Godzilla 2000: New Era, PART 11 · 4:51am Dec 31st, 2021
PART 10
Proofed by Lance-Omikron
Hina and illustrations by FallenAngel5414
Ami by EvoWizard
Additional illustrations by LordShrekzilla and Zeroviks
Ami Hayata wasn't expecting much when she was setting up her food stand. The twelve year old had set about that exact task, tying her hair back with a braid and net and putting on her apron alone without help. Her uncle Shin Hayata, a G-Force Colonel, was a dutiful and loving guardian; but he frankly could barely boil water and practically raised her on takeout and vendor food. So while he did assist any way he could, he was prone to culinary disaster if he tried helping her with the food prep. To be fair, nobody was expecting her to take so well to cooking when neither parent nor her uncle were in the practice. Still, distant support and yet independence in her efforts meant she was able to set up and breakdown her food stand with plenty of practice. Uncle Shin being away was abnormal, but not detrimental in this way. He was part of G-Force's patrols after all, and he had a plenty important task with the recent operations. Ami admittedly didn't know exactly what said operation was about, he wasn't part of the group rumored to be going to Amami island, but she soon got an idea as to why there was a communication's blackout when the UFO had passed over their apartment.
Ami shielded her eyes and squinted down the long street that weaved between distant buildings, glimpsing the hovering craft which had taken to looming over G-Force headquarters just on the edge of Tokyo proper. She shrugged and went back to business, ignoring any gawking crowds or frantic passerby stepping out to watch. She had been part of the generation who'd grown up with Mysterians being a thing for about half a century, not just in her life by in her parents' and Uncle Shin's lifetimes too. Aliens were just a fact of life to her family so a new one coming to town wasn't as world breaking as it otherwise might have been. Uncle Shin bringing work friends home sometimes that included hybrids or a few full-blooded Mysterians helped.
Besides, the UFO showing up meant lots of people would be getting out of work soon and be out in the streets grabbing grub!
Ami almost saw the yen signs in her eyes as the rice started cooking.
What she literally saw the moment she turned around was the rush of air going past her and the echoes of a loud crash.
Everything moved like a blur as her food stand and utensils went flying past her whilst her hair whipped about at a sharp angle. She was blown off her feet by the sudden gust and shockwaves, stumbling onto her hands and knees to look up and glimpse an absolutely destroyed Toyota Camry’s backend disappearing down the street. It was a coincidence that she was several meters away from the front of the small shoplet Uncle Shin had turned the front of their apartment into, but a fortunate one. Not a moment or two after the Camry went rolling off after having to smash through her stand, the entire front of the shoplet exploded into debris. Plastic, sheet metal, and ingredients went flying in all directions like shrapnel when a truck rammed into the structure and kept going. Thin drywall and limited metal or concrete was no match for the sheer mass of metal colliding with it, letting out horrific screeches and uproars of destruction. Ami screamed and covered her head to shield herself from the flying debris that spattered across her, glimpsing a semi-truck bulldoze its way into the apartment and go flying out the back of it like a cannonball.
It just didn’t stop! Blasting out of the now hollowed building with a truck sized hole left agape to the world beyond. Somehow through the shower of debris that used to be her home, Ami stumbled upon something that flopped to the ground beside her. At first she thought it was a ball of meaty ingredients, only to gasp and nearly gag at the sight of an eye staring back at her. The odd growth of flesh, muscle, and bone was the size of her arm and roughly tube shaped; like a tendril with an eye at the end somewhat akin to the eyestalk of a snail. Only the flesh was warped, deformed, and irregular unlike anything in nature. It was something Ami Hayata was only vaguely familiar with, and yet knew had come out of the truck which seemed deadset on chasing down a car just as deadset on getting away from it.
She cringed and kicked away the tumor staring at her and scrambled through the debris of her home, as confused neighbors came out to gawk or bombard her with questions. Ami ignored them and dug around where she guessed her room had been, stepping over the tattered remains of posters and her bed to find shattered wood that used to be her drawer. UFOs were one thing, but this? This was too much! Time to call Uncle Shin.
G-Force had a communications blackout, but he wasn’t keen to leave his niece without an emergency contact.
She picked up the pen-shaped transponder and clicked it to activate the signal, seeing a tell-tale beeping to alert Uncle Shin they’d be in need of some extensive remodeling.
Tires screamed and metal snapped, another chunk of the Camry ripped away and this time; the front passenger door didn’t survive the trauma. The hinge tore out entirely and took the door with it. The interior of the car was assailed by blasting gusts of wind caked in the stench of sparking metal and burning rubber. Outside, now with nothing to dampen its visage or uproar, the twisted behemoth of the truck roared its engine and tried to ram the Camry off the road. It was only by Yuki smashing onto the brakes and letting it overshoot the sideswipe that avoided getting bashed into the metal divider along the median.
“How the hell does it keep finding us?!” Ichinose screamed, wrenching the wheel aside and forcing her poor Camry to fishtail back and forth to keep directly behind the large semi-truck, within the previously opened blindspot.
“I don’t know! Did it put a tracker on us or something?!” Yuri Tachibana yelled back, having to call out over the blasts of wind hitting her in the face.
“When would it have the time to do-”
“I don’t know! That’s how it works in spy movies!”
The truck blared its horn, no doubt a tactic to unnerve the meddlesome driver and it was working. Yuki had to react in a split second to every moment, weaving right and left to stay in the blindspot, then slowing down abruptly to avoid another attempted collision when the truck slammed on its brakes. Her car thumped the back of the trailer, but she managed to slow down enough to dampen the blow and avoid an airbag detonation. Thankfully the truck had far greater mass and slowed down slower than her car, but they were taking too much damage. Multiple emergency lights were lit up on her limited dashboard and she could smell burning oil coming from the engine to indicate the motor’s oil tank was punctured. Either this thing would smash them up on the road, run them off it, or they’d lose all momentum soon enough.
The road noise and bumpy pavement rattled every bone in her body, and the truck wouldn’t stop blasting its horn.
“Well look for anything it might have left back there! If you wanna check the bumper, there’s the exit!” She sarcastically yelled out whilst pointing to the giant hole in her cab due to the missing passenger side door.
Yuri gulped but quickly checked about. She’d have to hope the monster really hadn’t left something behind on the bumper or underneath the car when Yuki had rammed it into the wall. It was thrashing violently then and flailing about, so maybe it didn’t have time or focus to do so. There wasn’t much she could do about that, so best to check the other options. She busily looked about, trying to shield her eyes with an arm so the wind gusts didn’t blind her.
But there was no dice. The only things in the Camry were some photography equipment, the medical kit she’d already ripped apart, herself, Ms. Ichinose, and Io. Absent-mindedly, Tachibana glanced at the poor girl sympathetically, seeing the youth was still worryingly unconscious. Being knocked out for a few moments or minutes was alarming, but typical. But it had been almost half an hour now since she took that fall. If only she had more than just bandages to try and help her!
