Age of the Titans

by GojiGrimlockSaurus

In honor and tribute of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this one-shot series will mostly focus on Godzilla and King Ghidorah. This will focus on how each fictional universe will react to them and other Titans when they stomp into the fray. As monsters vie for supremacy, all hell will break loose, and nothing will ever be the same. As one wise scientist said, "Let them fight."

20. Titanomachy! Bloodbath and Ruin!

Disclaimer: Godzilla (c) Toho Studios, Warner Bros., and Legendary Pictures

All other characters used in the fanfic belong to their respective franchises

I only my own OC Titans.

Design of Godamera belongs to Matt Frank AKA KaijuSamurai on DeviantArt. Design of Titanus "Sargon" goes to PrettyFlacko808 also on DeviantArt.

---

TITANOMACHY! Bloodbath and Ruin!

---

Underneath the vast expanse of the Rocky Mountains, a small group of mountain climbers and cave explorers, who were actually scientists and specialized troopers from the G-Force bearing the telltale insignia of Monarch were exploring the treacherous cavernous tunnels of an abandoned silver mine, which was found four years ago on November 3rd by accident by a trio of tourists when they were on the run from a ensuing brawl between antagonistic packs of gigantic macro-Grey Wolves, feral Pokemon species, and Grimm Beowolves. Curiosity had gotten the better of them after they heard unusual deep-throated grumbling coming from deep beneath the mine. They ventured in, having no inkling of what they were about to witness with their very own eyes after trekking several hundred miles underground. In the end, only one made it out of the cavern and the woman was shellshocked of what had happened down there that claimed the very lives of her boyfriend and her sister. It was late in the evening by the time the park rangers found her lying unconscious in the woods 10 miles south from the abandoned mine. They took her to the hospital in Prince Georgia where she was given more advanced medical care. For a long time, the young woman, who was in her early twenties, was in a state of coma as she was rendered unconscious from the trauma. Since she was in a deep sleep of sorts, no one was able to find out the story of what had happened within the particular mountain where the abandoned silver mine was since the only other two persons that would've been more effective to collaborate the events were long gone and considered KIA after fruitless searches by park rangers.

That was until a major earthquake rocked Prince George. That wasn't the only thing that happened as part of the mountain where the silver mine was located collapsed structurally on its eastern side, which set off a giant landslide that disturbed the wildlife and a miniature earthquake that rattled Dawson Creek. Monarch's investigative agents caught word of how the people visiting the Jasper National Park reported what sounded like all-encompassing, trumpeting scratchy roars that echoed seemingly out of nowhere followed by a dark spiky mountain-like shape that was occasionally seen from certain angles of a gorge or cliff. It took some more investigative work on the agents' part, including when they managed to get a hold of the unconscious female hiker, who had finally recovered from her coma at the time, to interrogate her on what she had seen in the abandoned silver mine after all of the other clues from talking with the locals both in Prince George and Dawson Creek point to the particular mountain where she had lost two of the people she loved dearly. Once she had managed to muster the courage to tell the agents exactly what she saw down below the mine as best as she could, they have enough evidence to form the basis that a potential Titan monster could actually been dormant in the mountain only to be awakened by accidental human intrusion into its lair. Enough to convince Monarch to fund a more serious expedition deep into the mountain to locate it and contain it.

And convinced Monarch they managed to do after taking more time to corroborate all the clues and evidence they gathered as to make a strong justification for such an investigation.

---

Now on April 13th, the Canadian Monarch Expedition team ventured some 200 miles deep beneath the surface and the collapsed eastern entrance of the mountain. They were currently watching their step through a cavernous chamber that had a waterfall feeding into a small underground river that was leading into an alleged subterranean freshwater ocean further down underneath the Rocky Mountains. It was almost pitch black if it hadn't been for some small luminescent bluish-white crystals that scattered about the cavern ceiling and small rocky outcroppings. Still, the chamber was dimly lit and the terrain of the cavern floor was treacherously uneven and slippery with small depressions and slopes to make those with poor situational awareness slip and likely hurt themselves. Everyone was reliant on their high-powered LED flashlights mounted on their helmets and had to be extra cautious of where they placed their footing in this unforgiving, damp cold environment.

"WHOAAA!" One of the G-Force Troopers slipped on one of the hidden depressions and a loud crack could be heard as the man's ankle twisted about at an unhealthy angle before he slammed chin first onto the cold floor.

"GAAAAHHH!"

He screamed out in pain, both startling the expedition team and spooking out the bats from their roosts.

"Eckbert?" One of the troopers, his teammates, pointed his helmet flashlight in his direction and became shocked at the fallen state of Eckbert as he writhed about on the floor with his foot all messed up.

"OH GOD! AARRRGGHHH! I BROKE MY ANKLE! I BROKE MY FREAKING ANKLE!" Eckbert hollered out with the pain sharp and difficult to bear coming from his foot.

"Eckbert!" His teammate cried out as the Chief Warrant Officer shouted the order to the entire group to halt as they all quickly gathered towards Eckbert's fallen form with his foot stuck in the depression. As the trooper got around to see the damage, he swore when he saw how bent out of shape his ankle was as it was twisted into an awkward angle due to the way it got caught in the depression.

"Hang on, Private! We'll get you out! Just shut up and stay calm with us!" Chief Warrant Officer Anthony Barnes ordered as he and his men quickly took a look at his foot and then made a snap decision of how to dislodge his foot from the hole, "Alright, Private Zach!"

"Sir, yes, sir!" from his right, Private Zach answered.

"See if you can untie his boot and make it loosen up," Anthony figured as the boot was firmly stuck in the hole while the tied laces confined Eckbert's foot.

"Yes, sir! If I can fit my hand through the crevice, I think I can that done, but I need light here!" Zachary pointed out, "Otherwise, I'd be going in blind like these bats in daylight!"

The Chief Warrant Officer quickly got out his flashlight from his velcro breast pocket and shined onto the hole depression. With the light, Zachary was able to make out the tied laces more easily.

"Don't worry, Eckbert! We will get your foot out real quick!" He comforted his friend, who was biting his lip in attempting to resist the urge to move about from the pain engulfing his foot. Zachary quickly untied the knot, allowing the laces to be loose, which was then the cue for Anthony and Lynda for what they're about to do.

"Okay, Eckbert. Me and Lynda will help you pull your foot out, but be careful. You understand?" Anthony stated, to which Eckbert responded,

"Yeah."

Anthony and Lynda nodded at his response. They gingerly removed his foot from the boot while Eckbert slowly crawled as to ease the process for them. Until his foot was finally dislodged with Eckbert and Zachary breathing hard out of relief.

"Okay, I gotta take a look at your foot," Lynda, the field medic, took out her own flashlight, turned it on, and aimed the light at the foot where the protrusion could be clearly seen with a big red stain on his sock. Anthony looked around the cavern with his flashlight aiming its beam across his surroundings. It was the bats flying all over above him that fascinated him...

...and troubled him.

Like most people, he was not too thrilled about having to interact with the flying mammals in a claustrophobic environment where darkness was the bats' domain. It didn't help that bats were basically rats with extra large ears and wings. One alone by would be unnerving to him by itself. Seeing multitudes of them gather about even when flying with apparent chaotic manner certainly elevated his anxiety to an uncomfortable degree higher. Combined with the claustrophobic and eerie atmosphere, venturing into caves was not his cup of tea. Today, his hairs stood on all ends as he sensed a more malevolent feeling deep in the pit of his stomach when he noticed the bats had suddenly gone silent.

"Shit! Eckbert, you're in deep shit! You're foot's all messed up like crazy!" a trooper said in exasperation of how grossly the ankle bone protruded almost through his skin.

"Thanks, Mr. Obvious! Shut up!" Eckbert hissed from the pain as he tried to wedge his foot out only to hiss through clenched teeth again from the sharp jolt of pain running through his leg.

"Private Eckbert, calm your nerves down. The last thing we need is for your anger to make the wound worse," Anthony said sternly.

"I know, but I've been so stupid not to see this coming," Eckbert said with pained irritation.

In the meantime, while Eckbert was being pulled out, scientists were collecting geological samples of the rock formation, and the unique crystals dotting the cavern walls. Few of them even collected smaller greenish-yellow crystals that were found among the blueish-white crystals. However, they also noticed the unusual silence from the usual chatty bats, apart from the G-Force soldiers conversing with each other with some of them complaining with dread about the damp coldness of the cave. When they expected to hear to the sounds of bats screeching, no sounds came from the creatures' mouths, and all of these small flying mammals stopped fluttering around in the darkness, which created an unnatural silence that gripped on everyone's nerves, putting the expedition members on edge.

"Why have the bats gone silent?" Eckbert asked.

"I'm not sure," Lynda answered.

Everyone kept their mouths closed with no one wanting to speak while they kept ears sharp for anything that might be causing the bats to shut up.

Then all of their hairs erected on all ends when the expedition people all heard a deep, low-pitched grumbling growl coming from deeper beyond the cavernous passage along with hot gusts of musty air rushing through it and at them. Those sent chills colder than the frigid cave down through their spines. The cave itself seemed to shiver from both the bone-chilling groaning and next, the distant sounds of gigantic foot stomps that also echoed through the cavernous halls of the chamber.

"What the hell is that?" Anthony whispered.

The chamber continued to quiver from the rhythmic yet chaotic pace of the quaking foot stomps as they grew louder and more intense. As whatever giant was making them slowly drew ever closer to them, rocks and small stalactites started to become unhinged from the ceiling above the Monarch expedition team.

"It's no longer safe here! The cave's falling apart!" Dr. Francis Rochmont cried out in alarm while covering his head above with his arms, "Warrant Officer Barnes, please, we have to get out before we're crushed to death!"

The African-American G-Force officer, after his own quick assessment of the situation, concurred with the leading scientist of the expedition.

"Everyone retreat back up to the surface! Don't waste time dilly dallying in here! On the double pronto, ladies and gents!" Anthony barked out the order. Everyone was trying to run, but the terrain was so uneven and slippery that all of them slipped or tripped up on a depression in the ground.

"Come on, Eckbert! I am gonna help you get onto yer' feet!" Zachary lifted his injured best friend off with help of Lynda.

"No, man! Leave me! I'll only slow you down!" Eckbert complained when he started seeing the larger stalactites starting to become undone after losing structural support of the rock ceiling. That was when they heard one of them snap off and it was huge. The length of the crystalline stalactite was twice the height of a full grown man and about as thick as one of the pillars of the Lincoln Memorial.

"Stalactite incoming!" One of the G-Force grunts hollered.

"Aaaahhhh!" Zachary and Lynda screamed as the falling stalactite headed straight towards the two and Eckbert with the former npt being able to move away in time. Eckbert, however, in his last ditch effort of self-sacrifice, stood on his good leg and miraculously had the arm strength to push his two friends away before he fell to the ground.

"Save yourselves!" Eckbert exclaimed to the shock of them both and Anthony.

"Eckbert!" Zachary hollered out in astonishment.

The stalactite finally crashed onto him, impaling and bisecting the Canadian-American in half with gore flying all over. The stalactite fell sideways, flattening him into a bloody mess of clothing and crushed bones.

"PRIVATE ECKBERT HARDY!" Chief Warrant Officer Anthony Barnes screamed.

"ECKBERT!" Zachary and Lynda screamed in despair from witnessing their friend die for them in such a brutal manner.

"Oh my God!" the latter said through her hands muffling her mouth.

Then she heard more rocks and even the stalagmites being chipped off by the falling stalactites. Looking up, the cave was falling apart on top of the expedition team.

"Oh no...MAKE A RUN FOR IT!" Lynda hollered.

Other G-Force soldiers and Monarch scientists could be heard shouting as they scrambled and tripped on the slippery inclines of the cavern chamber.

"Go Go Go Go!" Anthony could be heard hollering.

"F*# ! The floor is killing me!"

"I can't see thru shit!"

"Don't drop the equipment! We need that!"

"Watch your head!"

"I swear I will never enter a cave again as long as I live!"

Bats were now flying desperately out from their crumbling roosts. It only served to make the escape more chaotic as everyone now had more difficulty making sense with all the sonic screeching going on. More rocks fell from the walls of the cave and struck several members of the team, killing some of the scientists, including the leading Canadian scientist.

"GAHHK!" Dr. Francis Rochmont was struck by a grapefruit-sized rock in the nape of the neck. He immediately died after his spine broke.

"Doctor Francis!" Anthony was horrified of the doctor's death as he was supposed to protect him and his scientists, therefore protecting the samples needed to confirm the Titan's existence. Sadly the entire mission was absolutely derailed when large stalactites and boulders came dropping on top of another, crushing more soldiers and blocking their exit.

"NOOO!" Zach roared like a madman, had his own eyes widened like saucers while swearing worse than a sailor as their only escape was cut off.

"Shit! We're trapped!" Those were Anthony's last words before his world around him suddenly turned white.

