(A/N: Behold, the "three chapters worth of monsters kicking the crap out of each other condensed into one chapter" chapter! If your eyes start to glaze over, I apologize sincerely. I suppose I could also call this the "long monologue though mortally wounded" chapter. Or maybe the "what the heck happened to Kaori?" chapter. Hmm…)

Of course, Mr. Mihama's very first thought was to see to the safety of his daughter. It was too bad that his very first thought finally came after so much had happened; he'd entirely lost track of the girls in the choking clouds of Destroyer by-product, and two of the creatures were closing in on him at that moment.

James Bond he was not. To be honest, he'd been to the range once or twice with friends, but he'd never fired a gun at a moving target even to hunt… Zatoichi probably could have outshot him just then. Nevertheless, the attackers were big targets. BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! Though he didn't manage to take them down, both were persuaded to find other targets and he had a moment to think… until a purple beam gouged across the floor at his feet and he had to totally face-plant to avoid it.

Chiyo, he thought frantically, I've got to make sure she's al…!

His brain froze. As he started to rise, he saw his daughter and one of her friends (Tomo? No… the hyper one? It didn't matter!) slowly walking hand-in-hand as if in a daze, serenely oblivious to the carnage around them. But bony claws were falling towards their fragile bodies; a Destroyer had emerged from the mist behind them and its shriek filled his whole universe. Mihama's gun rose but he was moving through water and he would never get off a shot before…

VOIP!

Then a flaming pink arc was burned into his vision and the Destroyer was tumbling away, geysering misty gray blood from its throat and chest, to crumple over backwards, legs flailing in the air. The girls continued on their blissful way, giving no sign that they'd even noticed the monster's attack. Sakaki followed behind them, every bit as baffled as Mr. Mihama; their eyes met and she spread her hands—then they both remembered that they were in a warzone and got moving again.

VOIP! Another Destroyer plunged to the ground, missing most of its limbs.

VOIP! Yet another found its torso opened and its head gone.

There was a vague, flickering form warding Chiyo and her friend, something with big, fluttering wings and jewel-like eyes. Mihama realized that, against all reason, his daughter was safer than he could ever make her, and that he should really forget about her and see to himself just now. Not that he ever would, but still.

"You're doin' good, Chiyo-chan, doin' good…" Osaka murmured, "Stay with me, just stay with me and you'll be okay…" A purple beam danced and snarled about their feet but didn't touch them. "Just stay close…"

VOIP! A pair of claws tumbled through the air above them.

VOIP! A Destroyer retreated, thrashing at the air about its ruined eyes.

Only one creature stood between them and the ground-level entrance. Claws the size of small cars rasped together hungrily as enormous crimson eyes lit on the approaching girls. Nightmarishly huge, filling the room before them, the beast swept forth, the clatter of its advance drowning out the battle behind them while its honking bellow rattled their bones.

"Sure…" Osaka said dreamily, "Take as much as ya need…"

With that, she let go of Chiyo's hand and stepped forward into it… and who could describe what happened next? Chiyo screamed and stumbled back into Sakaki as the room before them seemed to explode, orange blades flashing in a lethal tornado and chunks of chitinous armor thundering to the ground in a single, titanic gush of gray blood.

When it was all over, Osaka stood giggling dazedly in the midst of a sea of acidic Destroyer guts, which had thoughtfully parted so that she could collapse unburned. Wasting no time, Sakaki picked her way through the hissing mess and scooped Osaka up, the thought rising unbidden that all this practice handling fragile, injured little creatures was probably helping her practice for her future career.

"Is she okay?" Chiyo asked anxiously at her elbow. Though she'd looked dead for a moment, Osaka was breathing slowly, fast asleep.

But just as the three of them were going to make their escape, they found something even worse than the Destroyer blocking their path. He was propped up on the edge of the doorframe, bleeding hideously but very much alive. Every other part of him was shuddering, but his gun glared at them steadily. "It's not going to be that easy, girls!" Lord Ogawa hissed.

