Halloween Special: Shōwa, Junior, Zilla, Legendary Godzilla vs. Godzilla-Earth
DISCLAIMER: This story is much, much darker than my usual affair. It's the season for spooks so the typical Showa-Era fun will return shortly. For now, let the other aspects of the franchise have then fun...
A massive creature’s fiery orange eyes greeted the evening sky when they snapped open. A boxy head sporting a prominent chin was shortly raised by a long neck to swing to and fro to try and make sense of its surroundings. Though the only traits readily identifying it as a squamate (more specifically an iguana) were the curved, triangular dorsal spines, broad cheek scales, dewlap, and five clawed fingers and toes; the rest of the creature was far different. Eighty meters tall in a horizontal stance, ninety if he reared up, his mother would forever live on in infamy for a case of mistaken identity. During the initial journey through Manhattan seven years ago the headlines read, “Godzilla takes a Bite out of the Big Apple!”. After she was brought down by anti-ship missiles she’d been rechristened “The Iguana that Ate New York”. While his brothers and sisters- born premature and less developed -were all slain, his egg survived. Further mutated and finalized, history repeated itself from what happened at Kyoto Research Institute five years earlier when Dr. Tatopoulos was present when he hatched.
Docile and growing protective towards humans, ‘Zilla Jr.’ or just ‘Zilla’ as he’d been christened served much the same function as his Japanese counterpart, especially after the two met. And Zilla had long since become accustomed to defaulting to “if it’s weirder than invisible giant hummingbirds or tornado shrews, find Boss-Dino”. Like that time with the psychic, teleporting, electrical monster.
This seemed like one of those times given absolutely everything around him looked, smelled, and felt wrong. It was a forest by appearance, but the colors and textures were all off. The trees were massive, some so big he’d gander they’d make a redwood look tiny. But the most bizarre feature of the plants was the color. Everything was a dark gray and blue tint with only a moderately green sheen on what should have been leaves. While his hide was up to snuff as a kaiju, the fact that he could actually feel prickles when walking through some of the trees told him these leaves could cut a human to ribbons if they walked through it. Like a forest made of hacksaws. Even the air was wrong, reeking of radiation and extremely thick. He could breathe it fine, but it was in a manner a human might compare to breathing through a snorkel.
Zilla grunted, sniffing at the air and pacing off after a familiar scent of seawater, scales, and a lot of radiation. Yep, this definitely was a “find the resident weirdness magnet” kind of day. And that was without his magnetic pole-based navigation indicating he was somehow in east Asia after dozing off outside of Manhattan.
His only pause came when his thundering steps spurred a form to fly up before him. It wasn’t massive by his standards but easily had a wingspan over fifteen meters across. At first, he thought it might be one of those new bat monsters Gamera often dealt with, gyaos he thought the turtle called them. He hadn’t seen them himself, but based on what the massive Chelonii told him, this couldn’t be one of those. The neck was long and serpentine, ending in an elongated venus-flytrap like head that looked like it had sharpened jaws as opposed to teeth. It also lacked the distinct flathead crest Gamera drilled him into remembering should any gyaos make it to the States, instead sporting a spiny, whiplike tail that thrashed about as it flew. More specifically, flew directly at him.
Zilla was so confused by it he didn’t avoid its lunge and got bit on the nose. Shrieking sharply, he responded by swatting the Servum and smacking it to the ground. If he was surprised at the brazen attack, he was more surprised when the comparatively smaller creature managed to get back up after getting slapped into a tree. He didn’t give it much of another chance to attack, however. A glow trailed up his dorsal scutes, flashing across his eyes before a surge of green, napalm-like inferno spewed out of his mouth to flash fry the transgressor and some of the forest.
Inspecting the charred ash left behind, Zilla snorted flickers of green sparks out of his nose before continuing on his way. He hadn’t the faintest idea how he got here but he already really didn’t like it. Was Japan usually like this?
Godzilla had a distinct scent, both from where he’d been and what he was. If Zilla could place a claw on it, his cohort smelled like a bird dunked in seawater near a nuclear plant; which was what he was picking up now around a mountain. Rounding the bend, Zilla almost crooned in thanks when he recognized the distinct upright posture, maple-leaf shaped dorsal spines, and charcoal gray hide. The massive lizard barked briefly, happily running up to his ally but soon hit the brakes and skid across the ground when Godzilla turned around.
It was still Godzilla for sure, but it wasn’t Godzilla Junior a.k.a Godzilla III a.k.a BossDino. It was like Zilla got to see his leader’s appearance through a funhouse mirror. The face was flatter and wider, the teeth a bit smaller but more uniform in shape or size without Junior’s distinct double-canines. Its body color was more uniform all around, lacking the slightly lighter patch Junior had on his chest and stomach. Still a dinosaur, not a lizard given the finger count, though like Junior the mutation had given it a fourth claw on the fourth finger instead of just the usual three typical of archosaurs. Most distinctly, the dorsal spines lacked the jagged, keened edges and were much rounder and blunter with only the central row being large and the two flanking rows of spines being far smaller.
It was a Godzilla, but it wasn’t Junior. It looked directly at Zilla and grumbled lowly. Not necessarily as a threat, though it carried a tone of wariness, asking for identity. Zilla tilted his head and barked, casting out a familiar nickname while keeping his body language relaxed as not to threaten. This Godzilla kind of sounded like Junior, but deeper, older.
The nickname implying leadership just made the Godzilla confused. But before the Old Buck could ask the strange lizard more, his species sensory ability went off, indicating another of his kind nearby. A young male by the feel of it, approximately ten years old. They appeared out from behind another mountain and his arrival was noticed by more than just the other Godzilla. Zilla’s relief was palpable when those trademark jagged spines, golden iris on red sclera eyes, and powerful build came into view and he rushed over to his friend.
Thankfully Godzilla Junior returned the grunt Zilla cast, nodding to his compatriot in a friendly manner. Zilla barked and looked about at the surroundings in an inquiry. Junior just shook his head, no more familiar with this region than Zilla was, though he did nod towards a distant, tall mountain he could recognize. To his surprise, the older Godzilla also was looking towards it knowingly, leading to Junior addressing him.
The two Godzillas stood apart from each other, Zilla at the ready beside Junior in case a slugfest happened and his ally needed back up. Thankfully there wasn’t aggression in either dinosaurs’ eyes, just a wariness that ebbed into curiosity. The distance closed and sniffs were exchanged. The Old One rose back and started muttering a series of grunts, chirps, and low shrieks that might almost sound like a broken radio.
He first asked why he was suddenly near Mount Fuji and not Monster Island. The two younger kaiju shook their heads, unknowing. His introduction as ‘Godzilla’ caused his audience even more confusion, Zilla motioning towards Junior with a visibly perplexed motion. Perhaps seeing his reign need more introduction, tales of the past were cast. He awakened as he was now on the eve of his father’s demise in the year the humans called 1954, and the change of decades had been incurred. He cast his tale like an orator of old. First, he was a destroyer, then a neutral force against a dragon from space, gaining allies as well as a son. In time, he came to call mankind a friend in his most recent ventures against both a magnificent mechanical doppelganger and a final duel with King Ghidorah. The last time he’d been to Mount Fuji it was to destroy the base of those hated controllers called the Kilaak who’d forced him to act as he once did.
Zilla was both fascinated at the tales and wondering if the old dinosaur was off his rocker given he probably would have not failed to have noticed that many alien invasions in a row. Junior, however, was keying in on something else. He was recognizing a few features in this Godzilla, both physical and contextual. He had pieced together a sort of family history from both his father had told him as well as information told to him by the psychic Mysterian-Human hybrids Miki Saegusa and Io Shinoda. And the more he looked upon the old Godzilla, the more he noticed the senior male looking upon him.
The latter grunted a word and tilted his head. Junior shook his snout, not knowing who this ‘Minya’ was, but he was sure of one thing as he approached and tentatively tapped the other Godzilla like he was seeing a ghost. Unbeknownst how or why Junior was sensing familiarity. Of circumstances elusive to the kaiju, his audience looked different because, in that world, meddlers from the future didn’t transport the then-unmutated dinosaur away from Lagos Island, instead of leaving it in the South Pacific to become irradiated by the Bikini Atoll test in the 1950s alongside his father. Whereas in Junior and Zilla’s world, those interlopers had come and moved the injured dinosaur to the far north sea, where he’d be irradiated by a nuclear submarine crash over two decades after 1954. One way or another, just as Dr. Yamane predicted, a second Godzilla was inevitable; it was just a matter of which decade he was created in.
The older kaiju curiously gazed upon Godzilla Junior, seeing resemblances to how he imagined his son would appear in years to come as his successor. The younger Godzilla, heart pounding within his chest, bellowed quietly.
He expressed that he didn’t know what was taking place or how this was possible, but the son recognized his father, albeit a different version of him, when he saw him. This one smelled like Gojirin’s progeny much like Minya. A child not by blood, but a father recognized his son nonetheless. Pride bloomed, the old king seeing his successor in the peak of health and standing tall and mighty as the new King of the Monsters; the new king content in ways he knew not he wished for at hearing his father had, in some form, learned to forgive and align with humanity.
Named for the reign of the Japanese emperors of their first active decades, The Godzilla Senior of the Showa Universe and the Godzilla Junior of the Heisei Universe bumped foreheads. Zilla barked and got their attention, apparently baring his fangs at the two dinosaurs. Junior grunted, tilting his head at his ally’s antics with an inquiry as to what he was doing. Zilla however, showing no rage, just bobbed up and down and grunted to indicate he was doing what humans called smiling the best he could manage without any lips.
Gathered up and deciding it was best to stick together to figure out where they were, the three needed not journey far to reach the next introduction. With Mount Fuji only a few miles away and day ebbing away, the ground started to shake. Zilla, who’d been zipping up and down the shoreline while the two Godzilla walked the land, came rocketing out of the surf with a terrified look on his face.
The Old One was already disturbed by what he’d been seeing. This was Japan, he was dead certain of that based off both where his magnetic field navigation, a trait common to many animals, as well as memory on orientation relative to Mount Fuji after his many battles starting with the one involving that big ape he’d had on the slopes. This place should have been bustling with humans and yet he’d failed to see a single primate. In his younger years, that would have been a welcome discovery he’d be keen to celebrate. But it had been over forty-four years since he razed Osaka in a battle with Anguirus, and time had a way with remodeling views. Just as Anguirus became his closest ally, the Ankylosaur’s wounding by his mechanical imitation driving Godzilla to hunt Mechagodzilla down with a vengeance; in time humanity had helped him in victory after victory and he’d valued them. Be it against Hedorah, Gigan and Ghidorah, or Mechagodzilla and Titanosaurus, he owed them for their aid and was keen to return it in kind. It helped that Minya was so fond of them, and if his son could end up as powerful as he sensed the other Godzilla was, who was he to argue?
So given the only trace of humanity, they’d found thus far were a few shattered machines of some sort and a petrified building in a forest full of monsters, honest worry was budding within the Monster of Justice, as Zone Fighter once called him. Something was very, very wrong.
The feeling was justified when Zilla came charging out of the surf frantically with a clearly frightful expression. The Showa Godzilla barked and glanced at the oncoming iguana, having been the one walking closest to shore, asking what in the blazes had gotten into the young kaiju. Zilla squawked and jumped an admittedly very impressive distance, turning about as he landed and looking to the shore.
The iguana snapped his jaws, indicating a name the Showa Godzilla didn’t recognize but Junior evidently did. The younger Godzilla was quick to form up beside his friend and brace, calling out to his father from another timeline to do the same. The older dinosaur was glad he did when a tsunami chased Zilla’s path to shore and slammed into him. Weathering the blow, the Showa Godzilla smashed his tail into the surf to bat part of it away and called out to the transgressor. The reply came in thundering footfalls that exceeded his own.
Each of the respective heroic kaiju was massive in their own right, Zilla being the lightest at 45,000 tons, Showa Godzilla at 55,000 tons, and Godzilla Junior at 60,000 tons. Which made the 90,000-ton footfall all the more noticeable. Dorsal plates broke the massive wave’s surface as the tsunami flooded much of the forest. While multipronged like the two Godzillas’, they were more akin to Zilla’s in coloration as they weren’t dissimilar in hue from the rest of the body. Medium in length and extending down the length of an extremely long tail, they were soon shown to crown a broad face and head which almost recalled the features of a bear with scales instead of fur. The body itself was burly, bulky, and simply massive, with noticeable scutes like those of a turtle or alligator studding the chest and belly. Armored gills flexed and closed down with Sauropod-like feet stomping ashore.
Showa Godzilla was certain of several things regarding this ‘Gojira’ as Zilla called him. He was ancient and angry.
The now second-oldest Godzilla cast an eye to his companions while standing up to the titan who towered over him by about 8 meters, grunting to inquire about anything else they wanted to tell him about this one.
Godzilla Junior and Zilla were both tense and almost on a hair trigger, clearly recognizing this Gojira of legendary status, but it seemed the recognition was not mutual as confusion was visible behind the rage present on Gojira’s face. An observation not lost on Junior when he muttered something to Zilla, Showa Godzilla thought he said something about Gojira evidently not trying to eat the iguana as a change of pace.
The Showa Godzilla smacked his tail against the ground, demanding the larger kaiju’s attention and making something clear to Gojira. Any quarrel he had with the young ones, he had with him, even the lizard. Zilla grunted nondescriptly.
Gojira grumbled, sniffing the air and nudging a tree with his foot to get it to release more of its almost metallic pollen. The disgust upon his visage was readily identifiable even before his growling demand to ask what they had done.
The Showa Godzilla grumbled back, motioning with his arms and pointing to the isolated remains of a petrified building, then sweeping that arm about to indicate what he’d been pointing too should be everywhere. Something was very wrong indeed, but they didn’t cause it.
Gojira snarled, dragging his tail across a swath of forest to level it with a sneer on his face. The world was very imbalanced, ecosystem turned on its head. His speech was hard to make out to the Godzillas and Zilla, almost like how someone from 2010s Mexico might have a hard time intelligibly understanding archaic proto-Spanish from over 1,500 years ago, but one word did stick out. Taint. This world seemed tainted from the sky to the forest.
Gojira grumbled something to Showa, starting again as if he noticed he wasn’t being fully understood, but paused when he saw Godzilla Junior stiffen up and look off into the distance with an expression almost like someone was calling him. After a grunt from his father and nudge from Zilla, he suddenly bolted and started sprinting directly towards the mountain. Baffled for a moment, Showa Godzilla looked to Zilla as the iguana sprang up and down to bark at the older kaiju before taking off after Godzilla Junior. His cohort always had a knack, a sense for when something was wrong and it could point him to it like a compass. And evidently, Zilla was gandering now was one of those times.
The Showa Godzilla turned to glance at Gojira, bellowing lowly with a simple proposition. If he wanted to know what had gone wrong with this place and who was responsible, following him and his son was a good idea. With that, the Monster of Justice ran along Zilla and Junior’s path towards the mountain.
An idea that was soon vindicated when, as the day turned to night, light and fire ignited the sky.
What was going on? That was a question given clear as day by Zilla as he ran alongside the larger kaiju, Godzilla Junior loosing a bellow as he kept his eyes transfixed dead ahead; running with such large strides he was covering hundreds of meters in a few seconds. His retort was a single word that made Zilla’s eyes widen. Human. A human had just called out to him, pleading for help, and he was closing in on her like a laser guided missile. If having a whole city of them behind him helped him fight harder or travel farther to protect them, sensing just one in such desolation was even worse. He didn’t know how she’d called for help in such a way, it felt similar but different to when Miki or Io would try to talk to him, so she wasn’t part Mysterian; but all of that mattered for naught.
Thankfully one thing Junior did know was his allies and the trust was mutual. He indicated towards the ridge up ahead and growled to Zilla, knowing the lizard was faster than he was and this was urgent. Zilla nodded and kicked to a higher gear, sprinting ahead. Coming around a mountainside and springboarding off a cliff, the athletic lizard soon beheld a hideous surprise. Finally, they’d found a city… of sorts. Most of it was on fire and something about it really, really didn’t smell right. Toxic even. No humans in sight there so he instead focused upon the ridge his leader directed him to.
Servum hissed and snapped at the air, one of them landing on and crushing the fallen ‘Vulture’ mech suit as the pack cornered their prey on the plateau’s edge. Four figures continually backpedaled from the advance, but only three were standing with the fourth being half carried and half dragged by the only unarmed member of the group. Two mild tanned girls with light, tattoo-like markings strung, fired, and reloaded arrow after arrow that shot into the forest. Bearing white hair that formed bangs resembling moth antennae and tribal attire, the two were effectively identical in appearance; The only way one could discern them was their typical expression. Miana was the one who carried herself more calmly and with a smile upon her visage, while her harsher sister Maina was typically stern in expression and less emotive. Right now, however, they were identical in shock and fright as every free and patch of forest threatened to burst forth with more servum.
Thousands of years ago, a Mountain that Walked lit the world of humanity on fire, leaving both the death of the old world and the tainted siring of a new world forged in its own image in its wake. The few of that creature called man that survived only did so under the protection and affliction of a slain goddess and her egg. Slightly mutated from their original state, the telepathic Houtua where all that remained of the old world in this Planet of Monsters… Until a ship from a bygone era returned. Bearing both humans of old and their alien comrades, having left before the final cataclysms, their return had been driven by an ambition of revenge and pride.
