> The Bridge: Sound of Thunder
>  by Tarbtano
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

> Chapter 1: Not as They Appear
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

=================
Jakarta, Indonesia
=================

Tides roared and waves crashed as a mountain torpedoed its way through the water. A bellowing thunder screamed out, the kaiju rupturing the surface beneath a cargo ship and breaking the hull in half. Metal screeched and the sea was thrown up in torrents as cargo containers were shattered and thrown about everywhere. Agon, the fire dragon bent the broken ship's hull between his jaws, tossing it away after mauling it like a dog with its toy. 

All around sirens tore through the air as all of downtown and the docks became alight with panic. Dock workers, sailors, and the like filled the air in panicked screams; billowing into the streets to rush inland. Agon bellowed over the uproars, his maw becoming filled with burning lights before torrents of napalm spewed forth. Waves of sea water were overpowered by waves of fires that spilled across the ocean's surface with burning oil. Flames encircled and flooded the seas around Agon, the mutate laughing as the flames washed into the docks and set the premises ablaze. But behind closed eyes, he couldn't help but notice some of the lights dimming. Cold sprinkled across his face, causing Agon to halt and look around.

Thunder rumbled overhead as the sky became blotted in dark clouds, buckets of rain pouring down and smothering any flames born of wood and washing any blazes born of oil down the drains and into the sea. The sky was lit up and Agon soon found himself being struck by lightning repeatedly. The first few strikes to the shoulder hardly registered, only mildly numbing the limb. It was the trio of bolts crashing into his forehead that sent the fire dragon reeling back. Agon snarled, regaining his footing and pawing at his eyes and face to clear the shock to his nerves. A slow wail echoed over the sudden storm. The cry, akin to a whale's song quickly shifted into a booming fog horn of a war cry. The tides shifted and a hill of water formed on the edge of the bay, barreling towards Agon. 

A long, jagged shark fin cut through the peak of the oncoming tsunami, secondary fins flipping out to the sides to form three prongs. Red orbs of light glowed beneath the rushing water, heralding jolts of electricity to slither out of them and arc between the fins. Agon reared back and took in his breath, napalm building up behind his tusks. Torrents of flame slammed into a wall of erupting water and electricity when a massive form burst out of the oceanic hill and pounced at Agon. An energy charged arm clad in sapphire and tipped with ruby red talons tore through the sea of flames and grabbed Agon by the head. His jaws forced shut, Agon hissed as flames shot out between his teeth before the back of his skull was slammed through the churning sea and straight to the bottom. His attacker bellowed, dragging the invading mutation's face across the shallow's sea floor for several dozen yards before tossing him away from the docks. 

Dazed, it took a moment for Agon's rage kick to in and he tore himself up to his feet. Thunder roared overhead as he glared at the new kaiju who was cloaked in the thunder bolts she drew in like a lightning rod, charging herself up. Agon stomped on the surf, flames trickling out of his maw as he called out a dominating roar. 

Shocked onlookers amongst the city looked at the newcomer's spine-like fins, familiar shape; and even more familiar facial structure as an impossibility. One young dockworker picked up his dropped jaw, brushing aside shocked thoughts of the dead rising as he raised his hand and pointed. 

"I-Ini Godzilla! Godzilla!"
("I-It's Godzilla! Godzilla!")

Several older coworkers whapped the junior on the head, having already noticed the beast's distinctions; shaking their heads and motioning with their arms.  

"Tidak-tidak-tidak-tidak-tidak!"
("No-no-no-no-no!")

Rather than charcoal gray, the titan that called down thunder to itself was sapphire blue with a sandy yellow underbelly and red patches on the cheeks, palms, and flanks. Ruby red claws flexed amongst arcing electricity. And most importantly, it may have been a related species, but the "it" was a "she". Raiga growled and punched her electrified fists together to the sound of crashing thunder.  A sly smirk formed across her jaws. Ever since the romp on Solgell, she hadn't gotten much of a chance for some fun.

Lightning and fires were strewn all about, Agon bellowing at his challenger. Ragia was unmoved by weather and kaiju, almost chuckling under her breath.





-Alrighty, let's hope I don't break your face in during Round 1. Ding Ding ding~-

She put her fists up in a boxer's guard and Agon charged.

=============================
Small town in Northern Equestria
=============================

Maps and notes flew about every which way as a purple and green hurricane figuratively and literally tore through her belongings. Teal magic coiled around the stacks, levitating them up amongst the glowing auras and sorting through them. She wanted to make sure she got everything important, but Starlight Glimmer knew full well that time was of the utmost essence. Frantic didn’t even begin to describe her mood after she received her notice and the information came streaming in. 

It wasn’t more than a week after her cousin Moonbeam was on the radio, and suddenly all the signs started pointing in her direction. So much had happened in the past few days it gave the past millennium a run for its money. Alien monsters arrive, the confrontation at Canterlot, kaiju enter the popular lexicon, more kaiju show up as if coming out of the woodwork, Xenilla’s record goes public, more confrontations as the kaiju are spread out; it was all happening almost too fast and she’d been hard at work the entire time. Nothing was ever going to be the same and she was working herself up a wall brainstorming to try and find a way to alleviate that. The unicorn rapidly stuffed numerous notes into her saddlebags, forgetting to even fold half of them. 

-With the alicorns busy at Canterlot and Sombra gone, I’ll have to get to Chrysalis quickly. She should still be in Manehattan after sending me the message about her scouts.-

Shoving more than a few ‘Calm Down’ carrots in her bags, Starlight Glimmer tore the door to her tiny home open and bolted down the street with such speed in her gallop that it would put a racing pegasus to shame. Dread washed across her face as much as the rushing wind did, all too familiar information about one kaiju in particular tearing across her mind. Moonbeam was the smart one, and if her warnings were accurate and Chrysalis’ correspondence with Xenilla were to be believed. 

-Godzilla is up to something, he must be stopped!-


==============
Back on Terra
==============

Raiga dug her feet into the ground, kicking up mountain-high mounds of sea floor and shattered dock behind her heels before her backwards advance ground to a halt. Snapping her hips, the aquatic theropod threw her weight forward and shoved Agon back for breathing room. Agon didn’t have time to grunt from the push before one electrified fist after another crashed into his torso. Raiga grinned as the patches on her flanks and cheeks glowed, arcing her storm’s wrath into her hands for a series of jabs followed up by an uppercut that nearly floored Agon. Searing lights came blazing across Agon’s maw as he lurched forward after recovering, vomiting up several Olympic pools' worth of napalm onto the Guardian Beast. 

If Raiga felt the pain through her tough scales when the burning oils engulfed half her form, she didn’t show it. Roaring in chorus with the thunder, the now on fire kaiju stampeded forward whilst getting struck by lightning several times. Agon took a taloned swipe at her, raking one paw across her shoulder before she tackled him and dunked both underwater. The surf was churned and thrown about as the twin titans rolled around in it, napalm washing off Raiga and cloaking the surface as thunder bolts stabbed at the ocean’s surface. The sea turned into a dueling landscape of lightning, fire, and surging water before the two surfaced in a lock. Agon had grabbed onto Raiga’s left arm and head, with Raiga using her right arm to try and pry off his hold when he started to bear his weight onto her. With flames flickering out of his throat and his fangs virtually ignited, Agon widened his jaws and took aim at Raiga’s throat. 

But his would be bite victim wasn’t having any of that. Stomping on Agon’s toes, Raiga freed up her right arm enough to grab Agon by the face. Grimacing upon spying a familiar fiery glow building up in his maw, Raiga shoved his snout to the side and diverted away a stream of burning tides into the broiling sea beside her before the Guardian Beast gave off her own glow. The biological conductor on her palm fired up and emptied its storage capacity. Several thunder bolt’s worth of volts and amps shot through Agon’s skull and sent his nervous system ablaze. He thrashed and shrieked, desperately trying to regain full control of his body as he spun around and clocked Raiga on the head with his tail hard enough to trip the guardian over. With every moment his body glowed more and more with searing lights that sent the sea broiling. The split second Agon regained his vision and saw the tumbling Raiga, he let out a voracious roar that drowned out the rolling thunder. 

After taking in a quick breath the berserk fire dragon unleashed almost all of the napalm he had left, completely engulfing the thrashing Raiga in an avalanche of fires for over half a minute until she was submerged beneath the blaze. His foe apparently smothered under the flames, Agon was far from sated. His lust for inferno ever increasing, Agon flailed about in a blind fury, hosing down the surrounding sea, the ruins of numerous ships, and parts of the sea side with flames galore. He cackled and screamed in delight amongst the burning holocaust, taking aim at several of the warehouses. That’s when the shift in the tide caught his eye. Casting a glare to the bay, Agon was quick to notice a burning wave heading directly for him. The wave grew into a tsunami by the time it reached him, a giant shark-like fin sticking out of its crest. Just before the wave could come, the fin ducked under the blazing surface and the tsunami petered out. Agon hissed as he scanned a sea covered in flames and debris as the rain poured down harder than before. Cloaked under the fires above, a high speed, glowing object was all but invisible while it flanked him until it was right next to the intruder. 

Raiga exploded out of the surf, her sapphire blue scales covered in just as many black char marks as it was crackling electricity that diverted its full fury to her left arm. Twisting around with her momentum and throwing her hips, Raiga’s left hooking uppercut connected with Agon’s previously bruised jaw with enough force that the air was split and half the city heard the resulting ‘boom’. The fire dragon screamed in a mix of rage and pain, which came out slightly garbled given half his lower jaw had just been dislocated and fractured hard enough to knock several teeth out. 

Though she was sore, burnt, and in some cases still burning; nothing kept Raiga from cracking an eager grin when she grabbed onto the downed kaiju’s tail. Absorbing more and more thunder bolts like a sponge to replenish her might, Raiga dug her feet into the sea floor and started twisting around. Ripping Agon out of the surf, he soon found himself being spun around by his tail from a very over eager opponent; helplessly flailing in the air as her rotation speed climbed. After several more whirls amidst the churning surf, Raiga cackled and, in a show of titanic strength, tossed the similarly massed Agon several hundred meters straight into the air and away from the docks. The dinosaur-like dragon screeched, getting struck by lightning several times before plowing head first through the waves and into a reef away from shore; disappearing in the waves. 

Raiga snorted for breath, letting her arms drop tiredly to her sides. She closed her eyes and picked her head up while letting fatigue wash away in her shower. Rain pinged across her hide as several lightning bolts struck her fins. Never a kaiju of great stamina without a storm, each bolt was a much loved recharge. She stayed like that for a good minute to fuel back up, before popping some of her joints and turning back around. She opened her eyes and looked toward some of the still burning docks, shrugging under her breath with a frown.

-Aaah dang iiiiit, was hoping he'd put up a better fight!-

She shook her head, wading through the surf and storm towards the docks after she ceased calling down any more lightning. 

-Oh well, fun's over. Let's see what I can do here...-

Raiga loomed over the warehouses and docks below like a stork over a pond, scanning the drenched cityscape to find what she was looking for. The giantess got her wish when she spied a large crowd of humans cornered on a pier, a napalm born blaze cutting off their exit. It took a moment for the group to notice the tall shadow standing over them, Raiga having a hard time telling if they were screaming more after seeing her than they were at the chasing inferno. She got her answer upon raising her arm to a shrieking chorus. Despite the group's sheer terror, Raiga only grumbled, rolling her eyes before casually flicking her index finger through the burning portion of the dock. The flaming wood splintered and was shot away dozens of yards into the sea, smothered under a crashing wave. 

-There, should be alright until help arrives... Yeesh stop screaming already!-

Raiga grumbled, turned and moved away, careful not to let her tail brush up against and potentially topple the docks. Minding the torrential downpour from her storm, the sea titan got to work scooping up hundreds of gallons of sea water and sloshing it against the still burning warehouses and roads, either smothering the flames out under the sheer mass  or siphoning it away into the storm drains and ocean. She practically breathed out disappointment in the sigh she gave. Amaterasu made her to help fight off the most dangerous monstrosity of all time, Mr. "He Whom Shouldn't Be Named" as Anguirus put it. 

She was made to fight. She loved to fight. She'd pick a heavy sparring match with Godzilla if she couldn't get a good fight. 

And yet in this modern era she got woken up in early, short of an all out alien invasion she couldn't keep a good fight rolling for as long as she liked. Raiga mumbled in a growling, annoyed fashion under her breath, Mothra Lea's badgering tone echoing through her head all too familiarly. 

-"You need to take things more serious Raiga! Stop rushing into fights so much Raiga! Tell us before you run off to a fight Raiga! You're too overconfident Raiga!"-

Raiga growled, planting her hands into the ground to smother out a pesky fire that refused to get rinsed away, applying a bit too much force and smashing the street pavement to rubble. Not like she noticed, the brash giantess was arguing with her own memory. The sight of the burning docks was recalling unwelcome times. 

-What, did she expect me to be a meek little lackey and hang back?! Pah! Come on, outside of Xenilla or Destroyah it's not like any of these mutation sluggards could take me on!-

She grimaced as memories shifted to millennia long since passed. Raiga hardly seemed to pay any mind to the roaring surf behind her as she turned around. Agon had gotten back up, more enraged than ever. The fire dragon screamed his war cries in stubborn resolution, napalm pouring out of his mouth and nose to half drench himself in flames as he charged. Raiga winced at her recollections, the sight of a charging fire demon replaced by a ruined city floating in the sea. Raiga calmly raised her arms to the sky with her fingers curled out. Thunder cracked and lightning roared, striking Raiga's palms multiple times as her own stored energy poured and arced into her limbs. With focus came might, two balls of crackling lightning forming in each palm. Raiga curled her digits in, compacting the electrical spheres as she pumped all of her excess energy into the attack. Visions of flapping shadows and dozens of shrieks filled her mind, blotting out the image of Agon as he bore down closer and closer. The electrical energy shifted as it became mana charged and put on overdrive, shifting from a sparking yellow to a crackling scarlet. Raiga roared, giving Agon his last warning. 

Turn away and leave now, or risk it all. 

Agon cackled, barreling towards Raiga despite the show of force; flames starting to spew out of his jaws. Raiga let out a wail eclipsing her foe's call, mind still racing as she swung her arms down and smashing the two orbs of power together. 

There was a blinding sun of a light, one visible for miles, before an enormous torrent of energy shot out to sea. The red beam completely engulfed Agon, blowing him back and frying him even worse than it did the thousands of gallons of sea water around him. Raiga looked on blankly through it all, dejavu plaguing her thought. The ray, the engineered godzillasaur's variation of the spiral fire, lasted for a good ten seconds before she cut it off. The seas rushed back in as the storms above settled into a placid drizzle, the thunder dissipating. Raiga looked on at what she wrought, Agon's still sparking corpse being virtually de-atomized down to the bone.

She saw her success, but only remembered her failures. Lea's voice chimed back in through her psyche's catacombs, abet in a much calmer tone than before. 

-"Raiga... You can't blame yourself for what happened. Throwing yourself around isn't going to fix it. You need to slow down or you're going to hurt yourself one of these days!"-

-"I'm not the one slowing down! I'm the one getting out there and fighting where there needs to be a fight! Get in, wreck the baddies, rinse n' repeat!"-

-"Don't forget why we fight in the first place..."-

Raiga let her arms drop in a tired fashion, closing her eyes to cut off the thousand meter stare she'd been cracking. She looked over at the city, Jakarta; as it busied itself after the figurative and literal storm began to pass. Emergency sirens began to blare out once again, growing in strength as the personnel began to file into the damaged locales. Despite all the life, hundreds to thousands likely owing themselves to her actions, Raiga was unable to keep herself from seeing death overlaying it. For every intact building, memories of ruins blotted it out before she forced her mind to the present era. Physically and mentally tired, Raiga shrugged before she waded out of the bay and past Agon's skeleton, her wake knocking it over as she lowered down into the deeper water. Extending her tail's flipper and collapsing in her back fins, Raiga let herself lazily swim off to the dark depths. 

-"I don't forget.. But I'm not failing again."-

She harped on the thought for longer than she cared to think, settling at the oceanic blackness dozens of kilometers away. After some time she ceased her tail's undulation, letting herself drift for a few hundred meters before sinking to the bottom, kicking up a large cloud of silt and particulates with her drop. The world around was an inky black, sunlight having long since been banished under the great depth. 

-Stupid moth killed my mood, shoulda enjoyed that more...-

The only pinpricks of luminescent fish were visible in the realm, like tiny stars or will-o-wisps chasing each other through the void. It helped her force away the past to home in on the present. Still, it took a while for mildly depressed Raiga to shift back to typical Raiga; having wrestled down her memory. 

-I'm a rough'n'tumble who gets my kicks with my fists. Being some sap ain't in my vocabulary. Dumb moth, best get back from that whackoland that Gamera told me about soon or I'm going to have to drag you and the others back here!-

She closed her eyes, letting rest start to wash over her as schools of fish and squid started to swim away from her. With those four gone, the Defenders had their hands full, even with Xenilla no longer calling the shots with the Mutations. As one of their strongest left, she'd need to keep on her toes for anything. Least lack of loud sonar and bright masses meant she could catch a nap without worry of Titanosaurus or one of those Anteverse buggers waking her up. Raiga sighed, trails of bubbles billowing out of her nose as the glow from her conductors died down. 

-Godzilla... Anguirus... Rodan....... Lea, stay safe...-

With sleep overtaking her, Raiga didn't notice a curtain of purple light opening up beside her; a swirling portal linking the deep sea to parts unknown. 


===============================================
Equestria, several kilometers North from Hollow Shades
===============================================

Starlight Glimmer hadn't stopped galloping since she hopped off the train. Township had turned to rural lands as she darted through the forest with a thousand worrying details plaguing her mind. Despite the hours past, her goal and destination were still at the forefront, so much so she hadn't even noticed the sights the train had passed by like Foal Mountain or Neighagra Falls. Starlight blazed down a game trail, hopping across a stream to get back onto the old dirt road. The unicorn reluctantly slowed her pace down whilst her horn glimmered, pulling out an old changeling map that Chrysalis had drawn up for her. She eyeballed the old parchment and stole glances at the distant mountains poking up over the canopy, the mare continuing forward confidently.

-Alrighty, the trail I'm on should take me past the northern caves and to Manehattan's outskirts for the shortcut. If I hurry it up, I might make it there before nightfall.-

She cast an idle glance at the sun above, the celestial body having already shifted downward, marking the afternoon. Seeing the growing shades in some sections of the scrub wood caused her heart to pound against her ribs, Starlight memorizing her path before rolling the map back up and putting it away to carry on at an increased pace. She did not want to be out here after dark.

