Chapter 20

Godzilla was locked in hand-to-hand combat with a particularly stubborn Zilla. While the latter's skin was much weaker, its claws were also much sharper and its blows came about twice as fast. It was a bit less strong, however, which caused the two to be pretty evenly matched.

Godzilla swiped at the Zilla's head. It ducked quickly, only for Godzilla's other hand to rake its face. The kaiju gave a screech of pain as blood poured out of the wound. It clawed at Godzilla's lower body area with animalistic ferocity. Godzilla, ignoring the pain, kicked the Zilla in the stomach, forcibly expelling all the air in the Zilla's lungs. The Zilla took a desperate gulp of air, the exhallation manifesting itself in a point-blank blast of fire.

Godzilla shook off the stinging feeling and caught the Zilla in an uppercut that knocked it off its feet. He quickly charged up a heat beam and fired. The Zilla barely managed to avoid it by rolling to the side. It looked up just in time to view the sight of Godzilla's foot rising high into the air before bringing it down on its face. There was a sound oddly reminiscent of someone biting into a tortilla chip, but quite a bit louder.

A quick scan of the area showed no immediate targets. Godzilla heard a distant and familiar boom behind him. He turned around, only to be met by the sight of ten Zillas directly in front of him.

Before he could so much as roar in surprise, a long tail caught the right side of his face, and he was the one falling to the ground. Unlike the Zilla he had just killed, however, he wasn't quick enough to evade the five or so flame attacks his adversaries sent his way.

Knowing full well that the next thing the Zillas would try to do was swarm all over him, Godzilla swung his tail blindly along the ground, hoping to trip at least a few of them. He felt his tail connect with two pairs of ankles, followed by two loud cracks as their ankles broke and two louder thumps as they hit the ground, but that was all he received.

Godzilla felt something slam into his chest, hard, and at the same time heard a sickening crack from the same general area. When the pressure didn't subside, he looked up to find that a Zilla was on top of him. It had probably jumped over his tail and used the opportunity to pounce on him.

The Zilla lunged down and sank his teeth deeply into his neck. Godzilla tried to roar, only to find that the effort met his windpipe and halted. He reached up to claw wildly at the Zilla's neck. Although he managed a few glancing blows, the Zilla's jaws remained tightly clamped on his throat. Even as he battled this Zilla, he felt others find their own grips on his other body parts. Godzilla soon found himself thrashing his entire body around like a fish out of water.

It briefly occured to him that Minya might help somehow, but a steady chorus of warbling cries to his right told him that his son was preoccupied with a Zilla or two himself. How he hadn't noticed this before caused him a short moment of puzzlement, as his son was making a racket fit for a stadium full of teenage girls at a Keith Urban concert, but the intense pain and the roars from his own group of attackers had probably just blocked it out. Speaking of which...

A loud boom rippled through the air that Godzilla could actually feel instead of simply hearing, followed closely by another. A brilliant orange flash momentarily blinded him and came very close to scorching his face, but it was well worth the abrupt absence of the Zilla's weight and teeth on their corresponding parts of his body. He heard and felt another explosion to his right, along with a Zilla's dying scream.

Minya, it seemed, wasted little time in coming to his father's aid, as Godzilla made out something bright and blue hit the general area near his right leg, where the pain was still flowing keenly. As before, the pain instantly decreased.

That was about all the assistance he required. Godzilla swung his left arm, which had been randomly yet mercifully spared of becoming a makeshift chew toy, across his body, where a Zilla had gotten a loose but effective hold on his right wrist. Instead of clawing or punching the Zilla in the face, though, he actually stuck his hand up the Zilla's throat.

Ignoring the kaiju's surprised squeaks, he felt and groped around until he found something long, moist, and squishy. He grabbed this new apparition and yanked back as hard as he could. A sound horribly similar to someone tearing up a wet piece of paper ripped through the air as the Zilla's tongue came free. Blood and deafening screeches spouted from the Zilla's mouth like a water fountain from Hell as its resolution snapped and it ran off somewhere.

Confident that his neck was sufficiently healed by now, Godzilla looked up to assess how much of a charge he would need to keep his beam going long enough to at least get the remaining Zillas off him. He inadvertantly caught a glimpse of Gamera fighting a few Zillas a respectable distance away as he did so. Well, that explained where the orange plasma balls came from. Godzilla felt a quick surge of affection for the Guardian - or as close to such an emotion as a 100 meter tall dinosaur could achieve. He quickly recomposed himself and focused on summoning the radioactive energies inside him for a heat ray.

