few mere moments. He could eye the amount of data that had been transferred, no doubt uploaded onto the Millennian UFO. 2.6 exabytes. A little over two and a half million terabytes. That was bigger than the entirety of the internet. Much of that data would be near useless, but if even just 1% of 1% of 1% of that was important, medical research or records, communications access codes, military security, and more; that would be several times larger than the repositories of several nations. The sheer size was likely because such secret repositories had been breached remotely. If it had the capability to be interacted with remotely, it was.
A stray thought crossed his mind however, and it granted a flicker of hope; a single candle in a storm.
"Give me the connections listing,” Yuji panted whilst taking a keyboard.
“There are approximately 60 million machines that had been linked to this terminal,” 023 noted whilst still moving a window showing them to Yuji’s monitor.
Shinda was thankful that, unplugged as it was from any remote connections, this was indeed one of the two strongest computers on the planet. Even with limited capability, scanning through five dozen millions of listings didn’t take too long. Within a few long moments, an error code flashed across the screen.
Error: Query “Asuka S. 85” not found!
“My work computer used whilst keeping my harddrives off any network,” Yuji indicated to the name with a finger, “I kept it off any chance of remote access, was thinking CCI would steal my Godzilla research again.”
023 eyed the very computer room around them, “Wise. But how does this help anything?”
“It means they need to have a connection to our internet, and a strong one at that, to pull off what they were doing. Their technology far outpaces ours, but they need a strong medium to assume direct control most effectively,” Yuji explained and was relieved to see 023 passively nodding along to the logic.
“You can’t hack the Pentagon easily from a school library terminal,” 023 grunted, “Then this means the G-Force and CCI terminals must be secured.”
“Have they breached into G-Force’s terminal, ours is just as strong as CCI’s,” Pentecost grunted as he stepped into the room, not paying much heed to the gash cut across his forehead that was painting red down one side of his face. Evidently, one drone got very close.
Yuji made way for him and let Pentecost type in a name he knew he didn’t have clearance to see. The search proceeded in the connections list before the code message cropped up again.
Error: Query “Sunshine 60” not found!
Pentecost didn’t smile, but he didn’t frown either, “Good, they haven’t gotten in. Yet.”
“Yet?!” Shinoda snapped around as Pentecost handed him several objects it took him a moment to realize were grenades. His heart jumped into his throat and he almost dropped them on impulse, before an even stronger one snapped him back to clutching them to him.
“One of those things came bursting out of Aso’s office, and it had his eyes when it landed,” Pentecost busily explained whilst calling over several troopers with a wave of his hand.
023 stiffened visibly, “You mean to say.”
The look in Stacker Pentecost’s eyes, those of a man who once faced down Godzilla himself whilst piloting his mechanical double, never looked more horrified behind the controlled visage he was trying to maintain.
“As acting head of G-Force, charged with the protection and security of mankind, I cannot allow a threat like this to fester,” he shot a look back to Yuji Shinoda, “I can’t risk getting close to the supercomputer access panels, I could become compromised and make the whole venture easier for them. Admiral Tachibana is still MIA and Aso is….”
The troopers behind him gulped and looked about warily. Pentecost read the room and straightened up.
“MIA. That leaves myself and Dr. Katagiri with access. The terminals here and in Kyoto must be destroyed, no matter how this battle outside goes. If we can’t stop it ourselves, we can’t let it scramble the rest of the world and use their own weapons against them,” Pentecost barked with the utmost seriousness in his voice. There were a million reasons he wanted to have to shoulder this burden himself, but fate hadn’t dealt him any of those cards. This do or die moment, potentially for the whole of humanity, rested on just one pair of shoulders.
He pointed directly at Shinoda, “You. You need to start running now. Go to the headquarters, get to the computer room and blow that thing to kingdom come before these things get to it! You two!-”
He motioned to the troopers who’d tailed him inside, “Get yourselves and Dr. Shinoda to the terminal. Protect him with your lives and help him destroy that damn computer if you need to. Only reason I’m not telling every trooper to go for demolitions is we need as many boots fighting those monsters off!”