-This forest used to be safe...-

She kept galloping for awhile, moving trail to trail based off recollection; not wanting to slow down by pulling the guide out again even if the effort was winding her. She'd passed the caves a while ago. By her estimate, she was only a few hours away from the city limits; the knowledge that her teacher summoned her there meant it had to be urgent. For a denizen of a world as colorful as her's, with shapeshifters, demigods, shadow kings, and chaotic beings that defied all logic, not also bearing giant monsters; it took a lot to give her pause when she was on a mission.

A few hundred gallons of water out of nowhere tended to do the trick. 

Starlight ground her hooves into the dirt to skid to a halt, spinning around on her momentum to turn herself around and sprint away from the surge. Having been running on a trail cut into a slight incline, most of the waves thankfully washed away between the trees, down the slope, and into a creek down below; giving the pony enough time to move out of the way and not get overtaken. Starlight Glimmer turned back around as the sea water retreated away, leaving a soaked, muddy path littered with sediment and a few flopping fish. Still a tad dumbstruck as to what in the world was going on, Starlight gingerly approached the flooded path. The stench of salt was near overpowering as she approached; all much confirming it was sea water, all but befuddling Starlight as to how this was so. Stepping on the now exposed stone to avoid the mud, she levitated up one of the fish to inspect it. 

Marine biology wasn’t exactly a forte of her’s, Chrysalis’ instruction tended to only cover what walked around on four hooves and it wasn’t like her cutie mark study would cover anything that was sea going; so it took her a moment to recognize the bizarre looking fish. The vaguely serpentine thing could be almost accurately described as a mouth with a body, over sized fangs sticking out of its bottom jaws as it wriggled about. Along its flank orbs of light ignited themselves on and off as it struggled. Starlight probed back through memory, dimly recalling a textbook she’d read through at her study a few months back. While unable to tell it was a viperfish, she did gleam enough from memory to recollect that bioluminescent fish are usually from the deep ocean. 

-Well that answers one question but… Where did all this stuff come from?-

Starlight puzzled as she tossed the fish into the stream, looking at the area hit by the flash flood whilst scratching her head. She looked all around, half expected anything as obscene as an overturned truck for a marine park to be a reality. At this point she was groping for any answer out there. Sadly, even an off theory of a sea life bearing water spout wasn’t proving itself true. 

-It’s like it just dropped in out of nowhere.-

She was about to consider interrogating the fish when a quiet groan caught her attention. Hopping a few rocks forward, Starlight looked in its direction and found out that the “flood out of nowhere” hadn’t just brought in fish. Obscured by a shrub it had washed into and half caked in mud was a large form. From her angle, Starlight Glimmer could only make out some bare bones details. Firstly it was fairly large, easily two meters long though she was having trouble getting any details. Secondly, it started moving. A thick tail flopped out of the cover, the motion sloshing off some mud to reveal a broad flipper. Clad in jagged, sapphire scales that almost seemed more akin to a reptile than a fish; the appendage wasn’t the only thing freeing itself from the mud. 





Upon seeing a hoof jutting out of the earth, Starlight’s eyes widened and she rushed over to help. 


===================
Five Minutes Later
===================

Raiga didn’t need to be the sharpest kaiju to figure out something was up when she started mentally kicking herself out of delirium. The lack of whale sonar bleeps and feeling of something a bit more solid under her form was a big enough clue that she was on dry, or at least drier, land again. Something was splashing water across her back and face, helping to wipe off mud she could feel stuck onto her and started pawing off. It was when she reached for her face that she didn’t feel it. She paused, feeling around again, rolling her appendage into herself to confirm it. Nothing to get upset over; it was just that she couldn’t feel her fingers, or her entire back legs for that matter. 

Shaking her head to rinse away some of the lasting mud and water, Raiga opened her eyes to technicolor. It was so bright at first that she reeled back slightly and rubbed her face with her wrist. 

Starlight Glimmer pitched up her eyebrows, putting away the cup she’d been rinsing off the standee with. She leaned in closer and waved her hoof in front of the siren’s face. 

“Um h-hey there, are you okay?”, Starlight muttered in a meek voice. 

Not recognizing the voice as any kaiju, Raiga brushed it off as a human addressing her and groggily shook her head to try and clear her surging vision. She groaned from the spiraling in her head and slurred her tone.

“Yeah, fine just uuurg musta sleep walked again.”

Starlight cocked up and tilted her head, swishing her ears in a clearly confused manner. Hints of exasperation slipped through her usually quiet tone.

“Sleep walk nothing, you dropped out of the air in the middle of the forest! Did you bring in all that sea water?”

“Bring in sea water? What are you talking about? Yah I usually displace a lot but it's not like I can pick up an ocean.”

“But you just came in with a bunch of it. I never met one of the Muse sisters so is that how your kind travel overland? Using a bubble of water or do you just float?”

And now was the point the still self blinded Raiga was thoroughly bewildered and growing in annoyance, grumbling through her voice. She never was much a fan for Q&A, and this human was reminding her more of Lea by the minute. Add that to knowing she'd somehow been moved Tanaka know's how far from her spot and her mood was dropping as much as her tone was.

“Muse? Kind? Travel? Who is this!? Where is this?!”

Starlight squeaked, reeling back as bit with dropped ears. Rowdy ponies and her never did mix too well. Still, she tried her best to keep up her manners and answered the siren.

“My.. name is Starlight Sonya Glimmer. And we’re a few kilometers away from Hollow Shades.”

-Starlight Glimmer…Yeesh what was you’re mother thinking?... Wait a minute-

Raiga shot up slightly, eyes finally starting to adjust to the light when she opened them. Not like she’d have noticed either way, a bewildered expression crossing her face. 

-… How can a human understand me?-

Once her vision focused on the blob of purple in front of her, Raiga's lips and heartbeat flat lined for a moment. She didn’t know what exactly to expect, having a mental list of everything from aliens to sea elves to a bizarro dream induced by inhaling napalm fumes. That said looking right at the face of one of those cartoons Zilla mentioned was pretty far down on the list. Hardly a soul of any refinement, she spoke quite bluntly and quite truthfully. 

“Okay what the fu-”
> Chapter 2: Beware the True Fear
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Raiga had been cursing up a storm for the past seven minutes straight after she got one look at her body, both at how she looked right now, who was looking at her, and how she'd gotten where she was now. Starlight Glimmer calmly sat on her haunches through it all, trying to filter out the torrential downpour of expletives flying around with less, profound words, to try and hear anything that made sense. That and it was highly amusing. 

"WHAT THE fudge gaseous phalanges pass RENDING dewdrops!? HOW IN THE slag ridden REALMS OF DAIEI hay sandwich MY fantastic LEGS?! WHERE THE cardiovascular ARE THEY?! I'M A fun loving TANAKA adorable SEAPONY OR fundamental convertible car SOMETHING?!-"

The swearing siren was cut off by a veil of magical aura wrapping itself around her. Lifting Raiga up a few feet, the unicorn gently rocked her back and forth for a few moments. Starlight hummed calmly despite sporting a slightly embarrassed look on her muzzle. She kept rocking the former kaiju until the latter stopped cursing and quieted down. After which Starlight put her back down. Raiga sat up on her tail and hooves, taking in several deep breaths with widened eyes despite the bright sun being in them. 

-Must have hit her head when she dropped down and the world's just in a spiral, poor girl.-

Starlight trotted over to her and nudged Raiga's shoulder with her hoof. 

"Better?" she murmured in a half muted voice, ears still flopped down just in case Raiga decided to burst out into shouting again. 

Raiga took in one deep inhale and let it slither out between her two remaining fangs. 

".... Thanks... Turned into a blabbering dork for a moment there."

"You're just surprised, that's all. It did kinda sneak up on you. And actually you're a siren, not a seapony. There's a big difference. But, never heard of either kind in these woods. What are you doing way out here? Can you remember?"

"Where exactly is here? I can't exactly recall trekking inland."

"We're west of Manehattan and Fillydelphia, near Hollow Shades in northern Equestria."

Raiga's mind took a moment to process that last word. Memory rushed back to five days prior to a night on Solgell Island. Zilla came and brought her out of her trench home to a meeting Gamera had called in. A meeting that ushered in both hope and utter bewilderment. Turns out Zilla, whom had been the first to be told, had a good reason for being so frantic. Godzilla, Lea, Rodan, Anguirus, they were all still alive. Just, in a realm and state no one saw coming. Everything said about magical equines and transformed bodies came flooding back in with that one word, 'Equestria'. 

Raiga's widened eyes twitched.

-Oh good Tanaka I was afraid of that...-

Giggling a tad awkwardly, Starlight opted to ignore the half shattered look on the siren's face and continued on. 

"You seem, lost. I was heading towards Manehattan to meet up with someone. It's close to the ocean so-"

The siren in question was half listening and half frantically brainstorming through her own mind. 

-Alright... Aaaallllright, if I'm stuck in magical loony pony world thanks to some magical timey whimey bulls***ery, then that means I'm in the same place as those four... Pheeeeew. Okay, new plan Raigy. Step one, find Junior, Lea, and the others. Step Two, kick their ***es for getting stuck here in the first place and giving everyone a heart attack, or at least commence kicking when I get my legs back. Step three, find a way to drag them back to Terra.-

"-you want to come with me?"

Starlight quipped with a little smile. Shifting fully back to the reality around her, Raiga shrugged her shoulders. 

"Eh, maybe. I guess you could say I'm looking for someone too. Just not exactly sure where they'd be."

"Well Manehattan's a big city, maybe they're there? And if not, I'm sure we can help you find something to point you in the right direction while over there."

-Big cities tend to attract kaiju like flies, whom tend to draw in Lea and Junior. Well it's a start.-

"Meh, getting my bearings should help."

Starlight Glimmer beamed and nodded, hopping back up to her hooves. She turned around to start off on her way, giving the orange hued sky a worried glance.

"Alrighty then. If you don't mind I'd prefer we run to make up for some lost time. It'll be night soon."

Raiga raised an eyebrow. Forgetting most herbivores didn't have night vision, day or night never made much difference to her one way or another. If one could see at the bottom of the ocean, they could see with the moon out just fine. Someone showing concern about it being night time made about as much sense as being worried there was a bird overhead. Raiga muttered with a slightly confused shrug.

"...So?"

Starlight shuddered slightly, ears twitching about in varying directions to home in on any creaks and crawls in the forest around them. Usually, the night was as fine a time as the day. But after the attempt on Canterlot and disappearances in the rural lands lately, all that had changed. And she knew exactly why.

"Something... Somethings, that are really bad tend to come out at night..."

Raiga sighed as she got up the best she could with only one pair of limbs, carefully trying to balance on a hoof to pat Starlight on the back reassuringly. 

"Alrighty then, just don't give ye'self a heart attack. If anything shows up I'll clobber em'-!!"

She lost her balance and would have kissed the game trail dirt had a quick-reacting Starlight not snapped to action, grabbing the siren in a magical aura to levitate her up. Raiga grumbled, angrily flailing her hooves.

"Okay how in the circles of Daiei am I supposed to run like this?!"

"Umm, I don't think you really can."

"But you just said we should run."

"I know I did but uum-uuh I hate pressure.."

Starlight shied back slightly, knees shaking a bit. For a brief moment, her magic canceled out and Raiga plummeted a few inches before being recaught. Looking at her companion with a slight groan after that startle, Raiga reached out and patted the unicorn's head with her hoof. 

"Not really a social type but I'm not gonna take your head off, chill out."

"S-Sorry, I was being metaphorical. I g-guess you forgot a lot when you crashed."

She meekly said with a stutter, cursing herself for it all the way. Raiga groaned, rolling around in midair under Starlight's hold. 

"Well what exactly am I supposed to do? High speed flopping?"

"N-no, sirens do have a way of traveling overland; I know they must have."

"What was it?"

"Lemme think uuuuum..."

Starlight puzzled, quickly trying to comb through her memory while stealing glances at the darkening sky above. Her pulse was quickening with each glance. This debacle had slowed her down so much she knew she wouldn't clear the forest by nightfall, something she had intended to have been very keen on doing. Safety in numbers was her best bet, that and the fact she wasn't one to just abandon some poor soul in the middle of the woods. Raiga had to get moving and Starlight could have sworn she remembered something to help the lost siren regain mobility. She was straining to remember, cramming her eyes shut and tapping the base of her horn. 

"U-Um.. uuuuh!! Ahah!"

She popped back up, a small smile crossing the unicorn's lips when memory trailed back to her mentor's history lessons. 

"Duchess Chrysalis, my teacher, once told me about the Muses!"

"The who?"

"A trio of sirens from one thousand years ago. Their names were Adagio, Aria, and Sonata."

"Musical names? On Muses? Cute. How does this help us? Did they master teleportation between song writing sessions?"

Starlight giggled, shaking her head a few times before continuing. Some of her panic was slithering away with each word. 

"They went on tour across Equestria during King Sombra's reign, giving their musical performances to inspire others and strip away hatred. Chrysalis told me about the time she met them, how they could swim through the air like they were underwater using their magic."

Raiga looked upwards and rubbed her chin, thinking it all through. Some concepts weren't exactly alien to her here, and this was one of them. This was sounding a lot like what Manda did when she got herself airborne, or how King Ghidorah could get off the ground with minimal wing flapping. 

"Flight through levitation eh?"

-Could work. Maybe if I alter around the outputs on my energy spheres I can pull it off? If this body can levitate naturally, maybe it could work as a substitute?-

Shrugging, Raiga closed her eyes and focused. She homed in on every pulse, reading her own heartbeat to its distinct rhythm. Every beat was another charge of mana pumping through her system. Concentrating, she redirected the mana into the spheres mounted upon her form. Tiny arcs of electricity arced within the ruby-like pearls, casting invisible strands both across Raiga's body and through Starlight's bizarre magic, pouring to the ground beneath the new sapphire siren. A subtle, red glow cast itself across her form, Terran mana pushing away incompatible Equestrian magic. Starlight's hold vanished, but Raiga merely bobbed up and down slowly mid-air, carried upon invisible waves. 

Starlight's eyes and smile widened, clapping her hooves a few times. 

"Ah good, you're doing it!"

"..Huh wha?-"

Raiga's eyes snapped open and in brief surprise, the energy cut off and she plummeted. Snapping back into her previous state, the siren caught herself about a foot off the ground. Refocused and rearmed, she smirked and rose back up, fanning her tail to swim around and do rolls about a meter off the ground. 

"Ha! Nailed it!"

"Okie dokie then!-"

Starlight beamed, her nerves calmed slightly. Strange as her magic was, it seemed like the siren's self assurance was infectious. 

"-if you're situated, I'd like to head out now."

"Lead on McPony!"

With that, they set off at a quick pace. A quick pace they maintained for a good five minutes before a bored Raiga found her eyes trailing off to the side to have a look around. Amidst the thought of counting trees or fancying the thought of letting loose a stray blast to blow something up and kill the mediocrity, a small glimpse caught her attention. For a split second her vision freeze-framed between a set of tall trees. Amongst the trunks, about fifty yards from the beaten path, briefly illuminated by a dying sunbeam, was a blurred figure. The details were vague aside from it being a quadruped, as Raiga had been moving too quickly and the shape was too far into the corner of her eye for the siren to make it out. She thumbed through her memory to try and identify it. This was a deep forest, deer maybe? Seemed to have something poking out of its head. Raiga grumbled, pushing away the thought, but still looking at the passing pillars of oak and leaf as they rushed by it. After all, said forest was in a bizzarro world with talking ponies; it could have been anything for all she knew. She just bumped into a unicorn for Tanaka's sake, anything was possible.

Still, didn't stop some of her atavistic nerves from firing off. A curiosity that kept it in the back of her mind. 

"So, Starry Gal; what exactly makes you so scared of sun down? You mentioned something comes out at night."

Starlight, even amongst the effort of running at near full speed, visibly shuddered before speaking in a haste. 

"Huf- All the attacks by the kaiju have been at night. Hef! And recently there has been some disappearances after dark."

Raiga looked forward with narrowed eyes. 

-Kaiju attacks... So those punks that got hit with Dimension Tide afterwards also ended up here. Alright let's see how many skulls I'll have to punch in, time for a headcount.-

"Which kaiju? Who’s the most dangerous?”

Starlight Glimmer had to resist the urge to change her expression entirely to frantic shock. The one thing keeping it from that was the knowledge that the poor siren next to her seemed to have memory problems. Still, she distinctly recalled her cousin’s broadcast and interview with Dame Destroyah being shown around as far as Yakyakistan and Saddle Arabia; it was anything but low profile. Reigning in her voice to the level of slightly less shouting, Starlight turned her head to answer. 

“Godzilla and his cohorts of course! Who else would try to level Canterlot?!”

Raiga blinked her eyes, tilting her head over in such befuddlement that her neck creaked. After a few moments of mental reboot, the siren floated upright; waving her hooves back and forth in the universal gesture for denial. 

“Whooooooooooooooa whoa whoa whoa! Seriously? Good Guy Goji? Junior? Chief? You think HE'S going to wreck some city?”

“The capital!”

“Even more bullsheetzu!”

The look upon the unicorn’s face couldn’t have been more of a mix of shock and confusion even if it had spontaneously started raining statuettes of Queen Trixie constructed out of jell-o. Now thinking the siren must have really hit her head hard, repeatedly, Starlight went on to state what she felt was the obvious. 

“YES! After they struck a deal with Empress Cadenza, Godzilla marched upon Canterlot and attempted an assault. It was only due to some quick work between Chrysalis and the other kaiju that they were repelled. After the failed plot at Canterlot, Godzilla, Cadenza, and the others have been laying low for the past week. I’ve been doing-”

Starlight hopped over a fallen log as Raiga hovered above it. Despite the confusion racing across her mind, Raiga’s subconscious picked up on more surrounding details. Time again had slowed to a crawl as Raiga fought between finding what unknown danger her instincts were trying to alert her by taking in her surroundings, and trying to listen to the raving of a unicorn she now was questioning the sanity of. Rather than having tumbled over with age, the trunk of this oak was shattered; gouged into with fresh, white wood jutting out of the cutoff point. The tree hadn’t fallen over, it had been torn down. They crossed over another one several dozen meters down the speeding trail in the same condition. Before Raiga could focus on the thought however, Starlight continued on. 

“-studies on the reports and after listening and researching them I’m certain. Godzilla is going to attack Manehattan next!”

“Wh-WHAAAT?! Why in the three eras of Daiei would he do that?! Seriously your bright colors couldn't have ticked him off THAT much!”

“Because he’s a monster! Do you have any idea what he tried to pull at Canterlot?! He freed Empress Cadenza and charged the palace! The entire capital might have been destroyed if he landed one good shot! And the reports-!”