Pride in restoring humanity to its dominion of this world, revenge for a family slain by a walking mountain. The spearhead of which was tearfully carrying the body of his adoptive sister behind the twin’s protective fire. Haruo Sakaki, he didn’t feel he was worthy of his title of ‘Captain’ anymore. Haruo wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he was certain he was in literally Hell on Earth. The Bilusaludo had betrayed them, betrayed them to such a degree he was forced to choose between letting the monster who’s slaughtered his world destroy the one thing that could stop it and becoming like that monster himself with toxic nanometal to reign free over the world. Either way, his path to ruin cost the lives of most of his men and women, and not seemingly his last tether to that old, dead world. He could hardly talk anymore, having almost torn his vocal cords in his cries of anguish when he pulled Yuko’s half nanometal covered body out of her Vulture, unsure if she was dead or alive and in too frantic a state to be sure.
Cradling her, so that he might die first if she was still in the living and buy her another second or two to live, Haruo looked up at the forest of his demons as Miana and Maina continued to fire arrows that killed several smaller servum or kept the larger one at bay. He wished they’d leave. Take Yuko’s body with them if they could. Miana kept putting her hand to her head and letting out telepathic shouts. Hauro wasn’t sure what exactly she was saying but he thought he heard her project ‘Help!” ‘Danger!’ and almost a mental projection of their location. He wasn’t sure who she was calling out too. Maybe Dr. Martin and some of his team were still alive? Maybe to some of their tribe who might be nearby?
He didn’t know and in some ways, wasn’t sure if he could care. After having the world be killed in his life and having to go through not only experiencing that again but having to choose between what he’d always wanted and averting that with both choices resulting in Yuko’s demise… He was at the end of his rope.
Miana loosed her last arrow, backing up with his sister as one last, massive servum slowly walked out of the forest into the clearing with the cliff at the human’s backs. The malefic beast, spawned from that walking Mountain’s own cells, snapped its jaws and took its time approaching. It didn’t need to kill humans, it didn’t eat them. They weren’t part of this new ecosystem that had taken over this planet of monsters. That didn’t matter for a second.
Haruo sobbed dried tears and tried to push Yuko into Miana’s arms as he stood up.
“Get out of here! GO!” he barked as he strode in front of them.
The three women mattered more than he. Miana and Maina lived in this world he’d turned up on its head, threw into chaos in his quest for revenge. The Godzilla, Filius, that he slew was innocent of his quest aside from an ambition for dominion, and in doing so he awakened the creature that destroyed the original Earth out of revenge for its fallen progeny. And when faced with the reality he’d started to become what he loathed, he turned it a blind eye, trusted those he shouldn’t have too much and for too long. Now the rest of his forces might be dead, the Houtua put in dire risk, and he was still alive.
Even if his closest friend was dead, he’d die before letting a creature like this desecrate her body as well as claim two more innocent lives.
He shouted, waving his hands and running to the side to hopefully draw the Servum away from the twins. It did seem to get the monster’s attention, tilting its head and leering at him. It lunged and through the emotional and physical agony he was in, Haruo smiled. At least he could do one thing right.
The massive claws descending out of nowhere and impaling the servum on the spot with such force it died instantly, that was unexpected. Haruo stumbled, almost falling over as he let his gaze travel up the arm. They widened when he saw it.
It was!... No, no it wasn’t him…
“A-A Zilla?!”
The Zilla retracted its arm, seemingly to sneer at the servum impaled on his first two fingers and flicking it off with visible disgust. Haruo’s mind raced.
-Doctor Martin said it was probable Godzilla wiped out the other monsters! Scans showed nothing but him. Di-Did one survive somehow? Why did it only attack the servum?! Why even be here when Godzilla was so close?!-
Hyperventilating in his breath mask, Haruo looked the creature over. He was very young when he evacuated Earth, but he had looked through the old war profiles to familiarize himself with past kaiju. The Zilla might not have been as durable as some monsters, but spread rapidly through a sort of cloning-based egg laying. This one, however, looked slightly different. Thicker in build, with larger spines and teeth. The coloration was also a bit different and darker overall, with a much larger dewlap and dorsal spines. A new mutation? A different subspecies? The mind raced…
And proceeded to race itself into risking insanity when he saw what walked up behind the Zilla and vaporized several servum it had grabbed in its hands.
Zilla Junior tilted his head at the odd humans, looking them over to check and see if they were okay. Familiar footsteps and blue light spurred him to take a sidestep and make way for the king, Godzilla Junior coming around into view with several other servum in his hands reduced to ash. Godzilla’s titanic shadow loomed over the humans even as he kept his distance on account of his own radiation, oblivious to the fact Haruo and Yuko’s suits and the Houtua’s biology protected them. Inspecting the woods for more monsters, he was about to try and see if any of these four were the ones who called out and reached him when the ground seemed to explode out in the city behind him.
Godzilla Junior and Zilla Junior whirled around to face it, instantly feeling a massive surge of energy in the air that could only mean one thing. A kaiju, and a gargantuanly powerful one at that.
Bursting free of the rubble the explosion had encased it within, a living mountain slowly rose up and began to haul itself out of the crater it had created and let out an uproar of radiant energy into the sky.
The poison, the nanometal, was finally dying and the pesky human constructs had gone dormant. Dominion of this world was beginning to be reestablished, and this time it would make absolutely certain humanity and anything born from it or was like it would be extinct. Why it was driven to do this was a question many, human and monster, had posed to it over the centuries every time it slew a kaiju or slaughtered tens of millions of the primates. Millions upon millions of species, born of the same planet it hailed from, were extinct because of it. It wasn’t evil. That implied it thought on some level that what it was doing was wrong.
In the end the question as to “why?” was as simple as it was nondescript. Because it could. It was the mightiest life form to ever exist on this planet. What greater authority could there be to decide dominion?
This Godzilla had effectively tainted the entire world with its trace and spawn, coding the earth with its own image. And so, it could be called Godzilla Earth, lord of devastation and the mountain that walked.
And when its wise, blue eyes were trained upon the nearest humans it could sense within range, of which they were in the same direction as those meddling flying machines had flown off to, the killing intent was obvious.
A crackling set of lights danced up its body, collecting near the end of its snout. A small barrier became visible in front of its face before the energy condensed and sprang out in a ray. Even in such a small charge, it would’ve easily leveled a plateau and killed any humans upon it. Only it didn’t hit because twin streams of emerald napalm and sapphire plasma slammed into the side of its head. Godzilla Earth canceled out its beam and threw up its barrier.
The Mountain that Walked looked beyond the rays, seeing two forms that, while titanic compared to the humans, were minuscule compared to itself. Having circled around it to be wary, Godzilla Junior and Zilla had burst from their cover behind some of the ruined Mechagodzilla City structures and opened fire when the new kaiju made its intentions clear. Their audacity and keenness to put themselves between the 300-meter tall titan and the humans made their intentions clear, much to Haruo’s utter shock and the Houtua twins’ joy.
“They’re… standing up to Godzilla?!” Haruo muttered under his breath, seeing the smaller ‘Godzilla’ which seemed to be animal-like rather than plant-like, almost appearing to glance back at him.
Maina panted for breath as a smile started to grow across her face, resting a hand on her collar as she exchanged a mirrored glance with her twin sister. For the first time in a very long time, Maina smiled back. It had been over two hundred centuries since a giant of creation had stood up to the one the humans of the past called Godzilla, the last of which was their goddess before her demise to protect her sacred egg. Perhaps these two beasts who were obviously trying to protect them were her emissaries? Maybe their arrival heralded the predestined hatching?
One way or another, they had to be made aware of what they faced. Maybe it would motivate them to fight more in earnest? Maybe these possible heralds of their goddess already knew about the Monster King? One way or another, wouldn’t hurt they supposed. The elders always stated to fight the Mountain that Walked was a foolhardy gesture, but times have changed quite a lot recently…
Miana and Maina joined hands and cast both a prayer and plea to the young kaiju.
Zilla was a bit more startled by the images he suddenly saw in his head than Junior was, on account of the dinosaur already experiencing similar from the shobijin or psychics; but the end result was pretty much the same for both of them even if it didn’t tell much; just what the Houtua elders had passed down about the death of the old world. And who did it.
Godzilla Earth shattered the sky with its roar, physically blowing the air back around Godzilla Junior and Zilla even at a one-kilometer distance. It had been a very long time since it saw another kaiju, the first ones killed in the last century of the old world lost hope of fighting back at the mere sight of it; submitting to misery and death. Only the moth had the audacity to actually fight back on her own accord. It expected them to bow down and let themselves experience a quick cleansing.
It didn’t expect the roar of Odo Island’s sea god and the bellow that shook Manhattan to fire back. Facing a massive opponent almost twice their combined height and many times more massive, Godzilla Junior and Zilla Junior stood firm and in form as a unified front before charging. By method or means they didn’t know how they came here, but in some way, they knew for what reason.
Forth from this haze, Zilla pounced after running full speed directly towards Godzilla Earth. The mutant lizard slammed his full weight into the plant-like monster’s back, actually managing to stagger it slightly thanks to momentum. Like a mountain climber, Zilla tried to dig his claws into the metallic, barkish hide of the Mountain’s back to gain a firm hold. Even swinging his talons in as hard as he could barely offer any purchase. The fact Godzilla Earth was beginning to turn about and slowly thrash to dislodge him wasn’t helping and in the end, he had to resort to clinging to the dorsal spines.
It was only by Godzilla Junior managing to strike the distracted titan dead in the face with a slightly more charged up plasma beam while the shield was down that his companion wasn’t thrown off. Godzilla Earth growled in response, its body crackling with energy that soon sprang forth from its face and raked across the terrain. Though Godzilla Junior dodged the best he could, he still felt the edge of the extremely powerful beam knife into his chest. It only cut down to the ribs, but the fact it managed to do that after only maybe a quarter second of exposure told a lot.
Zilla, doing his best to ignore the shocks it was getting while holding onto Godzilla Earth, was quick to notice and barked in worry. One thing was very clear now, they couldn’t risk taking any direct hits. And if this big bastard’s skin was too thick to dig through, he’d just have to go after something softer!
Zilla clambered up Godzilla Earth’s back, half climbing and half jumping from spine to spine until he reached its head. Almost wise-looking blue eyes gazed indescribably back at him. Zilla flexed his hand and brought back his all arm, which rapidly came for it in a swing. It was only by a last-minute jerk of motion by Godzilla Earth that his talons didn’t dig into the monster’s eyes, instead missing and managing to cleave into the skin around the cheek. Swinging its entire body about to bring up momentum, Godzilla Earth managed to throw itself sideways even in its comparatively slow motion and transfer its entire body’s inertia into Zilla. With so much momentum put into a much smaller body that couldn’t get a good grip on its foe, Zilla was sent flying off and past Godzilla Junior.
It appeared the imbalance and taint the alpha predator had been detecting was now standing before him, drawing all of his ire. Usually, he’d frown upon less than an honorable combat between solo parties; but given the scale of this catastrophe against nature both figuratively and literally given the three hundred meter height, he was not opposed to these younger forms taking up arms alongside him.
And with his over four decades of experience battling kaiju ranging from giant crustaceans used by terrorist cells to repeated incidents with a three-headed space dragon to animate sludge to the myriad of bizarre opponents he faced alongside Zone Fighter, the Showa Godzilla hardly needed much introduction to know an enemy. Besides, he always did want to have the chance to fight alongside his son given such opportunities were so rare.
Godzilla Earth saw the three forms approaching it and the fourth rising back up, healing back the damage from its wounds, and its unemotive face inwardly sneered. A chorus of calls belonging to those who’d dethrone it called out into the night, roars that in their own respective worlds began to or already did bring hope to those under the threat of hateful giants these heroes would battle against. Intentional in their designation or not, four champions converged on the greatest dragon.
Father and son lit up the night in twins sapphire glows, vaporous and condensed beams of plasma spewing out that were absorbed by Godzilla Earth’s shield. While they failed to wound, they did provide covering fire for the two more melee oriented in their number. The kaiju associated with the Americas in their respective worlds managed to close the distance. Gojira didn’t even mind the iguana springboarding off his back and shoulder to gain some more height as they approached. With his boosted ascent, Zilla pounced for Godzilla Earth’s throat, digging his claws into the massive kaiju’s shoulders and stomach to try and keep a purchase while clamping his jaws down on where the windpipe should be. Godzilla Earth snarled, easily absorbing the impact of the smaller kaiju this time and slowly shifting to pry it off when Gojira slammed his full body weight into the titanic plantimal’s knee from the side.
Actually lighter than its size would indicate, even if it still outweighed the ancient alpha predator by a wide margin, Godzilla Earth stumbled backward several steps and stumbled a half-step more when Gojira spun around and slammed his mammoth tail into his foe’s other knee. Godzilla Earth groaned from reactive pain, dull as it was, shortening in height and slumping over slightly as it had to catch itself with one of its arms to avoid falling. It’s massive bulk but relatively long and thin legs made it top-heavy and having Zilla clinging to it while having its foundation struck only made it worse.
Zilla, failing to have his bite do any meaningful damage, decided to bite back the pain and try something possibly very very stupid. The dorsal scutes from his tail up to his head lit up in sequence before similar indication came across his eyes and dewlap. With his jaws still firmly affixed to Godzilla Earth’s hide, he fired his atomic breath point-blank into the shallow bite wound. Godzilla Earth actually reacted to this, letting out a bellow of pain from being unable to shield itself due to Zilla still clinging directly to his body, well within the shield’s minimum radius.
While the green atomic napalm didn’t do much in itself other than burn through some layers of hide- of which the level of damage was more related to Godzilla Earth’s massive durability than any lack of firepower from the iguana kaiju -it did lead to one promising observation that Godzilla Junior keyed in on.
Miana watched on, eyes full of hope between the battle and one of the elders saying the one Haruo called "Yu-Ko" might just live despite her nanometal poisoning! None had managed to wound the Mountain that Walked since the fall of their goddess, Mothra. Truly, these four heroic giants were blessed by her grace! Her goddess hadn't abandoned them!
Zilla skid across the ground, yelping in dull pain before coming to a stop. A pair of thundering footsteps approached him but thankfully it was neither Gojira, whom based on Zilla’s experience with his counterpart in his and Junior’s world the iguana wasn’t sure didn’t intend to eat him or not, nor the freaky-looking Godzilla-Shaped-Plant-Mountain they were fighting. The Showa Godzilla growled in thanks, helping the younger kaiju up while Gojira and Junior kept Godzilla Earth’s attention. The old warrior even helped dust some of the irksome tree shards off the lizard and asking if he was all right. The way he complemented Zilla’s courage that helped secure their first meaningful hit reminded Zilla a lot of an aged military commander, kinda like that Colonel Hicks his adoptive father Tatopoulos associated with. This world was freaky-deeky as Randy would put it, but he was actually beginning to really like this company.
When the Showa Godzilla saw Godzilla Earth firing off its own beam with such power that Gojira was sent sprawling backward and Godzilla Junior had to dodge out of a beam-lock he was being overpowered in, a play he had once used with Anguirus and Jet Jaguar came to mind. Pointing a way to the young iguana kaiju and growling an order, Zilla found himself wondering if he should imitate his father around Colonel Hicks and salute. One could practically swear they saw him smirking at the idea.
A loud roar caught Godzilla Earth’s attention, causing the titan to look up while charging its beam at the downed Gojira and refocus on an approaching Showa Godzilla. It fired true, but in utter defilement of physics, the old Godzilla launched his feet into the air and somehow managed to keep himself aloft using just his own momentum and tail, throwing off Godzilla Earth’s aim for a few moments enough to close the distance. Smashing his double dropkick into Godzilla Earth’s knee, the Mountain that Walked barely stumbled.
Loosing a low, rumbling growl that rattled the air, its body began to charge up now that it had one of the intruders directly in front of it and with no hope of dodging this. Showa Godzilla smirked, keeping his own beam charged and waiting for just the right moment. Zilla called out, having used his great speed to run up to a cliffside near Godzilla Earth at such velocity that between his acceleration and claws digging into the bedrock, he was able to run up a cliffside’s length sideways. Worked up in height, the lizard springboarded off the edge and came flying at Godzilla Earth’s face with his jaws alight with green flames aimed squarely at the monster’s eyes.
Showa Godzilla’s distraction worked beautifully, Godzilla Earth having no time to swing his head around and finish charging the beam to fire it in the right direction. The metallic plant monster might have been extremely distinct, but it was still a Godzilla, and that meant the beam came out the front end. Having a ranged attack come out of the maw was excellent for good aim, but it restricted your line of fire. Keep out of the straight line coming out out the mouth between the eyes, and it can’t hit you with the beam.
The charge on Godzilla Earth suddenly redirected to its tail, the tip of which was directly beside Zilla when the energy flew out of it’s swinging end. There was a bright flash that accompanied the shockwave and Zilla was sent flying into the cliffside with a sharp shriek. The Showa Godzilla bellowed in rage, unleashing his beam into Godzilla Earth’s chest for all it would do. Godzilla Junior was about to join in on the assault when a low growl came beside him. Gojira rushed forward to engage in close quarters, shifting his gaze briefly towards the cliffside and then back to Junior to tell him to get Zilla. He’d seen the strategy at play and while this latest one backfired because of a surprising ability they didn’t foresee, it was their best chance at beating this thing.
Godzilla Junior grunted back, still firing his own beam back Godzilla Earth as he ran past it to force it to put the shield up and focus on that so Gojira and his father could get in close. All four of them were a lot more agile than this living mountain up close, so as dangerous as it was to be there it probably still their best chance at dealing any meaningful damage. And to pull that off they needed their fastest member.