Yuri’s pupils dilated in recollection. She had seen something snap off the abomination trying to Mad-Max them. Her eyes darted to Io’s leg, which had that squid tentacle snagged on it when she’d hastily pulled the girl in. It was disgusting to look at, much less get off her; but she hadn’t the time to remove it when loading Io up.
-Had to remove that thing while on the road, hooks from the suckers were dug in.-
She felt queasy just remembering prying it off, seeing the gig-like snag hooks found on some very large deep sea squid that left several noticeable cuts across Io’s ankle and lower leg. She’d thrown it aside in her haste to care for the girl, not thinking much of it beyond getting it off carefully given it was limp and dead.
A look to the floorboards where she’d thrown it aside showed nothing. Not even any fluid like blood. The carpet was completely dry. Her eyes narrowed and she held onto a seat to reach down and feel around, not really knowing what to think but wanting to be sure.
A jolt of shot up her arm, originating at her palm, and against her better judgment to pull away, Yuri instead clenched her hand down and squeezed something into her grip and wrenched back. Yanking it out from its hiding place underneath the driver’s seat, Yuri pulled free what looked like a strange gestalt of a bat and octopus. Reformed from the biomass of the torn off tendril, the strange creature snapped and clattered its teeth and tried to sink them into Yuri’s fingers again. It would have had the understandably startled woman not screamed and hurled it against the window to smash it.
“OOOIUUWAA!H” Yuri shrieked as she tried to pull away from the foul thing and keep Io behind her. Her efforts to pull away were soon undone when the truck banged the back of the trailer against the side of the car and violently rattled the interior, “THERE’S ANOTHER ONE BACK HERE!”
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON BACK THERE?!” Ichinose cried out as she tried to get a look through the mirrors, unable to take her primary vision off the truck that attempted to bash into them again and forced her to retreat back.
“K-K-Ke-” Yuri watched on, wide eyed and horrified as the unsightly thing reconfigured into a mixture that had the body of a rat and the elongated torso and neck of a brightly banded snake. Tachibana didn’t need a zoology degree to make the educated guess that bright bands on a snake meant it was lethally venomous, which proved very true in the case of this sea krait. Additionally, several pustules of mass, like tumors, slid off of the body, ejecting mass that it had to force off before it could start moving again. It shuddered and then looked right at her, arching its back and pouncing despite being even smaller now.
Tachibana’s eyes darted to the first-aid kit and she soon hefted it by the handle to try and keep the small monster at bay.
“K-Keep driving! I got this! Kinda!” Tachibana cringed while bracing for the worst as the small drone crept closer, ready to spring out like rats so often did when uncovered.
Yuki Ichinose could put two and two together that if some serious chaos was going on in the backseats, it was no doubt connected to the one in the truck having always known where they were. Just how many of these things were there?! Was it some kind of group-think where they could sense one another? Could anything block the signal?! Could anything actually stop it?! She hadn’t the slightest idea what they were up against, what the rules were in. She only could tell what the game they were in, life or death; and they had to act fast not to be the latter.
"Get it out as fast as you can!" Yuki called out whilst rapidly analyzing the roadways, "You take this road more, that overpass is up ahead to the left, right?!"
Tachibana yelped as the serpent hissed and snapped at her, fortunately able to dodge on account of it being a marine snake and not quite as agile as a terrestrial viper, she batted the head back with the medical kit.
"Right!"
Yuki grimaced and tried to keep directly behind a truck to stay in the blind spot, a difficult task given it was swerving into another lane. She soon found out why when it abruptly sped up before slamming on its brakes. There was a loud crunching and car horn going off, Yuki quickly aware the truck had slammed into something in front of it before using the collision as a means to rapidly de-accelerate and send its back trailer lunging backwards. She tried her best to avoid rear-ending it at full speed, dodging sideways with a sharp swerve. Unable to stop and stay behind it, she was forced to go past it and get parallel with the big rig, which wasted no time in bulldozing forward and throwing the car it had used as an emergency brake aside to clip into her back left tire.
Tachibana lurched back as the serpent rat snapped forward and was sent flying in their direction by the sudden hit. She tried to shield Io with her body, spreading her arms to keep the girl behind her whilst holding up the medical kit like a shield. The plastic box caught the hybrid across the middle and it simultaneously clung and wrapped around it, it's elongated midsection arcing over the lid while tiny arms clutched The edge to give leverage for lunges with its elongated neck. She swung it about frantically, trying to keep it shaking so it couldn't launch down and bite her in the hand or face.
The entire suspension screamed and rattled, with a very telltale pop sounding off when Yuki managed to coax her Camry forward to get away from the truck. The side panels and what was left of her trunk was crushed and fell off, the tire popped and bent out of shape. Sparks were starting to fly out from the bottom of the car, visible in the side mirror. They were driving on the rim and that would not take them very far.
The intersection was rapidly approaching, not even a few hundred meters away. Yuki knew full well they only had one shot at this.
Her rear view mirror became entirely swallowed up in a dark visage. The mangled front of the truck had been bent and broken in multiple places, pieces of other cars stuck into it with jagged twisted points, the absence of the grill making them look like gnashing teeth from some snarling monster roaring and anger at being denied prey. At being denied a little girl in the backseat.
Ichinose's fingers went white at the knuckles.
"LEFT OR RIGHT?!"
It took every ounce of Yuri's concentration to be able to yell out the right answer, dodging a lunge by the sea serpent’s jaws.
“LEFT LEFT! BUT SWING RIGHT FIRST!”
Ichinose didn’t argue, she stomped on the accelerator as the intersection streamed closer and closer. She could only eyeball the distance and gauge the time left.
Ichinose screamed over the blaring truck horn, “ON THREE! ONE!”
Tachibana grit her teeth as she thrashed the first-aid kit against the back seat and snapped it open, medical supplies flying everywhere. The serpentine drone squirmed as it flopped against the seat, half-covered in spare bandage wrapping and getting hit in the face by tweezers. Quickly getting free it braced to pounce, back arching and tail thrashing back and forth.
“TWO!”
The drone watched as Tachibana slipped further back in fear, and it lunged to capitalize. Fangs were exposed as they aimed at her face. The truck horn roared and the massive vehicle steamed forwards while the crossroads came into spitting distance. The overpass bridge, stop light, and warning signs about sharp turns and low clearance coming into full view. Yuki Ichinose registered where every passing car was at that moment, preparing to thread the needle. All she could do now, was drive as instructed and as was instinctive, and pray.
“THREE!”
She swerved to the right, clipping the trucks’ jagged front with the side of her car and watching as the whole tire ripped out as she’d planned. It caused them to suddenly lurch to the side, now that they were driving on an exposed rim with the rubber of the tire going free in the gaping maw.