Raiga’s eyes narrowed and she threw out her hoof in front of Starlight whilst putting on the air brakes. After a bit of skidding on Starlight’s part, the duo pulled to a halt that the unicorn was not happy about. 

“What are you doing?!”

“LADY!-“

Raiga barked, practically snapping her jaws shut an inch in front of Starlight Glimmer’s muzzle. The siren put her hoof on Starlight’s shoulder. The expression crossing the former kaiju’s face could best be described as a bizarre mix of annoyance, stubborn confusion, and just plan stubbornness. 

“-Is your head lodged up where it is for the warmth?! All of that is bullsh**! His old man mighta not been the nicest type from what I've heard, but I've known Chief for the better part of a decade. If a city is in trouble, he's been known to beat me to a fight just to keep it from spilling into a populated zone. Now THAT's an achievement!"

The gears behind Starlight's head were turning in all sorts of ways she didn't like. Half of her brain was in shock and the other half was scrambling through her memories for a specific spell. Raiga, oblivious to all of it, only rambled on. 

"Who gave you those fake a** reports anyways?"

"X-Xenilla! He's been in correspondence with Chrysalis ever since they met! He's the one who gave us the detail about all the atrocities Godzilla would reap and what he's done before. He was going to join me with Chrysalis in Canterlot to formulate up counter measures!"

"Not f***** likely!"

Raiga snarled, grabbing Starlight and pinning her against a tree trunk, electricity beginning to spark across her fins. The unicorn's mind was in freefall as she desperately tried to remember a spell she hadn't yet mastered; all while she was trying to make sense of how a random siren who didn't read the news could know so much. 

"Y-Y-You're... Oh M-M-McCarthy!"

Her voice quivered as she finally remembered the spell. Horn glimmering like her namesake, Starlight cast a harmless, brief wave across Raiga. The pulse of energy was brief, all she could manage; but it did its job. A detection spell King Sombra had originally invented, it scanned one's aura to reveal their true self. Handy against shape shifting alicorns as well as changeling friends. When it washed over Raiga, revealing a reptilian form very much unlike anything that should exist in Equestria; Starlight's heart froze. 

"... Who the f*** is a McCarthy?"

"YOU'RE ONE OF THEM!"

Starlight's face flushed with adrenaline after she screamed, her eyes slamming shut and her form disappearing in a green flash. Reappearing several feet behind Raiga, the unicorn was about to run when the siren snapped around amongst crackling energy. Raiga didn't know if she should be angry or confused. Usually most Mutations allies were prideful or brutish before they were cowards. This was new. 

"Hey get back here! I'm talkin' to you!"

Starlight Glimmer scrambled back, terrified tears blotting her vision and flowing down her cheeks. 

"NO! STAY AWAY! PLEASE STAY AWAY!" 

She could hear her pulse pounding in her ears. The unicorn's horn began to spark and glow in a counterattack, but before anything could happen, a magic blast shot over Raiga's shoulder and hit Starlight's horn. The unicorn shrieked and fell to the ground, convulsing from the shock as if electrocuted. A slithering voice trailed it, going around Raiga to the left. 

"Well well, seems fortune favors the progressive. I come to pick you up, and I end up finding two things we've been looking for."

Raiga froze up, slowly training her vision into the direction of the voice. She both knew and didn't know it. As much as she butted heads with it before, the voice always was characterized by its warmth. The tone was in familiarity, but the feeling was frigid. Her vision granted her the sight of a new pony, one covered in smooth exoskeleton broken up by jagged spines. A crown of horns sat atop a brow as threateningly vibrant wings shimmered in the glowing moonlight. 

"L-Lea?!"

"Hello there Raiga, just when we were beginning to think Gamera didn't spread the memo."



===============================================
One Hour Earlier, The Thicker, former Deer kingdom
===============================================

A bestial roar rattled the old oaken halls, sending any birds and beasts that dared come nearby scrambling for cover. A wise decision in the wake of the king's roar. Chitin covered hooves nudged the desolated palace's doorway over, Lea briskly walking inside with a casual image painted across her face despite the summoning's power. The smell did bother her enough to scoff as she walked in. 

-One week later and it still smells like burnt deer in here...-

Stepping over a regalia clad and thoroughly charred elk skeleton, it didn't take her long to see the host of the realm. He was still venting off glowing, irradiated blue steam from his mouth. 

"You know, if you need to call for me you don't need all the theatrics. I'm just down the road in the study. Cadenza still isn't quite used to the noise."

"She'll get used to it."

A deep snort punctuated the response. Feeling a warmth on her hoof, Lea trailed her eyes down to the floor amongst the dying sunlight, only to groan in mild disgust when she noticed a trail of blood starting to trickle towards her hoof. Lea groaned and stepped away, wiping the crimson off as her face twisted in disgust. 

"Urf! An entire kingdom to roam and you're still a sloppy eater. Never did understand your liking to this stuff."

There was a low chuckle, the beast with glowing eyes only finding humor in the situation. 

"Flesh is solidified energy. Foolhardy to ignore one's proper place in the food chain. Even in this state."

"Still, isn't your species omnivorous? If you feel like you need an edge against Xen by chewing on something, just munch on this place. The entire palace is just a tree."

"Live game is more fun. This one was another straggler come to reclaim their king's regalia. A bit stringy. Admittedly, only two fangs makes it a bit slower though."

"Eating or... preparing, the food?"

There was a wet squish of gnashing fangs followed by her host tilting his head up to swallow a hunk of venison, before he responded bluntly.

"Yes."

Lea snickered, waltzing over to the now vacant throne and seating herself. She reclined across it after a good stretch, lazily pawing at the ornaments overhanging it.

"Well if you want your mouthful of pointy pearly whites back, we're close. Would be closer if you didn't suddenly call me in."

Lea rolled her eyes and looked over at her friend, scrunching her nose from the predatory stink coming off him. Relaxing, she flipped back her mane to stretch out. Her voice was a chorus of dangerous slyness and seducing whispers. 

"Why did you call me over Goji? Were you about to offer me the liver and choice cuts?"

Godzilla Junior hissed through a low laugh, walking off to the main window to the chamber. Even in the dim evening light streaming through the unmaintained windows, the creature standing in the light barely resembled anything equine. Charcoal gray fur broken by a massive scar covering half his chest, and the gray being blotted out by crimson across his maw and throat. He held himself high as he looked across his domain. Ignoring the vines overhanging it and the burn marks clad across the walls around it, he peered out to the north. Godzilla spoke in calm stoicism.

"I can sense another of my kind nearby."

The assured smirk across Lea's muzzle vanished and she picked her head back up. She sat up slightly. 

"Xenilla? Did he find us?"

"... No, Cadenza's enchants are doing their work. The newcomer is female."

Lea snickered whilst shaking her head, the brief unease she had vanishing. 

"Ah; it's just Raiga then. I was wondering when we'd get some back up. Could have asked for someone who actually liked fighting buuut beggars can't be choosers I suppose."

The changeling rocked her hooves and flapped her wings to pick herself up and into the air, hovering over to her ally's side. She rubbed up against him slightly, a smile forming across her face upon feeling at his fur. Godzilla kept his eyes trained on the horizon.

"She's there, about five kilometers away. I'd like you to retrieve her."

"Consider it done my king~..." She quipped, pulling away with a slinking walk. She pitched her head around for a tease despite the feigned disgust in her tone. 

"Oh, and take a bath, I could smell you from outside..."

"Didn't stop you from approaching."

"I have practice."

With that, Lea smirked and headed back the way she came. Godzilla's low voice chased her down and pounced before she could leave. 

"Lea, how is the project coming?"

"A bit more work and we can finally make an attempt. We'll have to find a unicorn with a certain talent for magic to test something."

"Does one exist?"

Battra Lea snickered in a manner very unbecoming of what she had planned for the desired test subject, her tongue drawing around every letter when she spoke. 

"Our dear friend Cadenza knows of one under the good Duchess' instruction that fits the bill." 



=========================
Manehattan, present time
=========================


Duchess Chrysalis jolted up so fast her glasses flew off and landed on Suri. The seamstress squeaked shyly as the image of her eyes became enormous. Gingerly taking them off, the earth pony mare pawed at her friend's shoulder to offer them back. 

"U-Um, Duchess? Chrysie? Are you okay?"

The showroom floor was empty aside from the duo, the lights streaming from above illuminating the nearby collection of elaborately designed dresses, gowns, and a few suits. The gorgeous designs were strung up on racks or mounted upon oversized mannequins. Chrysalis shuddered and vibrated her wings as a cold snap trailed down her back. Slipping out a slightly exasperated sigh, the regent levitated her glasses back onto her face while trying to get back on topic.

"Sorry Suri. Just a, sudden jolt I suppose. Call it a vibe. The suits and dresses based off the kaiju look great. Wouldn't expect anything less from the best dress maker in Manehattan!"

Suri blushed and muttered a tiny, mouse-like squeal in a manner that would likely cause insulin stocks to rise by the second, fumbling up on a stepping stool to put a regal, crystal bejeweled navy blue suit with a red trim back onto a mannequin that was nearly double her size. 

"Least I could do after Sir Xenilla saved my shop in Canterlot from getting, well, stepped on.... A-Anyways I just hope this helps out, they could use all the good PR they could get!"

The beautiful changeling's face was still wrought with unease. A prickling feeling in the back of her mind refused to give her any real calm. That and her maternal instincts were going so ballistic that it threatened to give her a migraine. She hadn't felt this strained since the alicorns crashed Trixie's coronation and nearly made off with the Queen-To-Be while the Duchess was unconscious. While circumstances said a repeat incident wasn't likely, she was still certain. Something was very, very wrong. 

"Suri-"

Chrysalis muttered with masked distress as the seamstress was about to present Dame Destroyah's dress. 

"Hm? Yes mi'lady?"

"-You said you were in contact recently with Sir Xenilla earlier. When was the last time again?"

"Oh, just before you arrived actually. He called while on the Northerly train, on his way here with some of the others."

Chrysalis raised a curious eyebrow. Least she didn't have to worry about requesting his arrival a tad early, seemed he was doing that himself. Why bring along more of his kind with him then?

"Oh? He didn't have to leave Canterlot until the morning. Why is he heading here early? Eager to try on your suit?"

Suri Polomare, having not yet turned around and noticed any of the duchess' distressed body language, only snickered and waved her hoof while keeping her head half buried in a fabric rack. 

"Said he sensed something a tad funny a bit ago and wanted to come here early to check it out."

-Fortunate...-

"... When should he arrive?-

"Oh, he said sometime around midnight as the train rolls."

-...Very fortunate indeed..-



> Chapter 3: The Storm's Call Above
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Good work Raiga, we've been looking for this unicorn for a while." 

Battra Lea slyly hissed as she strode over the unconscious unicorn. Raiga looked at the changeling for a time, and kept looking in growing confusion. Yes, she expected the others would have taken native forms, Gamera briefed them on that. But it wasn't the part about Lea only having four limbs and hooves that was was confusing her. This, this didn't seem right at all. The voice seemed right, but everything meeting her eyes and not her ears just didn't match up. Raiga especially locked onto the crown of horns growing out of Lea's head, the changeling's pair of dark wings with an almost fiery pattern fanning behind it. 

-She looks like... a battra. Lea what has happened to you?...-

"Lea, what happened to you? You seem-"

"-Different? Comes with the territory of coming here my dear." 

Battra Lea remarked offhandedly, believing the new siren to be talking about her Equestrian body and not the fact she looked like a completely different half of her family tree. Raiga still felt no better, thinking such a big detail would have been something Gamera made clear when he told all of them the fate of their comrades. Raiga then felt a wave of embarrassment wash over her when she recalled how attentive she'd been at the meeting. 

-Oh... right... I barely paid attention at all. All I heard was 'Godzilla is in Pony Land' and burst out laughing for ten minutes straight...... Why am I such an idiot?-

Battra Lea ignored the clear confusion on the siren's face and hovered over Starlight. She skillfully levitated Starlight's still form off the ground and held it up alongside her as she walked back to Raiga. 

"Never took you for the manipulator type Raiga. Keeping her talking helped me catch up."

The siren in question snapped back to the modern day and combed her recent memory. And when she did, she felt a tiny chill trail over her fins. Recalling the tall form she'd seen passing by in the woods, Raiga was now well aware that she'd been stalked. Only question now was, why? Why didn't Lea say anything when she saw them on the trail? And, why did she not feel any safer now despite having an ally less than two meters away? She and Lea might have butted heads a lot, but she knew Lea when she saw her. And right now it was the uncanny staring her right in the face. 

Shifting topics to hopefully alleviate the weirdness factor, Raiga pointed a hoof to the unicorn.

"You said you'd been looking for her. Why?"

Lea cast a backwards glance to the immobile unicorn. Even unconscious, the poor mare seemed to have a fearful look on her face as she lightly bobbed midair under telekinesis. 

"She's a close associate of an enemy of ours named Duchess Chrysalis. She'd been working with Xenilla."

"So is she like a criminal around here or something? She seemed so timid."

"You could say that, looks can be deceiving Raiga; she is-"

"And who the Daiei is Chrysalis?"

Battra Lea raised an eyebrow at the siren. Apart from the new form, Raiga was acting weird. Usually at this point she'd be groveling or meekly just following in line by now. She never did take the aquatic saurian for a talkative type, let alone confrontational and demanding. Had something changed back on Terra in the time they got sent here? Brushing aside the minor curiosity, she merely waved her hoof offhandedly at her subordinate. 

"In due time Raiga. For now, we should hurry back to our little hideaway before Xenilla senses where you are."

Recalling her species' ability to track other members at a long distance, Raiga paused for a moment. Picking across the furthest reaches of her psyche, she felt her mind reach out. Sure enough, an all too familiar signal of another Gojirasaurus was within range. Xenilla was only a couple dozen miles away at most, and as she could tell, getting closer. For the first time in her life however, she wasn't biting at the bit for a scrap. This whole past hour had thrown her so far out of the loop she still was at a loss as to what was going on. Best get situated, then look for a duel. The siren snapped to attention and began following the departing changeling with only a mental protest. 

"Yeah I can tell, he's not too far away. Why can't I sense Junior though?"

"Not to worry, our ally here has come up with a way to cloak our base. Godzilla is back there so if you can't sense him we know it's working. We must hurry though, just in case Xenilla has detected you by now or not..."

With that, Battra Lea turned towards the wood and started half galloping, half flying down a game trail with Starlight hovering limply alongside her. Putting the most of her control into levitation, Raiga zipped off right behind her. Over hills, through scrub wood and ravines, and across a river they trekked for about twenty minutes before Lea landed completely and started to slow down. Raiga put on the airbrakes for the first time in her life and fortunately succeeded in not plowing into the walking royal changeling in front of her. The forest around them had changed for the worst. Between the dying sunlight and dense canopy of wide-topped trees, it was practically as dark as midnight. Raiga eyed her surroundings some, deep sea adapted eyes able to pick up on a multitude of tiny details. She wasn't liking what she was seeing. The trees, despite the dense overgrowth, looked for a lack of better terms, sickly. Burn marks ripped holes or gouges into the trunks in several spaces. The understory growth was stringy, wisps of brambles reaching out like gnarled talons in many regions. And despite some signs of fauna spotted earlier, there wasn't a single animal present. This forest looked anything but welcoming. 
Slowed to a trot, Lea nonchalantly crossed over a patch of  dimly marked dirt that Raiga hovered over in pursuit. The instant she crossed over, a cold snap trailed across her in a line. Startled, she whirled around and looked, half expecting something to have hit her. After some spinning around midair, her eyes picked up on a tiny glimmer present in the low light. Hidden under some shrubs and half buried in dirt was a straight dark hued crystal. Across the thin line they'd passed over she spotted enough disguised into the base of the tree. Just looking at the dark violet colored gems was giving her chills. 

Battra Lea, having noticed the siren's confusion, drew a smug smirk and chuckle. 

"So you did feel it? It's local magic a native ally supplied using aerenths. A line of them around the base makes it untraceable by spell or sense. Keeps Xenilla and his crew from finding this place."

The sense part seemed right enough. Now that she focused on it, a new signal had cropped up on her intraspecies detection. Less than a kilometer away was the signature of a new adult male Gojirasaurus, one Raiga recognized instantly. Godzilla. 

They kept walking for several minutes, until the trees briefly began to thin. Birthing forth from the forest were a series of structures like no other. Walls, houses, and towers all formed out of magically manipulated tree trunks. The structures were just as grim now as the forest looked; stained gray and dull brown with vines and brambles beginning to overtake some of the empty space and buildings. Past the now vine choked and haggard gate was the corpse of a wooden kingdom.

Corpse was unknowingly quite an accurate word. The Thicket, as it had once been called during the rule under the cervids, used to be a prosperous albeit extremely xenophobic city state. Due to their hostility towards all outsiders, very few ponies or any races for that matter even knew the region it existed in; much less laid eyes upon it. King Aspen, the Lord of the Forest as some dubbed him, frequently had patrols scour the forest for intruders. Very adept himself in flora magic, he had both shaped the city itself as well as its defenses. Between the often hostile foliage and patrols, it was common for those trying to find the wooden realm to 'get lost' in the forest. Sheltered, obscure, and self sufficient; the Thicket went untouched across the millennium-long conflict between the good king Sombra and Queen Celestia, out of respect and lack of interest respectively. That time of isolation ended several weeks ago when nuclear fire burned through the gates, a black path of charred road leading all the way to the throne room. The Thicket fell in several hours, most of its population being fortunate enough to flee into the woods. Without the royal house's magic to mend the wounds and sustain it, the very city itself was already dead or dying, eventually to be swallowed up by the forest if it were lucky. 

Just looking at the cityscape gave Raiga unease as soon as she stepped through the large hole burned into the gate. This wasn't the first ruined city she saw, and she didn't like the similarity she was remembering. A cold feeling settled over her mind as she looked at the maintained ruins. The burned road, overgrowth, holes in many walls, and scattered bones or antlers were sign enough there had been a lot of death here. This didn't make any sense. When Gamera told them about Lea and company's situation, he made it sound like they were working with a lot of the locals in some town or capital. This place fit the bill, but so far she hadn't seen a single being in this weird city. The only rational thing she could think of was maybe this place was ravaged by Destroyah and Xenilla since the call Lea gave Gamera, but then that just left the question of why make this home base?

-Uurg-

Raiga pawed at her head in annoyance, shaking it. Trying to play visual detective just made her brain hurt. Lea was always better at that sort of thing. Speaking of which...

"So, mind telling me what exactly you need Starlight for?"