He ran to the rubble and started digging, soon seeing Zilla’s telltale shoulder scutes poking out from the rocks. He grumbled. Great, he’d been knocked senseless. He pulled more rocks aside to get him free, only to notice something else buried about eighty meters away. Something dark and scaly. It was mostly covered up by the rocks, which he nudged aside with his tail, only to feel something on his extremity tip. Something hot and wet. Had something else been buried in the cliff face and Zilla crashing into it accidentally uncovered it? He’d heard and seen weirder reveals. But one some rocks fell away, he found familiarity. Zilla’s tail and some of a hip exposed to the air. Far removed and pointing the other direction from his shoulder. Godzilla Junior felt more warped around his feet and looked up to see the fluid leaking from between the boulders. A hand on the scute, he pulled up.
If it hadn’t been for the scute, he wouldn’t have been able to recognize it as once being Zilla.
Godzilla Earth swung his body around, throwing Godzilla Junior off after the young kaiju managed to shiv Zilla’s shoulder scute into the side of its throat. Unable the fire its beam with the obstruction, Godzilla Earth crackled with energy and swung his tail around. Now wise to the tsunami of power coming at them, Showa Godzilla and Gojira ducked down. But Godzilla Junior surged forward, withstanding the blow despite his father’s urging to back off. It cut deep into his stomach, his regeneration working overtime to avoid being disemboweled. With the tail cutter bisecting two hills beside and behind him, Junior just kept coming, firing his beam with roaring hatred all the way.
Spiraling arcs of energy started to appear across the rays, dim white patches beginning to take hold over the young monster’s body. Craved vengeance for a fallen friend was driving his reactor of a heart into overdrive and the power was starting to show. Godzilla Earth’s shield cracked, some of Junior’s beams leaking through and lightly burning the titanic destroyer. Soon the distance was closed and he emulated his ally in a pounce. The nuclear pulse shockwaves that came off him on impact caused Godzilla Earth to backpedal and cry out in pain, getting shocked from every contact point as Godzilla Junior claw his way up the larger kaiju’s chest. Grabbing Zilla’s scute again, he wrenched it out of the throat and clawed higher with pure hatred in his visage. He’d never lost a friend before, not like this. And he was going to make damn certain with all the power he had that this demon would take no more from anyone tonight.
Godzilla Earth fired its beam, now free to do so with the obstruction removed. Even with part of the power venting off through the hole in its neck, it still struck home and dug into Godzilla Junior’s chest just above the heart. But with valiance that would stun anyone, Junior powered through it and swung the scute down as his entire body glowed with energy. Godzilla Earth experienced half of its vision going away from having the scute rammed into its eye socket and having almost the entire force of Godzilla Junior’s nuclear shockwave ability go off while being conducted through the scute and elsewhere arcing into its neck and throat.
Godzilla Earth roared in agony.
Godzilla Junior was sent flying back, smoking and bleeding from his chest to skid across the ground with his claws dig trenches to slow himself down. The same smoke obscured Godzilla Earth, who still stood... Before beginning to tip over. He wasn’t dying fast enough for Godzilla Junior. Exhausted as he was, damaged as he was, he wasn’t quitting. The glow about his spines had never dissipated and it and the similar brilliance appearing across his skin started to turn red. Searing malice formed and crackled between his fangs which reflected in the smoke around them.
Azusa Gojo’s son slumped over, limpy falling to earth in a heap with a gaping hole in his chest that leaked radioactive ichors that also spilled from his mouth. Godzilla Junior closed his eyes for the last time upon the earth.
The smog dissipated around Godzilla Earth, who slowly rose back up to its original height. Most of the front of its body was covered in burns that carved into its flesh. Most of its left brow was completely gone from the top of the head to the cheek, a heavily burned but resilient scute still impaled into the eye socket.
It paid little heed to its injuries, silently glaring with its remaining eye at the Showa Godzilla and Gojira. The Youngblood was dead, time for their elders to join. Two down, two to go.
Gojira huffed for breath, still smelling his chest armor smoking from getting half burned through. He looked to the Showa Godzilla out of the corner of his eye. The wet glint coming from the other old soldier was read well, even if it was hidden behind ferocious resolve. He’d experienced the same when the parasites took his nephew. His time with the youngblood was brief, but he could respect them for what he’d seen, the young lizard’s bravado and willingness to aid them all and the young dinosaur’s sheer power for a noble cause as well as wounding their foe. A look of understanding came to the grieving father, one the Showa Godzilla nodded at with approval. They would not run, they would not submit to doom. They wouldn’t let this monstrosity chase them down and perish from being shot in the back.
The duo of legends would never show their backs to this opponent, even if it was their last battle. They charged.
Godzilla Earth was being pushed back. Gojira knew how they did it though. By getting killed in the process. Every scratch and wound they managed to inflict was met with biting agony from the return strikes. They fought with tooth and claw, tail and spike; often side-by-side or back to back. It didn’t matter how many dorsal spines were blown off, scales burned clean through, limbs knocked out of socket it forced back into place; if they were going to meet their demise, they were not going to be slaughtered, they refused it.
Gojira was thrown back in a smoking heap, cutting canyons into the ground below with his heels as he tried to endure the agony burning into his chest from Godzilla Earth’s beam. The stink of his own body armor melting and vaporizing filled his nose and blotted the senses. It was only by the Showa Godzilla continuously firing his own ray into Godzilla Earth’s face that Gojira was given a reprieve.
The ancient alpha predator stumbled, catching himself with a bruised and bloodied hand that had been burned to the muscle. If the pain hadn’t been blocked out earlier his incurred wounds probably would’ve caused him to go into shock. He already looked dead, to be honest. But rather than gaze at himself, he instead turned his focus to his opponent. Godzilla Earth grumbled and threw up its shield to silence the Show Godzilla's efforts rather than continue to use the beam.
Gojira’s eyes focused upon two details that caught his attention. The first was how the glowing brilliance encircling Godzilla Earth could only seem to focus and condense before its snout to form the beam when it wasn’t using its shield. Maybe it didn’t have enough power to do both at the same time and thus relied on its natural durability to defend itself when attacking, maybe the beam was actually the shield projected out in a specific direction rather than encircling the body as a barrier. He couldn’t be sure of which one but that in itself didn’t matter that much. What did matter even more was the crackling energy he glimpsed coming out of the dorsal spines. His eyes briefly acquainted himself with his own spikes, the plates that remained at least. Those were used to vent off excess internal heat especially when using the plasma flamethrower, hence why they glowed whenever he used the attack.
Without them, he wasn’t sure how effective is ranged attack might be. He could probably still manage it now with a lot of agonies, but for something with even more power and a larger size….
Gojira launched himself from the ground with force and speed surprising for his age and size. Putting all his power into his momentum, the ancient one stampeded towards Godzilla Earth before quickly turning about. 90,000 tons of mass going over 180 kilometers per hour in terms of forward acceleration before being compounded by the momentum of Gojira’s putting all that weight and speed into a swinging tail hit with the force of a not-insignificantly sized bomb.
Effectively taking the force of a large bunker buster to its knee, Godzilla Earth sprawled over with a large kink in its leg from the joint being warped. Gojira kept swinging, bellowing a loud phrase to his sole remaining ally. The spines.
The Showa Godzilla battered and burned across most of his body and bleeding badly from his mouth, didn’t even register the pain. For the first time in many many years, he absolutely hated something. At one time this is how he felt about humanity, after the demise of his father. In time he realized that was foolhardy and misplaced, not proud of the soul he once was. But he could never imagine in a million lifetimes the hatred he felt for this living mountain could be anything but justified. It killed his world. It killed anything around it. It killed the humans. It killed his newest ally. It killed his son. It did all this and refused to ever even say why. Did it think itself higher than everything else, and thus never accountable? Was it just another psychopath like Ghidorah but less chatty? At this point, he didn’t care what the answer was. All he wanted to know was how to hurt it.
And Gojira seemed to tell him the means. Seizing the chance as the massive ancient tackled the lowered Godzilla Earth’s head to continue to throw the larger kaiju off-balance, the Showa Godzilla clawed his way onto Godzilla Earth’s back. From there he went on a rampage. Firing his beam consistently, kicking and smacking the spines with his feet and tail to knock them off their bases, anything to damage the dorsal plates. Ignoring the shocks he was experiencing from Godzilla Earth charging up a beam the fire and frustration at Gojira, the old Godzilla grabbed onto the largest dorsal plate and wrenched back and forth. The sharp spine’s edges cut into his hands like serrated knives would to a man’s, but he never let go and only clutched harder with bone to grip. With a burst of his plasma ray raking across the base, he achieved his mission and toward the plate out of its foundations. Spying the open hole in Godzilla Earth’s back he wasted no time in taking aim and firing directly into it just as Gojira, holding Godzilla Earth’s jaws at bay with his hands, spewed his own assault down the monster’s gullet.
Godzilla Earth felted insides catch on fire. It felt agony, rage, and shock. It held dominion of this world, extinguishing life unfit for its reign as it saw fit. It was ordained by the processes that supplied it with power above any other. It was only natural for the mighty to purge the weaker, as its bloodlines had most life on this world. A wisdom sparked in its blue, philosopher eyes, or rather eye as it still had an overgrown lizard scute lodged in a socket; keeping its tissue from regenerating. Another note to add to the list of measures to undertake, after...
Oh yes, the burning.
Crackling its entire form with converted energy, building it up to the point its body glowed reds and whites, Godzilla Earth released it all in one burst; much of it flying out its maw but also venting out the hole in its back. Pressure waves, electrical pulses, and plasma spewed out in an oscillating roar that overtook both its attacker’s beams. They had wounded it, more than any other ever had, and it returned the favor in excess. Like loosing a torrent of cleansing, burning light upon a tank that was a mere annoyance at best; there was no sense of overkill when undergoing extermination.
The largest of the four attackers called out in defiance and pain, launched back under the continuous pressure wave to be sent hurtling through several hills until the assault pinned him down. Deeper and deeper the onslaught pushed him, keeping him pinned down as scales were flayed and flesh seared through. It kept going for a good thirty seconds or so, the Mountain that Walked didn’t care to note it. In the end, Gojira was entombed a thousand meters or more underground, a progressively deepening trench carved into the ground caked in crystalized blood, indicating its fate.
Godzilla Earth grumbled lowly, pleased. A fleeting moment of pleasure when a vaporous, weak spatter of plasma struck him in the face. Unfazed, it slowly turned to face the cause and bore witness to the last one opposing it. The Showa Godzilla huffed and swayed as he tried to remain standing, a massive burn across his chest from the energy burst Godzilla Earth had released from the hole in its back. Ichors oozed from almost every inch of hide and exposed flesh, one arm limply hanging at his side from the joint clearly knocked out of the socket by whiplash. Only a single eye glared back at Godzilla Earth, the other, as well as a portion of the brow, completely missing. The old warrior balled a fist with his good hand, refusing to fall despite the risk of losing his balance at any moment.
Godzilla Earth instead looked past the insignificance, at a monolith of charred scales and sharp dorsal spines behind him. Sending a small dispatch to the servum around that dinner was served, he focused on regrowing his dorsal spines and gathering energy.
The Showa Godzilla would have felt dead already had it not been for sheer force of will and burning hatred. The eager youth he’d taken a shining to was slaughtered, his son who he finally got to see in the prime of his life had been impaled, and the seasoned ancient who fought beside him until the end had been entombed. All while trapped in this decayed world that could only be compared to a corpse of his own. While the fact he’d traveled through time and dimension eluded him, one thing was clear. If he were a human and aware of such belief, he’d devoutly believe he was in Hell before his own personal devil; a twisted icon of everything he’d ever hated about his former self.
The flapping monstrosities swarmed out of the forests in droves, covering him in a cornucopia of gnashing teeth and stabbing claws that dug into exposed muscle. But the pain, the agony the old hero felt was all too brief. Through the swarm of wings and eyes, he saw his tormentor stride past him and take aim upon a very specific corpse. The old king felt his body become alight with rage, not at his enemy turning his back on him, but at what it was about to do. Pure rage overpowered everything else and he bit, clawed, smacked, and swatted to live one more minute, one more second to stop this evil. His dorsal spines flashed red and a power he’d witnessed his son employ but never used himself ran across his body. Servum shrieked their death wails as a massive nuclear pulse flash-fried them.
The Showa Godzilla, burning across his form with eyes glowing like the dawn, charged forward before suddenly turning around and firing a spiral fire into the ground. The earth exploded from the torrent of energy, sending its jumping user rocketing backward directly into Godzilla Earth just as the titanic monstrosity was about to fire upon Godzilla Junior’s corpse. Even as his last act, the Monster of Justice would never let the demon defile his son’s corpse.
His spines, glowing red hot, cleaved into Godzilla Earth’s chest to carve a massive gash into the torso easily two dozen meters deep. Godzilla Earth screamed, recoiling back from the grieving father’s wrath as its beam shot up uselessly into the sky to divide the clouds. Backpedaling and stumbling away, it collapsed into the forest with an explosive landing audible for miles.
The Showa Godzilla crash-landed not far away from where he’d made impact, skidding across the ground on his side. By the time he warily made it to his feet, toe claws struggling to keep a purchase over waves of weakness, the glow across his body had faded. All hearing went away, he lost feeling across his body, vision began to tilt and swish back and forth in vertigo, and the once proud monster king and defender of mankind could only stumble, then crawl forward. The only thing he could detect around him through failing sight was the pulsing of his heart pounding between his ears. It was getting slower, dimmer. For the first time in his life, even having experienced being entombed in ice, Godzilla felt cold. Hand after hand, knee after knee, foot after foot, he limped forward. A teary wetness he couldn’t feel, yet knew of its presence, came across his eyes as he clambered onto the corpse of his son. In some ways, it had been a dream to fight alongside his grown progeny someday, never a prouder moment in his life than when Minya assisted he and the others in finally bringing down Ghidorah or first battling Komunga.
But it had become a nightmare. His vision faded, his only sensory input being what little feeling he could detect beyond surface tactile sense. With his last remaining strength, the Showa Godzilla embraced his son’s body, hoping that in whatever place the young king had come from, that version of Junior’s father got the chance to hold him just once. His heart stopped.
Godzilla Earth slowly rose. Genuine hatred was a rare thing for it, but it felt that now. Even more so than when it felt the Filius meet its demise. The last annoying pest managed to catch it while it had its shield down, too busy firing its beam to ensure the other one was dead. Its hand inspected the glowing wound, molten flesh rubbing off on it. The extreme heat had cauterized tissue that could treat magma like a warm bath, an impressive feat; but clearly, a fluke given it could plainly see the corpse sprawled on top of the other one’s body with the servum eagerly closing around both.
Oh well, it need not harp upon details. Togetherness just made fixing this blemish upon its perfect world easier. A beam was charged up, but the arcs of energy that made up the rays that had slew hundreds of millions of sapient souls instead arched inside the chest wound and conducted off the charred flesh. Godzilla Earth grumbled in pain, canceling the charge to avoid harming itself as it hunched over from the short circuit with a groan.
Damn pest, daring to wound it like the moth goddess once had. In the end, they both paid for it with their lives; unfit for its world. Willing the regeneration to accelerate and close the wound over time, Godzilla Earth instead opted to slowly trudge forward and dismember the bodies by tooth and claw. It had been so, so long since it needed to do such. About 18,000 years in fact. The last was against the sole remaining creature resembling the lizard it smote with its tail earlier, that annoying race bred so quickly their youths could equal the servum’s numbers in some cases. The campaign lasted centuries and eventually devolved into a death march across the planet, Godzilla Earth steadily chasing every last Zilla down to bring their end. The last one, in a fit of maternal rage, pounced at it to protect or avenge her destroyed eggs. The Mountain that Walked crushed her head in its jaws, slowly.
Not out of annoyance at how long the extermination of the last kaiju took, but merely because it could. Supremacy had dominion in its very nature. Sapience mattered not to interfere with the natural order. It was not an aberration, it was progression. It was this world now, for the world was it. And in doing so, it was not just a king; but a god.
That was why anything not of itself must perish, their very existence was an act of unholy defiance.
Such was the nature of the lights before it. Godzilla Earth looked on, still mending its chest and unable to fire its beam, as the inexplicable occurred. The body of the last defier was slowly vanishing, turning into will-o-wisps of azure lights and sparks that began to churn around the form of its progeny. And it wasn’t alone. From the rubble of the shattered cliffside where the lizard’s bisected remains had come crashing down, green flickers raced across the ground. And brought forth by some slow wind, light sapphire sparks trickled up from the chasm that had been the ancient archosaur’s grave. They joined the azure orbs, creating sparks and embers visible for miles across the night sky. Something was happening to the body that remained. The snap of bones and writhing of sinew became a symphony of heinous across the killing field.
The ruler of this world wouldn’t permit such. Neglecting its own health, it stunted its pain from energy crackling across its chest wound and fired a massive, blue stream of smiting judgment upon the mass; enveloping it in repeated blasts whose energy reacted with the glowing embers of past heroes in a fantastic eruption that formed a mushroom cloud.
In a way, if fate were real it would be poetic as the blast repeatedly rained down upon the land. For in almost every world except this one so far, the billowous curtain of radiation by the act of man or depths of ancient nature, of which was such an affront to the normal order of the world, was the cradle for a Godzilla. This world had merely lagged behind by 20,000 years…
Godzilla Earth paused its fire for a moment, the searing feeling in its chest demanding it. Energy sparked between the open wound, sizzling metallic, root-like flesh inside the gash and threatening to burst it open. But it soon paid little heed to that and instead to the blinding image before it. Reaching up to tear out Zilla’s scute at last to free its eye socket, Godzilla Earth regrew the orb to better behold, or more aptly leer, at the transgression of life that refused to die.