Outside, the collapsed entrance to the abandoned silver mine exploded outward with debris flying all over. The entire southwestern face of the mountain exploded outward from a flashing beam of bluish-purple energy of concentrated radioactive energy burst out. The feral Pokemon species, including Mankeys, Caterpies, Dodrios, Cascoons, Pidgeys, Pichus, Sceptiles, Geodudes, and Cubones screeched in terror as they were all thrown off from their homes by the earth-shattering commotion. A terrifying landslide of catastrophic proportions happened, forcing them to flee from the trees. Unfortunately, those that were too slow to react were swept up in it and died instantly. Regular wildlife, Macro-sized animals, and Grimm species of Beowolves, Ursa, Boarbatusks, and Griffins were also trying to scamper away from the danger as a titanic figure of 400-feet tall emerged from within the mountain.

RRREEEAAAAAAAAARRRREEEEOOOOOONNKK!

The Titan let out this screaming, bone-chilling trumpet-like roar that reverberated the massive dust clouds surrounding its entire being. The giant monster's roar created forceful, powerful gales from its maw that blew away huge swaths of the forests at the base of the mountain with some of the smaller and weaker creatures being sent flying away to their doom while most tried to run or cower behind any object that would provide them cover. Its feet kicked up the landslide and the remaining wall of the mountain and clawed at its edges to make room for its wide, bulky shell. The Titan, in question, was almost like Godzilla in that it had a large boxy, rectangular head with forward-facing, stereoscopic beady eyes, and strong muscular jaws and stout muzzle armed with visible spike-like teeth. There were two pairs of long protruding saber fangs on each jaw that stuck outside of the jaws when closed; its head was proportionately smaller due to it supported by a short, wider muscular neck that was joined to a generally strong, bipedal T-rex-like body with a wide barrel chest, a pair of large meaty arms, thick tree trunk-like hind limbs capped with large theropod-like clawed feet, and a large, sinuous tail trailing behind it. However, there were number of distinctive major features that stood out from Godzilla.

First, it had a wide bony carapace for its back similar to a tortoise, except it was much grander and titanic in scale and complete with osteoderms that have spiky, bony protrusions of considerable length sticking outwards both from the sideway edges and dorsal side of its shell, which gave its shell a rather porcupine-like appearance. Then the Titan has a pronounced mohawk crest of bony spines jutting from its head and neck, which would prevent it from retracting its head into its carapace unlike most chelonian kaiju. The beast's jaws did not have a beak, but were very dinosaurian and bore more resemblance to that of Godzilla or a T. rex. Its chin and lower jaw was adorned with bony scales that often had rock-like protrusions, giving it the vague appearance of having a beard of sorts. Its nose and nasal bridge have warty bumps and ridges that give the creature an overall, rugose elderly appearance to it. The arms of the monster were proportionally enormous even by Titan standards as they were almost gorilla-like or bear-like in terms of width and musculature and much bigger in size compared to Baragon's and Anguirus' own forelimbs. Its hands were more akin to oversized claw gauntlets with each of the four digits tipped with massive claws and the knuckles armed with bony claw-like protrusions to give the creature an extra frightening edge in melee combat. Then, unlike Gamera or any non-kaiju chelonian, its tortoise-like shell was not truly rigid, but rather semi-flexible and more akin to that of a pangolin with most of the spiny dorsal plate overlapping one another, except for the ones in the center of the shell that were interlocked. Then the carapace was connected to the base of its neck and the tail rather than disjointed as it extended across the latter. The tail was bristling with deadly tail spikes and edged serrations that would put Kentrosaurus to shame. The Titan had black, pebbly scales sporting mottled patterns of dull orange blending with rusted iron red color for its head, neck, arms and legs. Its semi-flexible shell had a coloration of gray with bright orange star-like pattern to the bony protrusions with the stripe marks at the base of each plate resembling that of veins.

Titanus Enki had already awoken, but was initially confused of how outside world had changed so dramatically from the Mesozoic world it had grown up in. It retreated into the shores of the deep underground ocean where its burrowed lair was located within to re-energize its mesothermic metabolism. The Monarch expedition team was in the wrong place and wrong time when the reptilian Titan felt the seismic disturbance of another Titan coming from lands within the southernmost parts of its territory. Aroused, he destroyed them unawares as he was more focused on confronting a potential threat from another Titan. The turtle-like dinosaur breathed out smoke from its nostrils and jaws as its iron red eyes glared at the horizon in the direction of where the disturbance was coming from. The beast growled as he felt the slight ultrasound tremors through his feet and caught the scent of the faraway intruder.

ROOOAAAAAARRRRROOOOONNNNNKKKKK!

Titanus Enki roared, declaring its presence to the whole world. He stomped onward and flattened anything unfortunate to be under its foot. An injured Pichu, who had lost to a Sceptile in a fight earlier, was desperately trying to keep up with the rest of the fleeing montane woodland creatures and Grimm monsters. However, its blind eye proved to be its undoing as it tripped and fell headfirst into a tree, further injuring itself.

"P-p-pichu...," the mouse Electric Pokemon groaned, too dazed to see Titanus Enki's foot about to stomp onto him. It was far too late when it shook its head. Its last sight was that of the monster's crocodile-like feet blocking the sky before the Titan heedlessly crushed it and toppled down several trees around it. Titanus Enki trekked through the valley unopposed with terrified birds and bird-like creatures flying away from the tree canopies as he pushed them down with the massive bulk of his legs and tail.

---

Rio Grande National Forest, Colorado, United States...

Flying above the montane forests on a bright sunny day were the ominous avian monsters that varied in size, ranging from the size of the Andean Condor to World War II fighter jet or bigger with giant wicked bat-like wings. To say that their appearance was grotesque would be an understatement as their bodies were so very thin and sleek, that their skin seemed paradoxical in nature.

Their scales were rough with the skin being bluish-brown with occasional shades of dark violet, yet the skin seemed so tight on their bodies to the point that bones could be seen protruding through it underneath. They seemed to be nothing more than skin and bones with some patches of reptilian scales to help prevent them from being classified as zombies as such even if it wasn't much as the rest of their bodies seemed gangly and malnourished, which included their bony, spike-like protrusions of their spines jutting out of their dorsal side. Their wings have sickly yellowish and pale green hues to them that would remind anyone of gangrene when a wound was badly infected and becoming septic. Strange bioluminescent yellow lines adorned their bodies. Their feet were very much like a hawk's with vicious-looking crimson talons that looked like meat hooks stained in the blood of the victims they feasted upon ravenously. Their tails were like a vague cross combination of a lizard and shark with the tail flukes at their ends vaguely resembling the latter.

Each of them have a vulture-like curvature to an equally vulturine spiny neck that supported their heads. It was the head that was the most horrific of the avian monster's body parts. It was flattened and arrow-shaped with a pair of bony crests jutting out sideways diagonally in a way that made the pterosaur-like wyvern appear to have fox or bat-like ears even if it wasn't actually the case. Its beak-like snout was pointed and the jaws were lined with razor sharp teeth that cut through flesh like steak knives. The beast's evil, fierce reddish-pink eyes have a haunted, desperate look of everlasting hunger to them that clearly reflected its foul, destructive nature as a hypervorous predator.

These creatures flew not with the intent to simply hunt, but to terrorize and destroy their victims relentlessly to satisfy their extremely unnatural cravings for blood and violence. One alone would be enough to annihilate a local ecosystem on a whim, but banded together with multitude of others of its demonic ilk, they become a destructive, collective force of terror and death that could render half of the United States into a dead wasteland. Their flock has blocked out the sun with their shadows engulfing the forest below them. The Titanus Gyaos were following their latest set of victims, who were a black-haired young woman with red eyes and wearing a black battle outfit complete with a skirt, a red tie, red arm gauntlets, and red pocket holders; an older busty blonde with yellow mane of hair, lion ears on top of her head, leonine claws, and a lion tail from her rear end, who wasn't wearing much in terms of clothing as in a revealing outfit with a black tube top, detachable sleeves, pants, boots, and a scarf; a young brunette man with green eyes, a youthful handsome face, and considerably bulked up musculature now donned in his Teigu armor called Incursio with a long cape to boot; another young black-haired man in his full swordsman battle outfit matching the color of his hair with swords equipped to his back; a young woman with orange-brownish chestnut hair and hazel eyes, wearing a red and white knight uniform and wielding a rapier; along with them behind and on their left was an older woman with extremely long black hair and plaited into big braids that were tied off by a bandage-like band, whose outfit consisted of a torn, revealing ruby-red corset, a belt, and torn-up black jean trousers, multiple belts around her legs, and a black jacket in the form of a robe with red-velvet lacing worn over her corset; a young Malakim spirit male in the form of a young boy with golden brown, shoulder-length hair and a cowlick ring at the tip of his head, and forest-yellow eyes; and finally an older man with blonde hair and blue eyes and in dark clothing consisting of black tailored trousers, a black waistcoat, a long dark business type jacket with an orange shirt and loose white shirt underneath with brown boots and gloves.

They were accompanied by what used to be a larger platoon of 170 Monarch G-Force soldiers, now down to 85, which were tasked to eliminate the immense threat of the Gyaos, and a smaller group comprising of American militia soldiers and Native American Apache and Comanche tribesmen from Del Norte, Monte Vista, Alamosa, and Saguache, who were trying to defend their livelihood against ecological monsters that had no good reason disrupting their lands in the first place.

All of the characters were being relentlessly pursued by these vampiric wyverns after they had tried to raid their nests situated in the hills to prevent them from becoming too large of a threat to the wildlife and people. While the heroes had destroyed the nests and the eggs, they underestimated how rapidly outnumbered they were by the Gyaos that had bred and grown quickly in their numbers, which led to disastrous casualties instantly when the Gyaos retaliated. Now they were desperately on the run to link up with the others to have a better chance of repelling them.

"Captain Hamilton!" cried out the black swordsman named Kirito Kirigaya from the Sword Art Online universe to the red-haired, bearded soldier who was leading the platoon at the front, "Please call for support!"

"We're being jammed! We have no communication!" replied the captain, which he mentally cursed at the horrific turn of their mission.

"I can't contact any of our allies either!" one of the militiamen replied as his walkie-talkie was only picking scratchy frequencies on all channels.

"Damnit!" Kirito swore, which had Asuna more worried than ever about the mess they had unwittingly gotten into.

"Tch...We're on our own! Curse my Reaper luck!" Eizen, the blonde man in the dark clothing yelled out of angered frustration from all the nasty surprises his cursed ability had wrought upon him, his friends, and the locals that were willing to fight along with them.

"It's not over yet, Eizen! We will fight back against these birds when we link up with the witch and the others in a more advantageous spot!" Velvet Crowe answered, trying to reassure him.

"Hope so cuz' these things are kicking our asses!" the Malakim spirit yelled.

Tatsumi turned his armored helmet around when he noticed at the corner of his eye that a couple of the Gyaos had their pointed beaked mouths glowed a yellow light. His eyes widened behind the lenses as he realized right away what was about to entail.

"Guys, look out!" Tatsumi hollered to get his allies out of harm's way as much as possible.

However, that was rendered moot when one of the bird wyverns spat out its Supersonic Scalpel in the form of a thin yellow beam that sliced cleanly through the canopy and tree trunk like a katana to a bamboo roll. Unfortunately, three of Monarch's soldiers were sliced diagonally without a chance for them to even scream as they died immediately with their bloody parts loped off.

That got everyone panicking as they now scrambled faster than they could possibly and humanely muster with indiscernible screams clamoring all over.

"Shit! Those bat lizards are spitting their scalpels at us!" Leone remarked, and immediately after she said that the sliced tree fell behind them.

Another Gyaos fired its own Supersonic Scalpel in concurrence after its fellow Gyaos had done so. Its beam came dangerously close to beheading a militiamen.

"Avoid the beams!" Asuna warned only to have a yellow scalpel beam almost slice her arm off and blow a hole in a G-Force soldier's neck, making her yelp out of horror.

"Asuna!" Kirito shouted, which he next heard two hundred and fifty Gyaos screaming as each started spitting out scalpel beams right at them with each supersonic laser projectile cutting through trees, which had several of them fall timber and tearing up the ground in the process. It was a hellish rain of death coming from the dark cloud that was the Gyaos flock as they were determined to kill the intruders even if they escaped to the ends of the earth. The soldiers and militiamen scattered, including the heroes, as they crashed and tripped through brushes and slipped on hilly inclines, attempting to not get sliced into cut pieces of meat for the ravenous monsters.

"Laphi, stay close to me!" Velvet cried out to the young Malakim.

"GAH!" Laphi jumped from having a Gyaos nearly bisecting his ankle when it spat its sonic scalpel beam to immobilize him. He wasted not time reinforcing the intimate distance to Velvet, which she quickly nabbed him close to her, sheltering him behind her cape to offer some protection from the demonic wyverns even if it wasn't guaranteed for sure.

"Velvet! They're slaughtering us!" Laphi said in a hysterical, terrified tone befitting that of someone his age as he's technically a child, both age wise and physically, despite being an accomplished Spirit Mage.

"I know, but there's nothing else more we can do for them!" Velvet hated to give such a cold, morbid answer even for her as the Lord of Calamity while all around her and her allies, both soldiers and militiamen alike were being terrorized and cut up mercilessly by the Gyaos raining their beams upon them.

Akame sped up and maneuvering with incredible agility around the yellow beams aimed to kill her even as she snarled at how she was not in the best environment to counter the enormous multitudes of the avian monsters as any advantage she would normally have in an enclosed space was negated by the sheer quantity of these malevolent creatures.