They snapped to and saluted, “SIR YES SIR!”
Yuji Shinoda felt hopelessly out of his depth when he had to quickly keep up with the trained soldiers harrying him out into the halls, trying to stay in cover as much as possible.
Taking a radio unit from the wall and setting the frequency, Pentecost had to hope the comms weren’t still on the fritz as he put it to his mouth.
“All units, I repeat all units; this is acting field commander Pentecost. Fall back to the central headquarters office building if you are capable. We have a VIP and demolition team on a top priority objective. Keep the enemy back as best as you can if you can still fight. I repeat, if anyone can hear me, you are to do everything you can to keep the enemy back from the offices!”
Pentecost put the radio down and closed his eyes, trying to take in a deep breath and collect himself.
“I have to destroy the other one.”
A quiet, hiss of a voice slither past him from behind. Pentecost turned and nearly thought one of the huma-emulating drones had gotten inside. From his sweat soaked hair, pasty skin, and bloodshot eyes, Mitsuo Katagiri’s appearance compounded his fidgeting muscles and staggering stance to give him an uncanny quality. His was a face of simultaneous shock, conviction, and attempts at robotic stoicism.
“I have to destroy CCI’s computer in Kyoto. If we destroy the one here, they will go there.”
=============
An explosion shuddered even the depths of the vault and Taizo Tachibana wasn’t the only one to subconsciously look up. The emergency bunk was still fairly dark despite using GUNHED to get some of the light running. This wasn’t the first echo to rumble across the bunker, but it was one too many for him.
“That does it,” he grunted as he stormed away from guarding the vault door and to where the few weapons that had been carried in were stored. He strode past the wounded youths put onto stretchers for a makeshift medical ward.
“What are you doing?”
“Admiral?”
Taizo didn’t respond, only going to the laid out weapons and mechanically loading up a rifle, racking the slide to get it to readiness before starting to push grenades back into a portable launcher’s cylinder.
“Hayata, is the emergency signaller your niece uses still going off?” Taizo Tachibana called out to the small crowd, and the summoned Shin Hayata stepped forward from a medic he’d been talking to.
Hayata pulled out the small, pen-sized device which was still blinking with a constant beeping light. He hadn’t been ignoring it, but it was sobering to look at for him all the same.
Taizo didn’t say anything to him, communicating regardless. Shin looked at the signaler and, perhaps for a moment, let his resolve waiver and show some of his inner fear that had been festering with concern. Without a word, Shin put the signaler away and moved beside Tachibana to begin arming himself. He loaded up a fuel tank for a portable flamethrower in perfect fluidity after his superior officer offered him the ammo.
It slowly dawned on the platoon, almost all of them quite young, what the two were planning.
“You can’t seriously- You can’t keep the vault door open to go out, those things are right outside it in all likelihood!” a medic no older than 22 yelped as they put their arms out as if to shield some of their patients in the wounded.
“That’s why, we’re loading up as much as possible,” Taizo replied stoically, slinging a rifle over his shoulder, “And that’s why you are closing it right behind us.”
“You can’t take the mech! It’s the only thing powering this place!” a scared private whimpered from the cot they were put upon, bandaging around the 19 year old’s right arm with red staining visible even in the low light.
“We’re safe down here! You open that door to get out and we all get swarmed!” A vehicle engineer, barely twenty years older, almost screamed whilst clutching the cot stretcher she’d been assisting with as a volunteer aid. Her back was arched like a scared animal about to spring away.
“I-If you’re expecting us to let you go charging out the door yelling Banzai you’re out of your mind!”
“It’s suicide! You’re going to get killed or copied and then we all die!”
“We have rations to last us months!”
“G-Force is probably already fighting them! W-We should wait for Commander Aso or Pentecost to come rescue us!”
“The Super-X3 has gotta be back soon! Captain Kuroki can beat these things no problem!”
“THAT’S ENOUGH!”