But these four creatures wrought true chaotic madness to the ordained scheme, an affront to the order of the universe. Even the law of nature seemed broken so that chaos might reign. If the divine beasts predicted by the future were acts of the heavens to smite the wicked along perfect, numeric paths, any outlier of the system must be the oppose. Not devils, not demons, for those, were agents of the divine who ordained opposite; but an antithesis. Antimatter to the matter, Anti-gods to the gods. The figure he witnessed, barely more than a skeleton with ash and charred ligaments as its flesh and the fires of its cradle as its body, managed to stand. It took a step forward, a sack of organs and muscle regrowing and compounding atop each other.
Metphies witnessed the swaying tail, shielding armor joined fast to one another, how the mighty servum retreated in terror at its thrashing rise. Even at its shorter stature, it seemed to look down upon Godzilla Earth, a king over the proud.
A cold sensation crossed his back and encircled his eyes. Spreading his arms, his lips moved on their own as a poem, created by an ancient lance-bearing human philosopher, perhaps a prophet of chaos and the antithesis to himself, escaped his lips as he looked upon the blazing skeleton standing tall.
None are its equal, none can stand against its might
For it is a creature that knows no fear
And brings death and devastation to all within sight.
It advanced out of the destruction of its birth, a hateful mass of sinew and muscle spreading over bone. Rows of jagged plates bled glowing ichors and pauldrons resembling the lizard’s scutes sprouting from the shoulders.
Four voices each loose a noble roar
But unite into one howl of flame
As the Leviathan seeks to win its war.
Brilliant redness pooled in the eye sockets, inky sclera encircling blazing irises so bright their color was indistinguishable. Fangs lengthened in a disorderly manner, too many being crammed into the mouth to the point the lips never returned to make room. From the cheeks sprouted tusks and from the tail a span of spines.
Wounds do not harm it, its blood does not dry
Its hatred and anger do not permit death
It cannot be subdued, such hopes are a lie
Pillars for legs and dense armor plating of the ancient became apparent across broad arms from the old king. The burnt gray skin was perforated by raw power, bloody fires from within blazing between the scales. It was no King of the Monsters. Methpies felt cold, so cold and so frigid his mind seemed to suffer frostbite despite the forest all around him being ablaze. He dropped to his knees, unable to comprehend the chaotic force before him.
Its fury seems senseless, but the rage does have cause
Its bloody screams are filled with anguish and pain
For the chaos in its heart gives even nightmares pause.
And so it was called, this chaotic God of Destruction, Leviathan.
Jaws spread farther than they should have been able too in a roar that sounded like four of its kind twisted together atop the bellow of Tokyo’s destroyer, wreathed in a tide of flames that washed over it like a storming ocean, the Leviathan gave its intent. One hundred and fifty meters in height, it stomped towards Godzilla Earth undeterred. Almost healed enough to use its atomic breath, the titan of this world instead turned about and swung its tail as the extremity crackled with energy. A scythe of energy came forth with the swing, cleaving the air and several hills in two.
Flames were shouted out, the forest was obliterated, and an advance was paused. Godzilla Earth slowly looked back to observe, but much to its displeasure it did not witness the bisected torso of the new monstrosity joining the cleaved mountains and hills. The Leviathan still stood, its tail slowly swaying behind it with no heed paid to the gash across its chest that bled glowing, liquid light. It wasn’t a deep wound and it promptly shrank before the moment even passed, the blood that oozed out being recalled back into the body in a most uncanny display as the scales and sinew replenished and sewed themselves back together. The dense scutes from the Ancient sprouted across the chest to spread and thicken into a plastron shielding its chest.
Unblinking, stoic eyes dared the ruler of this world to try it again and such was done. The charge wasn’t as significant, owing to a quicker time, but the moment that followed could practically be heard across the span and time of this Terra. Godzilla Earth’s assaults had been resisted before, first by the heroic cyborg that battled against it in the long march, then by the moth goddess who managed to deflect one of its rays in ages past, and in the modern time of the future with the nanometal city just barely being able to dampen its beam of judgement. But the impossibility of an attack bouncing off a foe with barely a scratch had never once occurred. Yet that’s what seemed to happen, when the crescent wave of energy rocketed forward, made impact, and then careened off into the sky to explode somewhere in the high atmosphere.
After a passing gale blew past it, the Leviathan lowered its torso. Servum took to the air in droves to protect their master, flanking around to come up behind the Leviathan in a snapping horde numbering in the dozens as the call to arms was put out across the whole of Japan with more and more coming. A blinding light overtook the spaces between the Leviathan’s back plates. With eyes glowing like the rays of dawn to cast beams across the land, the hues of light went from fiery orange to mixtures of reds and purples. Thick geysers of plasma spewed forth from vents across the back situated between the plates, first rapidly spreading out into jets of fire and smog before condensing.
The servum were largely fried to shriveled masses of vaporizing eyes and charred flesh even before the intense beams of purple with encircling spirals of red and bolts of gold carved through the flock. Uproars of death shrieks and the sound of hundreds of tons of falling ashes filled the night. The emissions shifted again, reducing in number but increasing in size to incorporate traits of the Old King’s breath. The Leviathan extended its legs and launched itself from the ground. Pushed ahead with a force that far exceeded gravity, the composite saurian deity used the beams spewing out of it's back to rocket itself towards Godzilla Earth with a bloodthirsty roar of anguish.
The resulting crash sent forth a shockwave that leveled trees and shuddered hills, blowing back tons of debris and ash across the burning forest. Godzilla Earth’s jaws flew open in a mute roar, unable to call out when every fiber of its gargantuan mass was sent hurtling back. It struggled, grabbing and clawing at the Leviathan that held it around its chest to continue and drag it along for the flight. Hundreds of meters flew by in seconds and an impact into Mount Fuji did little to impede them. Ramming into the iconic volcano with the force of a nuclear warhead, the top of that ancient monolith stood no chance. Thousands of meters of rock were crushed, burned, and shoved aside until the two finally hit an open space, a hollow cavity within Mount Fuji.
Or at least it had been hollow until their entry all but tore the top off the mountain. Evidently, an eruption had occurred sometime between man largely leaving this world in the 2030s and the present year, dried, smooth, black magma rock encrusting the walls as well as once forming the roof. But light soon not of the stars or living occupants soon came upon Mount Fuji.
The Leviathan twisted around after Godzilla Earth bashed the smaller kaiju with its tail, batting the transgressor aside and loosening its grip. Knowing it was about to lose grip upon this titan anyways, the Leviathan almost seemed to smirk. Letting go of Godzilla Earth’s torso, it let it drop for a moment before snatching the living mountain’s throat with its arm. Elongated talons dug into the bark-ish hide. Feeling Godzilla Earth grip its forelimb with titanic strength and revving its afterburners to full capacity, the Leviathan cocked back its arm and dove forward towards the dried magma chamber wall. With an arm thrust, it shoved Godzilla Earth’s face into the wall and flew across it and the floors, carving a thick groove into the stone amidst a shower of sparks with its enemy’s face as the plow. Jostled by the impact explosion and with its casing fractured by the trench dug, the bubbling, burning mass beneath the surface stone sloshed up.
Godzilla Earth twisted its head around to avoid having its eyes gouged out by the passing stone, blue lights sparking across its body to condense around its head and face. Because the Leviathan was still holding onto it, however, the energy conducted between them both, building upon itself in a feedback loop to a brightness that outshone the waves of lava. Just as Godzilla Earth wanted when it opened its maw and roared an oscillating bellow.
The eruption and explosion were visible even back in the ruins of Mechagodzilla City and Houtua settlement. As baffled as the onlookers might be as to the nature of the four warriors from parts unknown and the nature of the ascension, they knew what was transpiring was the matters beyond mortals; into the realms of legend. The clash of a force of nature and something that exceeded nature, the question at hand was a matter of whom was who.
The Leviathan stalked about, slowly circling around the rim of the magma chamber shrouded in thick gouts of ash and smog, only the occasional breaches in the floor that spewed out more magma illuminated its form. With a sweep of its tail, it smothered the glow and vanished, thick smog blotting out even its own burning glow.
Suddenly, with barely any charge time, a magnificent burst of red plasma spewed forth and swept across the magma chamber. It impaled through the back wall and shot off into the night sky, easily cleaving a hole into Mount Fuji’s side in its wake. The beam seemed to spiral as it drilled through all matter, even reaching the upper atmosphere with no issue before it was cut off. The smog, having another means to be vented off and towed by the intense force, was partially pulled free of the chamber; and act that between itself and the intensity of the magma’s glow, more brightly illuminated the chamber.
Godzilla Earth fully canceled its assault, looking about for where its foe had gone. The chamber looked like something from the writings of Dante, but with nary a demon in sight. Privy to the Leviathan’s ability to fly or at least propel itself, knowing eyes gazed upwards as it kept at the ready.
The ground exploded in oncoming ferocity as if a tidal wave of lava had suddenly been summoned. The Leviathan, having almost dove into the chamber floor through a combination of its components’ ability to swim and Zilla’s burrowing skills, had dug under the chamber and swam through the magma to launch its ambush. Erupting from the ground in a sea of lithic hellfire, it smashed a crackling tail full of energy into Godzilla Earth’s midsection. The hyper-intensified nuclear pulse, gold in color, all but destroyed a large chunk of Godzilla Earth’s midsection. If it had organs, they’d have been disemboweled with ease. Undeterred, Godzilla Earth threw open its jaws and let free a massive roar. The oscillatory pressure wave needed no charge time in this state, and easily hit with the force of several kilotons to knock the smaller kaiju back and blast it back into the lava pools. For miles, the god of this world’s roar was heard continuously.
Unrelenting, Godzilla Earth continued the roar as it advanced forward, intending to entomb its foe within the fiery depths. With the Leviathan pinned down from the force, there’d be nothing to stop its red sparking dorsal spines from charging a loosed red charged particle beam again; this time the asteroid buster of a judgment was guaranteed to have a direct hit.
The tide shifted. A geyser of nuclear flames started to push the oscillatory waves back. It shifted, first turning green, and then blue, white. Intensifying in both blinding brightness and force, when the beam finally overtook Godzilla Earth’s attack it could most favorably be compared to a thin purple line of energy encircled in spiraling flames that had fiery lightning twisting around it. Overpowered entirely, Godzilla Earth felt the ray fly into its mouth and combust on impact. The purple ray shot out the back of its neck in a manner that, had it a skeleton, would have easily crippled the destroyer. But biology regardless, the fact the spiraling reds and sparking golds utterly destroyed the sides of Godzilla Earth’s face to the point its jaw was left dangling limply certainly hurt.
But as the beams of spewed ray died away, they returned in full as the entirety of Mount Fuji shook, as if Heaven and Earth both quaked. Exploding forth from its attempted tomb, fiery lights erupting from numerous places upon its loathsome form and wreathed in the tsunami of hurled magma. Godzilla Earth whipped around as its shattered jaw sparked and started to mend itself, the Leviathan doing the same. Energy waves roared across their bodies and into the two’s tails, two unstoppable forces colliding. All sound was shouted out, condensing before rapidly expanding into an enormous shockwave that tore the innards of the volcano apart.
Mount Fuji, that 120,000-year megalith of nature didn’t erupt. It met its end by exploding. Lava, burned rock, ash, and dust was thrown out every-which-way for kilometers in a fiery end that could be seen across the corpse of Japan and felt across the planet. The world never seemed to stop shaking, like it would be torn asunder from its core. The only souls who didn’t throw themselves to the ground in prayers or pleas for life were the two at the epicenter of the explosion.
Burning earth and ash constantly falling down as a hail of fireballs and exploding rocks all around it, Godzilla Earth took a blow to the stomach that reverberated through its whole body in a shockwave in such a manner that surely would have shattered bones if it had any. Its foe had morphed again, growing in size. Now it was closer to 200 meters tall and closing the gap between itself and its foe. Godzilla growled and withstood the tremors, returning form by swinging down with a taloned, burning paw that ended up only swiping at blazing magma when the Leviathan leaped up. The pulses of energy constantly radiating off the titan. Fiery ballistic projectiles still raining down from above, hundred-ton hunks of rock molten and solid, exploded on contact with invisible energy pulses radiating off the monstrosity. Activating its dorsal vents, it took to the air with purple rays and spiral fire beams constantly raining down on the ground. It twisted around while flying upwards, rending the landscape and setting swaths of forest on fire by radiating temperature alone.
Godzilla Earth erected its shield, a bubble of brilliance deflecting the rays with visible difficulty. The heat was so intense that just the convecting temperatures coming through the air were melting parts of Godzilla Earth’s hide and causing it to smoke. Eyes that had long held a stoic gaze for thousands of years widened in shock. It was at its absolute peak and yet one thing just became abundantly clear from both each successive beam becoming more and more intense and the radiating power it could sense coming from the Leviathan even as it hovered hundreds of meters above it.
The Leviathan, every minute, every second, every fraction of a moment that incalculable wrath existed, was getting stronger. It wasn’t as if it was the four intruders compiled together, but multiplied to one another in a gradually increasing factor.
Crimson and burning eyes loosed untold wrath at the world around it. An intense magnetic field was generated, a power gained from the slain Old King. As it ascended, intense heat and pulses of energy conducted off the God of Destruction, igniting the metallic spore and ash clouds that made up the upper atmosphere. A curtain of blazing light spread across the sky like a wave a fire, burning countless tons of altered tree pollen and particulates. The intense energy emission flash fried all but the metallic parts of the particles, creating a cloud of conductive matter the energy and magnetic waves worked off of. In a fantastic roar, a shockwave of red energy burst forth from the Leviathan.
Far above in the Aratrum, the last stronghold of the endangered species called humanity, the occupants gawked at their screens in a mix of awe and horror. The sensors had detected it before any eyes did, but the advanced monitors and gauges had suffered almost immediate overload and shutdown if the technicians could get to them in time. Many weren’t so lucky, fire extinguishers sounding off across the ship along with the warning sirens.
The captain, a prematurely aged man with gray hair, short beard, and a diagonal scar going across his left eye, manned an extinguisher to hose down what had been his helm computer. Former deputy captain of the Gotengo before it was brought down, Unberto Mori, had been put in charge of the colony ship when it frantically left Earth behind with the express purpose of protecting the last vestiges of humanity and their allies. And so far, the colony ship's mission had gone to Hell in a handbasket in two decades of voyage and especially in the last forty-eight hours. He knew it was a bad idea to come back to this forsaken planet, human pride be damned. He knew it was a horrible idea to send anyone down there when the sensors picked up a familiar roar he knew from experience. Right now he was deciding between who he wanted to throttle more, Haruo for being the catalyst of this return to the homeworld or Metphies for supplying Haruo the means to do so, assuming either of them was still alive.
“Sensors are all down!”, some helmswoman yelled out from a smoking room adjacent to the command deck.
Captain Mori looked to a technician fruitlessly trying to get a system computer back online across the room from him, “It’s no use! You, get the front windows open so we can see what in God’s name is going on down there!”
The young man stiffened but nodded, hitting the release button as Mori went to put out a bonfire that had once been their navigation computer. Finally getting annoying, beeping fire alarm off, he couldn’t help but notice that aside from the sounds of the fires dying away, he could’ve heard a pin drop in the room behind him when the metallic world of the window shutters pulling back stopped. Huffing and coughing from exertion and a bit of smoke inhalation, Captain Mori couldn’t shake the overwhelming sense of dread that had befallen him. He really didn’t want to turn around and look out the window to see what everyone was gawking at. But so far this job entailed a lot of things he really didn’t like.
“... What is it?!”
Only silence and muted swears floated across his back into his ears. The captain closed his eyes, opening into a broken stare and an even more broken, almost whispered command.
“What is it?....”
“S-Sir…” A tiny whimper came to him, “...the sky is on fire.”
When Captain Mori turned around, he didn’t know what surprised him more after this visit to a planet of nightmares. The fact some of the Exif were mysteriously sprinting off to God knew where, the typically battle hungry Bilusaludo looked as pale as sheets, or the fact that exactly what the helmsman had said was true. Evidently, more than just the mission had gone to Hell.
What Godzilla Earth had taken centuries to do to the old world was happening in a matter of minutes and might be finished in a matter of hours to the new world it had forged in its own image. It might well be over by the day’s end if Godzilla Earth didn’t act.
The blinding light coming across its body was the stuff of magnificence, blotting out even the burning glow of the magma and firestorm it stood in. The metallic bonds that created its body started to warp and melt from the blaze, the crackling energy coming forth from them shifting from blue to red to white. It gazed upon the swirling mass of plasma, lightning, and fire that created a second Sun several kilometers above it. The Leviathan started to turn and rotate, the eye of its own monstrous hurricane. It began to descend with murderous resolve.
A roar heard around the world from its master rang out and the beam that would make all that came before it look paltry knifed into the air. Radiating splinters of energy shot out in a fan around the Leviathan when it was struck. They eviscerated the upper atmosphere, some raking across the Moon in such a way one could claim they saw the rays go right through the celestial.
And yet the descending funnel cloud from the hurricane of fire and lightning kept coming, its blinding eye spinning and charged with energy. When it struck, the Mount Fuji Plateau became the Mount Fuji crater when the Leviathan surged into it.
Godzilla Earth wasn’t fighting anymore. It was getting slaughtered. The impact force had destroyed much of its exterior body, physically shrinking it somewhat even as its regeneration worked on overdrive to mend it. Most of its dorsal spines had been completely blown off, half its face was missing as was all of its left arm with the accompanying half of the shoulder and torso, and it could barely stand on half crushed-in right leg and the chart mass that used to be its left leg. And it could feel the agony to a level it never imagined along with something else. A reverberating footstep, the booming echo that many worlds heard on Odo island in 1954.