Captain Isaac Hamilton wasn't faring much better emotionally as casualties for his squad quickly piled up with many of his men either sliced and rendered incapacitated by the supersonic beams, or crushed by the falling loped off tree branches and top halves of the trunks. He gnashed his teeth, trying to block out the screams from his head as to not let them be a fatal distraction to him. The worse was when some of his beleaguered men became fed up of fleeing with their friends dead and having snapped. They hollered in defiance, shooting their assault rifles and handguns at the flying beasts, which got some militiamen, who were fed up from running for so long, to join their defiance in the face of death.

Isaac stopped and the leader of the local militia did the same when they saw them firing their respective guns at the hypervorous wyverns.

"Stop! Fall back!" Isaac yelled at them, but the chaos, the gunfire, and the hyper loud volume of the Gyaos' screeches made it almost impossible for the three G-Force soldiers to hear his command.

Though the soldiers and the four militiamen did manage to kill several of them, it was only a paltry portion compared to the entire colony of 300 plus Gyaos. It didn't take long for the reptilian avians to adapt their tactics as the flock separated into smaller halves to avoid losing more of their numbers. Two of the Gyaos divebombed adeptly avoiding the gunfire until they had gotten close enough to the infuriated fighters and that was when they unleashed their claws, pouncing upon them. One Gyaos was large enough to pin three of the Monarch soldiers on top of one another while the second one managed to catch the two militiamen trying to escape all at once in its talons.

The men and woman screamed as the wyverns' talons pierced through into their flesh and drew blood. The force of the Gyaos' momentum also ruptured their organs, causing them immense pain, which these vampiric pterosaur-like abominations seemed to derive sadistic pleasure from with their mocking caws sounding off from their toothy beaks. Then in a flash, the Gyaos pinning the Monarch soldiers stabbed its beak through all of them like a morbid shish-kabob, killing them instantly with their voices rendered silent. The second Gyaos simply engulfed both militiamen's heads and with a slight twist of its neck, he ripped them clean off their shoulders with blood spraying through its jaws as it gulped them down its throat with a satisfying croak.

Isaac was speechless with his mouth hung open wide from witnessing his men's bloody deaths. He was snapped out of his shocked stupor when a screech from above alerted him to another Gyaos swooping from the flock above to make him its victim.

"WHOA!" He barely dived out of harm's way when the Gyaos tried to bite him. He could clearly hear the wyvern's pointed jaws creating an audible clacking snap. The monster flew back up above the tree line, which gave him a chance to right himself onto his feet. He took one last look at the people being eaten by the monsters with disgust and regret before he fled.

For the heroes, the situation just gotten worse as the small number of Gyaos became bolden to swoop down onto them. Four of them divebombed after Akame, Leone, and Tatsumi and actually landed to pursue the Night Raid assassins on foot, running at them like dinosaurs. Since they were so big, yet lightweight and agile with their skeletal structure hollow like that of birds and an efficient respiratory system, they quickly caught up to them. One man-sized Gyaos ran parallel to Akame on her left as it lunged, snapping its pointy, beaked jaws onto the black-haired, red-eyed girl. She dodged and swung her Murasame sword to try lop off its head, but the monster also bobbed its head and neck away from the strike and followed it up with a counter strike.

Leone had her own Gyaos deal with as one came onto her right and even tried to headbutt her with its side of the pointy crest. Leone had to duck and quickly put up her arm when the Gyaos tried to lunge for her head only to bite on her furry arm and sleeve. She grunted, powering through the painful sensation of the avian's razor sharp teeth cutting through her sleeve and puncturing right through her skin and muscle.

"Hey! Watch it on the merchandise, Arrowhead! This ain't cheap!" Leone roared as she retaliated by punching the beast thrice in the snout before clawing it right in the eye when punching didn't do the trick. The Gyaos let go and screeched from having its snout punched and losing its eye being ruptured with blood squirting out. Leone sped towards the dazed hypervore and landed a powerful kick right into its keeled chest that knocked the Gyaos back through several trees.

"Find someone else on the menu, you deranged vulture!" Leone shot back while her left arm healed quickly of the deep bites inflicted on it. Her sharper feline hearing picked up that Tatsumi and Akame were having more difficulty fending off the offending pterosaur-like monsters. Their fast reactions and skill as professional assassins were negated by the wyverns' very aggressive ferocity coupled with higher-than-average bird-like intelligence and predatory cunning that had been overshadowed by their relentless drive to satiate their constant hunger. It didn't help that the reptilian avians hovered in the air, weaving in and out from behind the trees out of range of their Teigu weapons due to their faster reflexive reactions, and periodically firing off their Supersonic Scalpel Lasers from their maws to throw both of them off their game.

"Tch!" Tatsumi snarled, dodging their beams of clean, but agonizing death while not risking to put the durability of both his Incursio and his spear, Neunote, to the test the hard way against them. He rolled and strafed rapidly as he could to avoid being blasted, pelted by canopy debris, or crushed by a loped off tree trunk. The Gyaos' supersonic oral weapons left deep scars onto the forest floor as a scary testament to how severe their cutting power was, which surpassed that of even the sharpest of swords.

'Whatever these murderous birds are spitting out, I don't think even Lubbock's strings could cut that deep!' Tatsumi internally cringed at how deep the gouges were as they cut even through the root system hidden way underneath the soil while cauterizing them with severe burns. 'Even my Teigu would be unable to protect me from this!'

For Akame, her situation was even more dire as she lacked any form of armor, save for her red arm gauntlets, in contrast to Tatsumi donning Incursio or the regenerative ability that Lionelle provided to Leone. Her choice of lightweight black and red clothing was meant for missions suited to her role as an assassin, not for prolonged battles of attrition like this. Speed, timing, and maneuvering had always been the factors that drove her how she managed to carry out assassinations and even precise spec-op-like missions involving the Gyaos nests. She needed them now critically when coming up against bestial enemies that were not only faster and stronger than her, but also deceptively cunning in their own right as exemplified by the Gyaos attacking her with its own oral supersonic laser, while darting from one tree canopy to another like a ghost.

'Damn it! It's using the trees to prevent me from getting close enough for Murasame to inject the venom!' Akame mentally concluded as the monster was constantly breaking its outline when hopping from one canopy to the next. Akame wouldn't be able to land a blow onto it other than cut down some branches with the beast constantly on the move. It would occasionally vomit out its death scalpel ray to try dismember her legs or slice a hole through her body, which would force Akame to avoid by swerving into unfavorable angles that would undermine her counterattack. Then she got sidelined as the Gyaos flew instantly past her like a bullet and bit her at the stomach and chest many times. She struck back when she saw the silhouette of the Gyaos at the corner of her eye. She swung her sword to try put a stop to the monster by cutting its wings only for the wyvern to seemingly disappear in the blink of an eye and pull a deadly fast one behind her by clawing her back with its foot talons.

"Hgghh!" Akame hissed through her gritting teeth when she felt the hooked crimson claws cut through her fabric and ripped deep into her skin, tearing her shoulder muscles and rupturing blood vessels. Thinking instantly, even through the pain, Akame grabbed a fistful of dirt from the forest's soil and threw it right in the vampiric wyvern's eyes. The Gyaos screeched out of angered surprise from the irritable pain of having dirt and small rocks touched its sensitive eye corners, which made the reptilian beast unlatch its feet off of the Night Raid assassin's back. She quickly twisted her body around and decisively swung her long katana Teigu diagonally, slicing through the malnourished flesh of the Gyaos' bony chest.

Both of them backed off from each other, but not without the monster pulling off its last underhanded trick as it spat out its Supersonic Scalpel Ray to take Akame down with it. Akame swerved her head away at the last minute and within a flash, she was behind the avian monster with her Murasame unsheathed. Every sound came to a dead halt in silence as both combatants stood still. A small red slit appeared across Akame's left cheek and began to bleed as a result of being nicked a bit by the Gyaos' Supersonic Scalpel Ray. Akame didn't react to it as she slowly pushed her sword back into its dark red sheath. Behind her, the Gyaos was vomiting bloody frothing from its mouth as the poisonous curse started spreading from the chest wound Akame inflicted with in the form of black markings. Once she clicked her sword when it was completely sheathed, blood erupted from all over the slicing wounds that Akame had managed to create, splattering the surrounding trees in a crimson bloody mess. That, in addition to the curse stopping the demonic wyvern's heart completely, killed the monster instantly before it even crumpled in a dead heap on the forest floor with blood leaking profusely from the fatal cuts.

Elsewhere in the forest, all of the Monarch G-Force and the local militia were being harassed and destroyed by more of the Gyaos joining in from their enormous flock to unleashing the carnage upon them. It was clear that the soldiers were fighting a losing battle that was quickly becoming a one-sided massacre to them as one Gyaos fired its Supersonic Scalpel Ray that bisected and decapitated half of the remaining G-Force soldiers down. That same razor-sharp energy beam also cut down a quarter portion of the militia, leaving only seven of them left now having to face the visceral horror that was literally falling upon them from the deadly skies.

None of them stood a chance against these ravenous, frenzied monsters. One militiaman got sliced half horizontally in the face by a Supersonic Scalpel Ray, which spurted out blood and detritus all over with his bloodied tongue and lower jaw exposed. A female militiaman with a buzzcut hairstyle had been swooped up in a Gyaos' clawed feet as the beast carried her away to her doom as she screamed in full futility. Another female militiaman with shoulder-length blonde hair had been headbutted by a charging Gyaos and was instantly bitten in her legs, but she still fought back by stabbing her pocket knife into a Gyaos' snout, even if the blade fractured and only managed to damage the sleek head armor before her fate was ultimately sealed with a bloody stab to her head. A militiaman of Native American and Caucausian descent lost his entire right arm and shoulder after a Gyaos overpowered him in a deadlock struggle. An African American militiaman was literally being eaten alive in the guts by two of the smaller, younger Gyaos. One Gyaos killed a militiaman, whose of lesser composure, trying to escape from the hell he was in by having its Supersonic Scalpel Ray slice him cleanly across his spine, cutting him in half.

The Monarch G-Force soldiers were worse off with a soldier getting split in half vertically by a Scalpel Ray and many others falling to gruesome, savage methods such as a couple of Gyaos forcibly ripping an unlucky soldier apart in two. Another having his ribs and entire organs of his upper body crushed and caved in by a nasty stomp from a Gyaos pinning him on top. A lieutenant having his two halves barely dangle by bloody remains of his spine caught hanging from the jaws of one of the wyverns before the grenade in his hand exploded, blowing up both him and the hypervore's upper half off all at once.

The carnal destruction wasn't limited to the soldiers, however, as dismembered bodies quickly piled up in the desecrated forest of the Rio Grande National Park. The Gyaos were not above cannibalizing on their own flesh and blood, especially ones that had been gunned down and/or hacked. The ones that were rendered incapacitated or weakened were being harassed and pecked to death by the stronger ones as they feasted on each other. In their uncontrollable frenzy, the psychopathic pterosaur-like wyverns also tore up large acres of the woods and routed out any terrified animal and Pokemon that were trying to flee from the carnage. The monsters wasted no time in inflicting senseless violence upon them, regardless of whether they were bigger or smaller compared to some of them, flighty or aggressive, etc. The Gyaos didn't care about those factors as so long as they have victims they could kill just for the sake of killing.

Not even the mighty Tyrantrum and the powerful Tyranitar were completely unscathed from bearing the disastrous blows wailed onto them by the ever-starving, bloodthirsty Gyaos. Ferocious and greatly mighty in their bestial strength and elemental powers, these dinosaur-like Pokemon still had much better chances in fighting back against the hordes of these vampiric avians than most of the humans with exception to the superhuman and demigod heroes.

Tyrantrum used mainly its heavyset jaws, large feet, and tail to combat these starve-ridden grim reapers as it caught one careless Gyaos by its entire and head within its maw with teeth and muscles that enabled it to crush steel. In a single chomp, the Tyrantrum beheaded the Gyaos, dicing up the scrawny vulture-like neck like a twig and crushing the armored crest and head of the wyvern due to its stocky, spike-like teeth into wet, juicy pulps of flesh and bone that was gulped down the Pokemon's throat.

"Trum!" Tyrantrum roared before having to duck a lunging piercing beak attack from one of the fighter jet-sized Gyaos. However, one of the smaller Gyaos managed to land its feet onto the Tyrannosaur-like Pokemon. Its talons penetrating deep into brownish red scaly skin, drawing blood as a result. Tyrantrum yelped out in a screech as the smaller wyvern already began tearing at its blood-soaked white feathery mane. Another small Gyaos flew in and attacked it from its right. The wyvern's momentum was strong enough to topple the Tyrantrum over onto the ground as the two now became more aggressive in pecking, clawing, and kicking the Pokemon to death. Tyrantrum bellowed out in both pain and fury from being harassed all over as it frantically snapped its jaws and kicked about its clawed feet to get the Gyaos off of it. The bigger and older Gyaos was about to join on into the vicious beatdown when it was pummeled away by a Rock Throw executed by Tyranitar when the large, green dinosaurian-type Pokemon saw Tyrantrum was in dire straits.