She muttered, motioning to the slack unicorn. Battra Lea gave her a sideways glance whilst shrugging her shoulders. There was a fanged grin on her muzzle and her tone was disturbingly song-like; causing Raiga to cringe slightly. 

"Ooooh that? I've been looking into some local magic to try and find a way to get back to how things should be. Anguirus and Rodan are off guarding something important until we figure the first step out. Fortunately I've had some help with that." 

"Some and a half. I see your pursuits bore success Lea."

Raiga turned towards the new voice just in time to see something that looked like what would happen if one tried to put a children's toy in a blender with too much dark metal. The alicorn, as she'd later learn the subspecies was called, looked like it was supposed to be colorful but had most of its pigments darkened or washed out. Even still, the dull pink coat and dark blue, purple, and yellow mane that gradually filtered to black clashed considerably with both the grim Thicket and the metallic gray regalia on her chest and hooves. Still, fit the norm for her so far. Wasn't a thing in this world she'd seen since getting here that didn't seem distorted or otherwise 'off' in some way. 

And as if being around this oh so cheery atmosphere of the Thicket and the aerenths weren't already giving her a bad vibe, just looking at the being's dimly glowing, magenta eyes seemed to stir up a lot of negativity within Ragia. Had she been made of weaker materials, she'd be feeling dread. But because Amaterasu built her tough, she instead just got enough hatred to get the urge to punch it in the face and keep punching. 

And yet the sense of evil Raiga was getting however seemed lost on Lea of all kaiju, who greeted the demonic kid's toy with a chirp and a smirk like she was greeting an old friend.

"Hello there Cadenza, intend to help me with this one?"

"Someone has to make sure you put the muffle on before getting to work, that last squealer gave me a migraine. Say-"

She muttered with a virtually slithering tongue as she inspected the unicorn's bangs. 

"Isn't this that witch Chrysalis' pupil? Good catch Lea, always wanted to get even.... Wait who's this?"

She spoke, her attention drawn away to the siren giving her a dirty look. Not like the alicorn minded it, she could already feel a trickle of invisible energy crawling out of the odd aquatic and into her padlock charm. Hatred always was a strong emotion even in small doses. Lea rolled her eyes, putting her hoof out between the intermixing glares from Raiga and smug smirks from Cadenza. 

"An old acquaintance back from Terra. Raiga, this is our local help, Princess Mio Odiato Cadenza-"

Cadenza interjected with a snide tone that almost sounded offended. 

"Empress Cadenza, least when you lot help me get my empire back from that usurper Trixie."

Battra Lea chuckled lightly, putting a hoof  over the pony's shoulders. 

"Prideful as always~... Remember, you still need to be on hand for our end of the bargain too."

Raiga sneered outwardly but was still mentally put off by all this. She tried as hard as she could to think back to when Gamera broke the news to all of them, still feeling like stomping on her own tail for not paying as much attention as she should have after the joy from the announcement her allies were alive died down. 

-Gamera did mention something about Lea working with a Princess. Maybe this is her... Oye isn't she a piece of work, well appearances aren't everything. Would it have killed him to mention that she looked like a bitc-

"Raiga.. Raiga!"

Raiga shook her head and looked to the changeling, who had a hoof on her temple. There was a slight glow in her horns and Lea's usually placid face was cringing for a moment before settling away to the disturbing norm. She took in a deep breath to make herself seem presentable before motioning to the largest tree in the cityscape. 

"Just got the mental memo, Godzilla would like to see you now."

Raiga however, wasn't having any of it. She'd been hit with nothing but befuddlement since she stepped into this world and now it was all beginning to bubble up. The spheres on her body started to glow dimly as she let out an exasperated bellow. 

"Wait-Wait-Wait! I've had it! I'm so flippin' confused right now! Nothing is making a lick of sense! What in the name of Tanaka is going on he-"

Lea winced and twitched her eye under the force of another telepathic roar coursing through her head. 

"He would like to see you NOW."

Either by Cadenza's presence or her own confusion hitting a broiling point, Raiga turned and did the closest equivalent one could do to stomping off while levitating. She held up a hoof to her side as she made her way to the building Lea had indicated Godzilla was in, holding the back of it towards the changeling. Cadenza raised an eyebrow while Lea reeled her head back in minor shock. 

-If she's doing what I think she's doing... THAT human gesture?! Ahe actually has the gall to do that!? To me?!...  Raiga, Raiga, when did you stop being such a weakling?-

"What is she doing? Is that some sort of kaiju gesture?"

Battra Lea sneered, instead heading off to her and Cadenza's laboratory. 

"It would be if she had fingers, never mind it though. Come on."

Raiga pushed open the double doors and slipped inside, the palace gate swinging to a close behind her. Not one meter in and she could already see and smell it all. Had she not been granted vision built for the marine depth, the entire royal chamber probably would have been near pitch black outside of the windows. Ragia had a sense this place once had a grandeur of some sort, but if a single word could describe it now, it was ruin. A lot of things must have gone down in here over the past week to bring it to such a state. The stonewood chamber had numerous gouges and rancid scorch marks carving into its floor and walls, obvious signs of battle. Any tapestries or carpeting had been torn or burned away with the scent of radiation still permeating the hall. Vines either stretched across or slithered through the broken windows and clogged the holes burned into the walls. Most notably amongst the desolation were the bones. Many of them lay strewn about like the throne room was a predator's den. Most of them were burned to blackened, cracked, disarticulated remains; but one was whole. 

It was the largest skeleton by a wide margin, and judging from the hooves and sole remaining antler it looked like some sort of elk. It was still clad in wears that resembled a mix of armor and golden regalia. If it was meant to protect them, it didn't work well enough. Truth be told, she had a hard time telling what did the cervid in, the burns layering the blackened skeleton or the fact one antler was torn off and jammed into the ribcage. As she floated past the edge of the skeleton, she could make out small cloven hoof prints approaching it from the side. They nearly reached the shallow crater the skeleton rested in before being dragged away. And suddenly the charred specks on the floor had drops of red stains in a broad mark where something had been dragged along the floor. She visually followed the trail until attention was torn away by a grim tone. 

"King Aspen, long time rival of the United Equestrian Kingdoms. He ruled the Thicket when Empress Cadenza led us here. Stayed with them for three days until he caused me to conclude that the place needed a new dynasty's management. This evening makes it thirteen times they've snuck in to try and reclaim his regalia, something about needing it to use their stronger spells again. Thirteen must be an unlucky number for them, but not me apparently."

Raiga suddenly found herself looking at a set of burning golden eyes surrounded by blood red. A monster masquerading as a unicorn stepped out from a corner. Covered in sticky crimson, the creature's mane and eyes lit up with neon blue and he trained his head down, hosing off his entire front half in a mix of low power plasma breath and a miniscule nuclear pulse. All of its fur and gory coating was instantly vaporized. Smoking and smoldering for a few brief moments, the skin and new fur quickly sprouted up and he looked clean as he could possibly appear moments later. Still, one portion of his body showed no such change. Clad across the demon's chest was a deep, hideous keloid scar  that covered most of his front torso. Swallowing back his own pain, the unicorn calmly walked over to the broken throne and stood tall before it. For the first time in her life, Raiga saw an equine that looked terrifying. And yet still, the voice and the coloration tipped off her as to who she was looking at; leaving her wondering what was with this world.

"Chief..."

Godzilla Junior flashed a fang filled grin and approached the siren, radioactive smoke still seeping out of his maw. 

"Low and behold, thirteen intruders and I finally get a guest."



Raiga's eye twitched and a charge built up in her energy cores. Sparks began to crackle along her fins as confusion fed into anger.

"Okay what the FUCK!?"


==========================

"And that's when I hit the jerk in the face with something and he learned what kind of bird packs a wallop."

"What kind of bird?"

"A crane, WHAMO!"

"Oh oh! And that's when you kicked everypony's tails out of the city and burst into a victory dance?"

"Darn tootin' kiddo!"

Dame Destroyah snickered, crossing her hooves and nodding to the cheers of her little entourage as the train rolled along. Momentarily ignoring Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon's hoof clapping and requests for another story of her heroics, the protective mutation leaned over to address the mare nudging her shoulder. Spoiled Sweet spoke with a giggle in her tone. 

"So sorry to pester you Ms. Destroyah, train rides tend to make my daughter a bit rambunctious and she and her friends do love your stories!"

"Oooh no problem at all! I've been around kids a lot and your tot's a sweetie. Don't worry, I left out the part about how I broke Gamera's legs and sliced his shell open before he flew away."

The kaiju half-whispered with a gleeful, toothy grin that caused Spoiled's eyes to widen slightly and chuckle a tad nervously. Oblivious to the mild distress she'd caused, Dr. Serizawa's legacy just laughed and gave the mare a light whap on the back. Diamond Tiara was about to ask for another story when a titanic roar ripped through the cabin from a neighboring train car, so vast in magnitude that it rattled the interior more than the bumpy tracks did. Instantly everypony in a two meter radius levitated off the ground and clung to each other and Destroyah, eyes expanded to dinner plates and shivering to a blur. The gargantuan dame on the other hand just sat where she was blinking in a half-confused manner. 

"WHAT IN THE NAME OF SOMBRA WAS THAT?!"

Diamond Tiara yelped as she clung to the side of Destroyah's neck, having springboarded off the ground quite a good distance and shuddering all the while. Destroyah snickered, shrugging nonchalantly. 

"Oh that's normal. Must be something getting him cranky, again. Hang on."

She chimed, gently putting the fillies' head together at their ears and putting her hooves to the other sides to block their remaining ears. 

"Heeeere it comes."

"What are you talking abo-"

A snarling voice bellowed out from the neighboring train car, practically as loud as the roar. 

"DAMNITDAMNITDAMNTDAMNITDAMNIIIIIIIT!"

The shouts over, Destroyah unblocked the confused pair's ears with a cheeky smile despite her ears flopping down. 

"What was that?!"

"I think it was Sir Xenilla!"

"Good Sombra! Is he alright?!"

Destroyah shifted, easily picking up her posse with one forelimb and gently placing them down, minding to give Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon a gentle pat on the head after getting her hooves beneath her. 

"Yah, this is normal for him. You all hang tight in here, I'll go see what's got his tail in a twist this time."

"Uh, sure Ms. Destroyah."

Spoiled Sweet half heartedly laughed off the verbal outburst and Destroyah's reaction, or lack thereof, to it and held the fillies close despite their requests to adventurously follow. She knew she was a good soul, having helped protect Ponyville from those scoundrels' intrusion with that bizarre swarm ability. And her daughter and her friend loved her. Still, she could seem a tad off-kilter at times. Sorta like that Maud Pie individual. Smile and waving at Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, Destroyah hummed to herself while stepping through the doorway and casually tightrope-walked over the next car. 

Firing up her horn cutter, she sliced through the encrusted seal of crystals blocking the doorframe and swung herself inside. The train car itself was still intact, but several windows and rows of seats had been popped or thrown out by the sudden generation of several large quartz crystal spires. Destroyah shrugged at the sight, spying her comrade angrily punching at one crystal and cracking it. She could tell Sir Xenilla, who had been thankfully alone in his car, had one of his outbursts from the moment she heard the roar. That left her only the question on her mind as she weaved around the crystals that lay strewn about. The enormous pegasus put an arm over Xenilla's shoulders as he shuddered and shook. 

"Hey, what's up doc? You nearly busted the windows with that shout."

The unicorn was gritting his teeth as he huffed his breath in gradually diminishing intensity. Eventually he closed his eyes and breathed in slowly, calming his pulse. 

"I had sensed another Gojirasaurus."

"Wait? You mean Godzilla? He stepped outta the rabbit hole? Where, When, How? I'llBeatHisFaceIn-"

Destroyah was hushed by a hoof pressing up to her muzzle and scrunching up her face. Xenilla sighed, rubbing his temple with his free hoof to avoid a headache. 

"Shush.... It wasn't him, the signal was female."

Destroyah raised an eyebrow, leaning away and pushing Xenilla's hoof aside. Her tone was noticeably more quelled than it usually was. 

"So, Raiga then?... Well we figured more might be joining this little trip eventually. Could be worse. You nearly got her to change sides that one time after all. Soooo why the outburst?"

Xenilla grumbled under his breath, shaking his head slowly, visibly at a loss. 

"I lost it, the signature... Just like his signal."

He spat under his breath, the anger in his tone being lost on Destroyah.

"Which meeeeeeans?"

"Means that they already found her and brought her to whatever pocket they crawled into I can't detect."

"Should we fly off and try to pursue?"

"No..."

Xenilla sighed tiredly, staring out into the lowlands below as the train sped along. At some level, he prayed he'd spy something amongst the passing forests. But the foliage was an impenetrable barrier that yielded naught. 

"If she's with those monsters already, we'd never find them. It's best get to Manehattan fast as we can. If they are grouped together they'll probably go after the nearest city they find thanks to the boosted numbers and I want to be in the best spot to counter if they do. Let's just hope this doesn't mean they've found a way to summon more of them here and we get to Manehattan in time. Tanaka knows what they are doing now..."


==========================


Starlight Glimmer groaned amongst her groggy haze as she became reunited with her consciousness. One by one each sense and sensation started to return. Before her vision even returned she could feel soreness in her joints spurred by her limbs being held out at a discomforting angle. When sensation returned to her epidermis, what felt wrong before became leagues worse. Firstly, there were straps tying her down by her hooves. Secondly was the blistering cold on her horn; which stung so much it forced a wince. With her vision finally returning, she could tell she wasn't in the best of shape. Her eyes felt heavy and tired, all efforts having a distinct drain to them. The unicorn's hair bun had come undone, letting her mane drape down over her bound limbs. Still, the sight before her wasn't any more pleasant. 

Secured to a table, Starlight bore witness to the chamber around her. Built out of a hollowed out tree, it seemed to be a laboratory of some kind; with bright illumination from several overhead lanterns that contrasted with the grim dead wood and darkened windows. Books about everything from anatomy to alchemy were strewn all about the neighboring tables, intermixed with all manner of crystalline constructs and tokens made chiefly of aerenths. The only things completely foreign to her were the odd symbols etched into both the floor as well as several of the aerenth faces. 

"Oh look, you're not in a coma after all!"

Starlight snapped her head to the side towards the cheery voice and spotted a pair of cruel eyes looking through her. Her jaw quivered in justified fear, the poor unicorn struggling against her bonds the best she could but the straps offered miniscule slack. 

"Battra...."

The kaiju, standing about three meters away, snickered and put a hoof to her chest, gasping in a tormenting parody decency.

"Oh so you dooo remember me! How touching.... But it's got a 'Lea' part to it too."

She chimed, a half grumble in that last part.

"P-Please, you don't have to do any of this! Duchess Chrysalis welcomed you ALL in so you could all get ho-HYIP!" 

She winced and tried to force herself as far away as she could upon the changeling suddenly zooming across the floor and pausing her fanged jaws snapping shut half an inch from her throat. The kaiju's eyes were practically on fire as she looked into Starlight's. Battra's tone was as punctuated as it was venomous. 

"You're teacher is an idiot and if it weren't for that lackey Xenilla, she'd be in your plaaace hehe..."

From her wincing and tilting her head upwards to get as far away from the demon as possible, Starlight happened to be looking at a previously darkened portion of the room. Lea's sudden movement caused a hanging lantern to sway, illuminating several jars stacked on a nearby shelf. Jars that retained the bleached, bony cores of two unicorn and changeling horns along with several sets of antlers. Battra's tone slithered across Starlight's neck amongst hot breath. 

"And you're not even the first..."

At this point Starlight's eyes were beginning to become clouded in a watery veil. She focused the absolute best she could through the fear, channeling her energy into her horn, controlling a panicking breath, and visualizing herself out the window. For a brief instant the unicorn disappeared in a flash of aquamarine glimmer, spurring an angry flare of energy from the runic seal plated onto the floor beneath her. Battra's sealing spell rebounded the unicorn's magic, causing her to reappear exactly where she had been. Starlight Glimmer gasped for breath, trying to build up the energy for it again as Battra merely looked at her with a sly beaming. 

"Why are you doing this?! Wh-What did we ever do to you!?"

She screamed after another failed attempt at teleporting free, Battra's seal and the aerenths grown into the floor around it containing and draining away the excess energy. Lea looked on at the desperate display and merely shrugged, almost in a bored manner. She stepped around the table to a tome resting on one of the surrounding tables, nonchalantly flipping through some pages. 

"Nothing. You and your kind did nothing at all. Well, other than not let us finish off Xenilla and Destroyah. But, have you ever heard of the parable, 'The Frog and The Scorpion'?"

Too scared to reason, Starlight couldn't nod or shake her head. Ignoring another escape attempt, Battra just continued. 

"In it, the scorpion stings a frog who promised to help it, just because that's in its nature. Take me for example. My mother was born with the purpose to end all sentient life. My father, well he played a bit more hardball, he was tasked with ending the whole of the biosphere. I'm the heir to both legacies, so I guess one could call me the ultimate 'scorpion' to your 'frog'."

Levitating the book up with her, Lea smirked as a tired Starlight lay back wheezing for breath after another failed attempt. The unicorn flinched and froze as the changeling ran a hoof along her cheek and chin, tilting her head up to look her in the eye. 

"Just doing what's in my nature. It's nothing personal deary, least not with me...."

The sound of a door opening in the background caused the hellish kaiju to snicker. 

"Her on the other hand~..."

She pulled away, revealing a wide eyed and grinning Cadenza standing behind her and staring at Starlight Glimmer. Just seeing the alicorn was enough to cause her world to fly into even more mortal terror than it already had been.

"C-C-Cadenza!"

The alicorn slinked over to the duo and stood beside the changeling, looming over her captive whilst speaking in a taunting voice. 

"Weeell, weeell, well, Chrysalis' darling little prodigy is awake. Say, Lea I believe I heard someone talking about her recently!"

Lea raised a curious eyebrow, tilting her head and addressing Cadenza in a friendly tone as she ran a hoof over Starlight's quivering head and through her mane. 

"Oh, do tell? So far she hasn't said anything of worth beyond exhausting herself trying to get out."

"Yes, it was actually the good Duchess who told me during a cell visit. She told me how so very proud she was of little Starlight here, about how she'd found her calling helping others find their's. She'd been researching the spell Sombra used to ascend that street trash of an usurper Trixie!"

She spat with poison on her tongue, face momentarily convulsing to an enraged expression. She took in a deep breath and slowly let it out, settling back down to a disturbing calm. 

"She was planning to do it to our guest here as soon as she was able."

Battra's eyes lit up with a malign glee that instantly killed any hope or inspiration that was welling up in the flabbergasted Starlight's mind. 