Power radiated onto it, still increasing every moment. It was over 250 meters tall now, and scaling with mass to such a point the world shook with every step. Still every bit the wrath of an angry god. The Exif had prophecies about beasts of the great power that came upon the haughty and the arrogant, those who fancied themselves masters of their domain and abused that power. For the species who pronounce themselves as lords of creation, a divine avenger will pay them a visit.
Godzilla Earth felt itself being grabbed by the head and dragged out of the crater. It went airborne, thrown hundreds of meters and crashing back down upon the same mountain it had initially burst from. Its nest it reforged the world from to become the tomb in which its creation died.
Another roar was heard over the horizon. A being of blue energy stretched across the landscape and struck the Leviathan on the back. It was like shooting a tank with a water pistol, but it got its attention. Burning crimson eyes trained on a Godzilla Filius. The sole survivor of its brood, it had sensed the plight of its sibling and then parent and courageously stomped forward.
The Leviathan gazed upon the young monster prince. Its thoughts were impossible to discern, assuming it was thinking at all. If one were privy to the details of its components, one might wonder what might be going through its mind when it witnessed a child rushing to save their parent. Zilla might perhaps remember a chance meeting between a repentant scientist and a young lizard in the depths of the destroyed nest when the former took pity on the latter. Gojira might recall a calm time in the Permian period where he oversaw the hatching of both his nest and those of his sister, greeting the site of both his own progeny and the faces of his nieces and nephews. The Showa Godzilla could reminisce back to a chance journey to a distant island after receiving a call in the depths of his mind that led him to a son, perhaps the fond memory of embracing his child as the snow fell around them. And Godzilla Junior might get an eerie sense of déjà vu at the sight of a monster prince being near his dying father before a monstrous mutation snatched the young kaiju up and sent him to his doom.
Miana and Maina, safe back in the Houtua Caverns and hobbled up against their goddess’ egg, were stoic in shock and fright, almost catatonic after trying to connect with the sacred egg and look into the mind of the destroying god. Four souls screaming in agony. Out of control.
The Leviathan had none of it. It had no conscience. No reasoning. Just a need to destroy. To destroy anything and everything that bore Godzilla Earth’s taint. Upon the graves of four heroes was spawned a reincarnation of the vengeance that turned Tokyo into a fireball in 1954.
The monster prince was snatched off his feet when the monstrous mutation rocketed into him. It tried to fire its beam, tried to summon now virtually extinct servum to its aid. It didn’t get the chance as two arms shot towards it. Bladed spines burst from the tops of the Leviathan’s wrists and similarly burst out of Filius’ back. The Leviathan snapped its arms to the side and the prince fell down in three pieces that were probably vaporized under a roar and geyser of burning lights.
Godzilla Earth could only watch on as Leviathan, wreathed in flames and the ashes of Earth’s direct progeny, slowly turned around. It began to start forward, a dark mass with broad spines crowning its shoulders and eyes like the radiance of dawn.
Usually, in most worlds, nature has a way sometimes of reminding man of just how small he is. She occasionally throws up terrible offsprings of our pride and carelessness to remind us of how puny we really are in the face of a tornado, an earthquake, or a Godzilla. The reckless ambitions of man are often dwarfed by their dangerous consequences.
It still fought back, for every extra minute, extra second of life it might buy. Like the humans, it vanquished who threw themselves at it in their nuclear weapons and war machines. Like a kaiju as they tried to defend their nests and homes. Godzilla Earth never accepted any life form not like itself having any right to exist, and yet so many had resisted it. Now it was resisting its own grim reaper.
This world was an outlier. In this world, it was the reckless ambitions of a kaiju who were called to task and judgment. In some remote way, Godzilla Earth could understand why this had happened. All of the needless destruction, needless slaughter, and devastation it had wrought come back to haunt it. The Leviathan was its own personal Godzilla.
Godzilla Earth swung its tail with all of its might and energy. The Leviathan caught it and wrenched the titan around, shoving it into the ground. Stomping on Godzilla Earth’s back to shattered dorsal spines and dent its tissue, it started pulling. It only lasted a moment or two but Godzilla Earth was kicked away and rolled across the ground feeling much lighter. When a tried to rise it was struck down by a heavy force. Glimpses of sight were only begotten as parts of the body were bashed in. The Leviathan, whom could end it all in one gigantic burst of energy, was beating it to death with its own dismembered body parts. Taking the end of the tail with its sharp tip to bear, the Leviathan stomped onto Godzilla Earth’s chest to hold it still before driving the tail through its stomach. Jamming the tail into a gaping wound upon the stomach, it burst out Godzilla Earth’s back and pinned the living mountain to the valley wall.
Tossing the broken and charred upper half of the tail aside, the Leviathan pounced. It’s intense heat melted what it touched on contact and titanic strength tore hunks of flesh out. A chunk of the shoulder, a leg, one slash from a wrist blade emptied out Godzilla Earth’s stomach. The Burning Mountain that Walked pathetically grabbed at its assailants face, only to have its hand and arm bit into. With a yank of its neck, the Leviathan tore the arm off and jammed its own hand into the hole within the shoulder.
With a clench of the fist, the wrist spike returned while the hand was still inside Godzilla Earth, stabbing into more inner tissue. With jerks and twists of its arm, the Leviathan carved pieces out of their holdings. The Leviathan sensed the radiation and energy within and began to seize it. Blue sparks traveled up its arm and into its body, siphoned from Godzilla Earth. The Leviathan’s maw and eyes burned with blazing lights to end this. It only paused for a moment to glance to the forest around it at the notice of a particular detail.
The trees, hearty structures that incorporated Godzilla Earth’s genes so much they could bend steel and snap a knife, were largely ablaze and crumbling. But the ones only touched by the spreading flames rather than a direct impact were holding on, and there still existed patches of foliage saved from the inferno. If given time, the forest of Earth’s making could regrow. Even with the death of its master, Godzilla Earth’s legacy might live on.
Except when the energy consumption started, there was a shift. Desperate to keep itself alive at the cost of all else, Godzilla Earth drew power from its surroundings. A set of ferns began to shrivel up, trees started to sag, and one such large, mighty stalk snapped under its own weight when its trunk weakened. The Leviathan saw this and canceled out its beam attack.
It could kill, or reap extinction. Wipe out one horrid excuse for a life, or cleanse this world of its infection. One could swear they saw the mad god grinning.
Noticing Godzilla Earth’s body heating up as it attempted one last desperate charge of its mighty ray, the Leviathan jammed its free hand into Godzilla Earth’s chin and forced its head up.
Godzilla Earth went still and convulsed as the Leviathan forcefully withdrew with arm and brought a handful of tissue it had torn free to bear. With a piercing stare, the flesh was plopping into a fanged maw. The energy was drained, life sucked out between jagged fangs before being incinerated. Crimson and fiery eyes leered at the master of this world. The Leviathan would have its feast. A final, desperate beam from Godzilla Earth shot into the sky when the Leviathan, holding its face away, bit into and tore out a large chunk of its collar and throat.
The beam divided the sky, before sputtering and flickering out. After its third mouthful, the God of Destruction took its prey. Grabbed Godzilla Earth’s face with both hands and brought it to its own. The latter’s stare was blank but conscious. A light passed from the Leviathan’s gaze to Godzilla Earth’s. Flashes of memory and vision. A hero king leading an army of monsters against a golden dragon, an ancient titan tired from battle gazing upon Ford Brody with a calm curiosity, the energetic protector playfully splashing his adoptive family, the H.E.A.T. Team with sea water; and a young prince smiling at his tiny mother, Azusa Gojo, inside an institute.
Godzilla Earth could hear the four screaming, but wasn’t sure if it was their death cries it was recalling or the echoes of their consciousness within the Leviathan. For the first time in its over 20,000 year existence, Godzilla Earth was finally feeling what it had subjected billions of victims to as it slaughtered them for no reason. Mortality, hopelessness, terror.
The Leviathan opened its jaws, slowing bringing the side of Godzilla Earth’s head to its mouth. With a crunch and gnash, Godzilla Earth limply fell to the ground with half its head missing. It was still alive, it felt everything that followed.
The Leviathan chewed, observing its surroundings and prey. Due to lacking any organs, Godzilla Earth wouldn’t die until its body ran out of energy or was entirely destroyed. That meant the process of eating in life, draining every chunk of energy from it, ensuring that no scrap remained that could possibly regenerate, could take hours. A brief glance was cast to the jewel-like bead upon its stomach. It still had not used its most powerful ability and it could drain Godzilla Earth far quicker with its hakai touch. That could both finish it and ensure there would be no need for cleanup for Godzilla Earth as well as probably a large chunk of whatever parts of Japan were in front of the Leviathan when it fired....
Jagged, uneven rows of teeth knifed into Godzilla Earth’s neck, pulling out another chunk to be devoured slowly as the living mountain’s single remaining, unblinking blue eye stare off into space from its paralyzed body. The firestorm had cleared and having previously destroyed the pollen cloud, there was nothing to obstruct the starry sky above. It beheld the Milky Way, features obscured for so long while being eaten alive.
The Houtua guard dropped to the ground with a smoking hole burned into his chest, the pale robed figure unceremoniously stepping over him and throwing the religious wares and butterfly-patterned symbols adorning the altar he’d been guarding aside to clear it off. The murderer perked to the sound of approaching footsteps, no doubt roused by the noise of the killing.
One of the few surviving humans to have the sense to scramble out of Mechagodzilla City before it was destroyed, a thirty-something blonde haired man named Dr. Martin, felt his face chill when he recognized the killer.
“Metphies?! What the hell are you doi-?!”
The pistol the stoic Exif was carrying rang out again. Several accompanying Houtua lurched back in surprise as the doctor dropped with part of his head missing. Metphies trained the weapon upon the doorway and emptied the clip, driving back the Houtua and collapsing the roof onto the entryway to seal it. Metphies paused, standing alone in the dark chamber with a cave entrance that went off the side of a cliff being the only one way in or out of the altar room. Usually the image of poise and reason, one could forget Metphies was still young as far as his kind persisted at a mere 50, even with his high status as archbishop.
Except for now. Cracks in the visage were forming. Dilation of the eyes, twitches of muscle, sweat creasing his body, and body hairs standing up on end. He’d previously clenched his jaw so much golden blood trickled out from the corners due to cracked teeth.
Everything thus far had been going smoothly, if unorthodox. Humanity would face its judgment at the hands of its divinely ordained executioner as all arrogant races would. Such judgment could never be escaped, never be forgiven or abolished. His race had suffered it once but they knew their end would come sooner or later by the planet eater. Humanity almost met their end, but the misplaced kindness of the Houtua’s goddess and stubborn resolve of others had permitted a reprieve. His guiding of Haruo back to this world was a means of testing the degree of their time allotted.
It had been so close to coming to fruition, only for four trespassers to suddenly intervene. It made no sense to him, none of it. The mighty punish and destroy the weak and the haughty, such was vindicated when Godzilla slew them; but the fact that they came to humanity’s aid, opposed such a force, and simply refused to stay dead was folly! Absurd! An affront to every sense of order his kind has witnessed in 100,000 years since their god ordained them.
Metphies shook, eyes wide as he placed a small green, glowing box on the altar before drawing up a sacred medallion shaped like a coin. He’d gazed upon Leviathan and contemplated raw chaos, and a mind devout to a single truth and rigid order without the ability to comprehend more than its god allowed; had gone utterly insane.
He pressed the medallion to the shrine, closed his eyes, and did what most of faith did when left in a situation spiraling out of control. Submit to a higher power. His was just what most would call a devil.
High above in the Arratrum, Endurph and several other Exif got the signal from Metphies’ shrine activating. Exiting away so that no human, Bilosaludo, or uncooperative Exif could stop them, they all followed suit with their archbishop’s command.
Miana heard the roars and explosions die down outside several minutes ago. It still took an hour before she left to investigate, nimbly sprinting along paths from memory with dashes across boulders and sprints over charred trees. She had to do it from memory because her surroundings barely resembled the forests she’d known since childhood. All the trees were either burned to cinders and blackened husks or were wilting, wasting away as if being denied something. A movement up ahead caused her to pause and frantically bring forth her bow. But no sooner had she notched the arrow, the servum flopped to the ground with barely more than a pathetic whimper coming out of its jaws.
Miana hyperventilated in every breath, very slowly sidestepping towards it. Noticing a pebble near her foot, she punted it towards the servum. The worm-like creature groaned, clearly wanting to move but unable to do so. Miana closed her eyes and wiped her face, having been crying from the intense psychic presence she heard screaming for hours. Slowly stepping forward into close range, she very carefully put the tip of her bow to the servum’s head. Multiple eyes winced, several closing, but no other action was taken. Miana finally saw it for what it was. Once a mighty predator, now wasting away like a dying man upon his final bed. Minding its jaws, she reached out and very slowly got to the back of its head to help close its eyes. The servum flinched at the contact, but either due to weakness or something the priestess might’ve been empathically telling it, it slackened. One way or another, after a few moments more, it would never move again.
The last servum in Japan, possibly the world, didn’t die without company. Miana’s goddess was a compassionate one and asked her followers to be the same. Withdrawing her hand, Miana found herself finally looking up now that she was standing alone. What she beheld left her gawking and confused.
Tiny blue and white fires in the sky, some of them twinkling amidst a vaguely pale curtain. They were only barely visible through the residual smoke and haze coming from the dying forests, but they left the Houtua priestess stunned. Where was the curtain of fog that separated the heavens?! Where did this dark ocean of fiery sparks come from?! Was the world drowning? Would the fires rain down? This wasn't how the sky was supposed to look, it had never looked like this in all her years or the years of her parents.
The forest was dying, the creatures were dying, and now it seemed even something as constant as the fog and mists up above were going away. Her world was becoming a corpse and she couldn’t move.
It was a telepathic scream that finally roused her. She couldn’t be sure if it was multiple voices or just one, but she got a fix on the location and ran off to see to it just like how she was able to find Haruo trapped under the wreckage of his ship when the Mountain of Fire destroyed it. She could only idly wonder about the fates of the four heroic titans who stood against the Mountain Haruo called ‘Godzilla’. The Mountain itself ruled over this world and any chance of fighting it was folly, especially with it enraged at the death of its progeny. Nothing had been the same since that day. The progeny, Filius that nice “Mar-Tin” man called it, her people knew well, and if they’d stay out of the way of it, it would leave them be either due to never noticing or not caring about anything that didn’t attack it. But the Mountain, it had been rampaging and hunting ever since it awoke. And with such monstrous force and resolve, everything on this planet might be of finite day with it about.
She could pray for the four souls her goddess surely sent to protect them, hoping at a minimum they could have held off the Mountain that Walked’s assault and retreat. She still had no idea what had given off that intense wave of rage and hatred she’d felt earlier that nearly made her catatonic with terror, but she found herself mentally pleading to Mothra for the heroes’ safety. If one day this world returned to peace, she’d love to share it with such valiant souls.
Maina, Miana’s much more aggressive twin sister really did not like the newcomers at all. Especially that young male her sister saved and seemed to like to keep an eye on named Ha-Roo-oh. But when the sounds of falling debris rumbled through the caverns, she could be appreciative of the fact the black haired moron who roused the Mountain of Fire was sprinting alongside her towards the source and one of the first to help her start digging out several Houtua buried in rubble after his companion had been stabilized, in a coma rather than dead despite the toxic nanometal due to their goddess’ gift. Maina knew the chamber, one of the altar rooms that overlooked the valley through a cliffside cave, and that it was fairly spacious. There still could be someone inside behind the collapsed sections. Or, given her suspicions, behind the collapsed sections in a different way. There was a reason she didn’t discard her bow even while helping excavate. It helped that despite a shorter stature, their goddess had blessed the Houtua with a sturdier constitution than one would expect.
Maina and Haruo were some of the first through the opening and what they saw left the latter shocked. Dr. Martin was laying on the ground, stinking up the room with the smell of burned blood and flesh as he lay with most of his head missing. If it weren’t for his suit and shocked expression still etched across the face that remained, they wouldn't have been able to tell it was him. Maina looked to two things.
The dead man, the burn marks across the ceiling from the invader’s weapons, one discarded weapon of such construct off to the side, and the pale not-human who was chanting, almost raving, before an altar that had been turned devoid of its proper articles and instead bore a glowing green shrine.
Putting the pieces together, Maina stomped forward and pulled out her bow. An arrow soon erupted from Metphies’ torso. The Exif stumbled, coughing up some fluid onto the altar. Dull golden ichors spilled over the shrine-like spilled wine of offering. But just when it seemed like he was about to fall, Metphies slowly rose. His head half turned and illuminated in the dim torchlight, the manic and yet calm look he gave the Servum-Slayer caused Maina the freeze up. Gold blood dribbled from his mouth, nose, and eyes as he slowly continued chanting some prayer in a language she didn’t understand even with telepathy. Almost like it was an invocation of something opposite her goddess.
Metphies surged forward before she could react, grabbing Maina by the neck and slamming her against the back wall with an unnatural force that bruised bone and broke skin. All the while constantly still chanting a prayer in a bloody voice despite the arrow sticking through his chest. Maina yelped, fighting against a raging headache and vertigo from her head hitting the back wall, grabbing at the Exif’s arms and kicking his stomach to try and force him off. Judging from the loud crack her powerful knee ensued when it struck him, she’d shattered half of Metphies’ ribs.