In the fractions of the moment, Yuri Tachibana opened the medical kit wide and grimaced, surprising the drone by lunging forward to meet it mid-pounce. She hit it across the body with the flat of the opened kit, the long neck and serpentine head of the sea snake lunging past. There was a brief stabbing pain in her nose, a fang hooking into the skin. But Tachibana didn’t give up on her plan. Putting every ounce of strength she could muster for the effort, she jammed her palms flat against the lid and bottom of the opened kit and snapped it shut as hard and fast as possible. The fang was yanked free of her skin, a few drops of venom that was almost delivered spraying free from the hollow points of the teeth.
Tachibana caught the body inside the kit and crushed down on the tail and neck sticking out of it, bones snapping and flesh squishing as she exploited every ounce of manic strength she could summon. The lurch of the car to the right, aided by the lost wheel, was used to its fullest. She couldn’t throw easily from the angle she was at, but she could let inertia do it’s thing. And unlike the drone, she’d remembered to fasten her seatbelt.
Tachibana both tossed and let go of the kit, which was carried sharply to the right as the car swerved to turn left instead. The thrashing Millennian drone, unable to get free of the first-aid kit box, was promptly carried out the gaping hole in the cab where the car’s passenger side door had once been. The wind sucked it out and sent it flying past the back window. Had she time to do it, Yuri Tachibana wished she could have smirked or flipped it off.
The truck wavered, evidently briefly distracted by the momentary loss of its eyes in the car and means to track its location. And with the vehicle it was pursuing flying right into a blindspot because of how high the truck’s driver seat was, the drone driving it had to hyper focus on the Camry and nothing else. It was close, so very close when it turned to follow them and floored the accelerator whilst Yuki Ichinose did the same.
Billows of sparks flew out from where the Toyota Camry had lost a tire, far more than when it had gone flat, and it limped through the intersection; almost out of steam. It was leaking fluids, was crippled, and couldn’t survive another direct hit. The monster of a semi-truck plowed through the intersection in pursuit, not minding the traffic-light and warning sign smashing into the cab. It gained on Ichinose’s car as the latter dove under the overpass bridge, accelerating its multi-ton mass faster and faster!
Everything in the rear-view mirror of Yuki’s car was blackened by the shadows of the bridge, blotted out by the metallic demon coming to claim them. It thumped the Camry’s rear end and sent the small car into a spin-out as the abused back wheel rim finally snapped the axle and went flying off.
Even whilst spinning to a stop enough to be facing their attacker, the photographer breathed an exhale of relief she’d been holding onto when the cab of the truck crumbled inwards from slamming into the low-clearance bridge at full speed. It might have weighed multiple tons, but the few hundred tons of concrete that made up the bridge wasn’t budging.
It was magnificent to watch in slow-motion, the front end of the truck arching up as the cab’s top and then the trailer it was hauling smashed into the overhanging support beams without so much as denting them. The top half of the truck jack-knifed upwards like the front was being snapped around to loop back, further smashing itself into the ceiling that crushed it down like a soda can.
A large hunk of the truck however snapped off with a metallic shriek, spinning end over end and rocketing forward. It snapped against the ground with a small burst of busted pavement, rotating like a helicopter blade and hurtling right for the Toyota Camry. Behind the wheel Yuki Ichinose’s eyes widened and she braced whilst praying. Her car was still in a spin-out, out of control even with her talent behind the wheel; and there just wasn’t enough time to get out of the way. The best thing she could do was yank the wheel counter to the way they were rotating. It would keep the front of the car facing the incoming debris, hopefully keeping the potential impact zone away from Tachibana and Io. The Toyota Camry screamed, grinding against the pavement in multiple spots that resulted in geysers of sparks shooting into the air. It slid backwards, whilst the pinwheeling debris closed in.
Ichinose saw the sharp panel of metal, several meters long and warping in mid-air, come right at her and she closed her eyes.
Through the veil of her eyelids, the light of the entrance to the bridge overpass was blocked out. Tires screamed and metal audible crunched; and yet somehow she was still alive. Still winching, she peeked open an eye and was soon confronted with the Godzilla Prediction Network logo just past the hood of her destroyed car. The GPN van’s workings and frame groaned, the vehicle tilted up at an angle on one side with the drivers’ side wheels pushed off the ground due to the spear of twisted metal lodged in the side. The groaning intensified before it tilted back to stability, with the two wheels contacting the road again and making the van bob up and down on its suspension.
Ichinose was still in a daze as the GPN van’s driver side door opened up and Yuji Shinoda, heedless to the contents of his van spilling into the road, hopped out. The impact of taking the hit had snapped the hinge on the van’s side door, which hung limply on its mounting with papers, instruments, and containers falling across the van’s floor or tumbling onto the road. He sprinted around to get to the totalled Camry, tear-reddened eyes wide and sweat staining his face.
“Yuki?! Yuki!?” He shouted, reaching the driver’s side window and thumping on the hood.
Ichinose was still in shellshock, tremors in her vision from all the adrenaline she’d been overdosed with for far longer than was safe. She kept looking ahead, still as a statue at the van which had intercepted the hit. She’d known taking a hit from that flying debris could have been lethal and she’d still chosen to do it, but her heaving breath and thumping heart were still processing it all.
A moment or two later and through the haze, she finally let go of her steering wheel and gripped the roller for the window, lowering it whilst still looking straight ahead. She swallowed a breath and slowly rotated her head to the side. Her adrenaline fueled tremor-filled vision clouded with a few tears, at last able to fully breathe. Dr. Shinoda gripped the edges of the window, looking broken down himself and not judging, and tried to keep his voice quiet.
“Y-Yuki… Io?” Yuji whispered with a swallow.
Yuki Ichinose just nodded, her pupils still contracted into pin-points as she motioned with her thumb towards the backseat. Shinoda slowly nodded to her, reaching through and patting her shoulder assuringly, before he moved to one of the only somewhat intact doors on the car. It was still scratched across the paint, with torn and dented metal curling into the frame. He very carefully opened the door to the backseat and breathed a moderate sigh of relief at the sight of a still unconscious, but still in-one-piece Io. Her pale gray hair was spilled out in a mess and she had a bandage wrapped around her forehead. But she was still in her seatbelt, with the arm of another stretched across her. The young woman was actually vaguely familiar to sight, Shinoda remembering the infamous news report from four years prior with Godzilla Junior’s battle with the Destroyah. He’d seen her on TV at the time, and now he got to see that short crop of red hair in person.
He swallowed a breath and tried to pitch his brow up to look as friendly as he could, given how much of a mess he still looked. Right now, trying to look presentable or helpful was just about the only thing he could do to keep from falling apart himself.
“Miss- Yuri Tachibana, I presume?” Dr. Shinoda panted, holding out a hand.
A good few moments to collect herself from the gambit of life-or-death later, and Tachibana managed to summon the constitution to shake his hand.
“H-Heya, heard of you.”
“Likewise.”
“Ar-Are you two okay back there?” Yuki Ichinose called out from the driver’s seat, rubbing at her temple to try and fight off the headache induced by the tremors.