As she fell, Osaka was entirely unsurprised to feel the universe twist about her to put the ground once more beneath her suddenly bare feet. The sort of loose, comfortable, but formal dress she found herself wearing for Shobijin calls settled around her, this time pale red. Gathra, once more a chibi baby bug, settled atop her head and stretched out his wings to enjoy the bright, idyllic sun that smiled down at them.

"The beach again," she sighed, "They're runnin' outta ideas."

"Sad but true," the Shobijin admitted, standing atop a largish white boulder before her. Great wings pounded the air behind her, but instead of just making a pass as they usually did, they held position. Mothra was personally invested in this encounter. Not good.

"So what's goin' on?" Osaka asked easily.

"The problem is not with you," the Shobijin said in perfect unison, "But your son. We see now that he takes his filial duties too seriously."

"What?" The bug in her hair stiffened.

"This is a conflict that you humans have brought upon yourselves. It is a conflict that the world's guardians have no place interceding in for any reason, even to protect an individual they care about." The left Shobijin looked apologetic as they both continued. "It is Mothra's duty to protect the Earth against menaces from beyond, not its own inhabitants."

"But… but I woulda…" Osaka protested.

"Even if you had been killed, it would have been ours only to watch and mourn. The forms we follow exist for a reason and if they were disregarded, your world would not be the only one to burn. Your son has broken these forms, and we must deal with him before order disintegrates."

"What are you gonna do to him?" she asked frantically, clutching the fuzzy creature to her breast. "You're not gonna hurt him, are you?"

"Neither of you will be harmed," Mothra said. Showing how detached, cool and on top of things she was, Osaka gave a cry of shock and had to physically stop herself from trying to hide behind the Shobijin's rock. She sat heavily in the sand and stared up at Mothra, who was… who was…

Now, Gathra was impressive in his way, and had quite a job protecting the Earth, but it was obvious who the true Guardian of Earth was when you stood beneath Mothra. She looked impossibly vast but her presence was even greater, giving the impression that there was a planet was hanging twenty meters above Osaka's head, bright and beautiful and monstrous all at the same time.

"You must forget," the greater moth told her, "The world will remember that you bore the egg and your friends will know that you saved them, but you will never know the connection that you once had. As your son, there is no hope that he will keep his place."

"You mean I'll never know…" Osaka looked down at the creature in her arms and then up at the Goddess of Infant Island, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. "How is that not being harmed? He's… he's my…"

The mighty moth was at once sad and sympathetic, implacable and merciless as it descended with deceptive gentleness towards her. "Not anymore."

Osaka hung her head and braced herself for she knew not what. Gathra looked up at her and pressed his wooly face into hers, and as dark brown eyes met glittering blue while the world seemed to blur together and swirl down the drain around them, Osaka realized that neither of them would ever forget.

"Not really."

Sakaki stepped in front of Chiyo, trying to figure out how she herself could avoid using Osaka as a shield. The terrorist overlord lurched off of the doorframe and shambled towards them unsteadily, chuckling. "How touching, your concern for your friends. You are truly pathetic, Andrea Nanashi Sakaki… get out of my way!"

"No."

"I could kill you instead, or Ms. Kasuga there, it's really all the same to me," the gun moved in a small, neat circle, taking them all in, "With your sort… I could destroy you by shooting any one of you. Such miserable attachment! Don't you realize that all it gets you is weakness and pain?"

"Y-you're wrong…"

"I've made it my business, destroying people. Not killing them, that's too easy, but destroying them inside and out. Long enough in my business and you see every attachment as a weakness. You're not impressing anybody, Sakaki. Move it or I'll kill all three of you!" After a brief pause, he said, "Ahh, thank you. Somebody's being reasonable."

Sakaki realized with a stab of terror that Chiyo had stepped out of behind her and now stood, trembling but unyielding, with her eyes closed. "Chiyo, what-?"

Then Mr. Mihama tackled the man sideways, the gun barking uselessly into the ceiling, and they were both gone in the mist. Sakaki didn't waste this god-given opportunity, but as she took off, she noticed Chiyo still staring after her father. "Chiyo-chan!"

"But he-!"