But the cold, astronomically cold, fingers clamped down on her windpipe. Metphies closed the distance, so close to her his manic chanting spattered his blood across her face and chest. The look in his eyes was a void, almost like something else with keeping his body going.
There was the sound of shifting machinery, clicking against the ground but she couldn’t see the source.
Metphies pressed closer, filling the Houtua’s nose with the stench of cold death. Maina’s eyes widened when she felt a sharp pain in her stomach. A scream of agony was wrought from the burning, stabbing sensations. That toxic arrow that had been jutting out Metphies’ chest was now lodged in her stomach and twisting through her flesh with her struggles.
A loud flash accompanied a wet, chilling splatter of fluid across her face. A dozen more bangs sounded off. Metphies’ grip shifted but didn’t waiver until bright streaks tore through his arms and all but severed them at the elbows. Haruo, eyes wide in a broken expression, dropped the magazine he’d been carrying out of Metphies’ pistol; the clicking sound moments ago having been him loading it. In a trained motion with no other thought able to cross his broken mind, he shoved another clip in and opened fire. The Exif archbishop’s body was perforated by dozens of projectiles, micro-bullets that traded size for velocity and thus allowed for a larger clip. He dropped another magazine and reloaded, repeating the process.
Finally, Metphies fell, his body from all angles shredded into a gory mess of golden blood and shattered bone shards. Curiously he had no organs to speak of, just a pulsating, jewel-like core were his heart would have been. Maina’s arrow had nicked it and Haruo’s free-fire had impacted the core multiple times, the bright glow within it dimming considerably as tiny blue wisps trickled out. Just as Godzilla had reforged the surviving plants and animals to his image and Mothra had shielded the Houtua by altering them under her patronage by the same gene swapping methods, so to had the surviving Exif carried the traces of their god.
Haruo finally took a breath, looking at what he had just done and throwing the gun away in a horrified shout. He felt chilled to the bone and yet burning at the same time, all organs pushed up into his throat so that he tasted bile. It took every spark of willpower he had to stumble towards Maina and help her up, holding a hand to her stomach to stem the bleeding while supporting her as the Houtua gasped for air.
But they were too late.
The shrines both on the planet and its cohorts in space all lit up with brilliance in activation at the uttering of a phrase escaping Metphies’ last breath, even as he lay dying in a pool of his own ichors with most of his face and chest blown off. One echoed by his followers aboard the Aratrum.
“Ghidorah.”
Long, serpentine shadows crawled out of the altar and from Metphies’ bloody pool.
Miana tried not to think too hard about the eldritch sky above, to the fact, the woodlands she trekked through were marred, burned, and decaying away before her very eyes. It was like watching a drought’s entire season play out in front of her in a matter of minutes. Aged trees that were several meters thick and healthy hours ago were shriveled and decayed to little more than husks, numerous dead animals carpeting the ground, and even the soil seemed cracked and broken under her feet. When she reached the edge of the valley, however, where the shimmering city of nanometal once was, she found herself dropping her bow in dumbstruck shock.
The invincible Mountain, the lord of this world and killer of her goddess’ ancestor, was impaled against the valley wall by its own tail with barely half its body remaining. Such an impossibility left a shock traveling through her body, so much so it took her time to notice the other titan.
An end for the Burning Mountain was a distant possibility. Her people had managed to live under its reign since time seemed to begin anew after the death of the old world. Its wrath was a terror and in some ways, Miana prayed her goddess to be reborn and rid the world of its taint. Even with the four heroes surely ordained by Mothra’s grace though, she was skeptical it could be done tonight. Force it back and away, keep it from stirring up the servum to seek and destroy her kind against their typical behavior, that’s what she’d hoped for. Prayed for.
But now, seeing the titan that walked in mountains laid low, her breath was dead. Especially when she saw what the other monster was doing to it. The Leviathan gripped Godzilla’s remaining arm, which was barely still attached, and tore it free before bringing it up to its jaws. Godzilla Earth, whom she had previously almost hoped had departed the coil of life, convulsed. Miana gasped as she saw its blue, almost philosopher-like eye twitch and glow weakly. She’d seen predators eat prey alive before, but that did little to hamper her illness. But there was something else she noticed, much to her horror.
When the Leviathan, a revolting monstrosity, brought the arm up to its mouth and started to drain away the energy, the trees and plant life around Miana seemed to react. In a matter of seconds, whole swaths of forest were dropping dead and the priestess soon realized why. Godzilla got its energy from its surroundings and was tied to anything that bore its bloodline since its sired a new world while entombed within the mountain. If it had been suddenly struck down in battle or driven off, the world it had molded could continue on independently. That she could infer from the fact the ecosystem didn’t collapse whenever it was wounded.
The beast of a god, it wasn’t just killing Godzilla. It was killing a planet. Her entire world.
Instantly her mind was a flurry of questions. Where were Mothra’s champions?! Surely she couldn’t have sent this thing too! She would never! Miana nevertheless though saw the resemblances. The large shoulder spikes resembling the scutes upon the one that saved Ha-roo-oh from the servum, the thick scales and plates borne by the one she could tell at a glance was as ancient as the hills, the powerful arms and mighty stance of the wise leader who instructed the youngbloods, and the robust body and jagged spines belonging to the youth that carried himself with such determination. It was like seeing all four of them mashed together and then turned into a nightmare.
Whatever it was, she had to plead with it.
The Leviathan dropped the shriveled, burnt remains of the arm after draining it dry of stored energy. It looked back upon the half-eaten remains of Godzilla Earth with the edges of its lips curling upwards to bear fangs in a malign grin. It lowered down with its jaws spreading apart to take another bite. The shadow of fangs came over Godzilla Earth’s remaining eye, and it was powerless to get free. The Leviathan seemed to laugh as it prepared the crunch down before a voice barely above a whisper echoed over its ears.
-Stop!-
Miana, eyes streaming tears, didn’t even realize she had physically shouted at the same time she had telepathically done so. So moved she was with emotion, her kind’s typically stoic attitude had shattered.
A terror she had never before known in her life came over the Houtua and she froze up for so long that by the time she could form a conscious thought, a god was towering over her. Miana winced as she gazed upon the enormity that stood above her like a mountain, dim burning lights crackling between the holes in its hide and through its eyes that burned like the rays of a radiant dawn as the dark body was wreathed in the light of stars she had never before seen. It was a crucible for madness to try and grasp it all.
-Please..-
She whimpered as steam and smoke exited the Leviathan’s fanged maw. Miana was just barely able to motion towards the dying forest.
-Th-The world… You’re killing it.-
The Leviathan lowered down to look at her closer, eyes larger than semi trucks forcing her to cover her own orbs, lest they be blinded. It surveyed her. She had a trace upon her that wasn’t human. But it wasn’t of Godzilla Earth either. Thus it didn’t care. Turning back around, the Leviathan’s tail brushed into the cliffside and collapsed part of it. Miana rapidly backpedaled, scrambling over jagged, snapping stone and twisting, dead roots to avoid plummeting. All the while projecting her begging, her pleas to the deity for the sake of her planet. That if it were to slay Godzilla and take its place of dominion, to make it quick so the world might survive; that it might not die like the one of old had.
She was wise to not beg for Godzilla Earth’s life, else there would be more than just a stiff glare thrown back at the Houtua.
But in that very look, it came surging back. Miana attempted to reach into the mind and heart of a God of Destruction, and she felt it all. The crushing wave of hatred, bloodthirst, ravenous want for devastation, that sent her crumbling to her knees. But it was what followed that left her shrieking. A chorus of four screams, two of which were extremely familiar. Tortured, tormented in a prison they couldn’t escape, helpless against the onslaught unfolding in their very body. Miana wept tears of blood as she clutched at her head, the sheer force of the agony of four heroes and the malice of a god threatening to tear her mind apart. Screaming out into the forest dying and burning around her, she joined her would-be saviors in a mental Hell.
High above in the Aratrum, humanity’s last stronghold had just gotten some of its systems back online.
“Status on the planet,” Captain Mori, back in his officer’s seat, muttered with worry and stress clearly staining his features.
A helmsman tapped at his screen and brought up long distance scans of the surface taken from the ship’s deck cameras, “Major fire and electrical storms over 40% of the Asian surface and growing, significantly thinning out the electromagnetic pollen cloud that had been blocking our scanners. We’re picking up mass tectonic activity in Japan indicative of an eruption, UTM coordinates indicate Mount Fuji as the epicenter.”
“Another catastrophe,” Captain Mori solemnly grumbled, “And of course it was Japan, where else could something go wrong after two disasters in a row for Metphies’ expedition?”
With thoughts trained upon the alien, Capt. Mori glanced around the helm and surrounding halls and again noticed the distinct lack of Exif on board.
“Where is Cardinal Endurph? Half the ship was on fire just a minute ago and a quarter of our crew is missing!”
It was just then when a powerful, quill-browed Bilusaludo woman, Lieutenant Kulo Numa, rushed onto the bridge, “Captain! The Exif!”
Several minutes later and with multiple security teams on hand, Captain Mori poked his head around the corner to one of the commons halls only to quickly duck back when pistol fire grazed the side of the wall next to his scalp.
Casting a glance to Kulo Numa and General Dulo-Do’s team on the opposite side of the hall, Mori called out as the squad circled around.
“What’s going on, Cardinal?”
The response was a language he, even with extensive training in Exif linguistics, could not understand. How could he when they hid their most sacred prayers, the prayers of truth, from all but themselves? More pistol fire rang out and Mori ducked again.
“If you keep shooting out this way you might set the cables on fire!”
The bullets kept flying but other than idle worry about a ricochet hitting him or someone else, he actually didn’t mind them too much. The outsides of the windows could take micro-meteors and the insides were just as thick. It was all to keep them and presumably the Exif’s focus on him until he heard the tell-tale bang of a rifle instead. The squad had circled around while Endurph was distracted.
“He’s down!” Dulo-Do called out, “No signs of movement.”
Captain Mori took in an old, tired breath and sighed. “Good work General.”
Steeling himself just in case, Captain Mori tapped at his PDA and spoke into it, “Authorization, Mori. Activate lights in Hall 3.”
The occupants of the room had shut the lights off and override the commands to turn them back on. Now with no more interference, however, he could finally literally shed some light on the situation as to why over five dozen crew members had suddenly raided the armory, shot anyone who got in their way, and then all piled into this one room. But as soon as the lights came on, he soon found himself wishing they hadn’t.
Every single Exif was dead, strewn across the room in a large combined pool of golden blood. Gore spattered green shrines glowed in the four corners of the chamber, emitting an eerie light that Mori felt disgusted just looking at. Swallowing a large lump of bile threatening to spill out, an action evidently some of the squad members couldn’t stop themselves from doing due to a chorus of loud vomiting and retching, Mori stepped over the bodies and met Dulo-Do in the middle above Endurph’s body.
“Any return fire by the squad before my arrival?”
Dulo-Do shook his head, “Only a few shots. Not nearly enough for… This.”
Even the hardened General found himself taken aback at seeing so much bloodshed. Aside from a small handful of Exif on his squad who always acted more like humans or Bilusaludo, it seemed every Exif on board was now laying in pools of their own ichors.
“Sir,” Kulo Numa barked as she jogged up and saluted, “Sweep of the dead. All pistol shots to the back of the chest.”
“Then it couldn’t have been any of the security teams, otherwise some would be from the front.”
Kulo Numa nodded, “All teams report only firing with shotguns or rifles. And all spent magazines in the room are registered to just one gun.”
“So only one shooter once they sealed themselves within the chamber,” Captain Mori lamented as he reached for the pistol in Endurph’s hand’s death grip, “And I have a feeling which one.”
“Ritual suicide pact?”
Mori glanced at the shrines surrounding the room, feeling a horrible dread come over him just looking at them, “I have a theory…”
Suddenly the world was thrown into pandemonium. The Aratrum rocked and swerved, the roar of twisting metal blasting through the hull. Captain Mori was ripped off his feet and went airborne in a flurry of vertigo. Weightlessness came and went from artificial gravity fluctuating off and on. Bodies, ichors, persons, and items were hurled about in every direction. Captain Mori found himself hurled into the upper edge of the side wall, frantically grabbing a ceiling fixture and hanging on for dear life as the body of Endurph was thrown up against him. The aged captain would be seeing the Exif’s elated, relished death-grin until the day he died by how badly it burned itself into his memory. Pushing the body aside, Mori brought up his PDA and activated the emergency controls.
“Override code: Burr-Yagochi-Ford! Emergency power to stabilizers and artificial gravity generators!”
The PDA clicked and a few moments later, gravity returned to normal and the room gradually stopped spinning. Mori dropped to the ground and got a single breath to collect himself before warning sirens blared across the entirety of the Aratrum. The ship AI’s voice called out over the speakers.
“EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! HULL BREACH IN SECTORS 4-5-19! SEALING! ENGINES 1-15 NON-FUNCTIONAL. ENGINE 16 INCREASING OUTPUT TO SLOW MOVEMENT-”
And then the worst thing the caretaker for humanity’s last chance could ever hear.
“-LOSING ALTITUDE! IMPACT IN T-MINUS 8 MINUTES!”
On aching legs, Captain Mori hobbled to view the portside windows and beheld doom. The curve of Planet Earth, gradually growing in size and distance. They were crashing. And the cause of it came with living rivers of golden scales and jagged maws.
Ignoring the burning ship slowly plummeting to the world, the god of the Exif slithered through space to greet its feast. Ever since it attacked the Exif homeworld 100,000 years ago, it had left its mark upon the survivors. Their minds broken from the experience, they grasped the enormity the only way they could. Devotion. Guiding it to do to others as it had done to them, feeling vindication of their worship in how they managed to survive when others didn’t. Surely, they believed, their god had ordained them for this mission. Their deaths had hastened its advance, Metphies’ signal whetting its appetite. There were two things of particular interest on the planet below.
The heavens shuddered as King Ghidorah, the Planet Eater, enveloped itself in a dark sphere of energy and opened three portals linked to it in the planet’s upper atmosphere.
Haruo punched it, forcing the hoverbike to move as quick as its damaged engine would permit. The Houtua had salvaged it from the first attack by the servum and fortunately hadn’t completely dismantled it when the injured Maina’s next action after screaming her head off was to grab Haruo and make her demand. With a healing salve slapped onto the nano-metal wound, one he doubted was enough given her convulsions and the discoloration of the injury site, Maina was hanging to Haruo for dear life so hard that she risked bruising his ribs.
-Take me to my sister, NOW!-
Haruo swerved around a set of trees. With the bike damaged, it couldn’t ascend and the only thing keeping it even just a meter in the air was vertical thrust pushing off the ground. His eyes briefly caught a glimpse of something he hadn’t seen yet since arriving here.
-Stars? The night’s clear.-
Maina evidently had noticed them too and clung to him a little tighter. Glancing at her reflection, Haruo could see the bewildered, shocked look on her face. Turning his head slightly as to keep his eyes on the ‘road’ and still be able to throw his voice back, Haruo shouted as loud as he could manage.
“We closer?! Which way?!”
He’d stop questioning how Maina knew where Miana was when Dr. Martin, rest his soul, noted the two’s telepathy was especially well-pronounced. The pit in his stomach over having to gun down Metphies but also losing the kindly scientist was a sour cavity in his gut. He wasn’t a Captain for nothing however and he managed to stow it, lest he throw up in his helmet.
Thankfully Maina, wincing visibly across his face, took a hand off of Haruo’s bruised chest and pointed ahead to the left.
Haruo pitched the bike over and went as indicated, passing by a dark form he briefly recognized as a dead servum. He was glad he gave it only a fleeting glimpse or else he’d have crashed into the cavity just ahead, a large, burnt trench carving dozens of meters into solid bedrock. Eyes wide, Haruo yanked back on the controls and stomped on the accelerator. The damaged engine groaned and misfired several times, the energy feedback going off-kilter as the milliseconds passed. Acting fast as they went airborne over the trench, Haruo hit the cutoff brakes and let the emissions build up.
“Hang on!”
Yep, Maina had definitely bruised or cracked a rib or two when she did, stabbing pains shooting up Haruo’s chest. He only focused on the building pressure visible on the gauges before him. Just as they went critical, he let go of the cutoff and jammed the accelerator with the safety clicked off. The bike shot forward from the built-up release, a sizable burst of purple blowing out of the exhaust. Countering its downward tumble, the bike careened over the edge of the trench. Haruo saw the world bend upwards and go horizontal again, the hoverbike lurched forward and would have buried itself into the dirt had a last minute yank on the handlebars not pulled its nose back up.
The stunt was too much for the dying engine to take, the hum of its systems sputtering with the display screens flickering off. Gritting his molars together, Haruo kept his head down and steered them down the game trail, lest they fly into a tree or bush and crash or get cut to ribbons by the foliage. The plant life seemed to be dying away, an observation he was keen on quite some time ago as well as the thankful note that the only servum they had seen were dead, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
The front of the bike gradually skid across the ground before catching on a root and digging in. It took every bit of drilled simulation practice and actual experience for Haruo to keep the bike upright and not roll over with them getting caught under it. They came grinding to a halt just inches from colliding with the dying husk of a tree. Haruo panted through damaged ribs, picking his head up and finding his helmet’s screen inches from impalement upon a snapped branch.
Coughing up a lung when he tried to take in a deep breath, clutching at his side while doing so, Haruo looked over to ask Maina where to go next but found himself glimpsing her half-limping and half-running off into the shrubs. Swallowing back his pain, he did his best to advance after her.