The bigger Gyaos was stunned with stars flying around in its vision.

Tyranitar wasted no time in unleashing Hyper Beam from its mouth in the form of an orange beam that sailed towards the two Gyaos attacking the fallen Tyrantrum. The Gyaos were so caught up in the frenzied thrill of killing their victim that by the time one of them finally took notice, it was too late for the second one it was brutally incinerated by the beam and exploded into flaming chunks while the first one hopped off just in the nick of time. The beam continued to carve through the forest, killing any Gyaos unlucky enough to be in the beam's way, but unfortunately also scorching one Monarch soldier that happened to be in the wrong place and wrong time when the beam struck. Tyrantrum took full advantage to get back up onto its feet and immediately nab the Gyaos when it didn't pay any attention by the torso with its steel-crunching jaws.

The Gyaos shrieked painfully before it met its end when the Tyrantrum shook it around like a ragdoll, snapped its spine, and chucked it into the air with much force that it knocked out others of its kin that were trying to gang up on the Pokemon. Tyrantrum swung its tail that smacked right into one Gyaos, while knocking out another one out of the sky as the smaller offensive attack flock dispersed to avoid being taken down. The dinosaur-like beast charged and jumped, pouncing onto the fallen Gyaos before they could even recover their bearings and crushing them underneath its powerful, massive hindlegs. The one pinned underneath its fallen ilk tried to charge up its Scalpel Ray, but the Tyrantrum beat it to the punch when it slammed its left foot onto its head. The head shattering underneath all of the weight forced onto it like a watermelon, all distorted and unrecognizable with all of its brain matter splattered out in a gooey, squished mess.

Not too long after rescuing its fellow dinosaur-type Pokemon, Tyranitar was soon next to be ganged upon by another detachment of Gyaos from the super colony of Gyaos hovering above the National Park. Eight of the vampiric wyverns surrounded the armored bipedal, Saurian Pokemon with three of them being bigger than a fighter jet with the rest being man-sized or closer to that of a Utahraptor in terms of size. The Pokemon didn't seemed fazed by the fact that it was outnumbered, and even as one of the bigger Gyaos jumped at it with its talons outstretched to disfigure it right in the face and neck. Tyranitar sidestepped and grappled onto the Gyaos' skinny tail and fin with its jaws and arms. The bigger sibling didn't have the chance to comprehend what happened next as the wild Pokemon then swung it around and threw it into a pine tree, shattering it and breaking the monster's back. The rest of the pterosaur-like wyverns watched on in alarm seeing their sibling slump dead to the ground before snarling and returning their oppressive glares towards the Rock Pokemon responsible for their sibling's demise. They hissed as Tyranitar glared back at them with its own angry eyes.

"Tar!" The Pokemon snarled as it made a 'Come and get me!' gesture with its clawed hand at them. It slammed its tail to reinforce the message it was more than capable of bringing them to their demise. The Gyaos responded to its sign of provocation by screeching as banshees and dashing at the Tyranitar. Tyranitar struck out with its tail, smacking one of the smaller Gyaos right in the chest. The force of the hit broke the neck and destroyed the chest, killing the youngster as it was sent crashing into a brush. Its head and neck became twisted at an unnatural angle. Its sternum caved, puncturing into the lungs and heart as the young avian croaked up with a bloody, foam-filled gurgle before it died.

Tyranitar got clawed and pecked from behind by one of the larger Gyaos. The Gyaos kept much distance away from the dinosaur Pokemon, hovering in the air carefully within the enclosed spaces of the forest as while darting in to attack after avoiding the Tyranitar's retaliating bite. However, another younger Gyaos was more reckless as it charged headlong at the Pokemon's armored belly. Though, the Gyaos managed to slice it with its beak and teeth, it went only as far as the armored scales would allow. Tyranitar bit hard onto the Gyaos' neck, swung, and shortly after, threw it right into its peers. It spat out its Hyper Beam, decimating three of them.

It was next assaulted by a Supersonic Scalpel Ray to its back, which tore off its dorsal spikes and right through the gut. The Tyranitar coughed out blood and was immediately tackled to the ground by the two bigger Gyaos when they pounced on it with their feet. They were immediately joined by the two remaining youngsters that were more than eager to make their victim suffer for killing off their siblings. They hounded viciously on the Tyranitar as the Pokemon squealed agonizingly.

Isaac was pinned to the ground by the same Gyaos that had slaughtered his own men in front of him. The beleaguered captain was desperately trying to push away the offending monster with his arm pushing against its throat with the Gyaos' jaws wide agape as it was trying to finish him with a decisive bite to his helmeted head. He grunted from the horrific copper smell of the Gyaos' breath and the slimy hot saliva dripping onto his helmet and face from the monster's sharp teeth.

Kirito cut down five Gyaos hounding him with his Sword of Eventide when he heard his girlfriend scream bloody murder from behind.

"Asuna?!" Kirito exclaimed and was shocked to see Asuna got bitten in the leg by one of the Gyaos that was supposed to be dead from being stabbed in the head from underneath by her rapier. It was one of the bigger Gyaos as its jaws engulfed the lower half of her leg.

"It's not dea-GYAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!" She was cut off as the monster hurriedly twisted its neck to rip and tear through her leg with its sharp teeth.

"Hang on! I'm coming to you!" Kirito stabbed his sword through the neck of a smaller Gyaos attempting to ambush him behind from above. He retracted the blade from the monster with blood coating it as it fell dead from having its lungs and air sacs shredded.

"Hurry, Kirito! It's gonna saw my leg off!" Asuna screamed hysterically with tears leaking from her eyes from the pain of having her tendons and muscle being destroyed by the wounded, but angry beast.

Kirito hollered loudly like a crazed madman, seeing red from witnessing his girlfriend about to lose her leg. He charged at the fallen Gyaos with the intent to ram his blade right into the Gyaos' left side of its head. He successfully did so as the blade penetrated deep into the eye socket and beyond. The Gyaos roared out madly, forcing to relinquish its death grip on Asuna. She rolled out away from the beast with a badly mangled limb to boot as Kirito angrily twisted the Sword of Eventide further in to pierce its braincase.

Velvet Crowe nabbed one of the Gyaos that were trying to sneak past her to get at Laphicet with her now unleashed Consume Claw that was free from the confines of the bandages. She slammed the malicious, repugnant reptile all around into various trees, bloodying it with splinters and pieces of branches marring its already malnourished body. At the same time, she was draining its life force to feed her own.

"These damned harpies are persistent!" Velvet growled as the attacks kept on going from the endless hordes of Gyaos swooping in from the sky.

"They're everywhere and no end to them in sight!" Laphi commented while casting an Elemental Water spell at the Gyaos hounding at Mine on the other side of the forest. The careening water orb struck one of the Gyaos, which was enough for Mine to dodge a Scalpel blast from a couple of Gyaos looking to make mincemeat of her. Both of them got dropkicked by Leone before she proceeded to use one of them as living meat club to beat one of them to death while killing the other. Mine took the opportunity to fire her Pumpkin. The beam's destination was for the four Gyaos about to sneak up on Tatsumi, who was busy fighting a T-rex-sized Gyaos. Its aim struck true and evidently so as the Gyaos screeched their last before their bodies disintegrated into ashes.

"And we fell right into their trap! Damnit!" Velvet swore as she stabbed her wrist blade right into the desiccated Gyaos underneath her to end its miserable existence after fully draining its life force completely. She then tossed away the carcass before jumping and lashing out with a flying kick to another vampiric wyvern that was headed for Laphicet. The kick stunned the monster enough for Velvet to let her Consume Claw rip savagely into the monster's right wing, cutting through the membrane and arm tendons. "These monsters breed much faster than rabbits! That would also explain why they're so ravenous since they constantly have more mouths to feed!"

"That means we're far too late to nip the problem in the bud! Their numbers have grown beyond out of control!" Eizen roared as he leaped away from a Gyaos jumping at him, clawing at him with its talons. He ducked underneath another one trying to bite him in the head from behind before quickly retaliating with a fire-imbued uppercut to its jaws.

---

Mushroom Kingdom...

Luigi was knocked out cold onto the dirt road while the battle raged on at Toad Town against a newly awakened 145-meter tall Titan named Red King. A gigantic bio-terrestrial rauisuchian with stony plated armor, huge claws supported by powerful armored forelimbs, saber-like teeth, a thick, armored tail, and a short, blunt brachiosaur-like skull with powerful jaws mounted upon a very thick neck. Already, it destroyed a quarter of the capital city of the Mushroom Kingdom and all of the citizens, namely the Toads, Goombas, Yoshis, and Koopas, that were not killed during the Titan's rampage, running in the opposite direction away from the Titan. Screams of terror abounded as they sought to escape from there without getting caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately, the Titan wasn't alone as it had a mate, who was also another member of the same species. A female Titanus Red King with the only differences being slightly smaller at 139 meters tall and more gray, pale yellowish in coloration in comparison to the bigger male and its more reddish scales.

Both of them were brutish and ruthless in methodology as the male Titanus Red King carved out a large chunk of the town's streets using its huge claws while the female spat out large magma balls from her jaws at everything in her path, including Toadley Clinic, killing two patients and several medical staff that were unable to evacuate in time. The red male chucked the boulder clump with its brawny, armored arms at the aerial fleet of Koopa Troop ships. The ships did dodge, but sadly, it struck Bowser's gigantic flagship, which destroyed the nose and the front hull with the smaller chunks tearing off the mast and sail in the process.

"We're hit! We've just lost our front nose and the mast, your Scaliness!" a Koopa hollered out, terrified that the aerial warship was now bursting into flames all around and threatening to crash land into the city plaza below.

"Damn those corncob Titans!" growled an infuriated Bowser that had lost half of his fleet to the Red King pair. He saw his prized flagship was about to go down when he heard the wood breaking off and the ship creaking dangerously downwards.

"Men! Abandon the Doomship!" He yelled out the order to his troops while he ran towards the upper deck.

"Wait! What about you, sir?! Aren't you gonna jump ship, too?!" said one of the Goombas that was shocked to see their King do the opposite.

"You idiots retreat and group up with the Plumbers as much as I despise them! Here are my orders: Live on, and help the Mario Brothers evacuate Peach and everyone else to safety!" Bowser laid out the second order to them as he went to the steering wheel and clasped his huge clawed hands onto it, "I'll drive the ship to crash into that ugly bastard of a corncob and use the Triple King Bill Cannons to blast a hole into his guts!"

"Sir! That's-!"

"I just gave you an absolute order! If you fail to comply, I'll make sure my ghost will roast your hides if I also find out that Peach has not survived this chaos due to your incompetence! NOW GO, YOU FOOLS!" Bowser roared back, giving his soldiers no room to protest as many of them gulped of such a consequence, regardless of whether the Koopa King could pull it off or not.

"Y-Yes, sir!" All of the Koopas, Goombas, Hammer Bros., and the Shy Guys all went down the Warp Pipes, evacuating from the premises of their now falling Doomship.

Luigi groaned as he came back to the world of the living to find out he was carried on by Princess Daisy's shoulders.

"Oh...Mama Mia, ugh, what just happened?" Luigi groggily asked Daisy and was struck with a headache for all of his troubles.

"We failed," Daisy said somberly.

"W-Wha?" Luigi thought he misheard her since his head was still foggy, "Did I hear that right?"

"It's true, hon. I wish I was wrong, but...," Daisy turned her teary gaze away as she admitted more heartbreaking news to her boyfriend, "We not only lost the Castle, but when I tried to search through the rubble, I only found Peach. Your brother, though..."

Luigi almost fell off Princess Daisy out of shock when she uttered,

"We couldn't find him."

He had the wind knocked out of him after hearing Daisy basically told him that Mario was nowhere to be found.

"W-W-We..., Luigi. He's gone. I even checked and asked anyone alive over there about his whereabouts in the secret underground bunker for Arceus' sakes and I couldn't even find his hat," Daisy struggled to cap her emotions through the trembling of her voice. Tears threatened to seep through her shut eyelids in spite of her best efforts.

Luigi was further in shock as his mind was going in different directions at thousand miles per second. Everything had gone from a day as peaceful it tried to be in this new world of Titans to hell in a handbasket so suddenly when the Titanus Red King all roared, stomping from apparently out of nowhere. Unbeknownst to him, the Red Kings had just finished making an utter mess of Bowser's Kingdom where they first awakened directly underneath Bowser's Castle that caught both Bowser and everyone else in the kingdom by terrible surprise as they burst out. This was what prompted an infuriated, riled up Bowser to have the entire Koopa fleet pursue them in retaliation for having his castle destroyed and his son, Bowser Jr., gravely injured in the process. Having learned that the old house that he and Mario shared bunking together was flattened like a pancake was the least of his ever increasing problems. Things went downhill real fast as the mated pair of Red Kings lumbered into Toad Town. First, his shopping had been disrupted thanks to them and he was forced to leave his many groceries behind in his car that was probably totaled by either of the rauisuchians. Then when he and Mario grabbed their Cape Feathers that magically gave them their capes, they attempted to put a stop to the Red Kings' rampage, but it was hastily thought up with not much planning put into it as it was almost reactive on the go. It failed miserably as the monsters were not only tougher, but also smarter than their brutish appearance might suggest, especially the female. None of the Mario Brothers' superhuman powers could put a dent past their armored scales, which was more poignant to them even when Bowser and his fleet finally arrived blasting at the monsters as none of the cannon balls even fazed the two.