"So you're saying we have a soon-to-be alicorn in our midst?! Oh why ever did she tell you this?"

Cadenza groaned, heading over to a crystalline work station while waving her hoof in a mocking, half hearted manner. 

"Oh probably just some heartfelt ploy for change, she's been saying the same thing since Celestia and Luna got bastardized to their side. Something about not being the "only alicorn alone" or along those lines. Appeals to the heart always were her shtick, never did work on me though."

"Why's that?"

Cadenza rolled her eyes, outstretching and rolling her wings. 

"Because I'm a cold hearted wretch who causes hatred and grief."

"Always wondered why I felt slightly more murderous around you.... Oh well, doesn't change the fact we have a future queen in our midst! Soooo..."

Battra trilled as she sat down next to Starlight, casually leaning on the table she was bound to and flipping through the pages of the tome to find the right one. 

"I shall grant her majesty a gift, knowledge."

Starlight looked at the churning pages, needing only a few brief glances to see its pages were filled with spells Sombra and Chrysalis had banned long ago. It was one of Queen Celestia's records of dark magic spells, an ancient one judging from the state of the book. 

"Knowledge of what..."

"Why, knowledge of how you are going to help these scorpions do as they do best, in the forms they do them best in of course... Permanently."

Battra Lea let his tongue roll over a fang as Cadenza cast a vile grin upon the unicorn. Starlight was too shocked to scream. 



> Chapter 4: Skies of Wonder
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

Godzilla Junior stood in silent confusion, his brow raising somewhat as Raiga burst into what could best be described as bombastic rambling. He didn't care enough to listen, only observing the female's mannerism and noting the contrast to his memory.

-Odd, typically she's the meek, reclusive type. Never had the audacity to do this in front of me.-

Raiga meanwhile continued to ramble. 

"-I don't know if it's because we've been dumped in this whacko dimension or not, but not a single ******* thing here makes any **** sense! I don't know if it's because I don't know who the **** she was talking about, but so far the most straightforward word I've gotten all day was from a pretty purplish-pink talking unicorn I met this afternoon- and good TANAKA I still can't believe I'm in a context where I said that!"

Raiga continued her ranting, trickles of desperation actually starting to show through her tone over the exasperation, as she shouted and motioned to everything around her. The siren outstretched a hoof to a window, able to spy Lea and Cadenza's laboratory from where she stood.

"What is up with Lea?! I never liked her much for being Ms. KnowItAllHighHorse, but now she sounds more psycho than Megaguirus on a bad day. And why does she look like Battra?! And you-"

She looked back at the stoic unicorn standing before a broken throne, a charred skeleton of the fallen elk king literally pointing to his slayer with the remaining antler. The sickening scent of vaporized blood was still circulating the room and caused Raiga's nose to crinkle.

"-I saw the radiation burns on the way in here and can smell that blood on you... All this, was.... Just... Why?"

There were bits of understandable sadness in her baffled tone. She'd lost four friends when Solgell was fired upon, one of which she'd grown proud to declare her 'cousin'. Raiga had thought them dead for a time, she just didn't show it in confidence something might have gone right. Her elation was masked by laughter when she heard of their current fate, nevertheless ecstatic they were still alive. A reunion had been wished for by all the Defenders. But this? This was the last thing she expected, and wanted.

"Either please tell me this was the ***hole kingdom or please, please tell me that somehow you didn't do this..."

Godzilla was unmoved beyond his eyes narrowing somewhat in a studious manner. A cruel intelligence looked over the siren for any telltale give away as to what he was suspecting stood before him. Not a siren, not a kaiju, but a changeling. One of his lackeys miraculously showing up out of nowhere? Even if it did trigger psychic perception, he didn't trust it. If changelings could change form so drastically after all, he wasn't leaving things to chance. His mane briefly flickered with a neon brilliance before stomping a hoof into the floorboards. The miniature nuclear pulse's shockwave rattled the palace like a judge with his gavel. Raiga flinched and floated backwards a few meters, a pause settling amongst the throne room before Godzilla spoke.

"Raiga, how many years ago did we meet, and where?"

"Um.. Si- Yes, eight years ago in the Philippines. Why are you-"

Godzilla took a step forward and Raiga instantly felt her unease rising.

"Who, is my brother?"

Both from the discomfort and edge she felt herself teetering on she almost blurted it out. Stopping herself at the tip of her tongue, she avoided stating the name. She knew that Junior wouldn't react too kindly to it.

"... You don't have one."

Godzilla stayed silent for a moment before shifting his stance in a subtle way that Raiga picked up on. He snorted, letting little plumes of glowing smoke slither out of his nostils. While she wasn't the brainiest kaiju, not by a long shot, as someone who loved a scrap she was good at measuring one's body language and posture. Almost everyone had a manner of holding themselves at certain times that was practically like a fingerprint; and enough of it held true even though the entity before her was in an equine body. The Godzilla Junior she knew didn't hold himself as tall as he had to. Most of the time when at peace; his position was relaxed, muscles slack and slouching slightly. One would think it unbecoming of a leader, but in many ways it made sense. After all, that was when he was amongst friends in a world with very few things that could actually hurt him. He wouldn't puff his chest up, hold his head tall while leering down at someone unless the situation was dire. Junior had a posture of someone who was wound up, but not so tightly that he felt the need to assert and prove himself.

This thing however, he'd been doing the exact opposite since he revealed himself. And judging from the brief glare that flashed across his eyes, it only was getting worse. She'd actually been a bit happy to get away from 'Lea' to try and talk to someone she could understand. Now, she just felt like she'd gotten away from the lioness only to walk right up to the pride alpha.

"Who is my mother?"

"Azusa Gojo, that biologist who looked after you during your days amongst the humans."

Godzilla's eyes instantly became alit with rage at that name. Streams of illuminated smoke seeping from his nostrils, florescent radiance waxed across his mane and eyes as well as showing through his scars. Godzilla shook in building malice, memories from three years ago playing through his head. He might have obliterated the Golden Gate and the soul upon it before his misguided brother arrived, but her face refused to burn away from memory since the instant he finally vaporized her. He bellowed, more a bestial growl than speech.

"You dare mention that witch's name around me?!.... Raiga and I met in Australia when I came to burn Sydney to the ground, my brother is alive but an idiot, my mother was a nobody who abandoned my egg on Adona island when she thought it a dud. I don't know how your disguise persisted though Cadenza's hexes, but Chrysalis must be slacking off to send in such a moron. You seem very eager to die, and You're. Not. Raiga!"

He roared with worth and plasma spewing out of his jaws. Raiga, having already been on her metaphorical toes since he started the threat displays, dove to the side. She just barely managed to dodge the oncoming thermonuclear breath, getting a painful burn across her side, halfway down her tail. Biting back her pain and seeing Godzilla already recharging for another shot, Raiga snapped her mind into action. Oscillating her energy cores, the guardian beast-turned-siren's body crackled with golden arcs of electricity. A launched torrent of radioactive plasma was met by the river of electrons firing out of Raiga's maw. The dueling beams clashed for a time, neon blue slowly inching up the golden assault.

Grunting from the effort, Raiga redoubled her efforts and ignited the pearls on her hooves. She didn't like tapping into her reserves, having no thunderstorm to recharge her if things got dire, but this was an emergency. Arcs of electricity jumped up from her arms and into the pearls on her cheeks, adding fuel to intensify the beam and push back into a stalemate. Raiga hadn't gotten the chance to spar much with Junior, the latter either being too busy or not in the mood for a scrap. But, she had gotten a good inclination of how they measured up. If she put effort into it, she could at least equal out his force and hold him off for awhile. She managed to do just that in the beam struggle... until Godzilla growled and pumped more energy into his attack.



Bits of spiraling red encircled the blue ray in a manner Raiga hadn't ever seen Junior do, and easily doubled its power. Already draining some of her reserves, Raiga couldn't hope to hold it off and wisely dove out of the way. The combined mass of her own strength as well as Godzilla's wrath swelled as it hit the wall behind her, part of it shooting off into the village below whilst the rest simply exploded.

============================
2 Minutes ago in the Laboratory
============================

"Aaah come on now little Glimmer, don't worry now. As the student of Chrysalis, shouldn't you love a test?"

Empress Cadenza chimed with a sincere dissonance clear in her voice. The alicorn rummaged across her work station with her back turned to the crying Starlight Glimmer. Between her positioning and cold tears staining her vision, the frightened unicorn had a hard time seeing what her enemy was fiddling with and could only croak.

"W-what?! Test? Please, please what do you want with me?!"

She pleaded through her tears, earning a mocking coo from Battra Lea. The demonic looking changeling, not at all like Starlight's mentor, pawed at the crying unicorn's cheek with the edge of her hoof. 

"Oooh, I see the rumors of your personage weren't exaggerated. Always so eager to know more."

Battra Lea giggle before running her tongue over his fangs. She hissed, her tone was of a creeping chime as she turned to burn an inscribed seal, containing dark terran magic and blackened mana, into the floorboards. 

“You're a smart little mare. You must be to since you're an alicorn royal in the making! My associate and I will leave it to you to figure out whilst we prepare. Find the clues, deary.”

Levitating over some of Cadenza’s aerenths, the changeling impaled them into the circles ringing the seal to create a glowing array of dark energy that sapped the heat from the room. Obsidian began to fill the cracks Lea had burned into the floor, acting as conductors for the cruel energy arcing between and out of the aerenths. A cursed seal from Terra and a dark hexing array from Equestria; a literal marrying of the worst in both. Starlight Glimmer didn’t even want to ponder and grope for an answer as to what exactly they were planning to do to her with that. She didn't need much intuition to guess why the floorboards had a slight reddish brown staining. Pulse pounding in her ears as she struggled to free herself, Starlight set her mind to multitask. Any detail around her, anything that might offer her a sliver of hope was taken into account. She busily looked to the illustrations on the boards and opened tomes facing her, cringing through a tear's sting upon again glimpsing the severed, yet still glowing horns of several changelings and unicorns. She glimpsed illustrations, showing a small form becoming giant. Guides on how magical energy interacted with aerenth crystals both for charge and storage. She froze in place upon seeing a familiar symbol on one patch of notes. A purple star with aqua-teal swirls ascending from it. Her cutie mark. Her capture was no accident, just a cruel coincidence. 

Cadenza hissed with a grin, a rhombus of aerenth levitating before her. A virtually invisible hand of magical telekinesis gripped and fractured the crystal with uncanny precision, fragments falling and pinging off the floor. She levitated the still shedding shard over to the cabinet with the severed unicorn and changeling horns. Murmuring the intelligible dialogue of a spell Lea had taught her, Cadenza called forth and drew out the magical energy still active within the inert organs and syphoned them into the aerenth like a vacuum drawing in smoke. She turned around slowly and looked Starlight Glimmer in the eye. Cadenza’s eyes widened with cruel and crazen excitement as she held high what remained of the glowing aerenth, a now pulsing crystalline scalpel. Lea took hold of the now screaming unicorn’s restraint table, beginning to eagerly pull her closer to the dark magic array. 

Whatever plans the pair had for their captive however were put off by the oncoming mass of plasma crashing through the wall. The combined energy behind Godzilla’s radioactive heart and Raiga’s energy cores hit the dark magic array dead center. For a brief moment, the aerenths and obsidian grew in brilliance, as if absorbing the energy. But if that were the case, they were soon overwhelmed and hit their breaking point. Hosting the combined might of itself and two transformed kaiju, the array exploded with debris and shockwaves flying in all angles. Empress Cadenza was hurled into, shattered, and toppled over through a window. Battra Lea attempted to get out of the way, but was unsuccessful and was subsequently sent hurtling back into a bookshelf and wall; hard enough to dent it in and knock her silly. By sheer dumb luck, due to the table she was strapped to facing away from the blast's epicenter, Starlight Glimmer got out of the explosion in the best shape despite being the most surprised. The table took the brunt of the blast and shattered into dozens of pieces. 

Disoriented from the explosion sending a sharp ringing through her ears, the only thing Starlight could feel was the rushing surge coursing out of her horn. More and more aerenths and seals around her began shattering or igniting from the blast’s chain reaction, the energy in her horn surging back into her like a broken dam’s floodwaters. The alicorn and changeling’s anti-magic broke apart, Starlight wasting no time fighting through the deafness to steal a glimpse of the world outside the window. Seizing her chance and having a line of sight, she disappeared in a flash of light before the fires spread to her locale. 

==================
Back in the Palace
==================

Raiga yelped after being tossed across the room, rolling and skidding across the floor before crashing into King Aspen’s skeleton. Shattered bones flew about in all directions as she regained her orientation. Spying her foe coming, the siren salvaged her power and ignited her pearls, electrifying and strengthening herself by the time the monstrosity of a unicorn charged her. The sparking shocks and strikes stunned Godzilla briefly, but his momentum was still great enough to bowl into her. A pair of hooves stomped down onto her chest, causing Raiga to snarl and box at Godzilla’s face. The unicorn, too bloodthirsty and enraged to care that Raiga’s show of powers had proven herself to be no imposter, lunged down at the siren with fanged jaws. Had she retained her digits, Raiga would have grabbed him by the neck and jaw to keep him back or possibly go for a neck snap. Instead she had to resort to bracing one sparking hoof against his throat to keep him back while swiping at his face with the other. Her assault, both blunt force and the electrical shocks following them, were registering but not doing anything lasting beyond some bruising. Snarling from another smack cutting into his lip, Godzilla snapped his jaws to the side and bit down on Raiga’s limb mid-swing. Raiga could barely choke back a scream when Godzilla thrashed his jaws like a dog with a toy. Between his weight crushing down on her and the worry Godzilla was going to chew into an artery, she had enough to worry about before noticing light gathering up on the unicorn’s mane and scars. Now fearing she was about to have a limb blown off, Raiga diverted all of her power into the pearl mounted on her left hoof. In a reaction that could only be compared to biting down on a lightning bolt, Godzilla was electrocuted and repelled enough for Raiga to rip herself free of his jaws and pin; as well as shove his chin up towards the roof with her hoof. 

The ensuring ray of plasma that spewed forth gouged, burned, and detonated the roof above and sent flaming chunks of the now burning tree raining down on the pair. Freed from the pin, Raiga wasted no time mentally parroting what she learned with Starlight, reactivating her levitation to dive to safety. Godzilla, still stunned briefly from the mass shock, wasn’t able to get out the way before the avalanche of the palace roof came crashing down on him hard enough to break a hole in the floor beneath him. Roaring kaiju and burning ruin were sent tumbling into the lower levels. The fires across the palace spreading, the siren flying out of the previously blasted hole in the wall to safety. She stole a glance back at the blazing ruin behind her, fires chewing away at the remaining tapestries and engulfing the shattered skeleton of King Aspen. 

-He might be stuck as a unicorn, but there is no way that’s going to kill him.- 

She turned and levitated down to the main street in a controlled free fall. 

-I’ll have to pray it slows him down.-

She had just started moving down the street and towards the burning laboratory when the one she was looking for appeared in a burst of light and collided with her. Starlight took one look at the siren and sprung back like a frightened cat. 

“No! Stay away!”

She screamed, volume not abaided at all with her ears still ringing from the explosion. Raiga, not having any time for this, ignored the pain in her side and arm, swinging around and grabbing the unicorn before darting for the front gate as fast as she could beat her tail through the air to swim. Tears in her eyes still reflecting the growing inferno behind them, Starlight pleaded and thrashed to free herself from another capture. 

“Agk! Easy I’m not with them! I’m trying to get us out of here!”

Starlight’s mind raced ahead and she stopped struggling. Still in emotional freefall from the terror inflicted upon her, the poor unicorn clung to Raiga. With her distress fueling her magic, a glow filtered down from the spirals of her horn and across both her and Raiga’s form.

“Then hang on! I don’t know if this will work, but!”

She yelped as Raiga flew over the gateway and freed them from any of Cadenza’s remaining magic. The unicorn stole a glance through the dead treeline towards a distant river, gaining a line of sight. Both Starlight and Raiga disappeared in a flash of light as the Thicket burned behind them. 

The last thing Starlight sensed was the damp chill of water and feeling of rotten wood on her face. 

A few minutes later at the ruins, the deer kingdom was still blazing, smoking, or smoldering. Without the nature magic to keep the plantlife living and green, the fires were quick to devour the dead and dying wood. Hundreds of years worth of magically grown flora literally went up in flames, with nothing but smoke and a fire cracked wooden shell left behind in what was once the royal residence. An angry roar tore through the air, shouting out some of the flames. Godzilla lifted himself up from his entombment, picking up and throwing many times his own weight in burning debris through the wall and roof of a neighboring building. Aside from some mended bruises and hair that was alternately singed or drowning in soot, he looked far more angered than hurt. Ignoring the flames overtaking it, he threw a hoof out before him and smashed the palace’s front doors off their hinges in an uproar of burning splinters and char. 

The tyrant king of the kaiju trudged out of his residence, walking through a wall of flames and into the main street like a demon born of inferno. The look on his face was unmoving, but brimmed with the intent showing in his eyes. The furious masquerading as the stoic. He approached the laboratory in time to see the smoke crowned forms of Cadenza and Battra haul some of their books free from the fires overtaking the structure. The duo looked a bit ruffled or singed, but were otherwise no worse for the wear. The alicorn saw the creature coming. Despite being who she was and sensing the upwell of hatred she felt flowing into her from his very presence, Cadenza couldn’t fight a slight wince as soon as she saw the look on his face. 

“The unicorn g-ot away. There was an explosion and-”

Godzilla’s voice, a baritone grumble, hushed Cadenza’s. 

“Is she the one required to proceed?”

Battra Lea’s eyes widened slightly and she moved to Cadenza’s side to calm both of them down. 

“We can recover, but her magic involving talent enhancement will speed things up exponentially. With her power to bring out the skills in other and the first captured asset's raw energy, we could maintain our true forms far longer than before, quite possibly permanently." 

"That's something we might need to have finished before Xenilla and Chrysalis can track us down. And there's the problem that she knows where the base is!”

Godzilla looked at the burning laboratory, looking down to the aerenth scalpel that had been flung out the window with Cadenza. He could smell the energy on it before noticing that the crystal was still pulsing with magic. 

“This base… Gather any surviving research and meet with Anguirus and Rodan back at the second locale, we’ll rebuild there around the containment for the other...asset. Do you have any more of those elusion options?”

Cadenza did a quick check over of her inventory that had been pulled free of the bonfire before them, a smirk stretching across her lips as she found the requested item. The alicorn held and levitated up a blue and pink hued aerenth inscribed with Lea’s emblem. 

“This one’s bonded to me. Why? What are you planning?”