Maina found her sister laying on the edge of a cliff, a quivering mess. Miana was barely responsive when she was pulled up into Maina’s lap, her skin unnaturally pale and chilled. In her frantic terror, she’d scratched up parts of her face and arms and had torn chunks of her hair out. Maina’s eyes watered and she held her twin closer, forcing her telepathy into her sister’s mind as best she could to quell the storm. An act complicated by Miana screaming and thrashing, kicking out with her legs and digging her nails into Maina’s arm.
Maina gasped in pain, trying to keep Miana from hitting her in the gut and risk accidentally reopening her wound. She honestly found herself liking a certain moron more and more when Haruo managed to catch up and, quickly realizing the situation, held down Miana’s kicking legs.
It took a grand minute to pull off and Maina felt like she’d just ran a marathon and bled from her nose while doing so, but it was achieved. It was what Miana finally ‘said’ to her sister when she regained consciousness that risked repeating it all over again. Maina, still pale as a sheet, helped guide the struggling Miana to her feet while supporting her.
“Wh-what going on?” Haruo muttered as the two brushed past him, heading towards the cliff edge to see over it.
When the young Captain followed, he was left with a sight he had craved for decades and yet was loath to see. Haruo had projected a lot onto Godzilla since the demise of his parents on the airstrip. The years of nightmares as an orphaned boy stripped of his homeworld. The Aratrum left Earth with 5,000 passengers. By this year, they were down by a 1,000 due to disease and despair. Every day, every hour was a reminder of where they were, exiled from their home by a monster. The losses of life aboard, once a week usually, was a constant reminder. When he was young, he’d sometimes pray to any god listening for an answer to what humanity had done to deserve this. Why Godzilla had appeared and smite them. But as years wore on, confusion and pleading for answers led to obsession and obsession into revenge. This miraculous titan had slaughtered hundreds of millions in the fires of its maw and crushing stomps of its feet and then condemned the survivors to slow torture ended only by suicide or infection. Humanity as a species had been rent asunder.
It consumed every thought of his being to counteract the slow demise. Godzilla turned from the nightmares of a scared little boy into a vengeful man echoing a famous fictional sea captain. And just like Ahab, he’d made his white whale his entire focus. His god in a way, and himself an antitheist with a worship of demise.
And now, seeing it fulfilled… He felt nothing. Haruo Sakaki’s hand fell to his sides and he stood, dead in mind and breath. All the years obsessing, all the toil, death, and strife to end it all and where did he find himself? All that and for what? Down many friends and comrades, disruption of the Houtua’s lives, several dozens of lives lost, himself a murderer, and a futile plan that only resulted in him doing to Godzilla Earth what the giant had done to him by killing Filius.
And now something else completely unrelated to him was doing Godzilla in. If he had waited a few days, a week, it could have all been avoided. Only to deal with a titan he knew nothing of, other than its very appearance was equally terrifying to behold.
“What… What is that?....”
He whispered breathlessly as the Leviathan loomed over Godzilla, stomping on the disembodied tail to impale it further into Godzilla Earth and keep it pinned down.
Miana and Maina lowered their heads, the former bearing blood tear stains across her cheeks.
-Them.-
Haruo flinched as memories returned to him, the bizarre looking Zilla and Reptilian-Godzilla looming over himself and the twins harmlessly after saving them from the servum, two other giants visible in the background. Brief flashes of worlds or places he didn’t recognize were also present. A young Japanese woman standing before an egg, a boat with a shark-mouth painted onto the bow, a father holding his infant son as snow fell all around them, and eyes beholding a crowd of archaically dressed people bowing to it within an underground temple.
-They’re in agony…-
The wave of emotions the twins projected onto him hit Haruo like a tidal wave. He loathed the feeling. All the hatred, all the rage that blinded everything but the torment; obsessive malice. He despised it so because it was exactly what he had been feeling for almost two decades; even if the degree of which seemed paltry by comparison.
-They suffered a cruel fate, and for that I am responsible.-
Haruo flinched and looked over to Miana. Maina tried to hold her sister back but the ravaged looking twin managed to pry herself free and stand on the edge.
-I was selfish to demand more time in this world than I had been allotted, it was my cry for help that made them come. Because it is devouring him, the world is dying. Because I created it, it is devouring Godzilla. Because I called them, it was created… If I had distracted the servant I could-
Haruo was upon her in a second.
“NO! Don’t you DARE!” he roared as he grabbed her shoulders, “Don’t you ever be ashamed of living! Why else fight but to live?! Battle, struggle, and fight; do anything you have to do to live!”
-Choice words.-
Maina projected as she stood in the ashes of a dying tree. Either by the intensity she was feeling coming off the Leviathan or by seeing her world die around her, the typically strong-willed, stone-faced Houtua had finally shown a chink in the visage in full. Red, bloody tears ran out of her eye and her lips quivered. Haruo almost recoiled when he saw how different she looked. Maina stepped forward and pointed to the interloper who’d turned this world on its head.
-How many have died because you battled or struggled?-
Her accusing finger might have as well been a fired gun. The proverbial tomato hit the mirror so hard in Haruo’s mind it broke it. It hadn’t just been his quest for revenge that cost so many so much. He had. Monsters killed people, that had been a fact to him since he was a little boy at that airport Godzilla attacked. He knew their names. Orga, Anguirus, Rodan, Dagahra, Mechagodzilla, Godzilla… Today added two more to the list. Archbishop Metphies and Captain Haruo Sakaki.
After a passing minute of dead silence, Haruo lowered his head.
“... Then it’s time to do something else.”
The twins gaze upon him could be felt. Haruo Sakaki turned to face the cliff’s edge and held up his palms.
The young man’s usually sharp tone was extremely quiet, solemn and almost pitiful, “Can you talk to their mind, as you did mine?....”
The Leviathan surveyed the carnage with a wide grin. Godzilla Earth had proven quite the feast. And like any good buffet, it wasn’t ending easily. Pieces of flesh from the almost hollowed-out body were slowly mending, sparking with blue speckles of energy to try and rebuild themselves as they drained the nearby flora for energy in a desperate attempt to stay alive; sapping power from the plant and animal life for hundreds of miles.
Another mouthful of flesh was taken from the writhing mass beneath it when a voice came to it again. Had it been the same insignificance from before, it had ignored it entirely. But this one felt, different. The force behind the telepathy was still minuscule, but stronger, more focused; and voice it propelled of a different flavor. Its head turned slightly.
Haruo didn’t even know who or what he was praying to, just that he was. Just that they might listen to the condemned like him. There was a magnificent flash of light before his closed eyelids, then gales of wind and heat as something flew over and landed with a titanic crash and rolling earthquake. Footsteps approached, louder in strength and greater in magnitude. He didn’t dare rise up to see the titan before him, for he knew to behold it in such a state and so close would do no good. He kept himself prostrate before the creature whose head touched the stars. And the man who’d devoted his life to fighting, to screaming at the monstrosities of life as he lay helpless and pinned under burning debris, begged.
“I do not know your name… or where you come from. Or why you helped us… But I know you coming to our aid hurt you… turned you into what you are now because we prayed for your help.”
The Leviathan’s shadow grew over the Houtua and Haruo. Burning, solid red eyes themselves in a judging glare. It remembered the agony of death four times over and the pain of mourning thrice. If they caused it, they’d face the same punishment as their killer as its accomplice. A hand was raised to crush, Haruo’s and the twins’ image superimposed with the likes of demons in human hides like Katagiri.
“Don’t do this to be a monster.”
The hand began to descend. Haruo stayed where he was and so did the Houtua priestesses, bowing to the deity till the end. A projection of a burning airport came to the God of Destruction’s mind, taken from the point of view of a terrified child being hurried along so he didn’t suffer the fate of his parents, Godzilla’s grim image superimposed over the dusk sky with his eyes glowing amidst the inferno.
“Don’t be like him… Just a destroyer for no reason. You’re better than this. I-I couldn’t comprehend it at first, but you all were. You can be better than all this, burning this world out of revenge. But then what about those who didn’t deserve it?”
Haruo’s hands gripped Maina and Miana’s a bit tighter, not for his sake however as the shadows grew larger.
“Godzilla and I, we’re the monsters-”
He briefly sensed a protest in the twins, no doubt Miana, but he shouted over it to ensure the message got through. All the sights that were relevant were broadcast. The cities Godzilla Earth turned into an inferno with the ashes of millions, the soldiers under Haruo who met their end on this expedition by the monsters who dwelled upon the Earth or Haruo’s misplaced trust.
“By intent or blindness, we killed… Not just those who were wrongly under fire by our wrath-”
Haruo’s mind briefly thought back to the look Godzilla Filius gave him in its last moments. What looked like a scowl of rage in a moment of malice on his part started to look more like a sorrow, fearful grimace. The same expression a small boy made at an airstrip two decades ago. That act led to the deaths of many of his men, and the rage of an awakened father. One in a series of malcontent acts that brought ruin to this world. Evil perpetuated evil.
“-but those innocent of all pride or malice. I’ve been known as reckless, wrathful, consumed. A monster. I ignored it all because if others think you sick, what does it matter? They’re just wrong… But when you think yourself a monster…”
So many faces crossed his eyes, each brought forth to the Leviathan with utter remorse. So many he’d grown up with on the Aratrum. So many who’d followed his ambition to restore human pride, only to find a deathly end in which they’d never gaze upon such ill-prized glory. Godzilla Earth had broken many families aboard the Aratrum, Captain Sakaki had contributed in increasing that count. One out of not caring for any life but itself in its existence, one for not caring enough for any life but the target of his revenge. In the end, not that different. Haruo’s infamous pride was vanquished, and he found himself questioning which monster he hated most.
“I know how you think because you’ve become me….”
He fed his memories, all of them to Miana and Maina, knowing they’d know what to do with them. They were brought forth as an offering before the deity.
“If you want to kill it, kill it to be what you were and to help others… Not what you’ve become out of revenge, burning down this world as it did… Not burning down others, becoming like me...”
Haruo felt a full minute come to pass, feeling an intense heat wash over him and then pull away. He looked up to glimpse a hand with fingers the size of a large bus pulls away from crushing them last minute. The Leviathan stood tall, but back, its eyes no longer burning and instead sporting a calmer red sclera and golden iris; the eyes of the reptilian-Godzilla Haruo had seen next to the Zilla. Its demeanor shifted slightly, seeming to relax from either genuine release or confusion overriding its seemingly limitless wrath. Like someone inside it had finally woken from a horrid nightmare and was baffled as to what had happened to them.
It lasted for all of five seconds before golden necks and shrieking heads descended from the sky. The Leviathan whirled around to confront the oncoming force with a titanic roar, the moment of reprieve dying with the waves of malice roaring back to life. Haruo and the Houtua twins backpedaled in confusion and awe at the thrashing necks and fanged maws which seem to be thousands of meters long and made of some sort of burning energy rather than mass.
Haruo clenched his jaw, remembering the word Metphies had told him. It was one he was to draw strength from, the Exif god he’d gander though the alien he’d gunned down less than an hour ago expressed a terrified reverence of it. He said its name would bring strength because Haruo was not facing it but “merely” Godzilla.
He invoked the name thoughtlessly, “Ghidorah…”
King Ghidorah, the planet eater, cackled and descended. One of the heads hovered before the Leviathan, sensing the great power and energy with it like one would an endless feast. It threw its jaws open, rushing the God of Destruction. The Leviathan sneered, extending one of his wrist blades and taking a swing with such timing it would’ve decapitated the space dragon. Had there been anything there to hit, that is, for the blade passed through it harmlessly and Ghidorah’s jaws snapped down on its bicep.
The Leviathan growled, swatting and gripping at the head to no avail as Ghidorah pulled it along. A brilliant glow emerged from his back, two powerful streams of purple and red energy shooting into the ground and sending the Leviathan airborne. With the first head still chomping down upon it arm, the other two joined it and chased their prey across the sky with seemingly endless length as they continued to spool out of the dark portals from which they emerged.
Just as the first head seemed poised to try and yank the Leviathan back and crashing to the ground, the deity spun around and pointed its back to the oncoming necks. The exhaust emitting from its dorsum built up and exploded out in a flurry of beams. Purple encircled by spiraling, fiery red crisscrossed the sky. Whenever they hit one of Ghidorah’s necks, however, they passed through harmlessly.
Ghidorah cackled and lunged forward… only to scream in shrieking agony that hurt the humans’ ears when several beams condensed and shot into the middle portal. The head biting the Leviathan’s jaws flew open and it screamed, rapidly falling apart into glowing ashes like embers above a fire as its two compatriots writhed in pain. The Leviathan put its feet below it and landed a short distance away in a titanic crash that threw mountains of dust and ash into the air, turning about to observe.
Two new sights came to the world. The three portals combined together, forming a massive dark singularity that seem to swallow up most of the starry night sky. A near blinding glow descended from it, a fiery star in the form of a three-headed, two winged, twin-tailed dragon. The maws of the void, ever-ravenous, demanded their feast in retribution after being hurt. And they would act on it through more than just their astral projections this time.
But beyond the sheer shock and terror he was feeling at seeing the Exif god, King Ghidorah, hovering above; Haruo experienced horror like he never had before when he witnessed the falling star coming down from another section of the sky. It was barely recognizable, if so only because of the glow of its one remaining engine and distinct shape. The Aratrum, wreathed in fire with smaller chunks breaking off, was crashing to earth. Over 3,500 lives aboard, quite possibly the last large concentration of humanity left. The colony ship was most of what Haruo had left of the world of old, and virtually every life aboard surely deserved to see a tomorrow.
Haruo gripped the twin’s hands as he wept, “Please! Please tell him to save it!”
Miana and Maina winced, witnessed bits of Haruo’s memory of nearly his entire life aboard. The sight of every single additional human face served to hasten their plea. The Leviathan pitched its head up to look at the falling Aratrum, feeling thousands of eyes upon it from those on board. The fear, dread, and terror of those onboard were palpable to it. So many lives depended on its action.
But the God of Destruction’s eyes again turned, facing a descending King Ghidorah who seemed to be positioning itself near the still immobile Godzilla Earth. Every instinct and sensation screamed at the Leviathan to end the dragon, and every conscious thought and memory demanded it terminate Godzilla Earth. Such was in the nature of a God of Destruction.
A response was given to the Houtua, one that left the nearly crumbling to the ground from the intensity. Grimacing from the burning rage broiling through their minds like a choking steam, Miana and Maina directed their telepathy to Haruo.
Haruo blinked in confusion at the name, “A-Azusa.. Gojo? N-No there’s no one with that name on board. I memorized them all.”
Miana and Maina’s stare continued to bore into him and Haruo felt another join them. He looked past the cliff to see a burning, gold and red eyes leering right through him from the Leviathan’s eye. Under such pressure, no lie could ever survive.
“S-She must have perished in the cataclysm…”
The Leviathan’s eye instantly diverted to Godzilla Earth, who was gazing up at the hovering King Ghidorah with its one regenerated eye but was helpless to retreat or attack. Within a moment the deity’s eye went from mixed gold iris and red sclera to a glaze of crimson before flames burst from it. He, it threw its jaws open in a bellowing, earthshaking roar that reverberated across the sky for hundreds of miles; broadcasting malign intent.
Miana and Maina clutched at their heads with their free arms, receiving an intense feedback from the enormity. Haruo scrambled up to them, hands upon their shoulders as he tried to rouse them to attention. But between their seizures and convulsions, it was to no avail. Haruo Sakaki turned around after seeing his futility, witnessing the God of Destruction facing off against King Ghidorah. The forest’s death was accelerating, life force drained by Godzilla Earth, whom slowly started to pick itself up. All as the final bastion of humanity plummeted towards the ground as a blazing fireball.
For a man who’d lived thinking himself to be the lord of his destiny, Haruo grasped how out of his hands it was. There was nothing he could do but beg a god that probably didn’t understand, hear, or regard him. He screamed so loud he risked tearing his throat. A plea, a prayer.
The Leviathan’s eyes fluctuated between pure crimson and red and gold.
The eyes of humanity, its compatriots, and its descendants fell upon the Leviathan. The dour, seemingly doomed crew of the Aratrum who saw their return to Earth as their death sentence. The bands of Houtua and accompanying expedition survivors who’d been following their priestesses’ path, the former bearing witness to their world dying. And, should they exist, those who’d passed into the beyond. From a scheming archbishop to the countless slaughtered by the giants of this history. All looked to a God of Destruction with a single question.
Burning light roared into existence upon the Earth.
=========================
Orange eyes burst open amidst a cloud of marine silt. Zilla gasped and wheezed, feeling phantom, agonizing pains across his back and side. He launched himself off the seafloor and back to the surface, horror washing over him at the sight of burning lights…. inside pumpkins. The streets of the still-existent city were layered in orange and yellow lights, carved Jack-O-Lanterns lining the pathways dozens of people passed through in a parade of costumes ranging from superheroes to monsters. Many of them noticed the large, box-headed living landmark and waved cheerfully at their city’s protector; bidding him a happy Halloween in the year 2003.
Zilla didn’t register it was a human holiday or the fact the H.E.A.T. team was similarly dressed up and on the docks. The fright within his gaze was fitting for the season, but far too real for his father and companions. He didn’t stay. His heart was racing ten thousand miles a minute and he was soon keen to try and match that speed. Kicking off the seafloor, the mutant iguana’s tail thrashed and he was soon on his way.
Hours passed and yet he didn’t regard anything for a second, following a calling with the only conscious thought in his mind being to keep swimming in a specific direction. Bursting out of the waters near Panama, Zilla stampeded through the forests near the infamous canal and dove into the Pacific. The day was almost spent by the time he arrived in the Mu archipelago, finding a set of tracks leading to the ocean and following them further still. The Protector of New York found himself, after following the radiated heat trail in the water, buzzing by a mythic isle with a very concerned guardian moth pointing him in the right direction, followed by an island surrounded in storms, and then to the edge of Japan.