The reddish-brown Red King simply overwhelmed Luigi through sheer brute force and just outright being intimidating that scared the younger, green-clad Plumber into wetting his own pants after being roared right in the face. After which, the male Red King smashed him in between his palms and then immediately nabbed and chucked him across Toad Town. He crashed beyond the town's borders. Though Luigi's mind was fuzzy at the time, he saw everything that had happened next.

The female was trickier in her approach but no less ruthless than her mate in dealing with Mario. She tackled and grabbed one of the Koopa airships out of the sky, which she then held it in front of herself, effectively using the crew trapped on the warship as hostages against Mario and Bowser. The former couldn't risk fighting the female Titan and outright kill the crew onboard in the process that would compromise his high standard morals as a hero. The latter didn't want to be seen in worse optics for callously disregarding his own men to his own people just to kill a beast more vicious than him. Sadly, the Titans held no such scruples as they quickly took advantage of either party's hesitation with the male Red King sucker punching Mario hard from behind, which sent the red-clothed Plumber careening into a Post Office. The female spat out her fire breath and scorched the Doomship on its right side of the hull, wiping out many of the cannons and killing many gunners. She also torched three smaller warships as they were also unwilling to destroy their own comrades. A decision that costed them dearly.

The male Red King stomped over to the Post Office where Mario was bruised and unconscious within the building. The corncob-like rauisuchian Titan uprooted the building and then performed a strong throw that sent the Post Office flying with Mario in it. It crashed into Peach's Castle where Princess Peach and Toadsworth were helping to usher in the citizens that were unable to escape Toad Town entirely into a secret underground shelter just below the castle's dungeon. That was when Luigi blacked out as the last thing he heard were the screeching, thunderous roars of the Red Kings.

The overriding fact that his brother was gone, though, proved too much for him to handle in his trauma with his world blurring out and Daisy's tear-choked words being no longer audible to him anymore. He fainted and fell off Daisy, much to the sorrowful dismay of the princess of Sarasaland.

"Huh? Luigi?" Daisy said when she heard his body plop like a heavy sack of pebbles to the earth behind her. When she turned around, her heart sank seeing Luigi once again unconscious.

"Luigi?! Oh my God, Luigi!" She quickly knelt down over him, fearing for the worst, "No no no no! Luigi, come on! Don't die on me! Not now!"

She pressed her head down onto his chest. Thankfully, much to her relief, his heart was still beating, albeit faintly.

"It was just too much for you," Daisy let out a small sigh even as she teared up at how internally distraught Luigi must be as of now. Frankly, it was quite much for her to take in as well now with her best friend, Princess Peach, in critical condition and the entirety of the Mushroom Kingdom thrown into chaos by the intrusive invasion of the awakened Titans without a leader to calm and guide them through the crisis. Worst, everyone had seen Mario quickly taken out of the fight by a sucker punch from the red-maroon Red King and then tossed away like trash. That demoralized the citizens and made their terrifying ordeal more scary to bear through.

SKREEEEEAAAAAOOORRRKKKK!

Speaking of those devils, the Red Kings were roaring at the ripped apart Doomship headed towards the male Red King in particular. Bowser was steering what was left of the ship while hollering at them,

"HERE'S MY KAMIKAZE GIFT FOR YOU COURTESY OF YOURS TRULY, YA UGLY SON OF A BITCH!"

The male Red King roared back as he charged forth and put a halt to the Doomship's last charge by grappling it with a show of his massive strength. The Triple King Bill Cannons popped out from the hull underneath, much to the male Titan's surprise when its eyes widened and he yelped in conjunction.

"Gotcha!" Bowser smirked as he prepared to fire the cannons only to be shaken up followed up by a really angry roar that almost made him deaf. He turned around to find the female Red King grappling his end of the destroyed Doomship and locking it in her arm. She grabbed the Triple King Bill Cannons and simply ripped them out, tearing a huge chunk of the ship, which she then tossed them aside.

An infuriated Bowser snarled defiantly at the mated pair surrounding him. He flipped them off by showing them the middle clawed finger as he said his last words to them,

"See you both in hell."

The second Bowser said that, the female lunged her clawed fist forward and punched him into the ship before he could fight back. He crashed through the hull and out as he went down screaming before he slammed headfirst into the pavement below with only his lower half of his shell, legs, and tail sticking out. With a mighty heave, both Titans slammed the Doomship onto him. The male Red King then clawed out another debris-filled boulder with his claws lifted it up to his chest, and relinquished his grasp once he was over the Doomship to let the boulder crush what was left of the warship with Bowser being piled beneath it. Both of the Red Kings then backed away a few meters from the killzone before they charged up their heat rays and next, spat them out simultaneously onto it. They scorched the wreckage and struck an oil tanker truck that happened to be in the midst of it all, which then created a potent explosion that rocked Toad Town. It engulfed both the boulder and the Doomship, burning them into ashes.

Daisy let out a muffled scream of horror behind her gloved hands as she was rendered shellshocked of the Red Kings' brutal execution of her and Peach's shared hated enemy. A gutwrenching fate that she felt was undeserving and too cruel even for Bowser in spite of all the world-threatening troubles and shenanigans he put her, Peach, Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi through. The Koopa Troop that had managed to survive were just as shellshocked or more so than she was. They had just seen their leader got crushed and scorched. This time, unlike the other times where he got out totally unscathed, Bowser didn't seem to come back and that scared them so much that they were rendered speechless.

The Red Kings didn't even care or feel the same as either the Princess of Sarasaland or the Koopa Troop about Bowser. To them, he was just another nuisance that needed to be put in his place like the Mario Bros. The male Titan brushed the dust off of his scaly hands and screamed out a victorious roar while flailing his claws and armored arms in vague imitation of a gorilla beating its chest. The female just scoffed at the remains of the Doomship and dismissively stomped on it a couple of times for good measure. She even spat out another fireball at it, which caused more of the mountainous pile to go up in flames before she and her mate head off, but not before the male hammered down the burning wreckage down with the slap of his tail to add insult to injury as they continued to crush more of Toad Town underfoot.

---

Fodlan and Almyra...two lands making up an island continent 41,200 sq. miles west of France and southwest from Ireland...

Titanus Megalon, AKA Megalon, terrorized the Garreg Mach Monastery the moment it emerged from a cave after burrowing through subterranean tunnels that stringed underneath the central Oghma Mountains located in central Fodlan. A heavily built, chimeric insectoid titan of hulking proportions with the orange-yellow wings of a cicada, the exoskeletal orange and black carapace of a beetle, and the overall body plan of a mole cricket with the forelegs being flattened for digging. There were distinctive features, however, that made Megalon stand out from its non-kaiju distantly related cousins other than just being an oversized bug.

One, its first pair of hind legs had been evolved into exaggerated, bulky, massive hammer/tree trunk-like appendages ending with two steel-like claws resembling serrated hooks. The modified hindlegs were almost as big as the Titan himself and functioned as a second pair of forelegs as he used them to support his massive weight in the form of them knuckle walking while acting as offensive pounders or defensive shields. Two, the second and last pair of hind legs were shaped and proportioned like that of a grasshopper only a hundredfold in size and proportion with the femur being robust enough to make them as powerful as the first modified pair of its hindlegs despite seemingly slender in proportion to them. Three, the abdomen ended in a long, flat segmented tail of great width with fin-like edges, which resembled an armored paddle. It was tipped with small bony pincer-like stingers at the end. Fourth, the insectoid's head was small compared to the rest of its body and reminiscent of the Japanese Rhinoceros Beetle in shape, possessing a large curved, cranial horn jutting from it with a star-shaped tip at its end. His yellow compound eyes were small, but prominently bulbous enough that they weren't exactly beady. Rather, they were sharp and fierce like that of a wasp. Megalon has a pair of long antennaes and a pair of silver tusks near its mouthparts. The thorax had spikes on its segmented armor plates that vaguely make up a crown of sorts.

The hulking insectoid Titan was quite an imposing behemoth at 155 meters tall as it surpassed the monastery's cathedral building in terms of size even from afar. Megalon was clambering up the steep hilly steppes leading up to the gated walls where a small town and market place full of scared, fearful townsfolk scrambling away from the walls to take refuge in the monastery further up the two major hills.

"Townspeople of Garreg Mach! Please, calm yourselves and evacuate the premises calmly!" Hanneman von Essar shouted as he, and his Golden Deer students tried to reassure the scared folks. The neighing shrieks of his panicked horse he was riding on, and the fact that it was frantically bucking up from Megalon's monstrous roar to flee along with the people didn't help him in the slightest as the elderly professor struggled to stay on the saddle.

"Keep firing at that abominable beast!" Alois Rangeld hollered out his orders at the shock-filled soldiers under his command, which did snap them out of their stupor and resumed firing arrows from their bows, and trebuchets with flaming explosive boulders at the beetle-like Titan traversing the mountains' steppes.

"We have to give the townsfolk and those in the Monastery more time to find shelter!"

However, just like before, all of them bounced off of him without harming him. None of them had any hope of even putting a dent into his armored exoskeleton as it was too dense and toughened with reinforced layers upon layers of chitin, keratin, and durable metals stronger than titanium combined Megalon had accumulated within the many thousands of years it had slumbered within the earth's bowels since the fall of Seatopia.

"Alois! Jeralt! Professor Byleth! Professor Hanneman!" Gilbert Pronislav called out to the four while riding on horseback towards Jeralt and Byleth, who were on the ground both assisting the evacuation efforts while leading their vanguard of students of the Blue Lion House while the former was up on the walls.

Jeralt was surprised to see Gilbert riding out towards him when he was supposed to be helping Manuela and the Black Eagles House guide and protect the others that had managed to escape into the sanctuary of the monastery earlier.

"Gilbert?! What are you doing here?!" Jeralt asked him with a confused frown, which only deepened when he saw the worried and grimaced expression on his face. "I thought you're looking out for the kids in the monastery!"

"Yes, I was, but we quickly ran into several problems!" Gilbert stated.

"Like there weren't already when this overgrown beetle showed up from underneath the mountain?" Jeralt groaned as he witnessed the cannons obviously having no effect on Megalon. "Get back to the Cathedral and help Archbishop Rhea and Seteth protect the townsfolk!"

"We're under attack!" Gilbert wasted no time as he said what really made his coming so urgent, "The Death Knight has launched a devious sneak attack upon us from within and seemingly out of nowhere!"

"WHAT?!" Jeralt hollered in absolute shock and anger, "The Death Knight struck us when our backs are turned?! Again?!"

His exclamation was loud enough to catch the attention of the student warriors and young nobles of the Blue Lion House and the nearby Golden Deer House, who were just as horrified and caught off guard by the mind blowing revelation. Byleth almost had her jaw drop with her mind nearly crashing to a halt as her students around her already started freaking out in their reactions.

"The Death Knight did WHAT?!" Dimitri roared with maddening rage marring his otherwise handsome, chivalric face.

"Simply unforgivable...," Dedue said slowly with cold stone fury emanating from his stone-faced grimace with veins popping on his clenched fist.

"Oh, man! I knew it!" Annette cried, clutching her curled ends of her orange short hair in despaired frustration of having the bad feeling that she had ever since the start of the sudden invasion come to fruition when she wished otherwise, "I knew something else bad was about to happen!"

"Grrrr! That scoundrel! Striking us when we're at our most vulnerable dealing with this accursed beetle!" Felix had a vein pop on his forehead as he was now swearing mentally all kinds of horrific things one would find them inappropriate to verbalize, even if they legitimately described the treacherous twist to their already precarious situation.

"Great...of all the times the Death Knight chose to strike, it had to be this," Sylvain grumbled.

"How could we have left our own defenses wide open for the Death Knight to stab us in the back?!" Ingrid asked in exasperation.

"Just when I thought this day couldn't get any worse," said Ashe as he pinched his nose bridge.

"Oh dear, what do we do?" Mercedes asked out loud not to anyone in particular with great worry in her chest.

"Truly disgusting that shady bastard!" Dorothea, the most recent transfer student from the Black Eagles House to the Blue Lions House, shared her ire for the ill-fated surprise attack to her newfound friends.

"This is why I hate plot twists!" Ignatz shouted out in a panicked manner. "Especially at a critical moment like this!"

"Huh...clever of that horned rat to make an underhanded move against us. Though I hate it that now we're on the short receiving end of it," Claude said "calmly" with a false smile that barely concealed the fuming rage that seethed inside him.

"Damn that bastard!" Raphael stomped his foot angrily on the ground. "If we weren't having to deal with that overgrown bedbug, I'd ride into the monastery and give that horned thug a mauling he'll feel for years to come when I get my hands on him!"

"Get in line! I am going to shove that stupid helmet up his behind when I'll face him in combat again!" Leonie said.

"That...good for nothing...!" Hilda hissed.

"Such a disgraceful underhanded method befitting a coward that knows no grace nor glory, but only dishonor in attacking defenseless maidens and priests!" Lorenz sneered in disgust.