"Please!" That almost nonsensical exchange had the desired effect, though, and the younger girl finally followed her to (relative) safety. And what of her father? Well, Lord Ogawa was mortally wounded already, so it wasn't much of a fight… but the fury of a protective parent had Mihama trying to make a fight of it.

"Why is all of this! It can't be world domination! That's laughable!" Yasuhiro snarled, resting his knee on the other man's chest and bearing down on him. "You would never want to rule anything but your sick little cabals!"

"It would be laughable, yes," Ogawa choked, "If I were taking the world for myself."

"What?"

"Always underestimating me, Yasuhiro! And look where it's landed you… your poor little daughter and all her friends in a warzone, your corporation full of spies and cutthroats, the world plagued by giant monsters… heh ha… you always underestimate me…"

"What are you talking about?"

"You can think of SSS9 as a… as a contractor. And we've done our part… I just wanted to be the one… to get rid of you…" his head lolled to the side. "Looks like I've failed at that. Heh… enjoy the world without SSS9… while it lasts…" Yasuhrio stood slowly, seeing that Ogawa was in his last throes. "And don't think that they're any safer outside… the Destroyers are everywhere."

That got Mihama moving. Still, there were no illusions that Ogawa used this diversion to throw down a smoke bomb and escape to his evil lair. He was gone.

"That was friggin' AWESOME! That was… that was better than awesome, that was… c'mon, back me up here, Kags…" Tomo exulted.

"If you call me Kags one more time," Kagura replied flatly, "I will tear your throat out and pour a bottle of after-shave down the ragged wound."

Tomo looked at her for a long moment and saw absolutely no indication that her erstwhile copilot was kidding. "Fine. Sheesh."

The two girls sat in the open hatch of the Mechagodzilla escape craft—an unpowered glider, launched by explosive charges but thereafter doing nothing to call attention to itself. The light metallic frame had borne them to a distant corner of Tokyo, far enough away so that the thunder of distant battle sounded much less immediate than the easing rain's patter on the titanium wing above them and the harsh gurgle of water rushing down the streetside drains.

The city about them was eerily empty, oppressed by the dark sky and aura of menace Destroyer's remote presence gave it. Or perhaps, Kagura reflected nervously, remembering the smaller beasts that had attacked them, it wasn't so remote. "Tomo, whaddaya say we go back in and bolt the hatch shut?"

"Why? There's nobody around."

"I'm not worried 'bout people," she stood slowly, searching the buildings across from them with eagle eyes. "But if there's a big monster like that, how do we know that there aren't more little ones?"

"I tell ya what, Kagura, you weren't always such a stick-in-the-mud," Tomo groused. "Can't you even be happy that we got to kick giant monster ass?"

"We would've kicked a lot more if you knew your left from your right!" Kagura replied testily. "It would've been nice to get those shock anchor thingies into him!"

"Well maybe if you had stopped yelling, I would've been able to think straight for five seconds!"

"You can never think straight, Tomo!"

"Neither can you!"

"That's not the point!" Like most of their arguments, though, this one fizzled out pretty quickly. Kagura paced in a small circle in front of her, looking around the eerily deserted street. "I'm really starting to feel nervous, y'know? It'd probably be a good idea to get under some co- GLURK!"

That last came as a knife-like leg plunged into her side and bore her heavily to the ground. A Destroyer, smaller than most of its brethren but plenty large for our heroines' purposes, scuttled heavily down over the glider, keeping the athlete pinned with one leg. It hissed softly to itself as it regarded its new catch; what it could be thinking about, neither wanted to know.

At this point, Tomo did something completely surprising. "Hey, ugly!" she cried, standing heroically, "Over here!" When it actually turned its malevolent gaze towards her, though, she did something much less surprising and fainted dead away. Kagura winced at the sound of her head on the pavement in spite of the fact that there was a big bony knife in her gut.

"You think this makes you tough?" Kagura growled, not wanting her last word to be 'GLURK!' "You think you're tough? Well," she paused to swallow something that tasted metallic, "Well I'm gonna come back in my giant robot, an' stomp you flat, how ya like that, huh? Yeah, I'm talking to you!"