Godzilla took the charged scalpel and the crystal from the alicorn, turning and walking towards the front gate. Ignoring the crumbling bellow of the last few palace walls falling in on themselves, neon colors flew across Godzilla’s mane and scars. 

“Snuffing out loose ends and getting our asset back…”

========================
About two kilometers away
========================

Raiga and Starlight Glimmer snapped awake from delirium. The slow cackle of moving water filled the air as they looked around themselves on instinct. Barring Starlight’s hooves, tail, and now unkempt mane, as well as Raiga’s tail end; they were slung across a rotting log drifting down a briskly flowing river about eight meters across with forest bordering on either side. 

Raiga, relieved to both not be under attack by a sociopath as well as finally being back in some water, groaned aloud to rid herself of some tension. 

“Ooooookay, I have no idea what you just did, or why we’re here; but…. thanks.”

She cracked a dim smile, reaching over towards the unicorn. The mare however, winced at the approach and quivered with sparks sputtering out of her horn. Raiga, on instinct, recoiled back a few centimeters. Upon noticing the tear stains under the unicorn’s eyes, a small frown stretched across the siren’s face. Ignoring the sparks, she reached over and gently pawed at Starlight’s scalp. 

“Hey, it’s alright. I’m not.. going.. to hurt you…”

“S-Sorry! It's not you.”

Starlight Glimmer squeaked, still wincing a bit as she looked towards her horn with one opened eye. 

“I c-can’t really do big teleports like this usually. Kind-a stings. I j-just had to get out of there!-”

“Shhhh shhhh, it’s okay.”

Raiga shushed her, letting her hoof stroke Starlight’s wet mane. 

“‘Long as you don’t try to be the third person today who'll try to burn my head off, you don’t have to explain- ack!”

The adrenaline and endorphins leaving her system, Raiga flinched up momentarily. A trickle of blood in the water guided her eye to the source. The burn mark across her side and the bite wound on her arm hadn’t closed up or cauterized entirely. Starlight’s ears raised up and she shook free of her paralysis inflicted by the pain in her horn, reaching out and taking Raiga’s limb to splash some water onto it. 

“Oh no! Is this really bad? What happened?!”

She pleaded, recognizing this sort of bite mark and burn wound on Xenilla. Her concerned face only ended up earning a wincing chuckle from Raiga. 

“I’ve had worse. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you one of the types of kaiju that can heal quicker?”

“Only if I can get enough electricity. And in this state I’m not exactly sure if I can call up a thunderstorm.”

The river flowed under an old oak and stone bridge. Starlight Glimmer’s eyes widened with recognition at the sight. She cast her vision forward. On the edge of the wood coming into visibility as they flowed down hill, trees of concrete and glass became visible through the canopy. The unicorn’s eyes brightened and her first smile in hours crossed her face. 

“We’re in luck then! This river must flow right into Manehattan! Once we’re there I can take you to the power plant. My friend Lightning Dust works over there.”

“Sounds like a-” Raiga grunted, shaking off the stinging pain in her side. “-plan!”

Remembering some of the words spoken at the camp, Raiga turned her gaze from the glowing city ahead and back towards Starlight. 

“Tell me one thing though.”

“Y-Yes?”

“The gal you were meeting in that city, Chrysalis, she really associated with Xenilla?”

“Yes indeed, after he helped save Canterlot from Godzilla she and him have been working together through this crisis. I was actually going to meet him in Manehattan too.”

“.....”

Raiga shot out an exasperated groan at the first sentence which just refused to make sense to her, just like everything else in this world since she got here. Starlight, thinking it was over the siren’s injuries, crawled over on her side of log to get closer to Raiga. 

“What’s wrong? Is it your wound? Is it getting worse?! How bad is it? Screwy is a good doctor in Manehattan, I can take you to her too!”

Raiga just waved her hoof in the air whilst whining. 

“Your world’s all kinds of messed uuuuuuuup!”

Just before she could wonder what mishap was going to be thrown her way, fate gave her the answer. It came from the west just as the moon began to peek out from the horizon, an intrusive upwell of white and blue radiance that banished all the comforting darkness around it appeared. The pillar of light tore the sky apart, blowing back the clouds above and summoning gusts of hot wind as its herald. Raiga and Starlight, for differing reasons, knew precisely what was coming. Ignoring her pain, Raiga hopped off the impromptu raft and braced against its tip. Between her tail thrashing sickling the water behind her and the hot gale forces billowing down from the highlands; their retreat to Manehattan was exponentially sped up. 

They arrived at the edge of downtown several minutes later. As soon as the pair hopped off the log and reached the streets themselves to warn everypony, a reverberating boom rattled the ground below. Everypony paused in confusion as a second boom echoed out, knocking dust off the ground in clouds. Then a single voice called out that could be heard citywide. Devastation was calling for his decree.

Godzilla’s titanic form walked out from behind the last of the Foal Mountain range, shaking the earth beneath him with every step among the echoes of trampled forest. Alarm sirens sounded off across the city. The citizenry, not blind or deaf to the lookout’s alarms or the thirty story tall dinosaur, flew into full retreat. Herds of ponies heralded panicking crowds out of the buildings and downtown, rushing, sprinting, or carrying others to safety. 

Raiga and Starlight Glimmer ran amongst the crowds with the former looking for her mentor. They both stole a glance backwards and upwards at the monstrosity wading in their direction and then looked back at each other. 

“How did he grow?! I thought we were stuck in these ponyland forms!”

“He must have been charged up on magic! It can revert one of you back to that state!”

“.... Magic can make us grow?! I could be a kaiju again?!”

“Only really strong stuff, like from an alicorn or another royal. He must have used something from Cadenza!”

“Well then we gotta get to your teacher and juice me up!”

Godzilla’s dorsal spines crackled with wrath that spewed forth from his jaws with a roar. He raked the beam across several tall buildings and obliterated their tallest stories. The last building, having only a portion of it gouged out, creaked and groaned into its foundations before the top portion broke off and fell. It was caught by its neighbor, slumping over like a parody of a bridge over the streets below. Starlight grunted, covering her head from the following downpour of falling dust and plaster. 

“We won’t have time! I don’t even know where exactly she is in the city right now and it’ll take an hour to find her in these crowds. By that time he’ll be in the middle of the city and I-”

Her speech was cut off by the sight of the lights ahead of her. The crowds filed past Starlight Glimmer and Raiga, the former still frozen in place and alone in her thoughts. The lights ahead of her were born from the many street lamps, room lights, and illuminated signs that dotted upper Manehattan. Hundreds to thousands of them, for just as many if not more citizens. Citizens about to face the monster's wrath.

-He’s heading right for them… Everypony in harm's way, they’re going to….-

She could hardly bear the thought of why she felt all those lights were going to go out before night’s end. Raiga grabbed and shook the unicorn, hiding her own panic. 

“Hey, HEY! Don’t break apart on me yet now! Listen!”

Starlight jolted back to reality and looked at the siren, eyes watering as another one of Godzilla’s footsteps bellowed through the ground beneath her. 

“You are a unicorn, if we need magic you can do it!”

“Wh-wh-what?! I can’t! Magic isn’t my talent, I’m j-just a talent aid! I’m no Trixie!”

“Look, I don’t even know who that is, but you taught me how to fly and in a blink of an eye you cleared a horizon away from that hellhole to get us to safety. You got your chops alright!”

The siren motioned back to Godzilla who, much to both of their dread, seemed to be looking right at them as he approached. 

“And do you got any better ideas?! It’s either we give it our best go now or we’re all about to get trampled and or vaporized in the next few minutes!”

Starlight Glimmer closed her quivering lips, taking a big gulp as she stood alone with Raiga in the middle of the street. The crowds were quickly advancing away, but with an eighty meter stride the tyrant monster was closing the distance with the duo right in the middle. Starlight looked at the crowds, Godzilla, and then into Raiga’s eyes, putting a hoof on the siren’s. 

“Can you beat him?”

Raiga looked up at Godzilla and took a deep breath. She didn’t let her confident, snappy facade cast a lie. She’d sparred with the Godzilla she knew. She could hold her own, but she knew he was stronger. And this one, this one seemed even worse. Raiga simply spoke the truth. 

“I can slow him down…”

Starlight closed her eyes and yanked her friend into a hug briefly, whispering as she focused on her happiest memories. 

“Be careful…”

“Eh, not my style.”




(Click to play audio)

> Chapter 5: Sound of Thunder
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

=========================================
Downtown Manehattan, Mirror Universe Equestria
=========================================

Raiga, crackling with lightning from her form and walking with thunder in her step, charged and met Godzilla head on. Tackling him away from downtown Manehattan, the two kaiju tussled and rolled into the river amongst a barrage of blue plasma and bolts of gold lightning shooting into the sky. Managing to get on top of the wrestling, Raiga snarled and slashed at Godzilla’s torso with her long talons. While her handheld scythes did manage to cut through the dinosaur’s hide somewhat, the wounds were just as quick to mend as Godzilla was to launch a counterattack. Grabbing Raiga by her wrists after another slash, Godzilla threw his shoulders upwards, ripping Raiga off her pin and slamming her back-first into the ground above him. Just when she was getting up, Godzilla's tail ripped through the churned river water and smashed a dizzying tail smack into her face. Knocked senseless, she wasn’t able to rise up by the time Godzilla got to his feet and grabbed onto her tail. His claws digging into Raiga’s flippers, Godzilla repeatedly ripped her off the ground by her tail and then repeatedly slammed her back into it with ever increasing force. Shock waves courses through the ground and river water splashed out in all directions.  

Having formed a crater on the river bottom by the fourth collision, Raiga regained enough wit to call down several thunder bolts upon being raised up. Electrifying herself, she managed to shock Godzilla enough times to get him to let go. Raiga landed on her feet and whirled around as her pearls glowed, firing a torrent of electrons out of her maw and blasting Godzilla in the forehead enough to stumble him. Still crackling with lightning, Raiga threw herself at her foe and slammed one electrified fist into Godzilla’s face and torso after another. Weaving like a boxer, she ducked under a tail-swing counter and landed several uppercuts into Godzilla’s torso. Unlike Agon however, Godzilla saw the strikes coming and was more than sturdy enough to brace. His reactions to the hits changed from staggers, to budging slightly, and soon enough the Tyrant King of the Monsters was barely even flinching from blows that would have knocked Agon silly. Stomping on Raiga’s toes before craning down and then slamming his head into her chin, Godzilla forced her back as his back spines ignited. Dropping his jaw into a roar that was soon chased by a beam of blue plasma, Godzilla blasted the stunned Guardian Beast off her feet and sent her flying several blocks backwards before crashing down into the debris. Digging her face out of the rubble after being sent hurtling through a warehouse, Raiga drew strength from her now glowing pearls, which arced electricity across her form. Stumbling to get her feet beneath her, she braced a palm on the ground and let loose a barrage of lightning from both her jaws and free hand’s palm. The stream of mana charged electricity smashed into Godzilla, burning away at his scales and scar tissue and forcing him to stagger briefly. Godzilla halted his advance as the golden electrons washed over him, groaning in strain, but soon managing to power through the onslaught and endure the attack. 

His chest being burned and muscles twitching the shocks, Godzilla focused on something else. Training his eyes upwards to the above and past Raiga, Godzilla all but ignored her assault and leered at the distant lights of the still evacuating portions of Manehattan proper. For each light, there were easily a hundred ponies fleeing from the kaiju brawl a kilometer away; and there were easily dozens upon dozens of lights. He began to suck in his breath, the dinosaur’s back spines flashing with light before building to a steady glow. Red flashes of light shown through his scars and skin were the only forewarning of what was coming, an attack that could easily kill some lesser kaiju in one shot. Spiral fire. Raiga knew it more when she dove in front of it to intercept the beam heading for the fleeing crowds. 

Though the burst was short, it was devastating. Raiga’s entire form was swallowed up by an explosion of sparks and smoke. When she fell out of it amongst her agonizing cries, her entire front half was covered in burns and melted scales. She tried to get back up, but with a hand braced to her chest and the other trying to support herself, she was clearly struggling. Godzilla treaded over to the fallen kaiju, nonchalantly kicking her in the face to roll her over. Raiga struggled and flailed to try and counter attack after he leaned down and bit down the back of her neck. Her groans turned to shrieks when he picked her up in his jaws, fangs punching through her scales and tossed her forward to send her crashing headfirst through several buildings. Rubble and torn concrete flew in all directions like a wave crashing on a rock. Through her pain and daze, Raiga opened her eyes and looked down at the street ahead of her snout. Much to her horror, she spied Starlight Glimmer standing besides some rubble with an absolutely horrified expression on her face and tears streaming down from her eyes. Raiga winced, blood trickling out from her jaws when she roared at the pony. Though she was no longer speaking a language the Equestrian could understand the intent was clear as polished crystal and as painful as impalement.

This foe was the strongest she'd ever face, too strong. Raiga wasn't going to win this fight.

-RUN!-

Electrifying her body, Raiga leaped off the ground and launched herself at Godzilla in a frenzy of last wind blows and lightning; determined till death to hold him off even if for just a little bit longer. Starlight Glimmer, with a bit of Raiga’s blood splashed onto her cheek, quivered and shook for a moment before doing as she was told. But as her mind raced, she remembered something Raiga said when they were on their makeshift raft after their escape. Rather than sprinting to the nearest shelter or evacuation point, she made a beeline for the source of Manehattan’s power. 

======================
Manehattan Power Plant
======================

Lightning Dust’s evening had taken a complete 180’ from placid and smooth to crisis situation at the drop of a hat. The normally calm engineer was zipping around the plant at breakneck speed after ordering everyone out to join the evacuation, leaving her to reroute all the power to the evacuation effort. Granted, she was probably the best for the job after having gotten a commission from King Sombra to build this station in a model after the Cloudsdale weather factories; so she knew the layout like her own hoof. Didn’t stop her from panicking amongst her rushes from one side of the control room to the other, ponying the switches, levers, access, and wiring from one setting to another. Shutting off power to the useless areas like the downtown street lights, making sure the essentials like elevators, emergency lights, and alert sirens stayed on; and constantly juggling one current overload after another to avoid the risk of an overcharge that might fry the system. Being as tightly strung as she was, poor Lightning Dust shot up like a startled cat when Starlight Glimmer threw herself through the back door to bust into the plant.

“Wha- Starlight?! Why are you here?!”

Lightning Dust shouted after prying herself off the ceiling lamp she’d been clinging to. The desperation in Starlight Glimmer’s eyes was as obvious as the blood on her cheek. 

“I need your help! Raiga needs our help!”

“Who’s Raig-!”

Lightning Dust was cut off by the building shaking hard enough to dislodge dust on the lights and ceiling. Both mares stole a glance to the outside, seeing Godzilla having just tossed the sparking Guardian Beast to the ground and started stomping on her. The malign monster’s roar rattled the window frames. That was all the motivation Starlight needed to teleport and levitate herself up to hover in front of Lightning Dust, grabbing her friend by the shoulders. 

“She feeds off electricity to heal and use her powers, we gotta give her the power grid! Is it still working all full capacity?!”

“Y-Yes…!!”

Lightning Dust eased them back to the ground, rushing to the central control panel with Starlight alongside her. While she didn’t know who this ‘Raiga’ kaiju was, if she was fighting Godzilla that meant she was a better alternative running around than he was. And if there was anything the reserved pegasus was, it was empathetic. She could see the sheer distraught painted onto her friend and was quick to share it.

“Y-YES! I can do that! But what are you planning to do? Plug her into it?!”

“I need you to reroute all the power you can to one core cable, put it in the closest one to her.”

“I’ll try! But if we put them much power into one cable the insulation might fry off and we’d overload the whole current!”

Lightning Dust yelped as she stole a glance outside the window to check and see where the fight was going before looking back down to mash at the control to get the right set up. Across the city lights flickered off and on as power was rerouting to a single location. 

“Whatever you’re planning on doing you gotta do it quick!”

"Will it work?!"

"I gotta re-balance the current flows so it doesn't short out in enroute!"

Starlight Glimmer’s eyes were transfixed on the quarreling kaiju. Raiga was still getting wailed on but was still defiantly fighting back against everything thrown at her. Grabbing onto Godzilla’s head as he hoisted her up, she called down at least a dozen thunder bolts into both herself and her foe. Godzilla roared in pain and annoyance even as Raiga tried to turn herself into a living taser. His body flashed with a red brilliance as he set to fire off a point blank nuclear pulse, a shockwave version of the spiral fire. Red light flashed across Starlight’s face, soon chased by Raiga’s screaming.

“HE’S KILLING HER! JUST DO IT!”

Starlight screamed through stressed tears before teleporting herself out of the power plant and following her line of sight. The system before Lightning Dust hummed to a deafening pitch, alarms and warning about a building overcharge filling the room. Much to her shock, she saw the brief flashes of light given off by Starlight’s teleports through the glass. The unicorn was moving block by block despite her exhaustion, and heading directly towards the kaiju. 

Godzilla held up Raiga by her throat, still sending small shockwaves into her as the Guardian Beast weakly grabbed at his wrist to try and free herself. Grunting, he casually tossed her forward several hundred meters and into a strip mall. Rubble, smoke, and ash shot up into the air and clouded the scene. High above, the thunder clouds began to part ways, their intensity ebbing away. Raiga struggled up to her feet and rose up from the smoke and airborne debris. Coated in burns, bleeding from her mouth and nose, riddled in cuts and bruises, she sucked in a labored breath and took a step forward. Swallowing back her pain, she threw open her jaws in a defiant roar that carried across the night and echoed into itself. 

Then her legs gave out from under her and she fell on her side, and didn’t get back up.

Starlight reappeared in front of the fallen kaiju’s muzzle, the weak trickle of hot breath coming from Raiga’s nose telling her the kaiju was still alive; but barely. Tears falling to the ground beneath her, she screamed to the biological mountain as she reared up and grabbed the Guardian Beast’s nostril. 

“Raiga!”

A rolling thunder of a footstep shook the earth beneath her hooves. Starlight looked back to see Godzilla slowly approaching them from down the street, taking his time in doing so while still being brisk. Starlight looked back to Raiga’s closed eyes, batting at her nose and even resorting to shooting a weak magic bolt out of her horn at Raiga’s forehead, anything to try and rouse her consciousness. 

“Raiga, you gotta wake up! He’s coming!”

She saw a brief flutter on Raiga’s eyelid and had to take that for what she could. Quickly spying the service hatch on the road with a lightning bolt symbol on it, Starlight Glimmer lit up her horn and shot a concentrated beam into the brick wall above the hatch. The street lamp near the hatch grew in brightness until the bulb shorted out, fracturing and frying itself. 