“... Well, alive?” Tachibana chuckled with a grimace, “I-um I kept Io steady… she’s still breathing.”
She tried to hold a smile and shrugged, “Kid missed the whole show.”
“Let’s hope there’s not a re-run,” Ichinose groaned as she unbuckled herself from her seat.
“Thank you,” Shinoda whimpered, sniffling back a few tears as he stroked Io’s head and checked her nose to confirm she was indeed still steadily breathing.
He glanced at the two women, gratitude overflowing his chest and making it feel like his heart would burst. Concern for looking macho or grown-up were quickly tossed aside when he leaned forward to kiss his little girl’s forehead and gently put her against the seat. The chance of meeting whom he had, being where he had been, and finding them was astronomic. A billion billions to one. And yet, the cards had fallen where they did. His prayer, unlikely as it seemed, had been answered by a smile of fate. He worried he’d lose everything this morning. Getting to keep hold of anything, especially Asuka’s legacy, was a godsend of relief to the nearly broken man.
He cried and bowed his head, “Thank you…”
“.. H-Hey,” Yuki Ichinose’s extremely soft voice whispered to him.
She’d unbuckled from her seat and gotten out, wobbling on her feet as she did, to put a hand on his shoulder. She tugged on it to coax him back. He got out of the car’s interior and kept his eyes closed as tears, both from the terror he felt and relief that came after, streamed from them. He couldn’t look at her, instead he just got on his knees and bowed. The wind blew under the bridge, carrying the scent of motor oil, smoke, and busted asphalt. He didn’t let it crinkle his nose, just breathing in heaves whilst keeping his head and body bowed.
Trembling hands slapped onto his shoulders, gripping them before pulling him up slightly to get back on his feet. The cusp of Yuji Shinoda’s eyelids opened and his heart stopped briefly upon glimpsing Asuka in his mind’s eye; before Yuki Ichinose surged forward and hugged him. They were both a mess, and yet had one thing on their mind.
“... Thanks, for the save,” Ichinose whispered, squeezing him a bit tighter.
Against norms or customs, Shinoda returned the gesture and squeezed her lightly across her middle. It was telling which one of them could hold up under pressure better in that it was Ichinose, with all that she’d been put through lately, that was able to compose herself first and pull back. They let go of each other and Ichinose smiled as much as she could, pushing a few of Yuji’s bangs out of his eyes. There was a nod she gave, a simple gesture that he understood and managed to return.
“Well, looks like this’ll need to go to the shop,” Tachibana quipped from the backseat as she undid her seatbelt and exited the car. Awkward as it was to be on an open highway, the truck was blocking the one-way entrance to this side of the bridge. Plus with how much she’d been put through in that car, she doubted she’d want to be in a Camry again; no offense to Ichinose.
She was just about to say something else, when the breath gasped out of her throat. Yuki looked towards her protege, only to see the younger woman was gawking at something up ahead. Tachibana quivered and raised a shaking hand to point.
“... Ah hell. Yuji,” Ichinose whispered as she backed away.
Shinoda stilled, already sensing what he’d had his back to even before the sound of snapping metal and glass came out from the destroyed truck. The wreckage was still smoking and the gas line had broken somewhere in the destruction, lit aflame by the sparks. But even with the fires wreathing the wreckage, something was moving. It oozed and swatted, kicking the door off the cab and sending it flying across the ground. The mass shifted and slumped, pushing itself through broken glass and twisted metal to get out of the truck. Glimpsed through lapping flames, it crawled and dragged itself free, reconfiguring its body into a myriad of shapes to try and adapt. All caution was thrown into the wind now, and it was heedless to its own safety or need for cover. Large arms gripped the hood of the truck, squeezing down to crunch the metal between its fingers to gain leverage; before it launched. Short wings were spread, attached to the back of the large arms that reached forward. It shot through the flames, catching fire in a few spots to burn and char; but it didn’t slow down.
The form was still cognifuring from the mangled human shape it had once been, viscera and muscle still visible in many sections; with glass and scrap metal lodged within the body. And yet the shape was totally unlike anything seen by human eyes. Exaggerated arms, shorter and deformed legs, both ending in clawed digits. A bulky body with a face approximating the union of a frog and goblin shark; topped in a malformed and broken knife-shaped horn. It reached up and ripped a twisted piece of scrap metal from its face, letting its eyes regenerate from between smoldering parts of skin. Still burning and smoking, the deformed beast was an apex predator from another world. Pustules and tumors erupted from the body where it was trying to heal, forcing the Millennian drone to rip them off before they compromised mobility at its joints. It was logged as a Jyarumu, but to the horrified trio watching it; it was a pure monstrosity.
The jagged, lipless maw spread open and a flicker appeared to grow up from its gullet into the throat. Its irregular eyes were locked upon the meddlers, clearly taking aim.
Yuji looked at the beast, his companions, and his daughter in the back of the car behind him; and wasted no time in running out into the open whilst waving his arms frantically to draw its attention. He did appear to succeed in that front as it lurched forward and let loose a flash of white and a geyser of mist spewed from between its jaws. Dr. Shinoda dove behind a metal divider for the roadway median, and instantly felt the temperature plummet. Frost crawled over his skin and stuck his sweaty shirt to his hairs painfully, but he soon was aware of how he’d avoided the worst of it. The entire side of the metal divider and a trail across the road leading up to it was covered in icicles, which had been launched with such force that several of them jammed into and bent the metal on impact.
The Jyarumu croaked, pulling another tumor that had grown across its eye and coughing up visible trails of mist in doing so. Yuji Shinoda gawked at what just happened whilst scrambling up.
-Like a high-pressure sprayer that shoots liquid nitrogen instead of water!-
One that was recharging, given how the alien was disgustingly inhaling air and gurgling fluid in some kind of chemical alteration going on inside the chest.
“YUJI CATCH!” Yuki screamed before she pitched something to him like a fastball.
Shinoda managed to snag what she’d hurled his way, Ichinose having thought fast and dug it out of the totalled Camry. His stupor was thankfully quick brief upon getting a look at it. It was thankful his endorphins had kicked in and he didn’t register the pain of stubbing a finger catching what he recognized as one of his data harddrives.
“What do I do with this?!”
Tachibana motioned with her arms in front of her as if she was holding it, “It was trying to take them with Io! Hold it out!”
It was a gamble, and a big one. They hadn’t been there when Io was hiding from the monster, nor seen that it was scouring the GPN office to find them. All they had to go on was Io doing everything she could to protect those drives while escaping from it, and extrapolating from there. Shot in the dark, a leap of faith.
And yet, he still held it out in front of himself like the most ineffective shield in history. The Jyarumu chortled, coughing up and heaving to ready another cryo-blast, and yet one never came. Shinoda looked past his own work to see the alien creature, swelled up like a bloated balloon, looking right at him but not firing its barrage. Glowing white and blue was visible through the veiny, burnt skin on the throat, and mist seeped between crooked and irregular teeth rimming the jaws. And yet, it didn’t attack. It stood still, staring at him whilst parts of its body burned or remained impaled by broken glass and twisted metal.