Zilla broke the surface in an exact spot he’d been summoned to, finding himself looking upon a living mountain standing on a submerged plateau with his gaze cast to the seemingly infinite ocean, the city of Kyoto at his back illuminating the night. Zilla lowered his head and stance. Godzilla Junior, ten years upon this world, was seen as many things. The wicked were terrified of him, some were wary of him, and other still were hopeful of his arrival. All could agree on one thing, however: the might of the King of the Monsters was incredible to behold. Young and still gaining skills or mastery, he’d already begun to exceed his father.
There was a reason Zilla looked up to the one he often called “Boss”.
Which was why it was a sobering reality to see the lord of the Mu islands looking so… broken. Blank, barely expressive outside of a thousand kilometer stare of a traumatized mind.
Godzilla let out a slow rumble, barely a whisper. He’d checked over the islands and surrounding waters, reviewing tabs on everyone. Orka, Gorgo, Gorosaurus, all of them on Solgell; then Mothra and Infant Island, and he even made a brief foray to Skull Island to confirm Kong was still alive before coming here to the last place he knew his mother was.
Zilla perched himself next to his fellow hero, nudging his shoulder against the dinosaur with a low warble coming from his throat. The lizard kaiju pointed to his head and closed his eyes. An inquiry of dreams, asking if Godzilla had had likewise.
Godzilla slowly pitched his head down to the Pacific waters around his feet, witnessing his reflection. In the distortion of the rippling waves, his visage almost resembling a plant-like juggernaut and a spined, monstrous transformation. His broken gaze was crushed even more and he spoke of what he remembered.
Zilla’s eyes widened and he jerked up. At first terrified, the jesting iguana soon let out a half-hearted chuckle and lightly smacked Godzilla across the shoulders and snapped his jaws. If someone translated the rabble he vocalized, he’d find mannerisms typical of the energetic lizard. Suggestions of a psychic link given he knew they both had experience with that, jokes about doing him a favor and just asking Zilla to slap him awake next time he decides to have a nightmare rather than pull him into it; and a jest about having a horrible crick in his back since he’d awakened with an over-the-top patting of his dorsum and silly stomping motion.
The jokes were drowned in the sea. Godzilla Junior slowly gazed at Zilla with such intensity and morbid pain that there could be no jesting. He outstretched a hand and ran the back of a knuckle along Zilla’s back. He couldn’t see the spot immediately, but memory told him the exact place to check. Zilla froze when he felt the knuckle trace over a bare part of hide between his scutes covered in scar tissue where his scales hadn’t grown back up. A long, deep scar running the length of his back from his mid-back to his left shoulder and encircling that large scute. In time, it would vanish, but for now, it was fresh.
As was the gaping, deep scar on Godzilla Junior’s chest with large keloids that ringed where his heart would be.
Zilla said absolutely nothing for a long while, cold tendrils constricting his mind. Godzilla Junior looked out to the ocean with the foggy clouds obscuring the night sky in an eerily familiar way. He told his friend about everything after the lizard was struck down. About the living mountain who embodied everything, Junior feared he might become, and the rampaging monster they'd been transfigured into which represented the very concept that defined all of those who bore their name, for good or for ill. Could anyone good be a facet of destruction? Unlike his forefathers, he actively tried to defend humanity and his American compatriot was no different. But, what was he deep inside to be a part of such calamity? When Junior looked at his reflection for years after this, the Leviathan he so feared would look back at him.
He’d have to double, triple his efforts to prove himself good. Maybe someday he’d get the chance to sacrifice himself and die in an act of complete altruism before any fate turned him into what he feared most, or at least help make enough good in the world that there’d be something to stop him when the time came. He couldn’t stand to see the innocent harmed, especially when he dreaded that one day he’d be the one doing that harm.
When the tale reached the recollection of the climax, with an ark falling from the sky, a repentant man begging a wrathful god for help, and the incarnation of everything that deity loathed standing before it to be smote; Zilla could only ask one question.
What did he do?...
The answer was silence.
.......... And now you know The Bridge not being dark was not a matter of inability but choice 
Proofed and additional ideas by Lance-Omikron
Characters by Toho Company LTD, Tristar Pictures, and Legendary Pictures
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Neat
My dude, you got featured again.
Holy crap. I don't know what to say.
Anyway, back to the Ghost Adventure's Live event. Tarb, if you read this, you should check it out. It'll be one until like 9 tonight. Just be careful
........................ holy jesus..... that was......... whoa.
Holy merciful throne....
Any more chapters read on utube?
Is this a typo that for the year 1500 or was there Spanish 15,000 years ago in the Bridgeverse?
Anyway, really nice on portraying Earth as this arrogant and domineering beast and then Leviathan as this crazy berserk figure against him. I have to hope that Planet Eater doesn't end up screwing this up in any way by having it be revealed that Earth was just a pawn for some mega thing in the end, lol, because this portrayal is just about right. I'm quite a fan of the gore, very reminiscent of Showa Ultraman's dismembering of everyone but with more gravitas.
As a sidenote, the kiloton numbers thrown around a few times are a nice touch given we actually know for a fact exactly how much energy Godzilla Earth throws around given the whole 1000 degrees scene in City on the Edge of Battle(IIRC the estimates were between 16 kilotons and 5.3 megatons, depending on the way one calculates the nanometal's melting point).
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Nope.
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Bummer.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn................
Now that was a story worth waiting for.
So whatever happened to Showa Godzilla and Gojira?
Okay, wow...just wow! This chapter was quite the voluminous read, one that I enjoyed going through as slowly as possible to take in any detail. Your depiction of six different Godzilla’s was amazing as I love the way Junior bonded with Showa due to their parental bonds and how Zilla managed to earn the respect of Gojira and Showa with his loyalty and bravery. Your portrayal of Godzilla Earth was amazing, an ancient being with no empathy towards anyone sans himself and his kind and with no set of morality due to believing in its privilege as the apex predator.
The fight or the four heroic Godzilla’s against this juggernaut was amazing as their smaller size, teamwork, hand to hand combat, and speed allowed them to seriously injure Godzilla Earth via conjunctive efforts. However, Earth’s regenerative ability and overpowered breath and tail attacks eventually managed to turn down the tables. It was shocking seeing how Zilla fell and how his friends’ attempts to avenge him, while capable of severely injuring Earth, led to their graphic demises.
It’s Here that the new combatant, Leviathan, appears as a manifestation of the deceased Godzillas’s rage towards Earth for its callous treatment of others, becoming a God of Destruction that rapidly adapted against Earth’s powers, growing bigger, more sadistic, and more powerful than Earth until it proceeded to brutalize Earth. In essence, Leviathan is an overpowered version of the original Godzilla, borne from the combined might of the heroic Godzilla’s and with the only purpose to act as a more powerful Godzilla to punish Earth for its abuse and hubris. Although Earth deserved comeuppance for being a destructive, selfish being, seeing our heroes turn into a berserk monster is terrifying, especially when it decides to torture Earth and wipe out all of the vegetation with a cataclysmic attack that nearly left the world barren.
On the human sides, seeing Haruo reeling from the events of the second movie made him a bit sympathetic, especially since the events from this chapter don’t make his life better. Metphies and the Exif’s summons of Guidorah and murder of Haruo’s team causes Haruo to kill the priest while undergoing a breakdown for killing someone he considered a friend. Furthermore, Maina doesn’t hesitate to tell Haruo that all of the problems that plagued the planet came from his quest for vengeance and Haruo is denied the satisfaction of seeing Earth tortured because he realized that revenge was empty.
In the end, the planet is pretty much screwed as Earth is slowly eaten by Leviathan and the new Godzilla is about to engage Guidorah in a fight. The sheer fact that Haruo actually apologizes and tries to appeal to Leviathan’s emotions to stop its fury is shocking...especially since Moana realizes that the four Godzilla’s are suffering inside Leviathan due to their hatred. In the end, Haruo’s pleas mean nothing as Leviathan is about to engage into a fight with the Planet Eater...a conflict that would mean the end of the world.
The reveal that the entire scenario was a shared nightmare that Zilla and Junior had was a twist, albeit reassuring. The fight scenes were amazing, but it showed how the pursuit of vengeance can turn even the most noble of beings into a monstrous entity of destruction. The fact that Junior chooses to remain silent about the result of the unseen fight between Leviathan and Guidorah only tells the readers one thing....the result, whatever it was, was too terrible for Junior to vocalize.
There's an extra 0 there.
What a bonus chapter. Love the design of Leviathan.
I'm so confused.
Also we better hope that was non-cannon because Junior is super dead.
That was a ride. That was one epic ride...
Is it just me, or was the scenario of a possessed malevolent Godzilla facing down a Ghidorah descending from the stars, having to answer the question of what it would do. A callback to the outcome of both timelines in Chapter 41?
Good lord....if Zinilla was there he could have saved the station.
What did he do, indeed? That may be a question we will never know the answer to. Just as i’m sure they hope never to endure this horrible event again. Seriously: this was epic, thrilling, and extremely heavy at the same time. All of the things expected of a Godzilla story in its darkest form. I already have a feeling i won’t forget this any time soon.:)
uh
awesome as fuck chapter, but i have some mild confusion about the ending
was it just a shared dream, or a Kreuger-esque shared nightmare?
edit: also, i wanna point out my disappointment at the complete lack of pony in this new chapter
i'm hoping we can return to the story in the next chapter
Boy, that was dark, but awesome!
Praise Tarbanto, and this chapter
Well... that happened. I think my favorite part of this was that none of the kaiju spoke, it allowed us to fill in the blanks. The songs were well chosen, and both the emotional battle and the physical fed into each other so that final line is indeed left up in the air. And now that we've all had our fangasms over this joy of a Halloween chapter, we can die happy.
Happy Halloween.
Well, that was something else.
Epic and horrifying in equal measures.
Did they ever tell anyone what happened?
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To be fair, just as everything in The Bridge doesn't focus solely on the Kaiju, not everything has to have a pony in it. Each side of the franchises in this crossover get their fair share of the spotlight, thus remaining perfectly balanced as all things should be.
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They did the die. Leviathan was the spirits of all four protectors combined in their hatred/anger at G-Earth. However, they were also brought from an alternate timeline, so they may have had scars fitting their encounters back in their respective times/worlds.
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I wonder if they'll eventually cross paths again in the future. However, seeing as how this may just be a one-time coincidence, I could just be wishfully thinking at this point
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Several people asked what exactly happened; was it all just a shared dream, or something more.
I'm not Tarbtano. I can only give my own impression. It goes as follows:
Be it response to a prayer for aid, the machinations of one who wished to undo the corruption of the world, or a destructive spirit who desired the perfect host, four champions who each worked to protect their worlds and those who live upon it were summoned in spirit to created bodies like the ones they have in their own worlds as they slept.
Together, they faced the source of the corruption. One by one, they fell before it's power. However, as the last fell, their crafted bodies and lingering spirits, perhaps guided by a true spirit of destruction, combined into the corruption's true bane.
Once the source of the corruption fell, and as it's corruption was being cleansed from the world, a plea for mercy awoke the spirit of one of the noble champions. Perhaps he could have swayed the Destroyer that he became to spare those who did not deserve to be cleansed. Perhaps not, for another threat, the World Eater, did arrive and the Destroyer returned to his grim purpose.
When the final battle ended, be it their falling in combat or the corruption and world eater being undone, their spirits returned to whence they came, but with their bodies showing the signs of their initial fall. Only one may yet know how the final battle ended. I suspect he will have nightmares of his time as the Destroyer for years to come, and likely shall never speak of such things. At least, not before he once again succumbs to becoming his own worst nightmare while visiting the magical land of Equestria....
Am I right? Am I wrong? Only one can truly say..... and I doubt Grendal's decedent is going to give us a straight answer.
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This is one of those situations where multiple things could have happened. I know which did, but the dice rolls in fate equally favor another possibility. How did the four end up in AniGoji!Terra? Jacen has a clever idea, might be that. Might be something different that achieved the same means.
In the end, the methods matter little, but the outcome is the question. The Leviathan had more than enough power to finish off Godzilla-Earth and the Planet Eater Ghidorah. Given its ferocity and willingness to use such force, it couldn't be bested in a head to head fight or through trickery. But, did it listen to Haruo? Did it heed the pleas of a repentant man to be better than he and save others? Or did it, an uncaring god, divert to just acting upon its whims and let the human race be extinguished along with their world? Notice how it had its back turned to Haruo at the end, leaving no hint as to who's eyes did it bear, Godzilla Junior the hero's or Leviathan the god's. Humanity might have found a God of Destruction their salvation, or their find grim reaper. Kill a planet eater or kill a planet? In the end, not even Junior probably knows exactly what happened next.
What matters is what you believe they did in that situation.
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This special is a callback to 41 and to Ancient History, yep.
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Fixed. Dem temporal Conquistadors can really ruin your day.
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More than enough power to finish off Planet Eater Ghidorah? Wouldn't it be a little too soon to claim such considering the movie's not even out yet, so we don't have a whole lot of info to fully gauge Ghost Ghidorah's power.
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Ah. So in the end, it’s left up to interpretation. This is “The Killing Joke” ending for this series.:D
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Given what I know but won't say alloud, yes. Yes I do think I have a grasp at the power scaling here. Anime Ghidorah might not even be the strongest incarnation of the character. For perspective by the end of the fight, the Leviathan was curb stomping a max-charged Godzilla Earth whom is far stronger than its base form, its version to a burning Godzilla transformation. Anime!Ghidorah largely is fighting the base form. So even if anime!Ghidorah is twice, thrice, even ten times stronger than base Godzilla Earth, Leviathan still outclasses it.
The question of ending is less "could it win with that power?" and more "what was the cost of those with that power?"
Remember how Junior constantly talked about responsibility for those with such powerful abilities?
Plus it's supposed to be OP as heck, it's in the same tier as Bagan and Hamrony.
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I won't argue with you on the point on whether, or not Leviathan eclipses Ghost Ghidorah in sheer power, even I can see that Leviathan holds the lion's share of strength here. But given that you seem to know things that I do not, and the only sources of official information that I possess are only trailers, and background magazine info, both of which aren't 100% reliable. I am unable to judge for myself on whether your assessment of Ghost Ghidorah is complete & fair. So for the moment, let's agree to disagree until the movie is released for everyone to see.
Although the modern Godzilla line had no ancient legends or prophecies associated with their creation, the disaster of 1954 nonetheless set the tone for all the human-kaiju interaction that followed it in the modern world. Despite this legacy of rage and destruction, Godzilla Junior always strove to protect those who could not protect themselves, fighting against evil monsters with justice and nobility in his heart.
But... what if he eventually found himself fighting a battle he couldn't afford to lose, against a foe that he couldn't beat without compromising his morals and surrendering himself to fury and bloodlust? What if eventually he had no way to avoid perpetuating the same terrible legacy that his grandfather began? This question would haunt Junior for a very, very long time.
He hid these fears as best he could, but a certain Nightmare entity bore witness to the full scope of them. To say that it gave her pause is something of an understatement.
After reading this, I no longer have the guts to get out of bed. The only thing I have to say now is...
What did it do?
Epic and Horrifying as F***,,,,,,,and I love it Happy Halloween Tarb
jesus man. This was a hard read. Also, is it canon? It seems to be set before they went to Equestria. It would make for a great speech from junior on how he views himself before he faces Baron.
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So basically you don’t even know what happened.
Also could we get more Zilla in the future? That bit about tatopoulos cracked me up.
I read the first paragraph about Monsterverse Goji and died from the sheer awesomness of it. Legendary Godzilla has always been my favorite variation, and you made him out to be a badass mother f$#@er with an attitude. LOVE IT.
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The Bridge is set to start in 2013, about ten years after this, and Tarb has indicated this is a canon story.
I've already given my assessment of how "real" this all was, and in what way. However, I will reiterate, this was likely the second worst night of Junior's life, or at least as shown in the story. (His time possessed by The Nightmare is likely the only thing that was worse for him, with his father's death a very close third....)
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Conquistadores, not conquistadors.
Sorry, can't help it.
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If that's true, then that's going to make this 100x scarier.
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Personally, I'd firmly place the night of Senior's death in the number one position for that. Not only did he lose his beloved parent (a loss that he's still keenly feeling), but he himself basically died too. It was a miracle that Senior's energy was able to flow into Junior and revive him.
Hey Tarb I've wondered this for a while now and maybe you have already explained this but what did actually happen in the amalgam verse between Jr and Zilla Jr? Did the aliens transport zilla all over the place and keep wondering why this kaiju wasnt doing anything? Did they find one of his sisters? Did Godzilla make it to Australia and zilla gets beamed down to only go "sup, g man."
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For the large part the whole "Control Terran Monsters and turn them loose on cities" that happened in Final Wars didn't happen because the aliens already had their own kaiju. An attempt was made, but the control broke almost immediately. So if Zilla did get beamed to Sydney, he immediately turned around and attacked the aliens in the city's defense so he and Junior never fought. Basically the latter if anything happened.
Omg dude, This was a long story and one hell of it. Dude I love this story because of the devastation the killing! Omg dude this was frightening, honestly I couldn’t sleep properly because I was able to finish it. Honestly great job dude you have honestly out done yourself, when it comes to devastation you sir are the master of telling it. You should get an award for this. And of course the master of telling that even if you become the hero for good, you’ll always have a dark persona in you that only cares for death. Honestly great job!