Shin Hayata almost jumped back at the powerful roar of a shout, not having expected it from the admiral. Taizo Tachibana, already a fairly tall man, seemed larger than life as he stood up straight in the lowlight.
He looked at each and every face gazing upon him, looking at them knowingly. He sighed, resolute in judgment as much as he was in acceptance. These were just kids. Takaaki Aso had put him in charge of the Tokyo division whilst mostly taking veterans to the Amami operation. It had been a conscious choice on his, Aso, and Pentecost’s decision making. A lot of these youths were kids brought straight out of highschool. They’d seen the superweapons, the tech, the larger than life leaders, and perhaps with the same misunderstandings of power that the group that tried to gift him that damn Imperial age sword; hadn’t understood that power they were encouraged by.
So many voices and faces, all saying the same thing. That they were just kids, and they were scared. For themselves and him, after all that security was ripped away by an enemy they had no context for.
He almost chuckled, remembering the times Yuri would cling to his leg when he had to go to work or an important mission; not wanting him to go. When she was but a toddler, it was because she didn’t want daddy to leave. When she was a little older, and knew what he was doing, it was because she was scared he wouldn’t come back.
Taizo closed his eyes in brief contemplation, before seizing the moment. He pointed to the vault door, to the smaller gateway built into the base of it..
“There’s a small, man sized access door built into the big one. I will be using it, and anyone who wants to come with me. We can’t rely on others to save our lives, much as we hope for it. But we can work to save theirs. GUNHED will remain here, to ensure there is power,” he announced with a powerful, commanding, but not domineering voice. It was a tone cultured by being a father, and it was meant to reassure he knew what he was doing.
“I’m not going to go running out there without intent to come back. I can still fight,” he made a point by tapping at the rifle, “Others of you can’t. And there is no shame in a lack of ability because of one’s condition.”
His eyes met the most scared, the most wounded. Thankfully none in critical condition, but still plenty of those on the stretchers all the same with bandaged limbs or heads.
“I and anyone who wants to come with me, have no intentions of dying for a cause. I have never, nor will I ever, call upon anyone to do that. That sort of sentiment of command died sixty years ago, and it should stay dead… I know, the enemy is frightening. They seem unstoppable. I make no illusions that I might still perish all the same, but that’s my choice to make to try and act so someone else doesn’t face their mortality like that. Civilian or soldier, that was the truest reason for self-defense,” Tachibana turned and faced the door, steeling the knots of fear roiling in his gut. As stoic and strong as he appeared, he could fully admit to himself how terrified he was, “This is my decision, and I make it for myself alone. Anyone who wants to come with me, you gotta make that decision on your own too.”
He took a step towards the vault and, much to his relief and pride, he heard Hayata’s footsteps shortly after following suit. The two made their way forward, towards GUNHED and the vault door behind it.
Minute by minute, others able-bodied looked to one another. Conversations, some silent and some spoken in whispers broke out. Weapons were taken for as long as there were any, one after another.
A young mechanic, not even a combat soldier, reached the racks of weapons to retrieve one. When confronted with an empty rack, their hand froze. But as her quivering face comprehended what this meant, her mind traveled to beyond the vault at the rattling of another explosion. Si-Woo Pak had no tethers to the city above and beyond. Her family were poor immigrants from Korea who’d worked as fishermen and dockworkers at Hokkaido. Job prospects had been slim, and sometimes it seemed like the only mobility out was to look to see if some shadier elements needed hands with ten fingers. The chance to be here was a Hail-Mary shot in the dark that she’d thought was a miracle landing a month ago.
And a minute ago, she’d come to the conclusion it had been a nightmare.
Si-Woo frowned and balled a fist, punching it into her opened palm much to the gawking shock of some of the wounded once they realized she was getting in line to head out unarmed, like she was about to bust out the taekwondo on the first alien she saw. The gobsmacked look on the attending medic and the wounded was infectious, especially when Si-Woo’s courage spurred on several others who were nervous about acting without arms in hand to fall in line. Already several more were hyping themselves up, cracking joints and rolling their shoulders.