Through the mists however, Shinoda glimpsed its eyes swiveling around to the two women.
“HEADS UP!” Yuji Shinoda screamed, trying to run to their position to shield them, but he wasn’t fast enough just as the Jyarumu swung around and threw its jaws open.
Tachibana acted quickly and shoved her mentor aside before running out into the open. The alien took aim and turned its body to track her movements. By chance, a piece of metal lodged in its shoulder joint caught on the flexing tendon. The alien had been forced to turn itself too far and the obstruction impeded its movement ever so slightly. The Jyarumu flinched and was unbalanced for the briefest moment, projectile vomiting the pressurized fluid at her position with less than ideal precision. Water in the air was flash frozen to add to the ejected mass, being too large for Tachibana to dodge entirely. She threw herself to the ground and soon screamed as the cold mist passed by her and smashed into a pillar, flash freezing it. Warm red ran across the ice and she struggled on the ground. Her pant leg was frozen to the asphalt and several icicles had penetrated it, all but nailing her lower shin to the ground.
A thrown camera tripod smashed into the Jyarumu’s shoulder and hit the exposed metal, causing the alien’s arm to twitch and collapse. The Millennian Drone stoically ripped the scrap metal from its shoulder, clawing back to its feet and glared at the source of the trouble. Yuki Ichinose was backing away towards the Camry and GPN van, crouched and keeping low to sprint away as needed.
It looked at her and stalked forward several steps, tensing and bracing itself as if to pounce. Yuki was expecting it to fire again or charge her, planning to run behind the van to keep it away from Io or the pinned Tachibana. The Jyarumu charged up another freezing blast, spurring Yuji to try and sprint to Ichinose and obstruct it with the harddrive again. Neither he nor Ichinose were expecting the fin-like protrusions on its arms to really be wings, despite looking far too small to lift the creature into flight. To be fair to both of their zoologic knowledge, there wasn’t any megafauna on Terra which was propelled into the sky that they knew of.
The Jyarumu pounced and extended its short wings, expelling a geyser of the pressurized gas and fluid from vents across its back to send it launching into the air like a jetpack. It wasn’t entirely flight, as the emission was brief, but it was rapid enough to clear considerable distance and get airborne to glide closer. It swooped down upon both of them and would have hit either had Shinoda not tackled Ichinose into the opened Camry’s driver side front door to avoid the unconscious Io. He’d wanted to go for the van, but there was no option and had he been a second slower vaulting over the frozen median guard rails and sprinting over; either of them would have been killed instantly. The alien hit the ground so hard it fractured the asphalt and sent a shockwave through the air.
Both members of the GPN madly scrambled backwards, glimpsing the monstrosity turn around to bear down on them from outside of the totaled car. The froggish face, frosted and yet burned, looked at them with uncannily human eyes as it bore closer, hand over hand to claw its way to its prey. The car door was gripped and ripped off its hinges, rattling the entire vehicle. Both of them screamed and tried to get away, scrambling backwards and kicking their feet in the cramped space. It was perhaps a passing thought in the back of either of their minds, that there was a glimpse of movement through the fractured windshield; a blur heading their way.
Mist leaked from crooked fangs, the horned head sticking into the car whilst clawed hands pried open the frame to get more room. Light began to flicker within the drone’s gullet, forcing its way up.
There was a scream unlike that which had been heard before in the hour, and something splashed across the opened ports and wounds dotting the Jyarumu’s back.
A metal canister with radiation hazard logos emblazoned across it audibly rang as it bounced across the ground, empty.
The Millennian Drone froze, eyes dilating to become a sea of blackness. Tremors coursed through its body, with a wave visibly coursing across its skin. The drone stumbled backwards, letting go of the car and rearing backwards. All at once, it seemed like its body went to war with itself. There was an attempt to absorb the new biomass, copy the new DNA samples; but something went horribly wrong. Cellular activity and replication skyrocketed. New mass was rapidly generated, devouring energy stores to control the process. Like cancer in every system at once, rapidly accelerated, the drone’s entire body bulged and expanded with grotesque deformities and tumors. The hide oscillated between the norm for a Jyarumu, several shades of human or marine animal skin, to growing charcoal-gray scales and scutes. The drone thrashed and clawed at itself, trying to eject the increasingly numerous masses that no longer responded to its command and will. It tore an arm engorged with tumors free, only to have the same appear across its face. Hobbling on two malformed legs, it practically tore itself in half in an effort to stop the out of control cellular activity.
Its DNA was falling apart, scrambling into a slurry, and the rampant cellular duplication and replication was destroying its energy stores. The Drone’s own body went berserk and it fell over, imprisoned within the chaos of its own rioting cells. This drone’s lifespan was already short due to solar damage and having to reconfigure so much, and this action had snuffed out everything it had left.
The Millennian drone thrashed about for a few seconds more, before collapsing; drowning in a sea of its own swollen, cancerous growths. A decaying white rapidly grew over the mass, crawling out from the interior outwards, until every piece of tissue that wasn’t dead matter like parts of bone or keratin was burned out. It cracked and crumbled, breaking away in even the slight wind billowing in under the bridge to reveal a pandemonium of a skeleton within. Human, fish, that which was unknown to this world; and something very familiar. Erupting from a twisted compound ribcage, was a maple-leaf shaped Godzilla spine.
Police cruisers and a fire truck audibly blared their sirens in closing distance down the road. Ichinose and Shinoda's eyes slowly migrated from the corpse of their attacker, up to the pair of legs made visible when the drone crumbled away more.
Standing behind the slain abomination was the one who’d thrown the Godzilla blood sample at it, Io Shinoda panted as her facial veins bulged with use of powers unknown. She looked at the awestruck Yuki and Yuji, eyes at first entirely blacked out. In a few panting breaths, normality returned, and she collapsed to her knees as rescue at last came.
===================
An angler fish lazily removed itself from the overcast beams of the small remote-controlled submersible, the floodlights mounted on the front of the ROV now piercing into mostly empty blackness aside from the detritus slowly filtering down from the surface like loose snow. The machine, a yellow contraption with an extendable neck and red grasping arm, swiveled the yellow, blue, and green colored optics placed upon the ‘head’ scope to cycle through various vision types as it whirled through the blackness, no doubt rousing all manner of deep-sea life from lantern fish to giant squid whom kept out of view.
The ship the ROV corresponded with via its long tether cable was kept poised and primed at a moment’s notice to get away with all haste. With all the strange goings-on currently and the high likelihood of a near-untraceable Godzilla being out and about in the northern Pacific, an unarmed scouting vessel was taking no small amount of caution in its endeavors. That was, after all, why the expedition had sent the prototype “N.ext millennium I.ntelligence G.athering E.lectronic L.iaison” or “NIGEL” instead of anyone in any minisub.