Lysithea only silently scowled with a glare towards the Cathedral and the unexpected assault on the Church of Seiros that was now certainly going on with the remaining small number of defenders now having to fight for their lives and for those of the people they swore to protect.

"And what about Barrett?! Where is he? Where is Barrett the last time you left him to tell us the bad news?!" Jeralt pressed on, becoming more and more worried for Byleth's twin brother that was left to fend off the Flame Emperor's "wolves" basically by himself.

Gilbert grimaced with his mouth in a pursed frown as he suddenly dared not to look him in the eye.

"Gilbert? Gilbert, please...I need to know what's happening with one of my children! Is he fighting well?! Or is he having some sort of trouble that justifies your reason to come to tell us the bad news?!"

Gilbert didn't answer and it only angered and scared Jeralt uncharacteristically as he hollered more loudly amidst the screaming, panicked citizens and the furious sounds of both explosions and monster happening outside the gated walls of the Monastery.

"Gilbert! For goddess' sake, answer the damned question! Is my twin son with Rhea and the Black Eagles?!"

Byleth quickly joined in to put on more of the pressure as she asked the silent Knight of Seiros with a concerned pleading expression, "Sir Gilbert! Barrett's the only other family other than my father that I have left! At least tell me that my brother's well and with the other Knight of Seiros helping him! Please!"

"Byleth...," Jeralt was surprised to see Byleth emoting much more actively now with the thought of her brother driving her.

"Professor...!" Annette was just as surprised as Jeralt and everyone at the fact that Byleth was being expressively emotional, which was a break from her usual cool, expressionless mask she put on. The orange-haired heiress of House Dominic looked to her father, whom her relationship to was rather...strained, to say the least.

"Father...," Annette whispered, silently pleading to him to answer her Professor's plea as well.

Gilbert finally relented after some time of hesitation as he swallowed hard before saying,

"Barrett...he...Flayn was kidnapped again by the Death Knight amidst the chaos."

"Again?!" Sylvain said in exasperation, "This guy doesn't know when to quit his twisted crush with Seteth's sister!"

"Shut your trap, Sylvain! Let him talk!" Felix silenced him.

"Both of you! Enough!" Dimitri quietly growled at the two, which shut both of them up.

"Naturally, this infuriated Seteth and he wanted to go after the Death Knight to rescue her, but he couldn't afford to and with Manuela having to ensure her Black Eagle students were okay. Rhea ordered me, Barrett, and Catherine to pursue him. We later found Flayn alone in the chamber where we held the statue artifact we recently discovered in the ancient ruins. However, that proved to be costly mistake for us when the Death Knight and Those Who Slithered in the Dark ambushed us along with their dark mage assassins. We did manage to untie Flayn, but in the process...," Gilbert took another deep breath through his nose before he continued, "...we lost Barrett."

"Excuse me? Come again about my son, Gilbert?!" an astonished Jeralt thought he was hearing wrong after Gilbert stated the very words he thought he would never hear from anyone.

"What I said is not falsehood. It is the saddest truth I bear and I tell it to you as it is. Jeralt, Professor Byleth, I'm sorry," he shook his head remorsefully, "I tried my sincerest effort to protect him, and so did Catherine in spite of being paralyzed by one of those dark spells casted by those witches. Flayn stood in front of Catherine to try protect her and I tried to rush to their aid, but I was kept at bay by the Death Knight! In the end, it was his own selflessness for others in need that propelled him to take the assailant's blade to his own heart to save both Flayn and Catherine."

Gasps of horror and screams of disbelief resounded, particularly from the female students. Some of whom that have grown attracted to Byleth's twin brother.

"No...," that said twin sister and Professor to the Blue Lions muttered with her voice lower and her legs becoming weak as she almost dropped her Sword of the Creator from her grasp. Meanwhile, deep inside her subconsciousness, a certain Progenitor God was both distressed and infuriated, screaming her head off hysterically at the heartbreaking news.

"B-Barrett...," Jeralt felt his mouth become dry and his stomach twisting into unbearably tight knots, feeling all of the wind knocked out of him as he staggered off of his horse. "Goddess...why? Fates...why have you conspired against me? First, you took away my wife...and now... m-m-my... son."

"Gilbert, please answer me. Who was the owner of the blade that killed my son?" Jeralt requested.

"Jeralt, I've already said en- Aaahh!" He was almost yanked off of his horse when Jeralt lunged and nabbed him by the collar, creating quite a disruptive commotion amidst an already stressful situation for the defenders trying to push back against Megalon. The beetle-like Titan was barely being detered away from the walls when a couple of burning boulders struck him in the eyes, which made him lose its footing as he tumbled down onto its side, still supported by one of its massive arms partly out of pain, but mostly out of nasty surprise being shot nearly in the eye.

"Captain Jeralt! What are you doing to him?!" Professor Hanneman exclaimed, horrified to see the former mercenary turned captain for Knight of Seiros once again now lashing out and manhandling another Knight of Seiros in a state of agonizing grief.

Everyone, including the evacuating citizens, were rendered scared and aghast of Jeralt's unstable emotional condition as he caused quite the scene yanking Gilbert off his horse. Even Byleth was shaken and taken aback of her father's uncharacteristic madness as he brought the former Faerghus noble close to his face. Gilbert was not an easy man to terrify. He had encountered many things that would terrify weak-minded mortals with a calm collected manner birthed from many years of experience and regret. Even Dimitri's bouts of psychotic rage as he vowed to protect him and therefore, patiently bear with the prince of Faerghus' royal family's flaws to atone for his own guilt for being unable to protect King Lambert, who was Dimitri's deceased father.

However, Jeralt...the way he was now. The man was his peer, a soldier, and a powerful warrior in his own merit in spite of the different paths they underwent. Not only that a family man, who had his fair share of family troubles and drama. That was what made Jeralt all the more terrifying when the man was looking at him with eyes of unmitigated sorrow and psychotic fury. It was like staring into a broken and twisted reflection of himself and a darker Dimitri should the young prince lose himself completely for his hidden lust for vengeance for the instigators responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur. Gilbert both understood and was so scared of what Jeralt was going through that he couldn't react other than be paralyzed by a strange paradoxical mixture of emotions.

"FATHER!" Annette screamed bloody murder at what was happening to her father.

"Byleth! Stop your father at once!" Hanneman shouted.

"Captain Jeralt! Unhand my friend or I shall be forced to put my blade onto you even if you're my Professor's father!" Dimitri roared angrily at him.

"You would do well to heed to my Highness! Do otherwise and I'll have no choice but to be your enemy!" Dedue butted in.

"Break it up! Stop choking Sir Gilbert, Captain!" Ashe hollered.

"Father, stop! You'll hurt him!" Byleth exclaimed after snapping herself out and she rushed to pry her father's hands off of Gilbert's collar.

"Relinquish your hold on Sir Gilbert right now, or I'll resort to force to make you if I have to!" Ingrid aimed her spear at Jeralt.

"Hey! Hey! Now's not the time for us to bicker amongst ourselves with that monster still crawling to our gates!" Claude ran in to break up the chokehold Jeralt had on Gilbert, doing his best to help Byleth, Dimitri, Dedue, Ingrid, Annette, and Felix pry both of them apart.

"Tell me who killed my son, Gilbert! Say who was it that had the gall to kill Barrett so that I could look him directly in the eye and vice versa when I will find him and kill him!" Jeralt ignored his daughter, her students, and Claude's attempts to de-escalate the situation as he wasn't thinking clearly anymore.

Alois slid down the ladder with an angry, stern countenance with his voice thundering out through the chaotic commotion in the marketplace.

"What in the name of Seiros is all of this tomfoolery?!"

Then that was when he and everyone else heard Megalon screaming out his deep-throated warbling roar sounding louder than he was previously because he kept lumbering his way up, climbing till he was at the point that he now stood at their doorsteps. His bone-chilling growls made everyone stop in their tracks as they nervously looked up at the towering beetle god. Jeralt loosened his chokehold on Gilbert completely, his grief-stricken rage completely washed away and replaced by the unsettling fear of the Titan that was looking at them all with unfeeling, expressionless compounded eyes that stared unflinchingly at him and everyone else around him. Terrified mothers huddled their frightened babies and children to them while their fathers stood protectively and apprehensively against Megalon as he let out low-pitched grunts and squeals of child-like curiosity. The knights and the mercenaries shakily pointed their blades and bow and arrows at the gigantic insectoid creature, but were far from ready to shoot with all of their nerves frayed at the monstrous sight of his hulking intimidating presence that was ultimately alien and ironic as they felt like the bugs they had indifferently crushed beneath their boots.

"By the Goddess...help us all," Mercedes whimpered frightfully in a scared whisper.

His size towered over the walls where he could clearly see the terrified, awestruck innocents below him and the equally terrified defenders standing against him at the gate.

Megalon let out scratchy garbling chirps before ending in a saw-like guttural bellow that emanated forth from his mouthparts like a surging flood. Like a dam that broke under the pressure, the people went into hysterical panic as loud shrills of terror sounded from their lungs and they ran madly towards the Monastery with whatever's left of their reason and sanity all thrown out of the window, overwhelming the Officer Academy's students, the faculty members, and the senior officers of the Church of Seiros that were doing their best to ensure the citizens' evacuation was as calm as possible until Megalon showed up at their doorsteps.

"Retreat! Retreat! Fall back to the Monastery!" Alois hollered at the top of his lungs to the men under his command.

"Townsfolk of Garreg Mach! Please calm yourselves of your hysteria!" Dimitri tried to restore some semblance of calm amongst the people. However, the passions of their collective fear have been riled up too far to listen to him. That threw whatever sanity and reason they had out of the window.

"*Gulp* And to think this would happen just a day before the Millennium Festival! The timing couldn't be any worse!" Hanneman groaned with dismay and a hint of anger in the tone of his voice as he witnessed more of the soldiers and mercenaries abandoning their posts on the wall outposts as they, including Shamir, who was also part of the Knights of Seiros, quickly found out that they were in danger of becoming mowed over by Megalon when he swung his larger right "foreleg" into the walls. His claws tore through them, which immediately knocked and demolished the trebuchets, and the crossbow turrets. Not only that, many of the knights lost their lives in that instant as Megalon's claws and the sheer overwhelming force of his hammer-like limbs swept them violently away. Their armor-clad bodies shattered against the town buildings and paved roads in disfigured, scattered heaps like broken toys.

"Run! What are you gaining from just gawking at that beetle lest you wanna be crushed underfoot?!" said Sothis, warning her host, Byleth, as the green-haired beauty verbalized her simple, yet urgent order to every one of her students in light of the dire danger they were in.

"Blue Lions, run to the Academy as fast as you can! GO! GO!" Byleth shouted.

"Golden Deer, leap as fast as the wind to safety of the Academy! Move it!" Hanneman urged his class to retreat, knowing it was suicidal to try oppose the Titan head-on.

"Yes, ma'am/sir! Blue Lions/Golden Deer, retreat to the Academy!" Dimitri and Claude reinforced their respective professor's orders to their friends as they all began to run for their lives away from a rampaging Megalon that was stomping into Garreg Mach.

Jeralt quickly pulled over on top of his shoulders an injured mercenary, who was a young man around the same age as his son and daughter, that had his arm and torso suffering from cuts and splinters after he was swept away into a horse stall by Megalon's swipe.

"Come on, kid! No point in dying here! I promised your mother that I would ensure you'd come back to her alive!" he grunted while the young man could only groan in response as the mercenary was too knocked off to even see who was rescuing him.

Megalon roared, clawing away another chunk of the wall. His second pair of "forelegs" flattened two rows of several houses with the stragglers struggling to scurry away from meeting the same fate. The Titan couldn't care less as he flattened a few as he devastated the town and dormitories. Then he felt more explosive boulders pelting him as the surviving soldiers left on the wall continued to fire the remaining trebuchets in mad desperation to save their loved ones that were still alive amongst the screaming evacuees. The beetle only grunted in amusement at their failed antics as they continued to exhaust whatever little left of the boulders they had left until they ran out of them. Like before, the smoke dissipated to reveal that Megalon remained unharmed by their pathetic attempts to stop him.

Next, things took a drastic turn for the worst as Megalon twisted his armored head around and his mouthparts parted way. Spitting out came forth a red goopy ball of mucus-like substance from the insectoid Titan's mouth. The ball splattered all over the wall, trebuchet, and the soldiers in a red, viscous semi-transparent liquid.

"AUGH! What the hell is this?!" The moment the soldier said his last words, the liquid covering him suddenly burst into flames as soon as the napalm-like element in the mucus-like goop came into contact with the air. Soon he was scorched inside and out of his armor as the napalm-like substance ate away at him, causing grievous burns that now ripped and torched his flesh.

"AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!"

The soldier hollered in horrific agony and joined the chorus of his comrades now immolating to death with some rolling on the ground like a frantic pig as the burning substance refused to be put out while others jumped to their death. The trebuchet caught on fire and quickly collapsed and the wall they were on melted in.