Taizo Tachibana looked back with a knowing glance, not smiling as that would imply he was glad he was about to lead a battalion who were half-unarmed into a war with an enemy they had no context for. He would have yearned to throw them his weapon, but as the man taking point in the pack, he wanted to draw as much of the enemy’s focus to him as possible.
He reached for the door.
“WAIT!”
Taizo and his contingent whirled around to the source of the voice, looking to the attending medic and the most badly wounded. It had been the latter, a face Taizo recognized even in the low light as the youngest captain in his force. Captain Ken Aiba, a lanky but very tall and thin man of 24, who’d lost a leg in the prior engagement, who’d yelled out.
They sat up, with help from others, a cauterized and bandaged leg in plain view. Ken was covered in a cold sweat and was still heaving for breath, the reason why being obvious with the burns across part of his cheek and neck from the same explosion that took his leg off below the knee.
Another rumbling cast across the bunker, and it spurred him on to finally let loose what was caught in his chest.
“Take GUNHED.”
The room went silent aside from his heaving. Several long moments passed before it was broken again. And it wasn’t just Ken talking amongst the wounded.
“Take it!”
“Take GUNHED, Admiral!”
“Use it!”
“Blast those S.O.B.s to Hell!”
Soon the room was echoing with the constant outcries from those too infirm to fight. They knew what it would mean. Total darkness as soon as it was decoupled from the generator. The vault door being forced open longer to get the mech out to fight. No big guns to assure them of a sense of safety as they waited in the darkness for rescue, never knowing if the monsters were coming too.
They couldn’t fight, but they could defend. If only perhaps, by proxy of what they could give up.
Admiral Taizo Tachibana felt more and more eyes looking to him for an answer. He closed his eyes and offered his rifle to someone who’d get more use out of it now, and nodded as Hayata led a short band of cheering engineers to decouple the mecha from the power bank. The enthusiasm was so strong that several infirmed had to be pushed back onto their beds, else they leave their stretchers to try to and assist.
The vault door creaked open and a set of powerful floodlights streamed down the long passageway leading out of the bunkers, lights otherwise completely cut off. In the sudden illumination, a hulking monstrosity lunged from the shadows, a man-sized balkzardan crackled with electricity as it pounced.
A flamethrower shrieked as it ignited the beast in a gout of flames, but even with skin melting off and eyes bursting the drone kept coming. That was, until a mechanical claw caught it around the middle and smashed the drone against the ground. Tank treads rolled over the broken mass that remained, Hayata ignited it again to keep it from getting back up.
GUNHED’s weapons went fully online where they could, as more and more drones swarmed into the illumination of its headlights. The Gatling cannon was deafening in the tunnel, ripping several drones apart in its salvos, but even so one could still detect the battle cry of those following the mecha into the fray. With the vault door closed behind them to shield the wounded, the only light was of flames, gunfire, and GUNHED’s beams.
Taizo gunned down, crushed, ran-over, or swatted every drone he could reach or get to stem the flow of them; but plenty made it past. Those that did, either by racing past the mecha, bursting from the ceiling or walls behind it, or from flanking them in the maze of corridors in the depths, were met with salvos of fire and weapons by those armed. Those that made it past them were the biggest threat.
Shin Hayata felt an uncanny sense of danger and whirled around to a tunnel that had opened up on his right. Just as his flamethrower started to illuminate a form in the shadows, a hand shoved him forward. There was a flash of light and Shin glimpsed the cause. A G-Force clad officer pointing a gun at them. At first it seemed a horrific case of friendly fire, but the brief instances of their illumination again when they took a second shot revealed a pair of enlarged, pure black eyes like what one expected from a nocturnal predator. The drone tried to take another shot at him, aiming for the flamethrower’s fuel tank which could have catastrophic results to the running-and-gunning platoon.
A blur shot past Shin and rushed the drone.