Survey of the concretion that fell off from the UFO had been swiftly conducted and marine biology consultants identified certain types of barnacles and deep-sea worm tubes as region-specific. So specific in fact that there was only one known stretch of ocean where they all overlapped with each other. That was where they were searching now, about 400 km south-southeast of the Amami islands and a few hundred more from the Mu Archipelago that had abruptly risen from the ocean during the battle between the new Mothra and Dagahra several years ago.
Already there was some speculation as to some tie between the craft and the seafloor tectonics tied to the Mu islands. But that wasn’t in the most pressing curiosity within the minds of those onboard the Calico, nor the operator of the ROV Dr. Mendel Craven. What the portly American had in his worrisome mind when C.C.I contracted them for this scouting operation was the observation that this wasn’t far from where the Eiko-Ryu had run into trouble. He really was beginning to reconsider that ‘new project’ Dr. Tatopoulos had spoken about in New York.
After a particularly large stretch of empty ocean bordering the bottom, the sensors aboard the remotely operated craft started to pick up peculiar readings. Dr. Craven eyed the results and perked his brow, seeing the meters rise as he called over his colleague.
“Dr. Darian, you might want to have a look at this! I think we're onto that ‘something weird’ we talked about.”
The called upon oceanographer joined her pupil at the controls, holding up a hand to the attention of the awaiting captain of the Calico just in case she was about to yell at him to the floor the proverbial accelerator to get away.
“What is it, Mendel?” Dr. Darian noted.
Craven pointed at the readings, displaying several meter readouts starting to gradually increase.
“Temperature, gamma, beta, and alpha radiation levels are starting to pick up. And I think we have a magnetic field disturbance starting to go on,” he noted as the orientation sensors started to go berserk, “The compass seems to be trying to do the electric slide!”
Dr. Darian bit her lip at trying to have to make a judgment call, the only thing visible on the seafloor being loose bits of detritus and the inky blackness of the depths as they moved along in undersea hill, “Let’s get to the top of this ridge, it could just be undersea volcanic activity. This region is known for that.”
Mendel grimaced, “Let’s just hope NIGEL can handle the magnetic fields, this is weird even for the deep ocean…”
Dr. Craven continued to move NIGEL over the ridge, anticipation building as the readings continued to go higher and higher with the ascent and reaching up the peak. What the deep-sea cameras mounted on the front of the ROV showed were something they had been expecting. The area was certainly geothermally active, flickers of volcanic light piercing through the seafloor and vents exuding billows of ash and debris. There also was a very noticeable hole or depression in the seafloor that one would expect if something had been there but lifted off and away.
Dr. Darian eyed the readouts the sonar beacons mounted to NIGEL were relaying, “Shape and size match up. I think we found where the UFO came from. The depression is a couple dozen meters deep in the shallowest spots.”
Dr. Craven tilted his head and looked to the brunette, “You’re the oceanographer here, how long do you think it would take for that thing to build up that much concretion down here?”
Dr. Darian glanced again at the volcanic vents spewing out billows of ash and stirring up detritus, “Getting covered would be quick, but actually forming rocky elements…”
She pursed her lips, “Hard to say without seeing the full sedimentation layering myself, but with how thick it was... A few tens of thousands of years at minimum.”
“Back when we were just working with sticks and stones, or at least we thought so until the Mothra showed up,” a voice called out from behind them at the helm of the Calico, a strongly built, short-bearded man at the wheel.
“Any signs of trouble for your brave little tin-scout?” Captain Carl Majors quipped, “Talk of that strange craft and us being right on top of where it came from is making me jittery.”
“N-No signs of problems yet, Captain!” Dr. Craven yelped as he resumed controlled NIGEL, “Just… strangeness. Maybe the magma is rich in iron and that’s what’s causing all the disruption with the magnetic fields?”
“Possible but-“ Dr. Darian’s brow furrowed, and she put a hand on Dr. Craven’s shoulder, “Wait, pivot back to the left. I thought I saw something.”
Dr. Craven did so and now he saw it too. The long silence they had spurred the captain to walk over and peek over their shoulders. Displayed on the monitor was clearly the skeleton of some kind of animal, the size of which quickly clued the captain in to it being a whale. A curious find, but not one he hadn’t seen himself in his many dives in the minisub. The long, almost rib shaped lower jaw told him it was a filter feeding baleen species, possibly a-
His mental thought was cut off as well when he realized what the scientist did upon seeing what was sticking out from the jaw.
“I’ve been at sea for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a humpback with fangs,” Captain Majors stated plainly what was on everyone else’s mind.
Dr. Craven, slack-jawed, just shook his head in affirmation. NIGEL was commanded to circle around the skeleton and the more its floodlights showed, the more it puzzled. Irregular bony fins jutting out from the ribs, what look like a second set of flippers mounted further down below the forelimbs, and the tail almost look like it was split in three like someone had Frankenstein’d together multiple types of whales. But then the floodlights swiveled around the spine.
Dr. Darian and Dr. Craven gasped as Captain Majors crossed himself with abject horror.
It was human, there was a human skeleton stuck to the back of the whale’s spinal cord near the tails. Skeletons. Some sprouting multiple irregular limbs. Some had bony remnants of fins corrupting from their bodies. All of them had bony pustules like a cancer spread over their skeletons that the trio could now see was also present on the whale bones. Altogether they were almost in a pile, as if sprouting or climbing atop one another in a desperate bid to reach the surface, with gaping maws.
There was only one thing that kept Captain Majors from calling the whole thing off, running back to the helm, and getting them out of there. Something that came through NIGEL’s sensors, even the ones that weren’t supposed to be picking up sound.
Singing.
The heat sensors, radiation meters, magnetic field detectors, and more all started to jump up and down in tandem like they were meters on a soundboard. The trio monitoring NIGEL paused and listened. There was certainly a melody, not just the cries of some deep-sea cetacean using sonar or vocalization. There were pitches, melodies, and somehow there was the uncanny sense of two voices despite them sounding identical. Dr. Craven pitched about NIGEL’s head scope to look about and was greeted to another surprise. Not far away from the skeleton, at the edge of a large drop off into the volcanic regions the radiation signals were highest at, there were two dim lights. One red and one blue.
As if silently drawn to the melody, Dr. Craven pushed NIGEL to approach and the ROV did as commanded, stopping with the floodlights just out of range from the two glowing masses. Just as they were about to be revealed, the illumination cut off and let them all in the dark aside from the red and blue iridescence. Dr. Craven puzzled and tapped at the controls.
“What happened?” Dr. Darian noted as she stiffened.
Craven frowned and tapped at the controls to try and get a response, “I-I don’t know, it's like I lost most of the power to NIGEL.”
“Did the connection cable sever?” Captain Majors weighed in as he eyed the large cable slung over the side of the Calico to which led to the ocean depths and ensured NIGEL’s signal was strong.
“N-No, that’s fine. It’s- it’s like most of NIGEL’s motor systems just shut off,” Dr. Craven whined as he uselessly tapped at the controls, while having the unspoken observation that the camera was curiously still working.