The monster leaned down and shrieked in her face, unsheathing its inner jaw. Now, the smell of micro-oxygen has already been described; let it be known that in the case of the Destroyers, it was their armor that smelled like ionization, while the "slow, painful death" part was mostly in their breath. Kagura gagged, unable to continue her tirade. "Well? What… are… you waiting for?"

Then a cyan beam licked across the side of its face and that clichéd inner jaw shattered as its mouth snapped shut. It tried to retreat, wrenching its leg out of Kagura's side as beam after beam stabbed into it, each giving her more cathartic joy than the last. She sat up slowly as the SDF men formed a perimeter around the girls and a medic rushed to her side.

Too adrenalized and giddy to care about a little thing like internal bleeding, Kagura happily babbled to the affable medic, a solid-looking woman with short hair. "Weirdest thing, ever, lady, I'm telling you! I didn't get scared or anything! I thought that I'd start crying or something, but instead it just made me mad!"

"That can come in handy," the other agreed, going into her first-aid kit. "It proves you're a fighter. Not like your friend over there."

"Is she okay?" Kagura swiped at the trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth, then looked at it in mounting horror. "Um… I… I'm bleeding inside, aren't I?"

"Er, yeah. Am I gonna have to sedate you?"

Kagura weighed the possible embarrassment against the knowledge that she'd nearly been run through by an eight-foot arthropod. "Probably," she agreed weakly.

Tomo had been loathe to leave Mechagodzilla when Control had informed them that the pilot was en route. "Oh, come on," she'd argued as Kagura dragged her away from the controls, "It's just like a video game! How much better could he do than us?"

The answer was forthcoming, though neither of them was conscious to see it. And sadly, the contract regarding pay-per-view had fallen through yet again, so the only record of Mechagodzilla's second whooping was grainy, jittery news footage shot from an allegedly safe distance.

It was clear to all observing that a new intelligence was in command of the mechanical monster (or, as many joked, an intelligence at all) as it backpedaled smoothly away from the Destroyer, stepping around some miraculously standing department stores. The micro-oxygen monster, not understanding why its foe was backing off, took one thunderous step after it—and got an atomic ray right in the face.

Godzilla hurled his tremendous body through the air and came down on Destroyer's side, digging his stubby claws into the larger monster's rough armor. Bleating and growling angrily, Destroyer stumbled under his weight and fell, doing its best to grapple what seemed to be a sixty-thousand ton wolverine.

Mechagodzilla's pilot (and the rest of the four-person crew that made sure the space titanium titan didn't trip over his own feet) watched tensely; it would be best not to fight both at once, after all. The Harrier shifted to get a better vantage, scattering the swarm of news choppers that had gathered.

An unfortunate thing happened for both living monsters, then. One of Godzilla's terrific blows actually broke through Destroyer's carapace, plunging his reptilian fist into the thing's freakish anatomy and coating it with the same horrifying acid that had killed his predecessor (or that he had once survived; either theory holds.)

The Big G snapped right out of his primal fury and was suddenly in self-preservation mode. He struggled to rise from his foe, but Destroyer had seen the Godzilla's anguish and held his arm in the wound sadistically, seeming to relish in the lethal hiss. In a full-on panic, Godzilla let him have an atomic ray point-blank and both beasts' heads seemed to vanish in the blue conflagration.

Destroyer's clawed tail arced over both of them and grasped the back of Godzilla's neck, flinging him away with savage force. Though wounded, Destroyer still had plenty of fight left in it. This seemed unfair to all watching; had its insides not been the most dreadful biological agent ever devised, Godzilla would have torn it apart by now.

"You know," the pilot said, "We saw that the heavy weapons didn't work that well. How much power did whoever-it-was leave us?"

"Eighty-seven percent," their engineering specialist reported. It was generally agreed that she had the hardest job; whereas the pilot got to do the fun part and the other two only dealt with emergencies as they arose, she had to be on the ball every second that MG was operational. "We can use Absolute Zero as long as it stays above sixty."

"Okay, then! In that case, who needs this shit?" The railguns and arc-missile pack disengaged from Mechagodzilla and crashed heavily to the ground; all that was visible through the resulting dust was the flashing arcs of MG's power blades engaging.