For a few seconds, he felt the electric warmth sweep up his body length until collecting in his mouth. He noted, though, that his neck and chest hurt a bit as it passed by. Thankfully, it was not enough to break through the skin, though this didn't change the now obvious fact that one of his ribs had broken when the Zilla landed on him. He pointed his head at the Zilla farthest to his left and fired.

To his surprise, the Zilla actually leaped backwards just before the ray of plasma hit it. Godzilla could only assume that it had in fact been watching him the whole time. The rest, however, didn't seem to be noticing, and a quick horizontal sweep of his head was enough to dislodge them all.

Godzilla hastily scrambled to his feet, and not a moment too soon; the Zilla that had just dodged his attack was coming back for more. At exactly the right moment, Godzilla took a left-handed punch at the Zilla's head, since his right hand was only starting to close itself up. As a result, the punch wasn't quite as powerful as it could have been, though still sufficient to knock the Zilla to the ground.

Godzilla could tell that he needed to save as little time as possible with this Zilla, because the others were just now starting to get to their feet. His solution: slamming his tail again and again on the downed Zilla's head until he heard the skull crack while simultaneously shooting a fully charged heat beam at the others.

To put it simply, it worked.

As the singed chunks of Zilla meat were still falling from the sky, Godzilla, ignoring his own blood-soaked form, checked to see what condition Minya was in. It wasn't good; several trios of bright red lines painted his son's chest and stomach. Minya had no dount realized the need to conserve his strength, hence the fact that he had only used his plasma blast once.

True, like his father, Minya had regenerative powers, but they were much slower. Like the strength of his atomic breath, that power would develop with age. At least the plasma energy was too dispersed at the location of the wounds for it to burst out them; that may well have killed him. Still, it looked like Minya would have to sit out the rest of the battle as best he could.

Godzilla turned again to see how Gamera was fairing - and was shocked by what he saw.

Gamera landed and looked around to confirm that no other Zillas had the brilliant idea of taking him on. Gamera would have smiled, had his Atlantean creators given him a mammalian set of facial muscles instead of adhering to those of a turtle, when he saw that the closest Zillas were the ones still running away from him. His smugness was swiftly replaced by the realization that the Zillas were all heading straight towards Godzilla, who was too busy fighting yet another Zilla to notice. Gamera opened his mouth, threw his head back, and-

The ground beneath him erupted, while at the same time pain shot up his legs from the soles of his feet. The plasma ball briefly illuminated the dark clouds orange as it flew harmlessly into the night sky.

Still in the air, Gamera felt the agony in his right leg suddenly magnify tenfold, and in more than one way; in the middle was the same type of sharpness that his feet were even now still experiencing, a crushing pressure in the same area was only making it worse, and his thigh felt like it was about to be ripped from its socket as his body inexplicably changed direction.

It wasn't until after he hit the ground and shook off the dizziness enough to see a Zilla with a viscous green liquid - Gamera's blood - dripping from its mouth and dorsal fins standing next to a large hole in the ground that hadn't been there before did he realize what had just happened.

The Zilla had burrowed underneath Gamera, who of course had no way of knowing of this ability, then jumped up through the earth itself. It's spines were what had stabbed his feet. The Zilla had then grabbed Gamera's leg in its mouth, swung him 270 degrees, and completed the move by slamming him into the ground.

Gamera began to charge up another plasma ball when he detected movement out of the corner of his eye. Disregarding the fact that the Zilla was now charging him, he turned his head to the left to be met with the sight of Godzilla and Minya, lying side-by-side, flat on their backs with Zillas all over them.

The plasma energies inside him were fully charged, not just for one, but for two blasts, and Gamera had a split-second decision to make: use them to save his allies, or himself.

Gamera took aim at Godzilla and shot the ball of plasma from his mouth, then did the same to Minya.

The delay caused by his actions gave the Zilla just enough time to bite down on Gamera's already seriously injured right leg. Despite the pain that lanced up from the appendage, he knew that this was the only way.

He could have saved himself with the plasma balls, but both Godzilla and Minya were already in a far worse situation than himself, and the latter was almost completely unequipped to be fighting at all, let alone have two fully-grown kaiju fighting him at once. True, he could have finished off his Zilla and then helped his allies, but by then the Zillas could have killed one or both of them.

He could have tucked his limbs into his shell, but that would have made his head, which needed to stay out of the shell so he could aim his attacks, an obvious and easy target, so instead he chose the lesser of two evils.

And he could have simply ignored the fact that there was a battle going on at all, and continued slumbering peacefully at the bottom of the sea... but where would the fun be in that?