Captain Majors looked to the readings and then to the singers, seeing how the radiation, heat, and magnetic disturbances all seemed to be in tandem with the melody, growing in frequency and falling off in tandem with the song. He motioned to the screen, “They’re… They’re the ones doing this. The readings got stronger as NIGEL got closer.”
“It’s like they’re… pulling energy, heat, electrical, and radiation to a single point,” Dr. Darian muttered as she looked to the drop off, “To something in the canyon.”
The song abruptly stopped.
The two glowing lights moved slightly closer, as if backing away from the precipice to the drop off. In their dim illumination outlines could be perceived. Based on the scaling to NIGEL they were both a few feet tall and seemed to be standing on the bottom rather than swimming. There was a keen uncanniness about them. Most of it looked human, and there almost was a sense they were wearing clothing swaying in the dark waters, but certainly not any deep-sea diving suit. The semblance of humanity was only increased by their adjacency to one another that seemed to indicate they were holding hands. The semblance of eeriness was heightened however, when the two specks of reflecting light appeared on either of the entities’ heads. The tiny lights flickered on and off in tandem, revealing it to be eyeshine looking directly at NIGEL’s camera; but remaining just out of focus to see with clarity.
Two beings, which seemed to look almost like small people and yet weren’t, were standing on the bottom of the ocean. A place that either required cutting-edge technology or the apex of nature’s ingenuity to survive the crushing pressures that were engendered from hundreds of meters of water stacked atop all which lay down there. And standing there as if there wasn’t a problem in the world.
“You will be safe, we’re just” “-borrowing every bit we can.”
The two voices that were part one spoke in a way that caused Craven, Darian, and Majors to almost jump out of their skins if the tone didn’t sound so calming. The three silently look to each other as if to confirm none of them had said that. The voice wasn’t any of them, and yet it had clearly been inside the room in their midst. The captain and two scientists, three sets of eyes silently looked back to where NIGEL’s camera was mounted.
The two entities were holding arms, they most certainly were arms, out and upwards. Rising to their apex, they stood in such poise before abruptly vanishing. Or at least they seemed to as they shrank away, before it became apparent that it was exactly what they were doing. The pair visibly shrunk down from just about a meter tall to just a fraction of that; their presence only shown by the telltale blue and red glimmer they gave off. NIGEL’s visual field started to rattle and blur as the seafloor was disturbed. The sonar sensor started to click back on but was quickly blotted out by a momentous noise that was thankfully deafened as it came through the speakers on the Calico.
A low, reverberating groan that pitched and yawed in a way only a living thing could. An extremely loud and extremely long bellow.
A darkness started to rise up from the drop off, and any notion it might be ash from an undersea volcanic eruption was quickly put to bed when the edges of NIGEL’s returning flood lights illuminated thick scales. A gargantuan reptilian mass was rising from the depths and the continual ascension of meter after meter of scaly body was as good a clue as ever to the grandeur of its size. NIGEL started to get swept back by the upkicking current, the undertows created by the sudden upheaval throwing the little ROV about. Dr. Craven grimaced and tried to re-maneuver the returning controls, clicking back on NIGEL’s propulsion in a bid to reorient his machine.
Only for his efforts to lead to NIGEL suddenly lurching forward, caught up in the current, and moving at full speed to smash right into the abomination of a whale skeleton from before.
“AAAAAAuuuaaaaaaah!” the coded call Craven had set NIGEL to emit every time he might have been critically damaged cried out as the engineer gripped at his scalp upon seeing one of NIGEL’s propulsion engines go flying past the camera after having been snapped off, spiraling about before crashing into the seafloor.
Craven pathetically screamed whilst holding his head in horror at the sight of his creation destroyed for the fourteenth time, “NIIIIIGEEEEEEEEEL!”
“I think that’s our cue to leave! We’ll see if we can swing back by to pick up the parts in a few days!” Captain Majors hollered as he ran back to the helm and took the intercom, “Brock, Taylor! Get the anchor and cables up! We'll be rolling out!”
As Dr. Darian tried to pat her colleague on the back upon seeing his creation smashed to pieces, they both looked back to NIGEL’s fizzling but still active point of view camera as it laid to rest on the seafloor. There was a tapping noise that had caught their attention.
Gazing back through it as the radiation meter started to spike, the bones of the whale abomination seem to visibly crumble and disintegrate from an unseen force. An unseen force that seemingly had no effect whatsoever on the two tiny women riding on the suspiciously butterfly-looking fish as they addressed the camera.
“Sorry!” Moll and Lora sheepishly apologized before having the aquatic form Fairy Mothra speed away.
===========================================
Within a near pitchblack chamber, with red emergency lamps as the only light, a transponder bleeped and binged abruptly. Several dozen present quickly turned to focus on the loud noise, aware of its significance.
“You have a signal?” “Something got through?” “What’s going off?”
A young man sheepishly and yet excitedly withdrew the transponder from his belt and grinned wildly. He was of strong built and short cropped hair, a youthful face for one with guardianship. Colonel Shin Hayata smiled and held up the transponder device to look and ensure that he could tell it really was going off and this wasn’t a false signal.
“Y-Yes! Yes! Ami you’re a lifesaver!” Shin chirped aloud.
A tall form pushed his way through the small crowd packed into the dark, crumpled, bunker-like corridor. The dim, blinking green light of the emergency transponder reflected off his face, mildly illuminating weathered skin, a short beard, and several badges showing high rank from both the Self Defense Force and G-Force. Shin, on reflex, saluted.
“Sir! A signal came through! I tried my end earlier but no dice, looks like it only works one way!” Shin noted with a nod.
A hand extended for the transponder and Shin allowed his superior to inspect it, “The one you stole to gift to your niece, right?”
Colonel Hayata shrank a little sheepishly but nodded all the same, “With respect Admiral, it’s paying off for however long it does.”
Admiral Taizo Tachibana inspected the transponder, the pen-like device in his hand and humored a nod, “Well, in hindsight maybe I should have given my daughter one of these. We don’t know how long the signal might last so let’s make the best of it. Does your niece have clearance to get into HQ?”
“No?” Shin shook his head with a frown, “And I wouldn’t want her walking into what’s upstairs, brave as she is.”
Admiral Tachibana kept his voice quiet and looked about in the lowlight, privy to the vault door barely visible in the dim red of the room, “She won’t. But like it not, this is our own guess as to what's going on outside.
Past the vault door, the sound muffled as it was, multiple sets of multiple varieties of ears listened. In the darkness of the emergency tunnels leading to the bunkers, various forms moved about in the shadows where the damaging Sun couldn’t reach them. Human hands on inhuman forms manipulated machinery, other forms dragged in bodies from food stores, meat lockers, and fresh bodies to be joined into a pulsing biomass that absorbed greedily. One such entity hefted a still form by the arm and deposited the human shaped person on the floor. The face staring up the ceiling, marred by a scar going across the man’s brow, did not indicate if he was paralyzed and alive or recently deceased. Neither mattered, the active drone letting the pulsating mass grow over and take their mass into its own.