-Lightning’s part is done.-

She looked back to Raiga and then back to the advancing Godzilla. She whispered to Raiga, not sure if the kaiju could hear her but not caring. 

“I’ll distract him for a bit. Dig. Down.”

Starlight would have to hope it was all enough as she disappeared in a flash of turquoise light.

Godzilla halted his predatory approach when a bolt of magic harmlessly pinged off his eyeball. 

“he-HEY YOU!”

Shifting his attention around to the source after a second hit, he soon spied the transgressor. Starlight Glimmer was a meek pony. She ran away from bullies, hated violence to the point of being terrified by it, and had just been put through more trauma in the last twelve hours than many ponies did in their lifetimes. She often wondered just what Chrysalis saw in her to make her the Duchess’ pupil. Little did she know, this was a reason why. As she stood upon a tall roof top shouting at one of the most dangerous monstrosities Equestria or Terra had ever seen, one she had no hope of hurting in their respective states but still drew his attention upon herself, she was showing exactly what her teacher saw in her. A powerful heart can breed powerful fears, but when it doesn’t let those fears control it, it can breed powerful courage. 

Godzilla Junior leaned closer to the building roughly his height with a small snarl. Starlight Glimmer glared back at the sight of recurved fangs taller than she was, unmoving as the dusty, dank air blew into her. 



“You wanted to stay like this forever right?! That’s what you had them working on! Well, according to Battra and Cadenza, you need my ability to enhance talents to do it! Can you guess what that means?!”

Godzilla’s snarl grew as he curled his lips back, starting to change his course and was now approaching Starlight. 

“You want me?! Come and get me!”

Godzilla power walked to the building and took a grab at Starlight, the unicorn teleporting out of range at the last second. Hitting the street running, the unicorn bolted away from Raiga with Godzilla in tow with the two quickly playing a game of cat and mouse. Starlight sprinting, levitating, or teleporting out of the kaiju’s grasp as he plowed through street and building alike to get to her. The tyrant wasn’t in any rush, the predatory chase was entertaining for him. And as the increasingly short ranged teleports from Starlight proved each time Chrysalis’ chosen pupil slipped out of his grasp, Starlight couldn’t keep this up forever. She just hoped she could long enough for it to count. 


Inside the head of a half dead kaiju, Raiga was in another time and another place. Near death experiences tended to bring up powerful memories, and this was her strongest. It was 70,000 years ago in the mid-Atlantic. A much younger Raiga knifed through the storming seas en-route to her destination, the voice of her creator, Anitun-Tabu, chiming into her head. 

-”You are almost there young one, hurry!”-

-”I’m trying! A-Are you sure I can do this?”-

-” Mothra’s egg hasn’t hatched yet so this needs to be done by a Guardian Beast. Manjushri’s Anguirus has already been sealed away and Queen Baji’s Yonggary is too young to fight, you’re the only one who can contain the gyaos outbreak.”-

He creator’s confidence wasn’t infectious to the young Guardian Beast. Raiga knew of their mission and accepted it, to help the Mothra and Battra lines safeguard the world from Bagan when he returned in 100,000 years. She wasn’t expecting her first mission to be given to her when she was so, new. Anitun-Tabu had been informed of what was going on in Atlantis literally hours after she’d gifted Raiga with her lightning, and heard of how the Atlantean attempt at creating a Guardian Beast had horrifically backfired. And now the defective monstrosities, the gyaos, were running rampant and risked spreading across the world like a ravenous plague. Raiga agreed to go, but she knew full well that this wouldn’t be like her training. So much was riding on her and that certainly didn’t stop her from being anxious and unsure of herself.

-”Your swimming speed is decreasing, are you tired already?”-

-”No! Just-!”-

-”If those gyaos stop chewing on Atlantis and escape they could spread so far we’d never find them all! You have to get there now!”-

Raiga swallowed a gulp and pushed her flippers harder to increase her top speed. Soon enough she’d arrived at the floating city...at least, what was left of it. Atlantis had been one of the lucky cities. When Bagan, formerly Reijuu started his slaughter, he went after the cities with nexuses first to try and get rid of as much the Mana Stream, the very thing he created eons ago as Reijuu, as possible. Atlantis happened to be further out than the other cities at the time so Bagan went after most of the others instead. But based off the shape it was in now, Atlantis might have been better off had it shared Thule’s fate of being blown apart or glassed over like much of Asia had been. Gyaos of all sizes were flying about and filling the night with their shrieks. Every building from the central citadel to the dock houses to the golem statues had been utterly destroyed. Despite the deafening horde of gyaos, there wasn’t a single human voice nor scream in the entire city, and Raiga soon saw why when she spotted the only human she’d ever see on this mission. Two gyaos were fighting over a half eaten skeleton, one injuring the other and prompting the nearby monsters to gang up on it for more food to try and sate their hunger. 

In their rush to make their guardian, Atlantis had created a species of mass producing kaiju that knew neither sentience nor a lasting end to their hunger due to an out of control metabolism. In the end, it literally came back to bite them and consumed every man, woman, and child in the now corpse of a city Raiga stood before. The young kaiju was shell shocked, her jaw quivering. 

-”Raiga don’t focus on that! You have to end them now before they spread! Use the hurricane and fry the city!”-

-”But what if-!”-

-”You have to do it now Raiga!”-

Raiga raised her palms to the sky and caused an increase in the storm above’s intensity. Rain began to fall from the sky as thunder rolled. The gyaos, quick to pick up on the new scent, shrieked and screeched to one another. A wave of teeth, talons, wings, and screams surged out of Atlantis in a shadowy cloud. Raiga, struck by multiple lightning bolts who’s crash was muffled out by the enormity of the gyaos calls’ numbers, charged up her power until the glow from her pearls was blinding to the gyaos and forced them backwards away from the light. Hundreds of bolts surged into her as the Guardian Beast of Lightning held her arms out and formed a massive sphere of crackling energy whose color shifted from electron yellow to a blazen red. Raiga closed her eyes and roared before slamming the entirety of the condensed energy within herself and drove the storm into the surf and sent it flying into Atlantis. The floating city, a jewel of it’s age, was completely electrocuted and charred in a blinding flare…….

It was an hour later and Raiga was still floating in the surf outside of the city, still frozen in shellshock. Anitun-Tabu’s presence returned to her mind, able to see everything her creation could.  

-”Raiga, you need to return to the Pacific. I used almost all my magic creating you, and my power is fading. We need to seal you in your chamber, for the future…”-

Raiga barely moved, instead shifting her eyes to what lay in the surf ahead of her. Atlantis, fried to a crisp and reeking of evaporated blood, was slowly falling apart and sinking to the depths. Her gaze trailed down to the debris scattered across the ocean’s surface, having been both flung out of the city before and after she’d burned it black. Amongst the curtains of ash and occasional bit of debris or gyaos body, there were a few things still in good shape. One of them that bumped past Raiga’s hand was a reminder that the mountains of ash before her was once populated. It was a tiny, primitive doll with an Atlantean necklace crystal around it. Raiga felt her face twitching.  

-”I was too slow. I got scared and I was too slow…”- 

Instead of her usual sharp tone or fickle nature, the ancient’s voice was noticeably quieter and calmer than before. 

-”Raiga, we were so far away.”-

-”You told me I needed to swim faster!”-

-”It was, too late for them already. This isn’t your fault. Now please, you must come back to the isle... I’ll get your chamber ready.”-

Raiga turned and swam away as Atlantis’ remains sunk behind her. Neither she nor Anitun-Tabu could have known one gyaos broke away from the attack early and flew to parts unknown, where it laid an egg. Hundreds of years later that egg would hatch and that escapee’s offspring would lay several clutches across the world before the ice ages drove them into hibernation again. When Raiga first emerged in the modern era and found out what had survived, Anitun-Tabu’s words plagued her mind and hardened her. She was convinced there was something she could have done. If she’d swam faster, jumped into the fight quicker, was less worried for her own well being, any of those; maybe the end result would have been different. Raiga’s personality and confidence shifted and swelled, in an oath to never hesitate to enter the fray and never be passive in a conflict. Atlantis might not have been her fault, but to her, it was the start of her greatest mistake and her greatest drive. 

It was then her mind and memory flashed back to more recent events, and a voice of the time soon entered her semi-conscious mind. It was Starlight Glimmer’s, heavily distorted and faded, but still audible. 

“R-aai-a!”

“Rai-ga, wak-k-ke up!-”

Her consciousness, as it was pulled in by Starlight’s voice, flew back into real time. 

“-he’s coming!”

Raiga snapped awake and flinched, her vision swaying and blurring before refocusing. The first thing she saw was burnt and cracked brick. At first looking just like scribbles, her the fuzziness in her eyes faded and she soon recognized it as a drawn symbol; the same star and swirl pattern Starlight had on her flank region. Below it was an arrow along with a crudely sketched thunderbolt. Dizzily raising her head up and looking down the street, Raiga quickly spotted Godzilla. He had his back to her, a small smile on his fanged maw as he pursued flashes of turquoise light Raiga’s memory recognized as Starlight’s magic color. But instead of just running away in a set direction to get away from the kaiju lumbering after her, Starlight, whom Raiga caught a glimpse of sprinting across a street, was just moving about at random. The Guardian Beast’s eyes widened a bit as the realization dawned on her. 

-She’s trying to distract him! And the message!-

Looking back to the symbol and figuring it was Starlight who had left it for her, Raiga bit back her pain and shifted to sit up a bit. Seeing the arrow with a line under it pointing to the ground, she dug her claws into the pavement. Ripping up the concrete like tissue paper, she was surprised to find a hollowed walkway beneath the first three feet. Inside the walkway was a single, massive cable with a thunderbolt symbol on it. Even through the insulation, Raiga could quickly sense what was causing the two meter thick cable to overheat when she focused in on it. Electricity, an enormously absurd amount of electricity. 

-Alright Starlight. You want round 2, I’ll give you round 2!-

Raiga grunted, pulling the cable out of the ground and biting into the thick power line. Surges of energy rushed into her like tides of adrenaline. Some of her more serious wounds began to mend themselves in seconds and her pearls glowed with an ever growing intensity. Lights across Manehattan flickered off and on before going in, a circle of darkness spreading out from Raiga’s location and spreading to others as she absorbed an entire city’s worth of power. The thunderstorms above returned in force, bolts of lightning raining down on the Guardian Beast and adding their own might. Flashes of Atlantis briefly flashed over the still form of Manehattan reflecting in Raiga’s eyes as she rose to her full height and glared at Godzilla, the monster king and the hordes of gyaos being interchangeable. Raiga balled a fist and dropped the cable, having drained it dry. 

-Never. Again.-

Godzilla paused his pursuit of Starlight just after he seemed to have finally cornered the exhausted unicorn when the lights around him flickered off and on before going out. With the clouds above blotting out Luna’s moon, the only light soon came from the building brilliance behind him. He turned around and glared at the source and exchanged a leer with the risen Raiga as she stood between him and the rest of the city. Lightning striking around her, Raiga curled her lips and spat out some blood. She snarled as her pulsing pearls arced power across her, the glow intensifying as the bolts of electricity turned bright red. Runic marks began to appear across her body on her chest, arms, legs, back, face, and tail. Starlight wisely used her last teleport to get as far away as she could as Raiga sucked in a breath. Just as Godzilla was about to emit an earth trembling roar at his opposition, Raiga stomped her foot and roared to the heavens in a call that eclipsed his and was trailed by rolling thunder. A massive stream of lightning shot out of the roaring Guardian Beast, infecting the clouds and begetting a downpour of thunder bolts from the sky. 



Raiga surged forward and stampeded down the mainstreet so fast her form was of blurs and light. A crackling punch to the jaw sent Godzilla sliding back several blocks. Literal aftershocks still sparking across his form, Godzilla grunted from the blow and retaliated; flashes of red and blue signalling an oncoming Spiral Fire. But even as he let loose the attack, the super charged and berserk Raiga kept closing the distance and charged right through it despite a direct hit. Though she suffered a nasty burn to her arm and chest, the constant waves of mana charged electricity deflected large portions of the beam away. Powering through the onslaught, Raiga slammed into Godzilla with an uproar of thunder and lightning. Her talons virtually glowing from the amount of energy coming off of them, Raiga raked her hands across Godzilla’s face and chest in a frenzy of swipes that cut and burned into his hide. Bloodied and burned, Godzilla lashed out at his attacker with multiple body blows and swipes backed by outbursts of red nuclear pulses. But even as the damage compiled and she was briefly knocked back, Raiga didn’t slow down in her assault. Roaring among thunder rolls, she charged right back into the fray with the two pearls on her palms brimming with light. The Guardian Beast weaved closer to Godzilla and loosed a barrage of electrically charged punches while lightning strikes to her fins amplified her strength. Uppercut, cross, weaving lunge, jab, uppercut to the sternum, each strike with a crack of thunder as it launched a surge of red across Godzilla’s body that shot out of his back as a bolt of lightning. After striking him half a dozen times with strength and thunderbolts, Raiga knocked Godzilla’s arms aside and grabbed onto his head. Sandwiching his head between the conductor pearls on her palms, she ran the entire current coursing through her body while calling down one massive bolt after another from the sky above. Eyes whited out from the shocks and sparking from every point on his body, Godzilla shrieked in pain. For the first time in this battle the tide had completely turned, Raiga was the one inflicting the heavy damage. 

Still stubborn as always however, a nuclear shock wave from Godzilla caused the lightning to bend around him and his pulse forced Raiga to let go of him. Didn’t stop her from tossing him a good five blocks to make him crash headfirst into the edge of the now ravaged downtown district. Bruised, burnt, bleeding, and smoking, Godzilla nevertheless rose back up to his feet. Spines and eyes burning with a searing light. Raiga did not return Godzilla’s threatening roars, instead she closed her eyes and focused. She put her arms up in the same manner of which she begot the death blow to Agon. Energy channeled across her entire form and concentrated in her palms and throat. Raiga caught hold of her pulse as time slowed to a crawl and blackness surrounded her.

-I am quintessence, an element of life. I am Raiga, the thunder fang created by the storm matron.- 

The glowing red runes stretched across her body grew in intensity as the pearls on Raiga’s cheeks and palms became blindingly bright. Godzilla snarled and sneered, the sheer temperature and burning lights within him starting to make the keloid on his chest smoke. He slammed his tail into the ground and opened his jaws to exhaust the massive energy build up. The spiral fire he let loose was the strongest he’d ever used in a long time, wide enough to span the entirety of the street. The spiralling death, twice as strong as the blow that nearly killed her, barreled towards the Guardian Beast. 

-I am the second Guardian Beast, meant to safeguard the world and stop destruction!-

Her eyes, glowing spheres of red lightning snapped open. With a roar, Raiga released everything she had in a massive beam of ruby hued light and quintessence spewing out of her jaws and hands. The spiral fire and crimson lightning smashed into each other with a blastwave that burned the pavement and ruins below and around the epicenter of the beam duel black. For a time, the struggle seemed even. But then, the deathly flames from Godzilla began to swirl around and inch back the ball of white energy forming where the two beams collided. Raiga held her stance taught, even as her feet dug into and slid back into the pavement behind her. With one last affirmation, she threw all sense of safety away. 

-And I will not fail again!-

Thunder cracked and lightning flashed. A surge of power brought out by sheer force of will flooded into Raiga’s beam and reflected away the progression of the struggle. With her own body smoking and her pearls cracking from the stream, Raiga gave the assault one final effort. Shoving the duel back into Godzilla, the sphere of white at the epicenter of the struggle expanded to many times its size before the resulting explosion engulfed both the kaiju in whiteness. 

Several minutes later, at a giant, five hundred meter wide crater that used to be the outer edge of downtown Manehattan, a flash of turquoise heralded Starlight Glimmer’s arrival. She’d managed to avoid most of the fighting by ducking into a storm drain, but nevertheless was scuffed up in several places in addition to being drenched in the rain. There was no sign of the kaiju, and that is exactly why she was here. Sweeping a beam of light from her horn to and fro like a flashlight, she soon spied a pile of rubble with a familiar flipper sticking out of it. Gasping sharply, she sprinted across the uneven terrain and started shoving the broken pieces of pavement and tile aside. Raiga, back in her siren form, lay unconscious in the crater as the rain fell down and washed some of the dust off her. A quick check of her neck confirmed a pulse, but it was immediately evident she’d burnt herself out. Aside from the numerous bruises, cuts, and burns across her body, every single one of the pearls mounted across her body were cracked and chipped. Touching one of the pearls on Raiga’s cheek, Starlight yelped and jumped back from the brief shock. Nevertheless, she was so focused on the fallen siren she didn’t hear something else stirring behind her. On the far side of the crater that bled into the river, the waters began to surge back in as rows of cracked, sparking spines broke the surface. Thousands of tons worth of foot stomped into the river bottom beneath it and shook the earth. Slowly rising up from the murky water and pulling his front half out of the rubble, Godzilla staggered back to his feet and rose up into the storm. 

If Raiga and Starlight looked bad, he looked easily twice as worse. Several of his dorsal spines have been blown off and a good half his body was covered in burns that were still smoking. One of his arms was obviously dislocated at the shoulder and broken at the elbow judging from the limp hang and odd bend. One of his eyes had been sealed shut from swelling and burns, blood trickling out of his jaws from multiple missing and burned teeth. Red electricity still crackled across the battered kaiju’s form, causing him to wince and twitch every so often. Had Raiga had a longer charge, she might have actually killed him. And yet, he was still standing. And with his remaining eye, glaring at Starlight Glimmer and Raiga.

Godzilla started to limp towards the two, obviously favoring one leg but still advancing through what must have been a blitz of pain. Starlight Glimmer whirled around and faced the kaiju, quivering on her knees as tears trickled down from her face amongst the raindrops. Godzilla grunted and hissed when one step turned into a stumble and he fell to his knee. Bracing his hand on the ground, the dinosaur lifted his head back up and shot a look of pure malice with his good eye. Letting a roar escape out of bleeding jaws, Godzilla’s back spines and throat began to flash with a weak blue light. Starlight grabbed the unconscious siren and tried to drag her free of the rubble. 

“Raiga! RAIGA! Please I can’t-!”

She choked, not having the strength to lift the siren and carry her despite her trying. She tried to grab hold of the still kaiju as thunder cracked above them, squeezing her eyes shut through the watery blur and trying to think of somewhere, anywhere close she could teleport them to. But each time she tried to jump, her magic just fizzled out before it could leave her horn. The strain of the night had caught up to her and teleportation was too taxing on her horn. Starlight opened her eyes and looked to Godzilla, the blue glow in the kaiju’s throat only growing with intensity. 