So when the Zilla sharply snapped its neck back, pulling a very large portion of the flesh on his leg and sending green blood fountaining into the air, Gamera was proud of his decisions.

He craned his neck as far forward as he could manage, then let loose another plasma ball. The edge of his shell assured that he didn't get a direct hit at this distance, but the attack did manage to skim the Zilla, which bought him just enough time to stand back up. He banished the feeling of pain in his right leg, which he had learned to do long before this battle. A very useful trick, especially because the Zilla had ripped off so much of his leg meat that his bones and tendons were clearly visible.

Two other Zillas had run up beside the one he was fighting as he had gotten up and even helped it up. Gamera had to admit, their teamwork was exceptional. He fearlessly stood before the trio for a moment. The middle one looked at the left one and nodded in a corresponding direction, then did the same to the other. Slowly, methodically, the two Zillas began to walk around him in a semicircle formation.

Gamera, however, did not intend to be surrounded. He quickly charged a plasma ball and shot it at the Zilla to his left. It expertly dodged it by hopping sideways. This gave the other two the opportunity they had been waiting for, and they charged the Guardian. The one in the middle got to him first, and was therefore the one was stabbed in the shoulder by Gamera's elbow spike.

However, that allowed the Zilla to the right to get a firm grip on the turtle's right arm... with its teeth. Gamera, hissing angrily, turned to the direction of this new torment and prepared to fire another plasma ball. A sudden pain gripping his other arm caused him to reflexively turn his head, however, and the plasma escaped his jaws as his head was in the middle of its arc, causing it to miss even the middle Zilla, who was crouching down.

Gamera soon discovered why it was crouching as he experienced the familiar sensation of a fanged mouth clamping down on his leg. This sense of deja vu was completed by the Zilla snapping its neck back again. However, it had a much different result. Before, his leg was already injured, making his flesh there much more prone for... removal. This leg, though, was intact, and the skin there held.

The leg's grip on the ground didn't.

This ultimately resulted in his body being held up by the mouths of three Zillas, and him powerless to do anything about it except tuck his head and right leg into his shell.

Maybe it would've been better to stay asleep underwater after all, he thought.

Godzilla watched the spectacle in front of him for a moment. Three Zilla were suspending Gamera in the air by his legs, green blood dripping from each one. As he watched, his only leg that wasn't being bitten - though it did look seriously injured - withdrew into the shell, along with the head. Smoke and flame shot from the former, and the shell began to slowly move forward in the air.

The Zillas tightened their grips and dug their heels into the ground, but it was no use; the shell kept moving. The stubborn kaiju, however, refused to let go, so the scene shifted a bit from horrible to comical.

Still, no matter how funny it was to see the Zillas struggling like this, Gamera was still in pain, and Godzilla couldn't let that go on unabated. With a roar, he ran after Gamera and his attackers.

It wasn't easy to get there. For one thing, Godzilla wasn't really built for running in the first place. For another, do to either the Zillas tugging their captive or Gamera somehow trying to shake them off, the shell would suddenly and seemingly randomly change direction. At last he reached the kaiju entanglement. Still running, Godzilla's fins and mouth flared blue, signalling the blast of nuclear breath that dislodged the Zilla's mouth from Gamera's arm... and its head from the rest of its body.

The shell dipped at an angle when the Zilla let go, but the arm quickly disappeared into the shell and was replaced by exhaust. Now the two Zillas on the other side were being pushed back. They had to run backwards just to keep their balance. Godzilla caught up to them and promptly relieved them of their need to keep their balance with a tail sweep that knocked them both off their feet. They both roared in anguish, finally letting go of Gamera in the process.

The airborne shell moved to the side a little before regaining its poise and activating the remaining two jets. It regained its customary spin, the familiar high-pitched grating noise pounding against Godzilla's ears. As he watched, the shell tipped its side downwards until it was spinning perpendicular to the ground. It paused for a short moment, then slammed into the two Zillas.

The edge of the shell was as sharp as a razor, and it ripped through the Zillas' torsos with ease. Blood fanned out with each spin before the jets of fire burned the wounds shut, then were opened again by the edge of the shell. Their dying screams, however, only stopped when the life abandoned them.

Gamera landed after he was sure they were dead and observed his wounds. The Zillas' teeth had cut deep into each of his limbs, and there was so much blood flowing out of each that, from a distance, one might have thought that was their actual color. Small strips of flesh hung limply from the sides, which Gamera pulled off without so much as a grunt. Godzilla marveled at the Guardian's endurance.

A sudden noise caused both of them to turn around.

It was Minya.

He was screaming.