A radio, not blocked by the vault door, buzzed with a coded message carried across short wave signals at close range. A few meters above was the roadway and a jeep was rolling down it calling out names.
“Lieutenant Jacob Mallery, report in!”
The mass of tissue and living cells contracted and reformatted, ejecting several dozen kilograms of mass that rapidly altered to take on the traits of bone, skin, muscle, and other tissues. Clothing was similarly replicated, and the look was perfected down to the scar going across the brow. The radio was picked up by a hand as the duplication calmly paced out of the tunnels to join others.
“This is Lieutenant Mallery, reporting in, over!” the inflection was spot on perfect.
Across the base, others filtered out and disseminated into the very heart of G-Force…
===========================================
Some pleasant surprise cameos for sure. And of course, Nigel must always be destroyed.
The action was still good with how viciously the Millennians were coming at the GPN crew.
And that ending was fucking ominous.
NIGEL gets scraped, what a shocker
really like how your taking the Millenium and merging them with the Thing(Not Ben Grim) interested to see where this leads
Huh, I didn’t know Evo had a character in the Amalgam’verse. But, yeah, (looks up Jyarumu) Oh another Kaiju from the Trading Game. (Bets Shrek is gonna draw it) And his fighting style is interesting, and to read his gross out demise was worth it.
) 
Nice cameos from both the Hanna-Barbera and 98 cartoons (poor NIGEL tho
Also, what the hell was going on with some of the G-force side? I’m confused.
But still a good read. Onward to the finale of Act 2!
The Fast and the Furious action was a lot of fun in this chapter, and I liked the majority of the character interactions. Some of the back and forth perspectives between Aso and Hina threw me off a little bit, but other than that, fun read.
Even in the bridgeverse, Nigel isn't safe from getting wrecked. That was a cool action scene having the drone take on the form of jyarumu. I'm getting the feeling that another drone taking the form of a trading battle kaiju isn't too far off, if what's been shown thus far is any indication.
5622414
Partially was a wink and nod to Lance as I was very keen to get the HB cast in there somewhere, and since I had already used Elsie Chapman from 1998/G:TAS, figured it be fun to tie them together. Nigel must die though, it's law.
Gotta have that ending hook and horror fits so well. ;)
5622485
Nigel must die. It is, the law.
Well give it time and I've sure they can, in fact, clobber
5633538
No joke, I actually drove a few racing games to help freshen my memory on how car chases and actions can work. That and the infamous GUN truck from Sonic Adventure 2
First time doing a car chase so I'm glad it seems to have landed, been wanting to do one for awhile actually.
5624623
Yep, I needed a Japanese civilian, remembered Evo's story and asked for a double check on the ages and we were in business. Also her uncle one day becomes Ultraman
NIGEL must die, it is law. Wanted to give Moll and Lora something and Lance is a fan of the HB Godzilla cast, whom have a research boat. So I got three birds with one stone. Show the fairies, use a cameo, and kill NIGEL
Ah to clarify, Admiral Taizo is holed up inside a bunker with his platoon of G-Force troopers, hiding inside to avoid the Millennian who've overrun parts of the base in secret. Communications are being jammed, but now they know something is going wrong publicly as Ami had an emergency signaler with her uncle, who's Taizo's right hand man. Meanwhile the Millennian are continuing to assimilate the base.
5633584
Hey, when in doubt, lesser used kaiju from extended media are a ready pool of reference to draw from and can cut down on the tedious time of designing and making references for something. So I've kept the Trading Battle kaiju in my backpocket for years in case I have need of them.
Also NIGEL must die, it's law.
And I see an Ultraman reference. Nice.
Also fun to see the UFO from a civilian perspective. Also how the Mysterians influenced society.
This scene is fun...until she gets caught up in the chase. Hope that was insured.
I do like that she's keen enough to call for help...and another Ultraman reference.
And now the truck is even more doing a City Escape impression. Good thing it's not the Generations version, that'd require dodging buzz saws.
I like the call back to where they'd been before to show how it'd managed to track them. And Yuri's reaction to there being a little monster and the general arguments. I like that it tried to go straight to a venomous creature, but Yuri thinks quickly.
Also like that the Drone is smart enough to find a way to force them to get in front of it.
I love Yuri's plan to get rid of the drone in the car and in turn Yuki's plan to finally get destroy the truck and get it off of them.
Unfortunately, sharpnel is a thing, but fortunately, Yuji arrives just in time to stop it. A bit of a lighter moment with everyone meeting again after all that...well, that.
But still very nice moment with Yuki reuniting with the group and just happy everyone is alive.
However, the Drone is doing its best imitation of a Terminator and emerges from truck in the form of another now human scale kaiju from Trading Battle, Jyarumu.
Fortunately, it's still heavily burned out and damaged. Fortunately, they're not out of plans yet and use the drive to prevent it from attacking him, as it's too valuable for it to destroy.
It of course takes aim at the others, but fortunately the sharpnel embedded in its body prevents a direct hit, even if she gets badly hurt in the process.
Also like the thing's flight abilities are basically an ice based version of a...third stage Graboid (I don't cuss). The thing manages to absorb a sample of Godzilla, which don't go very well and cause it to rapidly undergo a cell breakdown. Thank you Io.
Meanwhile, the HEAT crew are busy exploring the ocean floor near where Millennian awakened. As the ever expendable NIGEL explores the depths, they start to detect weirdness around where their craft once was...and discover the remains of some of Millennian's experiments. Which yay, more body horror.
Which is then contrasted by the singing and light they find. Also like the allusion to mana being radioactive by human standards...but it's the Shobijin. Which is a funny reveal...especially given they're standing at the bottom of the ocean.
They've been doing their job helping Junior, who is now awake...and accidentally wrecks NIGEL. Again.
Also, Aqua Fairy Mothra. Cute.
Meanwhile, Hayata receives the signal from his daughter...and is presently in an unfortunate situation. Namely trapped in a bunker with a Millennian abomination above them.
Good chapter, helps continue to build up the stakes, and has some good humor. Great chapter.
NIGEL NO!!!!!!
Some seriously great action. Loved the car chase and the monster trying to get everyone. It was fantastic without getting boring, which just 'dodging' sometimes gets to with lesser works. This was fantastic. Loved how the way to beat it was to overload the thing with Junior's cells.
Also, I'm really glad to see that cameo. Nice to know Ami's family is full of interesting individuals. XD
5641914
Good to know it worked! I'm very much not a fan of long action sequences, be they fights, chases, or whatnot that can be summarized as "They did A. action, so the other did B. action, and then they did A. and then they did A."
I aim to keep each action unique, planning out action scenes like panels in a comic book. It be a bad comic indeed if the same panels got repeated over and over.
Seems the fantastic runs in the family don't it?