Destroyer fired a micro-ox ray. Mechagodzilla ducked.

Boosters in its legs and back firing, the mechanical marvel streaked under the ray and slashed across his foe's chest, opening the wound yet further. The laser horn crackled, but its sweep was parried by the other power blade. Moving faster than it seemed possible for something so vast, Mechagodzilla turned that move into a thrust through the Destroyer's throat while the other blade hacked across its knees.

Shock anchors burst from MG's forearms and buried themselves in the freshly opened wounds, pumping obscene voltage through already tortured flesh. Destroyer tried to pull back, but Mechagodzilla held its position and the anchors kept them tethered together.

"We're below seventy. Turn off those anchors or something!" the engineer snapped. "We won't have enough power to fight both of them!"

"We won't have to," the pilot said confidently, "Godzilla will leave when this is over. Ready Absolute Zero."

"What? You can't mean…" but then she grumbled and started the dread weapon warming up. "You'd better be right."

Destroyer stopped trying to pull against the anchors and thundered forth, throwing a mighty fist into Mechagodzilla's face. Its metallic foe didn't resist as it pounded the crap out of him, denting sheets of pure space titanium and cracking the Absolute Zero cannon's diamond lenses.

"Ready," the engineer announced calmly. "Give the word."

Mechagodzilla suddenly grabbed his foe in a bear-hug and fired his thrusters, sending both creatures skidding out over Tokyo Bay. A purple beam streaked over his shoulder and scattered the news choppers afresh, though thankfully none were struck. Just as their speed started to give out and their weight hit the water fully, the word was given.

"Fire!"

Absolute Zero engulfed both combatants in a blast that would change Tokyo's weather for months. Nearly all of the heat abruptly fled a three-hundred-meter radius about them, flash-freezing thousands of gallons of water. The splash of their impact became a mighty transparent statue, glittering in the rays of a sun just now peeking from behind the black overcast. Mechagodzilla broke free and sank into the darkness, inert.

Godzilla rose and cast about furiously for his foe, keeping his burnt arm clutched against his chest. He seemed frustrated when it turned out that no monster was presenting itself, though some spectators thought that he also looked a little relieved, as well. As the pilot had predicted, he started to lumber back towards the ocean, clearly anticipating the lasers that had driven him away from Tokyo on his last visit.

Then the unthinkable happened. The Destroyer burst from its icy tomb, even larger and more hideous than before! Its grand wings spread in the frigid air as it shrieked a challenge to the Monster King. Godzilla was only to happy to roar back, forgetting all of his misgivings as he charged towards the iceberg and its loathsome passenger.

The micro-oxygen beam lashed across his body, completely ignored as he plunged into the dark waves and knifed through the deep towards his nemesis. He had reached that sublime state beyond enraged, a degree of emotion that the word "anger" simply fails to describe. His thoughts were smooth, clear and entirely aimed at one simple goal.

As he hauled himself up onto the ice, Destroyer tried to step on his hands and knock him away, but Godzilla was having absolutely none of that. He backhanded the enormous creature with his injured arm, freeing three or four more wickedly pointed teeth to splash into the bay.

He stood and Destroyer pushed into him, trying to burn him with the slick gray blood that now coated its armored body. Godzilla met him happily and ignored the violent hiss that rose, wrestling his larger foe to the ice and loosing one final atomic ray, an apocalyptic blast of bright cherry-red energy that plunged effortlessly through Destroyer's chest and the leagues of water beneath them. Both monsters fell into a clear cylinder flash-vaporized into the bay (the iceberg found out what happened to a snowball in Hell), which clapped shut over them as the water rushed to reclaim its place.

The water bubbled and churned as Destroyer dissolved, turning a great patch of the bay into vile anti-life much as Dr. Serizawa's weapon had done way back in 1954. Of Godzilla, there was no sign. Had he escaped the fate of his predecessor? Had he cheated death yet one more time? Or were his bones even now settling on the floor of Tokyo Bay?

These were questions for later, and not our concern.