Chapter Two

Inagos rose from his slumber in frightened shock. The Locust King rose up on his four hind legs and turned his multifaceted eyes around in all directions. He saw nothing; not even his twitching antennae could sense disturbance in the dark, dank cavern he was in. The ugly brownish yellow insect titan had sensed something whose mind was made of hate, death, and blood lust, nothing more. He had once seen minds similar to the cauldron of filth he had seen now when he'd flown near what the humans called Area 51 but no… it couldn't be.

Ignoring his darkened nightmare, the Locust King got to his six feet and marched out of the caverns. Inagos clicked his mandibles together and began walking hunched forwards through the catacombs. His billions of tiny subjects flew forwards, their mad humming announcing their master's arrival. Inagos was the lord of the flies—and of many other insects—and his body reflected as much.

He looked like some immense bloated locust or mantis. He was fifty meters tall and was the color of sand with black stripes on his back. Coming from his chest were two massive barbed arms ready to be used as weapons. Tipping his swollen abdomen was a long curved stinger from which a potent acid was secreted. When a stray drop dribbled from between his hind legs it burned a hole in the ground. Flanked by his reddish brown mantis like fifty-meter tall Kamacuras guards, he walked through the immense tunnels that the Ant Queen had carved for him and past the opening to the light above. He was in for a warm reception.

Having been told by his tiny locusts that they would see him, the various insect giants of the Swarm rose up and cried their hideous cries and shrieked their terrible shrieks in honor of their king. Inagos stood on the hugely titanic mound before them. Behind him was the one hundred story high hive from which the bee-hornets flew out for their master. Inagos reared himself up to full height, he threw his head back and cried with his utmost strength. To a human it would have been like the cry of tortured cat magnified a billion times over. Yet to the insects below it was the sweetest music. He was the Hive Lord; he was the master. Unlike Apophis's human slaves, Inagos's servants worshipped him as a god by their own free will. Inagos continued his shriek until he was done. He then glanced at his slaves and flew off.

With their master gone, the insect giants resumed their tasks. After all if they didn't serve the Hive Lord, who would? The ants resumed their building; every last sister using her titanic strength to lift fifty ton boulders above her head for use in repair of the colony. The flies and deathwatch beetles resumed their coronary tasks; even in death a child of the hive was to serve it and so the flies and beetles served the bodies of their late comrades as food for their fellow carrion eaters. The bee-hornets resumed delivering their loads of nectar to the hive from the grotesque flowers that dwarfed the Earth that spawned them; a poor collection, just a few million gallons of nectar that day.

As Inagos' wings set him atop the hive, he stopped, looked at his Kamacuras, and looked down far below to the desert land below him. Just as it had been in ancient times, so it was now that all that the sun shone upon from his hive was his kingdom. Inagos remembered a time when he ruled, a time even before the dinosaurs when insects commanded the earth. They'd been glorious titans who'd mastered the world and Inagos had been king of many of them and had been still before their time had passed. However, he'd willingly ceded his rule to the saurians when their father came. The Great Tyrannosaur wished for his children to reign and offered the Locust King and his minions another time for them to rule. Brave but not a fool, Inagos had accepted the giant's wish and waited for another day when the saurians were no more.

That day came on July 16, 1945, as humans measure time anyway. That was the day that one human summed it all up with the words: "I am become death; the destroyer of worlds."

In building the atom bomb, the humans had been so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they never stopped to think if they should. Such shortsightedness would prove costly because the radiation from the bomb seeped into the soil, the air, and the water. It changed the creatures into things they were never meant to be. Radiation there proved toxic to most all the life forms that hadn't been killed by the blast. Miraculously, the insects were spared and had even grown stronger from the radiation. Nobody knew why.

In the years afterwards, scientist Patricia Medford and her father suggested that perhaps because of the insects' simplistic body plan they were more able to survive than the more complex, and thus more prone to break down, animals of the desert. In any case the ants appeared in the 1950s in the New Mexico desert. First ants then more until their numbers were legion. They became giants; many of them weighed tons and were dozens of meters tall. They reclaimed the lost glory of their ancestors and were soon graced with their king once again.

It began when a mad band of Native Americans were exiled from their reservation by their own tribe. They had killed and kidnapped for Inagos, the monster that their shamans had seen in their visions. The tribe had never seen Inagos, nor did they want to. They knew he existed somewhere and wanted nothing to do with him. The exiled ones formed their cult and soon enough found the forgotten cavern of the Locust King. Remembering the magic that the shamans of the tribe had said would be needed to awaken the insect they chanted the chants and awakened the beast from his slumber. On seeing the humans, