Fluttering past, memories of yesteryear.

The lion pen in Novi Sad Zoo, a cat named Mish who crunched on dead birds under her bed, and a weekend trip to Mostar where grandpa Jovan lived all danced through the linked minds of Spasoje Kovic and Milla Ristic. And then, they and hundreds of other fleeting moments long gone, like the impressions left by an unmemorable dream, converged and congealed in their newfound gestalt. They were one, standing combat-ready in the Mark II Fatherland's Vengeance, two once-estranged twins.

Immense, in many ways unrefined, and with a caged visor that gave it a decidedly animal visage, the Fatherland was gently pulled off the launching station floor by twelve ex-Soviet Mil Mi-26s. Four each distributed the load of the massive wire 'clips,' which were connected by two-foot-thick steel cables to the jaeger—one to each shoulder, and a third to the bulging hump behind the Mark II's head, built to contain both the nuclear reactor and a pair of naval guns lifted from a decommissioned battleship. They carried it over the frigid waters off the Kamchatka Peninsula, then further south into the Pacific to the drop site.

Spasoje—short, wiry, and wide-eyed, with unkempt black hair—stood on the left, his Zastava Arms faceshield providing a constant stream of information from the jaeger's millions of sensors. Milla, the same height and demeanor, mirrored his constant surveillance. They communicated to one another through the drift their sensory input, and both of them began to feel a growing anxiety—an excited, controllable anxiety—over the imminent operation.

"Here's the skinny." The voice of the Russian head of operations at their launch bay, Roman Kuropatkin, bounced around in the head of their jaeger omniously. "The Category Three Kaiju, codenamed Paingod sighted coming through the rift is the largest we have yet encountered. Early sightings by a Japanese naval patrol have surmised it's snakelike, with many tentacles and a bulbous head. It moves very quickly, and seems to have no interest in civilian or military vessels, and appears to be heading directly for Vladivostok.

"We have selected you specifically for your skill in dealing with unusually quick Kaiju. Intercept this one and kill it; otherwise it will be tearing through the largest port in our corner of the world in less than twenty-four hours. Good luck."

"What kind of a name is Paingod?" Milla scoffed.

"Probably some obscure reference. I bet you the Americans named it; they always pick that kind of stupid shit."

"Fucking English-speakers."

"Fucking English-speakers." Spasoje nodded.

Then came time for the drop, and through the eyes of their jaeger they could see the rapidly-advancing Kaiju. One-hundred and fifty-two meters in length, its back lit up the surface with scintillating blue dorsal bulbs, like hundreds of little eyes. Milla pointed out to Spasoje through the drift that those 'little' eyes were probably each the size of a small car. He shrugged.

They hit the water from fifty meters up, so the ankle joints buckled as though they were hitting solid stone, and then it was simply a matter of sinking without pitching forward or backward before they braced themselves on the ocean floor. The moment the dust settled, they stepped forward.

One step. One step through the water and Paingod, five hundred meters away, was upon them.

It shot up from black waters, a terrible apparition out of a Lovecraft tale, its head a bulging bone brainsack, eyes pink and yellow like blood in urine, tentacles branching off from its shoulders much longer than its own body, each adorned with toothy maws. Without ceremony, without opening its long alien snout-and-beak to roar or shriek or show off in any way, the Kaiju swept forth. It grappled with Fatherland's arms, wrapping round them with tentacles so that it could drag itself close enough for four vile hands held close to the body to lash out.

They lost torso plating quickly. The reactor was exposed in some small areas after a matter of seconds. The two Serbs did not panic; Milla brought the right knee into its pelvis, and Spasoje brought down the left arm hard, so that Paingod tripped and hit the sea in an enormous blast of foam. The tentacle's grip on the right arm loosened, and Milla took the opportunity to nail the Kaiju in its beak a few times, cracking keratin and spilling glowing blue.

From behind its endless tail, with a ball of solid bone at the tip, came crashing by. It smashed their right knee, crunched it with the force of a rail gun blast, splitting hydraulic pipes and blowing motors along the support strands. The jaeger fell in the opposite direction of its opponent, stumbling ineptly into the sea. Cursing across the drift, the twins worked to steady themselves, expecting the Kaiju to attempt a killing blow any second. It did not.

"Where is that pitscu?" Milla growled.

"Come and finish the job, you bastard!" Spasoje chimed in. The radio crackled.

"This is Kuropatkin. Paingod is continuing on its path to Vladivostok, we're following the trial of Kaiju Blue now. Can you pursue?/i"

"We'll crawl after it if we have to." Spasoje spat. "Our right knee is damaged, but not crippled."

"Understood. Push on, we are deploying Cherno Alpha to the coast as a second line of defense. Quetzacoatl will be on standby, as well."

They limped on, more than able to keep pace with some of the Mark I jaegers, but nowhere near quickly enough to catch up to Paingod. Finally the two of them came to the decision, as their prey began knocking over and cracking in half fishing boats leaving Vladivostok, that it was time to steal its attention. Fatherland knelt, its head angled, and its guns deployed. Two barrels, each eighteen inches wide, peered forward, aiming to drop rounds packed with the weight of Volkswagens in TNT in the general area of their Kaiju.

Milla and Spasoje, both skilled in trigonometry, sorted through the sensor data and extrapolated where Paingod ought to have been ten seconds after firing. And then, bracing themselves not only to the ocean floor but to their own scaffolding within Fatherland's head, they hit the switch.

The thunderclap was as though God Himself was smashing cymbals larger than earth together.

Cordite smoke clouds marred the air before them, and after ten seconds screaming and spinning through salty sea air, the twin shells impacted. They did not hit Paingod, but they came more than close enough. It reeled and spun about underwater as the concussive blasts tore outward, no doubt suddenly deafened and in some pain. With a shriek, a horrifying scream of infuriated agony like the howling pain of every man, woman, and child killed by a Kaiju since the beginning, it leaped from the seas and made an about-face. It knew exactly from whence the blasts had come.

"There, now we've really pissed him off." Spasoje bellowed with a grin.

"Come on you bastard, let's see what you've got!" Milla cackled.

They rose to their feet, right leg still very much wobbly, and retracted the guns. Stentorian, monstrous, and yet possessing a perverse grace the Kaiju sped for them, bobbing up and down, blue back glowing brighter. It closed the distance in far less time than it had taken to reach the more distant Vladivostok ships, and then dived, skimming the surface, before putting all of its mass and momentum into a bold jump.

The entire Kaiju shot out of the water, from its bulbous cranium to its oval battering-ram tail, and its half-dozen tentacles splayed out in a vicious offensive stance. Fatherland's Vengeance bent down, raised its right fist, deployed a wrist-bayonet, and then jumped with it.

With a quick swipe they put an enormous gash in the Kaiju's belly, while the left arm sent a firm hook to the base of three tentacles, jarring them from their course. Then, Paingod lashed out with the unmolested tendrils, clawed away rather cleverly at the injured kneecap until it sheared away completely. The sensory overload sent electric daggers into Milla's knee, but baring her teeth in rage she collected herself, grabbed the Kaiju by its mouth, and dragged it in their backwards fall to the ocean floor.

Across the drift, memories of pain flashed by. They had seen these before; they knew to pay them no mind, to focus on the task at hand.

Milla's husband, nailing her on the head with a bottle. Spasoje's fight in the Bosnian tavern, when he had broke his nose headbutting a much larger man. Car crashes, failed relationships, lost chances. The drift brought these all forward with agonizing realism; it put memories in the present, when jarred enough. Otherwise it was dreamlike, easily averted. But the two Serbs knew to stay in the moment.

They were on the ocean floor, wrestling with something that had them gripped in six places, its fury strangely human, strangely desperate. With the wrist-bayonets' persistent cutting, two tentacles fell away, and then three. Kaiju blue lit the dark sea, drifted through the disturbed silt, revealed Paingod's face as it snapped with its beak just meters from their visor. Spasoje and Milla worked in concert and gave it more face than it could ever want: they nailed it with the forehead plate so hard its beak completely fragmented.

The tail club came in and shattered their pelvis linkage. Then it smashed the left leg. Then the Kaiju started to attempt to pull away so it could smash the torso, the reactor, possibly even the head with that same chunk of bone. Fatherland's Vengeance was too banged-up to keep fighting for long; if they lost the use of just one arm they were done.

"This one…is almost…worthy of our time!" Spasoje growled.

"It is going to kill us, brother." Milla answered, resigned. He couldn't tell if she had said it or if it had come through the drift.

"What have…what have we got to take it with us?"

"A…magazine of eighteen-inch shells."

The life of a jaeger crew ends quickly, and violently. That was something the two Serbs had accepted long ago, even while the rest of the world was thoroughly convinced the Kaiju threat was something that could be held back permanently. And so, during the construction of their jaeger, they had convinced the chief engineer at Zastava Arms to have an emergency protocol installed: at their command, in an emergency, the two could flood the battery magazine with burning gasoline. All it took was to smash one glass case and then smack a big red button.

"Goodbye, Spasoje."

"Goodbye, Milla."

The right arm was wrenched away by the three remaining tentacles and four smaller arms working in concert. Paingod began to position itself. Fire filled the magazine, heating twenty rounds of heavy-duty naval artillery ammunition. The bone-ball rose up, and then came down. It didn't have time to land: some shells fired right through the jaeger and into its body, while a few exploded within. Either way, the blast was enough to open a hole in the sea that, though it only existed for a few seconds, was seen and photographed from orbit.

All around the world, it was seen as the beginning of the end.

End