She was stuck. She couldn’t leave somepony to die, she couldn’t carry them, and she couldn’t use her magic to get them to safety with as burnt out as she was. She couldn't save herself nor Raiga from what was coming.

-Sorry Duchess, I guess I wasn't cut out for alicorn material after all...-

Starlight puzzled as she saw her death approaching when flickers of plasma embers billowed out of Godzilla’s jaws and heralded the beam. She cradled Raiga’s head close to her chest.  

-At least we bought everypony time Raiga.-

She lowered her brow and closed her eyes, igniting her horn in one last act of defiant courage against the monstrosity; putting up a magical shield around herself and Raiga as Godzilla’s beam flew forward. It stood no chance, a barrier from a single tired unicorn, at stopping the beam but the show of force was the more important factor. If Starlight thought she was going to die, she wasn't going to die afraid. Little did young Glimmer suspect, she’d succeeded in every regard. The two heroines of Manehattan had bought time for the evacuation to pull most of the city back, and enough time for someone else to arrive.

In a blinding flash of lightning, everything in the crater changed. Two crystals shot out of the sky and impaled the ground on either side of Starlight and Raiga, erecting a barrier magnitudes more powerful than the weakened unicorn’s. The shield blocked Godzilla’s ray, dissipating itself and the attack a moment before an enormous shape flew across the city and tackled Godzilla back into the river and landed on top of him. 

The rush of wind briefly stunted Starlight Glimmer’s hearing as it blew debris around in all directions, but a familiar warmth of a benign magic soon wrapped around her form and caught her. The emerald green glow gently lifted her and Raiga up and set them down in the palm of a bus sized hand. Starlight had barely been let down on the red chitin of a kaiju's arm when Duchess Chrysalis, not letting any fatigue of charging two kaiju slow her down, sprinted from Dame Destroyah’s shoulder to her arm and grabbed her student in a frightened hug. Looking past Chrysalis’ hooves and chest, Starlight spotted Sir Xenilla rising from the surf and lifting up Godzilla with his hand on the tyrant’s throat. Godzilla and Xenilla growled, snorted, and hissed to one another; conversing between actions. Godzilla grabbed hold of Xenilla's hand, far too weakened by Raiga to fight back as he spat. 

“Was wondering how long I’d have to roam about to get your attention brother.”

Xenilla snarled, tightening his hold on Godzilla’s neck and tossing his self proclaimed sibling to the ground. The savior of Canterlot only spoke in a barely contained fury as he stomped towards Godzilla. 

“Gaira, Megaguirus, Obsidious, Zedus, Dr. Orga, Orka, Krystalak, Varan, Dr. Katagiri,-”

He kicked Godzilla in the snout, rolling him over and punctuating the rest of his list with a stomp to the tyrant’s chest. 

“-Biollante, Zigra, Guiron, Dagahra, Pulgasari, the whole of Sydney, Boston, and Tokyo!”

He stomped on Godzilla’s chest hard enough to break every rib in it. But even as he spat up blood, Godzilla wouldn’t scream or do anything other than crack a bloodied smirk.



“Trip-” 

He coughed up several dozen gallons of redness from his throat as Xenilla hoisted him up with telekinesis. 

“-down mem-ory lane brother?"

“All the souls I’ve murdered, for letting the child that grew into you live.”

"You haven’t even gotten to my fav-rites yet! What was that red saurian’s name again? The tall one with the flippers, you liked that one. N-ame escapes me though.”

That hit a nerve. Xenilla’s breathing quickened and he roared, his eyes and spines ignited with red light. He snapped forward and grabbed Godzilla, shocking him with a fully charged nuclear pulse that sent the saurian flying back several hundred meters from the shockwave alone. He hit the ground with an earthquake, but wasn’t the only tremor ripping into the ground. The shriek Xenilla emitted before pounding the earth with his charging footsteps was more than enough of a sign for Destroyah to stay back. This was a personal affair and Xenilla was about to finish what Raiga started. Xenilla kicked Godzilla to roll him over, the crystalline kaiju growling, dorsal spines were soon brimming with light that bled onto Godzilla’s face like the raindrops from above. 

“No. More...”

Xenilla smashed a nuclear pulse charged tail slam into Godzilla, hitting him hard enough to expend the last of the energy charge Cadenza’s crystal had given him. A beaten, battered, monster of a unicorn lay in a crater of rubble as Xenilla loomed over him. Despite how much pain he was in and seeing his own doom forming in front of him, Godzilla only grunted a broken, bellowing chuckle once the light of Xenilla’s charging corona beam flooded the space around him.

“To y-ou, sparing me it was the greatest mistake you ever made. But I’m afraid, i-t won’t be the last one you make.”

A flicker of light crossed over from Godzilla’s body, slithering across his body like cracks spreading across glass. The second part of the charge crystal Cadenza made was beginning to kick in, locking onto the alicorn’s magic signature far away. Not realizing what was going on, Xenilla fired his beam. 

“You’re not wa-king up from this nightmare bro-ther, not just yet. Hehe, I’ll give Cadenza your regards….”

Godzilla vanished from the spot he lay in, the encapsulated teleportation spell warping him to the distant alicorn’s location. Xenilla’s beam bored into the earth below for several long seconds before he cut it off. Instantly reaching out across space, he sensed his species. One, an adult female, lay not far away in Destroyah arms. The other, another adult male, Godzilla, briefly appeared dozens of kilometers away to the north before vanishing under another of Cadenza’s cloaking spells. He’d gotten away. 

Xenilla’s face contorted and twitched, his body temperature spiking so high the raindrops around him were evaporating before they could even get close. The last thing Starlight Glimmer saw before passing out from exhaustion was Xenilla stomping a thundering footfall into the ground before throwing his head up and uttering a mix of a roar and scream, firing an enormous stream of plasma into the night sky.
> Epilogue: Looming Storms
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Raiga was able to hear her own heartbeat between her ears before she even opened her eyes. At first everything was nothing but a black canvas with flashing lights and swirls caused by excited nerves clouding any sense of detail, but after a few blinks her vision and mind returned to her own. And she was reminded of what happened right before she blacked out, lurching up from the hospital bed as the heart rate monitor spiked. She frantically looked to and fro, the image of a battered, but still very conscious and snarling Godzilla burned onto her retinas. She tried to summon up some electricity, and could feel it around herself, but her control was so far out of sync that she had about as much success in electrifying herself as she would trying to grab smoke. 

Fortunate she couldn’t turn herself into a living taser considering Starlight Glimmer was quick to grab onto the frightened siren. 

“Hey hey! Raiga, eyes on me!”

She yelped, causing Raiga to snap her head over to look at the unicorn and freeze. Her heart rate was still jolting, but after a few long seconds her breathing slowed and pulse calmed back down. 

“Wh-What happened?! Godzilla was-” 

“Gone. We’re in the hospital right now.” 

Starlight muttered while helping Raiga lean back into her propped up bed. She put a hoof over the kaiju-siren’s head to check for a fever as Raiga got a hold of herself. 

“D-Did we?”

She whispered, using the term ‘we’ as the memories of the battle played back through her head. If they were in a hospital then that meant the city was probably still in one piece, a fact that gave her both a lot of hidden hope and relief. Not needing to know the rest of that question to answer it, Starlight shook her head with a sullen frown. 

“No, he’s still alive. He escaped with a warp spell after the others came.”

Raiga tilted her head at the unicorn as the subtle beeping of the heartbeat monitor ticked on and off, having finally quelled down to a natural, slow beat. 

“Others?”

“More kaiju came to help us out, they drove Godzilla off.” 

“... Which ones?”

That’s when a series of heavy footsteps walked up from the direction of the children’s ward and a very tall shadow cast itself across the sheet wall. “Dame” Destroyah, as titled by the Duchess and alicorns after the defense of Canterlot, poked her head into the room wearing a purple nurse’s cap and medical garb as evidently as she wore a fang filled smile. 

“Hiya!” 

Raiga’s eyes twitched and instinct overrode any information Starlight had given her on the river trip, causing her heart rate to skyrocket as soon as she saw the familiar crimson body color and curved horn. The legless siren still managed to launch herself out of her bed fast enough that, had the snickering Destroyah not kicked it out of the way, Raiga would have crashed into the light hanger. She landed forcefully back on her bed, thrashing some as Starlight threw herself on top of Raiga to keep her from hurting herself. Destroyah pitched in, pinning down the siren with one forehoof in a casual manner that betrayed her gargantuan strength; while she dug through her own mane with the other hoof and pulled out a clipboard. 

“Let’s seeee...sixteen shattered ribs with three compound fractures, broken sternum in four places, ruptured left lung..ick, had to empty that one out, lacerations across 60% of your body with internal bleeding in your spleen, heart, stomach, liver, windpipe, and the upper end of your large intestine; shattered 92% of your right carpals, fourteen fractures on your radius and humerus, dislocated your left and right humerus, a shredded right tail fluke, third degree burns on your central torso to hip region; and multiple greenstick fractures on your frontal and parietal cranium. If I hadn’t helped them shove your severed lumbar vertebrae back into place you wouldn’t even be able to lunge at me just now. Only reason you’re not feelin’ any of this is the live-wire Lightning Dust hooked you up to for a recharge and all the pain killers we had to pump into yah!”

Destroyah quipped in a chipper tone despite ducking her head back and to the side rapidly to avoid the flailing hooves from Raiga. Starlight Glimmer wasn’t having as easy a time. 

“Argp! Raiga stop it! She’s on our side!” 

Raiga finally stopped trying to struggle free and flopped against the bed as exhaustion returned to her, the dulled pain resurfacing across almost all of her body with a vengeance. The places that hurt most were her energy pearls, each one cracked and occasionally giving off stressed, sputtering glows that flickered on and off dimly. 

“Ooooooow…” 

She groaned in a drawn out manner, Destroyah releasing her pin and rubbing the back of her own head. 

“Heh, um. Well, somebody’s getting a lollipop outta thiiiiis!”

She snickered awkwardly, spurring a new voice to enter the room. 

“Dame Destroyah! Please, have some more tact!” 

A refined but incredibly warm, motherly tone spoke and heralded Duchess Chrysalis’ entry. While she clearly bore some lines of stress from recent events, one of which included panic-charging two high end kaiju all by herself as soon as she found Xenilla and Destroyah, the regent of this mirrored Equestria still carried herself with a graceful stride. A stride that was all too happy to change up and cast a hug once Starlight Glimmer practically glomped her teacher and buried her muzzle into the good duchess’ shoulder. Chrysalis beamed, nuzzling her pupil affectionately while holding her close. She peeked out an eye and spied the head-tilting Raiga, her smile persisting as the changeling raised her head back up. 

“I don't think we've been properly introduced. After all, I believe you and my student here are the reason we have a mildly packed hospital and not a loaded morgue.”

Now remembering Starlight’s words at the river, the calmed Raiga put two and two together and placed the name of the unicorn’s beloved mentor and leader of this nation to the smiling changeling before her. She relaxed and sat herself up, still jolting a bit at Dame Destroyah’s touch as the latter helped her up gently. After all, the words “gentle” and “Destroyah” being in the same sentence was something she couldn’t conceive until a minute ago. She was about to say something to Chrysalis when another presence cut off her train of thought. 

Instinct flared at familiarity, signalling to her there was another of her kind, a male Gojirasaurus, was close by. For a moment she panicked, visions of the nightmarish imitation of Godzilla flashing before her eyes. But thankfully, her senses filled in some more detail that quickly dissuaded that worry. The sensing was slightly ‘off’ by the time she saw the tall shadow cast itself across the curtain. Just like with this baffling reflection of Destroyah, she was unsure how to feel when a familiar yet unfamiliar voice spoke dryly from beyond the fabric wall. 

“Duchess, may I enter?” 

Duchess Chrysalis raised her brow and glanced behind herself, raising a hoof to adjust her slipping glasses after nodding. She looked over at Raiga out of the corner of her eye. 

“There is someone else who’d like to see you now that you’re awake.”

She spoke in address to Raiga before throwing her voice out to the figure. 

“You can enter good Sir knight..”

Sir Xenilla telekinetically lifted the curtain and peeled it back in front of him as he slowly tread in. Ever the astute study of body language, Raiga quickly compared the giant blue unicorn to both the kaiju she remembered and the monster in a pony’s body she encountered in the Thicket. His horn, coloration, and sense of power were identical to the Xenilla she remembered; but everything else was different and there was hardly a similarity to be had to the unicorn Godzilla from the palace. This Xenilla didn’t hold his head high in a smug sense of superiority like the former, nor puffed his chest out and swaggered about like the latter. He strode forth with a thickly veiled, puzzled look on his face, rolling his shoulders with each step. This wasn’t a calculating enemy or a prideful conqueror, but rather someone who had a lot on his mind as he approached her. 

Raiga looked at the newcomer with a familiar face as he took his spot on an empty portion of the room, turned, and faced her. 

“Soon-To-Be Queen Starlight has told me much. You look a lot like someone I knew and tried to sway before, but it appears you are not her and are instead someone I’ve never met before. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about that, but something about your actions as of late tells me we’ll have a lot to talk about soon enough.” 

==================

Godzilla trudged through the dust storm without a mind to the sandblast he was getting from the thrashing gales nor the sharp and uneven stony terrain he tread across. After all, the disorienting storms and stone-laden ground were superb at masking his footprints ever since he surfaced from the river. It had been a long walk for him across Equestria, the fact most of the bones in his body were broken when he started off did him no favors for speed. But his path had been one he planned for and ensured it was safe, marching, hiking, and swimming along the hidden route Cadenza had hexed for just such an occasion, needing to keep Xenilla and Destroyah off his trail once the teleportation was enacted. 

Reaching a sheltered crevice in the badlands, Junior walked up to and through the perfect facade of rock wall, stepping into the cloaked cave behind it. He calmly strode forward, descending into a maze of near total darkness amongst the pillars and walls of lime and sandstone, with the only noise being the echoed howls of the sandstorm and dripping water from above. Recalling from memory, he mentally recited the directions to navigate through Cadenza’s old hideout. 

-Left, left, right, step back through the crevice, right, left, middle, then take the third ramp down.-

Even he had to be careful, if only to avoid any annoyances. If one could see through stone, they’d see this cave was littered with the alicorn’s crystals. If one didn’t know the correct path to tread, the illusions, warped perception, and ever-changing environment would induce a sense of misdirection and vertigo one would be hard pressed to pull free of if they ever did find their way into the remote and hidden location to begin with. That was one factor behind convincing the tyrant king that Empress Cadenza was worth teaming up with, her contingency plans were ones to rival Battra’s. Not even Celestia or Luna knew of this place, much less how to navigate it. While he would have prefered to stay in the Thicket for both elbow room and occasional entertainment with whatever deer tried to retrieve Aspen’s body again, this place was well beyond secure. 

He paused when his night vision-gazing eyes caught movement to his right and above him. Perched above on a half concealed stone shelf was a low crouching figure, almost entirely obscured by the outcroppings surrounding him. Even in a domain so well hidden and hard to navigate Godzilla had been properly paranoid enough to listen to suggestion and posted a sentry. After all, with Chrysalis knowing what he looked like one could never be too careful about changeling imposters. Not with how much of a precious resource was here. 

Godzilla curled his lip and hissed, letting glowing, radioactive mist trail out of his jaws. On command, Rodan backed down from his pounce-in-progress and bowed down. Godzilla grunted at the monstrous gryphon and nodded at him. The gesture was as close as one could get to him telling them to “keep up the good work” as Godzilla ever would give. With that settled, he tread through the tunnel Rodan was guarding, giving the cave wall a knowing pat to signal the submerged Anguirus it was definitely him. With all the misdirections, booby traps, dampening spells, and anti-scrying hexes Cadenza had installed over the years; it never hurt to have two other kaiju on guard duty. This was their fortress and anyone who tried to breach it was paying far more than what a life could give.

==================

Xenilla continued on, approaching Raiga’s hospital bed with a steady pace. 

“Had you been the one I thought you were at first, I’d be hesitant to do this. But, you are not.”

==================

Godzilla could see clearly now that the enchanted darkness and fog had lifted, stepping into a deceptively large chasm carved into the rocky cave. A carved path and illuminating crystals guided him past Battra Lea and Empress Cadenza, the two already setting up the surviving material from the Thicket that hadn’t gone up in smoke to get the new laboratory up and running. The monstrous unicorn followed the path to the back of the sanctum. There was something he needed to check on. 

==================

“I’ve brought my mistake to this world Raiga. The good Duchess may think otherwise but I don’t think of myself as a very good soul... but, this mistake has taken much from me and I intend to correct it before it can take from others. But, two against four can be a handful for myself and Destroyah-”

===================

Passing the length of the cavern into the back of the cave, Godzilla strode up to a sickly green and purple glow. It illuminated his features when he turned the corner and approached the crystalline coffin. Even now he could feel the power radiating off it, closing his eyes to embrace it as he walked towards the jeweled tomb. The dings, bruises, and scabs that littered his form evaporated away among the twinges of pain spurred by regeneration. He stopped and meditated before the pulsing aerenth and its glimmering contents. 

===================

“This wasn’t your fight, but it seems like nobody’s stopping you from joining in. So you have two choices to pick from. You can focus on finding your way back to your home and endure your stay at this hospital, or-”

Xenilla noted, raising a hoof and waving it across the room. His horn and shoulder patches glimmered, bringing forth a dual yellow and blue brilliance from a saddlebag he bore across his back. Xenilla levitated the healing and energy crystals to hover directly between his own and Raiga’s faces, the slowly rotating crystal shards flickering between their eyes as the two kaiju looked to each other. 

===================

Deep inside the aerenth coffin, the encased, near comatose form of King Sombra twitched and grimaced as his power was drained away from him. The darkness and wrathful power that had settled over the benevolent monarch since he ripped it away from the alicorn sisters was near infinite and replenished across his body and heart almost as fast as his captor could drain it away. His coma did nothing to dull the pain of either action. 

===================

The crystal levitated close enough to Raiga that the kaiju-turned-siren could practically taste the energy coming off it. Just the radiance emanating from the dual constructs was enough to cause some of her bruises to lighten. 

Xenilla finished his proposal. 

“-or you can help me finish what you started here.”

Raiga looked to the healing and energy crystals for a time before glancing down at her cracked and aching red conductor pearls. 

===================

The Tyrant King of the Monster’s eyes snapped open with a malefic grin, ruby red radiation trailing from his maw and dark magic smoke slithering out of his eyeballs. Back in the shadows, Battra Lea watched on with her own smirk. 

===================

In a small burst of yellow and blue radiance, the cracks and cuts in Raiga's pearls began to mend themselves back together. 

===================