Megalon looked at the other wall to his left at the corner of his compounded eye, which he turned around and spat another napalm spit bomb at the spot. The horrific results played out the same as bodies and the trebuchet burned into nothing and the wall melted away. Some of the substance seeped into it and eventually caused the entire side of the wall to catch on fire just like the first one. Megalon chirped gleefully at the destruction he had caused as he playfully slapped the ground with his massive arms, destroying more of the town as he behaved childishly with his shelled wings fluttering about as he jumped up and down like a maniac. He even sounded like one as his chortles were much similar to a kid laughing at seeing someone fall flat on his face. He was enjoying the thrill of making things break with his own two-clawed oversized forelegs. He continuously spat out more napalm bombs haphazardly and without any regard where they would explode, immolating the town and the montane forest outside of Garreg Mach. He punched the ground with his oversized armored arms causing dangerously earthquake-level tremors that leveled more of the town into oblivion with earth being pounded several hundred more feet into ground, resulting in massive craters, which transformed the terrain of the land outside of the immediate Monastery building into an unrecognizable wasteland.

All the while within the relative safety of the Academy, the Office Academy students and faculty members alike could only look on jawdropped at how childishly violent the insectoid Titan was as he kept tearing up the ground he had just incinerated, uprooted the walls, and giggled psychotically as he gouged the once-pristine land without a care for the people he had just displaced or the giant landslide he had caused when he made the ledge foundationally unstable.

"Goddess! There goes our home!" One of the common folk lamented.

"That monster killed my poor son!"

"Is this the heavens' way of punishing me for my past infidelity?!"

"We lost our livelihood!"

"Mommy! I wanna go home!"

"Where is the Archbishop?!"

"Goddess, please be reborn quickly and save us from this demon beast!"

"Mommy! Daddy! WAAAAHHHH!"

"DAMNIT! We can't just sit here and watch it tear Garreg Mach apart while all these people are suffering all around us!" Dimitri said in despair, which has affected nearly all of the Blue Lions and Golden Deer students with morale plummeting faster than the Titanic.

"Then what would you have us do, our Highness?! Charge headlong to our own execution?!" Felix asked the distressed prince sharply. "Abandoning the Kingdom of Faerghus to their own devices by letting that hunchbacked bug get a free pass in hammering us a hundred feet under?!"

"Don't even put such ludicrous, self-destructive words into my mouth, Felix! You know as well as I do that if we don't act now, we will all perish one way or another!" Dimitri shot back.

"Because I am not a royal pretender of a soft-hearted bitch that would throw away his sheep's clothing and and show his true colors as the ugly boar you are at the first opportunity to spill blood!" Felix, in his fit of rage and fear compounded by the stressful chaos, spat out an insult that struck right into the young prince's already shot nerves.

Dimitri felt his blood boil as he almost wanted to gut punch his abrasive childhood friend here and now and pummel the crud out of him.

"Refer to his Highness as boar one more time and I will separate that cowardly tongue of yours from your head!" Dedue glowered at Felix.

"I'd like to see you try, you royal suck up of an ape!"

That caused others to stop and gasp in shock of Felix's impulsive insult. Dedue, also already riled up by the accumulated chaotic commotion of today's apocalyptic turn of events, glared at Felix with eyes burning with rage. Sadly, one of the Blue Lions also lost her nerve as she marched right up to Felix.

"FELIX!" an outraged Ingrid grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and outright smacked him hard on the cheek, which left quite a bruise on him, "What's gotten to you?! Of all the times you pick a fight with our Highness, you had the nerve to do so when we're all under great duress by that monster!"

"You think I am not?!" Felix yelled.

Byleth had enough with her own temper snapping as she whipped around the people behind her and hollered,

"EVERY ONE OF YOU SHUT YOUR FREAKING TRAP!" And she sliced off a nearby wooden bench for a terrifying added measure with her Sword of Creation.

Everyone in the reception hall froze in dead silence, apart from the loped off side colliding the floor with an audible loud thud that echoed throughout the hall. The overall negative atmosphere, the constant hollering, the prevalent fear on the townspeople and the Academy students' faces, and the biggest nails in the coffin for her, her father's emotional breakdown and her twin brother's death were bringing Byleth over to the edge. A foreign experience which both angered her more and scared her simultaneously. She was supposed to handle the crisis much better than this since growing up the hard life as a battle-hardened mercenary, but if there was one thing her nomadic life did not exactly prepare her for was dealing with the responsibility of leading people that were her peers no less.

However, unfortunately for Byleth, her angry shrill also attracted Megalon's attention thanks to his sharp audio organs in the form of millions of very minute grass-sized stiff hair-like bristles found throughout his limbs, his antennae, and the tympanal organs found in his thorax that quickly picked up the vibrations coming from the Academy building. Megalon chirped as he lumbered towards the rocky hills and dug his giant claws into the Academy infrastructure, particularly where the reception hall was, thanks to the long range of his arms. He tore the ceiling and the entire wall down. Debris of cement, plaster, and glass rained onto the Reception Hall with everyone trying to cover themselves from them, whether by their arms as they laid on the floor crouching or by hiding under any bench they could find.

Regardless, Megalon had come for his main objective, the destruction of the entire Academy and Cathedral where he had sensed his hated archnemesis, now dormant and vulnerable deep underneath the church. The beetle-like monster roared, glowering at the hapless humans beneath his menacing shadow.

Byleth had to cover herself with her arms from the dust flown at her. After the dust cleared, she removed her arms only to be greeted with the scary, jawdropping spectacle that was Megalon staring down directly at her and her students. She had to crane her neck high just to barely see the actual digging forelegs that were wiggling closely to each other. They were small, despite being bigger than two full grown men, in proportion to the first pair of modified hindlegs, which would be thrice the size of a strongman's arms if they were shrunk down to human proportions. The fact she had to step several steps back just to see the Titan craning its head and thorax down at them was pretty clear to her that it was almost like being within the presence of a mountain.

Except this mountain was several hundred tons of flesh and chitinous exoskeleton.

"Oh shit," Byleth gulped hard while those of weaker constitution tried to flee once more from the ensuing carnage. Only for Megalon to close off their escape route through the entrance hall permanently when he smashed it and flattened it under his left armored claws, which unfortunately, killed several of them unlucky to be within striking range. The impact of the slamming limb caused a powerful shockwave that knocked away the survivors, including Jeralt. When he heard the sickening sound of bone being snapped, he turned around to see the young man he had tried to save died from having his neck broken by the harsh impact against the marble column.

He could only avert his head away in shame and disgust.

Then he heard Alois yell out his war cry as he and his few remaining knights under his command unsheathed their blades and charged defiantly at Megalon.

"Alois, no!" Jeralt cried out, but was too late for his words to reach him.

"I refuse to let this oversized cockroach turn us into cowardly mice! Have at you, monster! HRRRAAAAAGGGHHH!" Raphael charged madly like an riled up bull, joining with the Knights of Seiros in their mad dash offensive at the isectoid Titan much to the chagrin of his peers and leader.

"Raph! Don't be rash! Get back here!" Claude shouted in protest.

"That does it! I am going to skewer that bug right into those stupid, derpy eyes of his with my lance, even if it's the last thing I do!" Leonie impulsively charged as she was officially pissed off.

"Leonie! You'll be killed!" Hilda hollered.

"For House of Gloucester!" Lorenz let out his own war cry as he charged onward towards the Titan with his lance.

"You peacock-headed idiot!" Lysithea screamed in dismay.

"I'll ensure you will suffer for laying your hands on this Academy. Therefore, bringing harm to our Highness, which is simply unforgivable! Here I come!" Dedue clanged his axe against his steel shield before charging into battle like a runaway freight train.

"Wait, Dedue! We haven't even-!" Dimitri tried to warn him, but was cut off when Sylvain also shot off forward on his feet towards the towering insectoid Titan.

"Hey, ugly! Instead of picking on the defenseless townsmen, pick on someone like me that can at least fight back, you damned miscreant!" Sylvain yelled out at the top of his lungs.

"SYLVAIN!" both Dimitri and Ingrid hollered with the latter angrily exclaiming more words out, "Get back here right now!"

"Grah! Damn it, Sylvain!" Felix snarled before he himself ran off into the battle to begrudgingly assist him.

"I can't stand here and watch them get slaughtered! I gotta help them!" Annette was about to rush out until she was held back by Gilbert, Mercedes, and Dorothea. "What are you three doing?! Let me go!"

"Annette! Don't be a fool to rush into the jaws of death!" Her father reprimanded her.

"What are you talking about, Father?! They need help!" Annette protested.

"And get yourself crushed should your efforts be for naught?!" Mercedes screamed back at her incredulously.

"DEDUE! SYLVAIN! FELIX! Get the f*% ! back here this instant!" Byleth hollered out to them, but to no avail.

"Guys, we have to get out of here!" Ashe hollered out to them, but like Jeralt and Byleth, his words had fallen on deaf ears .

"Claude, help me get your peers under control!" Hanneman shouted.

"Dimitri! You're the Blue Lions' house leader! Pull yourself together and help me get those jackasses back to us for goddess' sake!" Byleth cried, her voice colored with angered frustration on the verge of reaching its apex. She turned around hoping that he heeded her and was spurred into action to save his House.

He was gone. She then heard his running footsteps. Indeed, he was spurred into action, but it wasn't exactly what she hoped would happen. Dimitri was charging towards Megalon with a war cry erupting from his lungs.

Byleth could only facepalm, breathing hard through her nose.

'Very lively of your students...that much I must say, though a lit-,' Sothis was prevented from completing her thoughts on the Blue Lions when Byleth cut her off.

'Shut up,' Byleth mentally snarled back while she physically emitted a groan at the deteoriorating chaos around her.

---

Rio Grande National Forest...

Isaac was at the edge between life and death when the Gyaos' jaws were on the verge of reaching his head. With each whiff of the creature's foul breath as the Gyaos got closer in its lunges, he thought he could already smell death coming to claim his soul. The maniacal bird-like wyvern's sharp teeth even grazed against his helmet and faceplate, which left quite some scratches on them. The frenzied shrieking proved to be murderously harsh to his eardrums even when covered within his helmet. The banshee screams were so disorienting that he almost blacked out.

The beast pinning him down while lacerating his stomach in spite of his suit's dense armor didn't help him either. However, that didn't stop him from outstretching his arm to grab a thick piece of log out of instinctive desperation. He swung it hard against the Gyaos' arrow-shaped head as it shattered. The beast shrieked out as it staggered off of the captain of the Monarch soldiers and tumbled onto the floor in its dazed state. Isaac swung the log hard enough to chip off the armor plating of its head as it laid there, blinded from the bleeding caused by the chipped wound and from the wood particles splintering into its flesh around the eye.

The red-bearded Irish-American grunted as he quickly scrambled to his feet despite the claw wounds on his abdomen. He whipped out his pistol as he hobbled close enough to the fallen wyvern while avoiding getting close to its thrashing wings. He pulled the trigger thrice, shooting the emaciated monster three times in its ruined eye socket. The eye burst open inwards like a bloody balloon as the gunshots decimated the optic muscles and penetrated through its braincase. All of the bullets piercing its brain, killing the wyvern instantly. The Gyaos let out its raspy death rattle from its beaked maw before it slumped to the ground lifeless with its bodily markings having ceased to illuminate and blood pooling out from underneath.

Isaac discarded the now empty magazine from the handgun as he spat out saliva at the beast's corpse.

"Only my wife gets to bite me. Certainly not you, Big Bird," he said contemptuously to the dead monster. He grabbed another full magazine and cocked it into his pistol. He then heard another shriek as a Gyaos along with another one of its ilk were swooping down through the canopy towards him.

"You gotta be shitting me!" He sweatdropped and quickly aimed his pistol at them. The beasts shrieked at him as they quickly closed the gap between them and Isaac.

Before he could pull the trigger, one of them got struck by a ballistic grenade and imploded in midair. The explosion sent the other one slamming into a couple of trees critically injured in the process. He turned his head to see the leader of the militia, a brunette Caucasian woman with some light freckles on her face, and her distinguishing feature, a tattoo of a snarling badger on her exposed left arm. She was wielding her custom SCAR-17 rifle while the man beside her was the one who wielded and fired the grenade launcher at the Gyaos.

"Captain Isaac!" yelled out the leader of the militia troop as she ran up to him.

"Burn in hell, ya decrepit buzzards!" the bald-headed African-American smirked at the burning remnants of the monsters he had killed.

"Are you alright?!" the female militiaman asked Isaac, who was covering where his abdomen armor was compromised with one hand as he leaned against a sliced off tree with its lower half intact while the upper one met the ground in an awkward angle that crashed into other trees around it, which bent them or snapped parts of the branches. He stumbled onto a high boulder situated between the shrubby bushes and a small upward hill with trees all around.

"No...but I'll live, Dinah. It's only a flesh wound after all," Isaac grunted through his teeth with the adrenaline slowly wearing off as he was now feeling the acrid pain of the deep wounds underneath his suit.

"Christ Almighty, that's not a flesh wound!" Dinah Johanssen didn't buy it, clearly seeing the blood staining his dark green battle gloves. "I warned you that these monsters pack fatal weaponry of their own like flying dinosaurs on steroids."

"I had wounds worse than this. By the way, you didn't exactly warn us there were more than 80 of them when they formed a freaking super colony," Isaac quietly shot back.