Si-Woo Pak, screaming a battle cry with several joining in her charge, didn’t stop when a round hit her in the gut. They tackled the drone, pulling it to the ground whilst kicking, stomping, punching, and wrenching with every ounce of manic strength they might have. The drone, not so easily killed, morphed a hand into a sword-fish rostrum that was buried into the chest of one attacker. It killed the man instantly, but more just kept coming. Pressing advantage in numbers, ineffective as hand to hand was, they swarmed the monster with courageousness and rage combined. Even in near total darkness, the flashmob tore it apart with their bare hands and a few combat knives, forcing it to regenerate time and time again until the tumors that incurred each time got more frequent or the drones parts too scattered to easily recombine.
The column kept moving, mowing down or impeding as much as they could down the dark tunnels. It felt like reaching a divine gateway when the entrance to the illuminated hangar came into view…
===========================================
Wow, this entire war scene was intense. You went full AoT/GoT with how you were killing off people left & right. Lol
And Taizo coming in with the heroic speech, nicely done.
I won't sugarcoat it, the first half of this chapter was tedious to get through. With none of the main cast present, we're left with a series of bit players in fairly detailed action set pieces just duking it out and I just wasn't engaged. This is the kind of thing a film can do in a montage but in written form just drags on and on. It doesn't even serve any real narative point other then maybe taking the Super X3 off the table.
Once we pick up with Yuji things are back on track without missing a beat though. Katagiri already taking steps to correct his blunder is nice, and i enjoy Yuji's being off network coming back into play. Tachibana stepping into the fallen Aso's shoe's as the big military leader with baggage is a good end note for the chapter.
New Era's still great overall and I'm excited for the finale, but that first half was rough.
Won't the shigan that enters the Super X-3 be able to commandeer it?
Hey Tarb, Quick question, what inspired you to use the Trading Battle Kaiju for the Millenium threat.
Not trying to say that's a bad thing, just curious.
best of luck on the rest of the story
5634392
No. Reading closely, the Shigan got killed in the blast too. It just happened after it stabbed through the pilot.
5634392
What Tem said 😅
He gave up a hand controlling the craft's start up to launch one of the missiles on the top into the shigan. So his last act was to fire the missile and the frontal maser.
I was expecting that when any drone took the form of shipman, it would be a single vehicle sized one. Liked the speech taizo gave. Inspired a bit by aragorn's speech in return of the king?
*inhales* Let the bodies hit the floor Let the bodies hit the floor Let the bodies hit the floor Let the bodies hit the Floooooooooooooor!
But yeah, intense action here, with some randos dead and some near death experience here. Like that Taizo and Hopkins is taking more action role moves here.
And we begin with G-Force attempting to destroy the UFO with what they can get available, only to have the first salvo sent right back at them.
Koji is understandably scared for others and the rest of their squad, but has to dedicate himself to trying and stop the invasion. Coming out, he finds himself in the middle of melee between the Millennian droness and G-Force. Including another form is revealed and an Apache is destroyed.
Fortunately, even as dangerous as the Millennian drones are, they're not invulnerable and the masers are still effective against them. While Kiyoshi is injured, Koji manages to destroy the drone attacking them with a lot of effort. This retroactively makes Belvera having kill MULTIPLE drones by herself is extremely impressive.
Unfortunately, G-Force, despite their best efforts, are losing.
Mei Shinjo is currently dealing with that exact situation after a field promotion. Despite that, and an severe injury, she does what a leader should and prioritizes her men over her own life, and managed short circuit its attack to prevent it from killing her men twice. While she dies, she did what a leader SHOULD do and saved her men and dies with grace.
Given the amount of sheer overkill that entailed, I get the feeling Millennian was annoyed.
Sadly, Gabriel arrived and destroys the Drone with a mix of weapons and his pyrokinesis, but not enough to save his friend.
Meanwhile, Akane is dealing with the drones merging into larger forms...and the Millennian drones still know how to use guns. The carnage shows the danger of the drones, almost like the Thing in some ways, and she's frozen by the sheer brutality of it, especially when a tank crew are killed and one looks at her.