"That was back then when we first spotted them in the woods. We didn't know they had already amassed by the thousands since we were too occupied making sure the nearby towns don't go batshit crazy out of panic when we had to evacuate. My scouts didn't make it by the time you, your men, and these "heroes" from other worlds arrived," she responded as she took out her portable medkit.

"Then we should have at least scouted more thoroughly on their nesting hideouts. I have drones that could have done the job without sacrificing any more lives needlessly," Isaac said, not exactly pleased at how they started out the mission. "Instead of charging in with guns blazing, or with our superheroes, swords bared and magic flared up without any inkling of their true numbers."

"And what? Wait for our turn to be next on their menu?! They've already decimated many of our ranches and have rendered our communities scared out of our wits!" Dinah rebutted.

"I know! However, going all gungho in there without knowing the size of their population is tantamount to walking blind into a wolf's den without knowing how big the pack that could be waiting to tear you apart the moment you stepped foot in there!"

"Better than to be sheep waiting to be slaughtered," Dinah said as she sighed, "Or have you forgotten that fateful day that feckless, pencil-pushing pansy of our superior costed us the element of surprise we had over ISIS in Afghanistan and almost our lives in that godforsaken village?"

She said the last part with venom in her voice. It made Isaac let out a sigh of his own with his face contorting with a heavy frown at the horrific memory he'd frankly rather forget as it had brought him many nightmares since then.

"No. How could I not? I never liked that bastard thinking we're expendable like a pair of worn out boots, but that's besides the point. This time, we screwed it up," Isaac stated with a heavy heart, "We went there with several thousand more of them waiting to kill us and we almost died there blowing their nests up if it hadn't been for them."

"We still lost many of our people as much as we killed large number of these monsters. At least, however, were buying the citizens more time for them to escape to somewhere far out of their reach," Dinah unbuckled armor plating and unzipped leather suit partially to reveal the gaping wounds on his chest and stomach inflicted by the Gyaos' talons.

"I hope so. More importantly-," Isaac winced and hissed at when Dinah applied water to quickly wash off the dirt from his wounds.

"Mark!" Dinah called out to the African American militiaman that had been keeping vigil for them. The bald-headed man turned around and said,

"Yes, ma'am?!"

"How's the situation out there?!" Dinah asked him as she quickly, yet gingerly wiped away the bloodied water and grime with a small medical towel before getting out her alcohol cloth to then apply it on Isaac's wounds. Isaac winced some more and even quietly swore in pain from the alcohol stinging his wounds like crazy.

"Not good," Mark Lethers replied somberly with the shake of his head, "It's still a massacre outside."

"What about our men and women?"

"All I saw was them getting sliced and mauled right in front of my eyes."

"And those super warriors?"

"I don't know, though I thought I heard one of those girls screamed bloody murder. Sadly, the Pokemon here ain't doing all that hot either."

"Shit," Dinah felt her heart drop. If even one of those anime warriors got severely injured by these relentless reptilian vampires, then their chances of surviving have just narrowed more slimly than they were before.

"What about Team B? Have you gotten in contact with them on how they're faring with the "Velociraptor" infestation?" Isaac grunted out as best as he could through the pain as Dinah squeezed in a white ball of cloth to stop the bleeding.

"All I still have is the damned static on my end of the radio com. In short, I don't know," Mark answered.

"Man, we better pray that they're having better luck than we are because this is so messed up as hell."

"Yeah, no shit."

That was when they heard rustling in the bushes in front of them with everyone, except Isaac since he couldn't afford to make jerky reactions that could worsen the wounds, tensing their nerves at the sounds.

"Crap!" Dinah hissed, aiming her assault rifle at whatever was rustling in the dense shrubbery. Mark did the same, pulling out his own M4 Carbine rifle and slinging his grenade launcher behind onto his back. He unlocked the safety on his rifle and aimed it at the bushes, ready to shoot.

The rustling continued. Already their hands were sweating. Isaac was just as nervous, but he had to be calm, or at least, looked so as he breathed slowly and deeply as best as he could as to not worsen his condition.

It went on for a couple of seconds until someone burst out of the bushes, or rather a familiar duo of a swordsman and a swordswoman.

Thankfully, it was apparently Kirito and Asuna.

"Kirito? Asuna?" Dinah was surprised and relieved to see that it wasn't a Gyaos that was going to lunge at her.

"Dinah! Mark!" a disheveled Kirito shouted, "Oh God, thank goodness that you're still alive!"

"Glad to see you'r- Oh...oh...holy shit..." Mark was approaching the Japanese male teenager to reassure him that he was indeed as safe as they could be with the Gyaos still hunting them through the forest when his eyes caught the state of Asuna, or to put it more accurately, her leg. His expression went from relieved to bewildered within seconds as he was forced to absorb the horrific, mangled condition of Asuna's left leg into his memory. What was left of her limb was a bloody mess of torn flesh and exposed bone. Then he looked down at Asuna herself, who was sweating like buckets and her complexion was not as pristine as it used to be from all the dirt and the flushness of the heat due to her body reacting badly to her mangled limb. Her eyes were half-closed and her breathing was labored. Her own chestnut brown-orange hair a frazzled mess.

"You gotta be kidding me," Dinah had her jaw drop at the gory sight as she finished patching up the gash wounds on Isaac.

Isaac winced and averted his eyes away. He may had gotten used to such unfortunate sights during his former service in the United States Army on many anti-terrorist missions in Afghanistan. It still didn't make it any less gutwrenching for him to see anyone, a young beautiful teenage girl of all people, have her leg messed up in combat.

---

All Byleth could see was red right now.

Not after what Megalon had done to half of her Blue Lion students. First, the gargantuan insectoid Titan had crushed Alois and his knights in one hammering punch, which also sent the Golden Deer students flying and hitting into the walls and balcony, knocking them out cold. Professor Hanneman was next to be incapacitated as Megalon spat out a napalm spit bomb in kind for having Sagittae casted against him. The bomb exploded and enough of the napalm-like substance splattered onto the professor, despite his initial attempts of avoiding the blast radius, as the poor scholar screamed in sheer agony from the horrific flames eating him alive. The healing spell he casted onto himself may have prevented himself from dying outright to the flames, but the severity was overwhelming him enough that he fell into a coma with his aging body unable to keep up with all of everything bombarded onto him at once.

Swiftly, Megalon turned his gleeful wrath upon the Blue Lions fools by slamming his exoskeletal claw almost right on top of Dedue, Felix, and Sylvain. While the claw thankfully didn't crush them yet, the impact was enough to send them flying all over the chamber. Dimitri had to cover his face to prevent dust and debris from blinding him and was also blown back in the process, though not as badly as the trio. When the dust cleared enough, Dimitri uncovered his face to be greeted with the terrible sight of seeing his trusted right-hand man, and his two childhood friends injured and sprawled across the ground. Shocked and horrified, the young prince of Holy Kingdom of Faerghus nearly didn't react to an infuriated Byleth casting her Thunder spell onto the beetle-like monster's spring-like hindlegs and Gilbert joining in the fray as not so much as to destroy, but rather to distract the Titan from Annette, Ingrid and Dorothea rushing off to help Dedue, Felix, and Sylvain. However, while Megalon may not be the sharpest tool in the shed in terms of Titan intelligence, but he's neither an idiot when he could clearly see through their ruse.

Byleth was rendered aghast. It was not so much when her Thunder Magic and her Fire Magic had no effect on the Titan's armored exoskeleton, or that Gilbert's axe couldn't even penetrate through the chitinous layer, but rather that the giant monster wasn't even fazed either by her efforts. It was focused on the three young women of the Blue Lions doing their best to rescue their male counterparts. Megalon slammed his one of his oversized, armored "fists" right in front of them, halting them to a scared stop with the tremors doing more than enough to cause them to stumble hard onto their behinds. All of them, even Felix, became petrified in absolute terror as they were totally under the Titan's mercy.

"ANNETTE!" Gilbert rushed in madly from where he was attacking the monster's leg to try rescue his daughter.

"Damn you! Keep your claws to yourself, you damned cockroach!" Ashe fired several arrows at the beast and was about to earn swift retaliation from Megalon when Dimitri pushed him out of the way and took the "light" backhanding swipe of Megalon's "arm".

A resounding crack resulted as Dimitri was sent careening into the wall and crashed hard against the pile of debris blocking the corridor to the entrance chamber.

A deafening, pregnant silence filled with everyone still alive, including a bruised and limping Claude, now shellshocked and horrifically speechless at what just happened. Nobody could move. None of them could even react.

Dimitri.

They hoped, even in their current state of utter, paralyzing trance of disbelief, that the young, blonde-haired majesty of Faerghus would still be alive. Even a twitching, little sign of movement would be enough to reassauge them that the violent beast had not taken the prince's life. However, that didn't even materialize as Dimitri wasn't even moving.

"Your majesty...?" Dedue could only whisper weakly with uncharacteristic subduedness to his otherwise strong, baritone voice. He barely had any strength to speak as it had been sapped out by what seemed like the untimely demise of his liege and best friend.

Felix stared blankly; dumbfounded with no curses that he could muster from his vocal chords.

Sylvain was the same with his hands clutching his head in unadulterated shock.

Ashe was already breaking down into a sobbing mess.

The girls were even worse off as Annette fell to her knees with an aghast expression, which her eyes went almost blank white and her mouth became completely dry. Mercedes became so traumatized that she couldn't even cry as she fainted. Dorothea whimpered as she cried and so did Ingrid when she lost her grip on her spear.

"Oh goddess...no, please...not again," Gilbert was beside Annette when felt his own heart figuratively torn out while being punched in the gut after seeing the future hope for the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus now taken away within a flash in front of his very eyes by just one backhanding tap from Megalon.

"Dimitri, you idiot," Claude face palmed. Besides him, a black-eyed Hilda whimpered with her hands covering choke-filled hiccups and whimpers.

Jeralt punched the broken tiles as he roared,

"DAMNIT! DAMNIT!"

Byleth was the worse out of everyone in the vicinity. She stared blankly with the light in her green eyes now dimmed and tears seeping through from the corners. Her fury had completely evaporated. Her grip slackened, causing the Sword of the Creator to drop onto the floor and clang loudly in heartbreaking contrast to the horrified silence around her. She didn't even know she had dropped to her knees. Frankly, she didn't care. Dimitri, the best student she had among others in her class apart from Ingrid, Annette, and Ashe, died and she failed to protect him when he needed it the most. He was more than just a student, the young prince became her friend, and the two had gotten closer with each other throughout the time since she and her twin brother started their newfound careers as professor and Knight of Seiros. When Megalon had backhanded him and sent him crashing into a wall, another part of her died as if Megalon had taken already her shattered heart and smashed it along with Dimitri.

Even Sothis was silent. So emotionally conflicted and torn in several directions that she lost the will to urge her host, let alone speak.

Megalon, however, had no qualms of striking his victims when their guard was down. The beast chortled out a gleeful trill that sounded like mockery, making fun of the humans' foolishness and the consequences of such as he was going to put them out of their misery soon. He raised one his arms and unfurled out his titanium, drill-like claws outstretched.

When Claude saw who Megalon had intended to snuff out first, which was Byleth, his eyes' pupils shrunk to almost nothing and after gasping, he hollered at the loudest volume his lungs could afford,

"TEACH! ABOVE YOU!"

That got everyone out of their traumatized funk and saw the same thing that Claude saw.

"PROFESSOR BYLETH!" All of them screamed at the shock-ridden green-haired woman.

"Kid! Snap out of it!" Jeralt scrambled fast enough to grab his twin daughter by the shoulders and frantically shook her, "BYLETH!"

Byleth gasped when she looked up to see Megalon about to bring down the hammer.

The hulking insectoid Titan roared before he had his arm lunge downwards onto both her and her father.

"Professor! Captain Jeralt!" Felix, Dedue, and Sylvain exclaimed with despair, helpless to get to them on time.

"NO!" Annette cried, but Gilbert shielded her, hugging her as he couldn't allow her and himself to witness what was about to be a gory end to the people he had grown to value as his friends.

"Don't look!" Gilbert commanded.

"Get outta there!" Ingrid wailed in tearful agony.

Byleth buried her face into her father's chest and he squeezed his eyes shut. Both father and daughter shielding each other and awaiting their end. Unbeknownst to them, a bright aqua green light emanated from the cathedral.

---

Author's notes: Titanus Enki is my OC Titan, whose inspiration came from Godamera, a fanmade kaiju that was a hybrid of Godzilla and Gamera fused into one terrifying entity that would give Giga Bowser a run for his money. Most of the design, apart from some changes I applied, is based on KaijuSamurai's take on it, which was I included it in the disclaimer section.

Megalon is back as Titanus Megalon, whose design is heavily based on PrettyFlacko808's artistic take on the now defunct rumored Titanus "Sargon" plus adding and modifying his Showa traits. Basically my take on Megalon if was in the Monsterverse, though he won't be as easily distracted or lacking in intelligence as he was in his one and only appearance in the Showa Era of the Godzilla franchise.

Also, having watched Godzilla Singular Point's trailer, expect me to bring in Jet Jaguar soon.

See ya next time!