I'm impressed you managed to make the equal of a beam o war with a cannon shell in a way that made since. The drones even go with more psychological warfare knowing the effect this would have.
Unfortunately, she doesn't have time and has to react has to deal with a small army of human-shaped drones. Unfortunately, this gives the Millennian drones a chance to form a far larger form known as Razin.
Love you using these lesser known kaiju most people don't even know exist.
Meanwhile, Kuroki is dealing with being alone in the Super-X3 and might be the only one that could do something about this situation, but is going to have to work alone because he doesn't know where his crew are. I like the sense of paranoia that this comes with.
This does add a sense of menace and threat, especially when Razin shows just how powerful it is and why they would devote that much effort into creating it.
The description of the Razin killing the soldier is chilling. It killed something insignificant because it was insignicant. When you step on a bug because it's a bug. Highlights how Millennian sees humanity.
I also like Kuroki goes through a lot of thoughts, wondering if this is karma for some mistake he made or some curse Godzilla put on him when formed. Shows the kind of things that go through your mind. It's a very good introspection, and I like how he thinks Gabe Hopkins' opinion on Godzilla and how that snaps him out of it.
I also like how he gets another Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane aspect of it as he thinks about Godzilla destroying the UFO and seeing Junior's eye. Is he really sensing something or just imagining?
Whatever the case, he sacrifices himself to destroy the Razin and save everyone outside. Good scene...and I think the first time we see a canonical character die if I'm not mistaken.
Meanwhile, Shinoda, Pentecost, and 023 arrive to check on Katagiri. I like that he knows exactly what he caused and has practically gone catatonic. He knows his mistake. In trying to save the world, he let in something that desires to destroy it.
Hehe, love getting a bit of snark out of 023. Reminder that appearing stoic doesn't mean one has no emotions.
And the heroes finally learn the name of their enemy's name.
I do like that even though Katagiri caused this, he did manage to disrupt Millennian's plan....but not before they threatened starting Judgment Day.
I like Yuji's observation that even if Millennian isn't a kaiju, yet, it's so far above humanity and capable of their destruction as a kaiju is.
I do like that Millennian might be far far more advanced, but for that exact reason they needed to use our technology to interact most directly. Clever and completely logical.
I do also like Pentacost realizes this means even if Aso was assimulated, Millennian hasn't been able to make use of that and thus they still have time.
I do like that despite the situation he's in and upset, Pentacost still takes charge and comes up with a plan.
Also like Katagiri stepping forwards and wanting to right his mistake.
Meanwhile, Taizo and Hayata are dealing with the situation. I like that despite the situation, the two can't stay here and let people die if they can do anything about it. I also like that they don't intend to bring the wounded and rookie soldiers either. Once more shows good leadership.
I do like them recognizing that these kids are too young to drag into this mess or hold it too much against them. Taizo is willing to risk his life without GUNHED to help, but is still a good leader. I very much like this speech.
This chapter does a good job of detailing what makes a good leader: one who puts themselves before others and their soldiers. Risking or sacrificing it all to protect them and making their actions count, even if they are their last. A leader isn't a tyrant, they're as much of a servant as they are a source of guidence.
I don't know if Si-Woo is an OC or from something else, but I do like her breaking through her fear and raising her courage to act. I also like that Taizo isn't happy half his group is unarmed, but at the same time willing to do so if he has to.
This all reminds me a bit of the boat scene of from Dark Knight: people choosing to do the right thing when they have no obligation to. Deciding to show the best of humanity in the worst of times.
The tunnel fight is terrifying, but also shows their determination. We get a pay off for Si-Woo's bravery as she helps fight and even a group of unarmed manage to actually kill the thing with their bare hands.
A dire chapter with deaths to be sure, but also one that shows humanity's courage and bravery. The things seperating us from Millennian.
That was awesome! The shifting battlefield. The epic battle with shifting monsters. All of it was heart pounding and really fun to read. I love battle scenes. Also great speech at the end. Really loved the soldiers turning the tables and being the ones to swarm and tear apart the drones. Fantastic chapter.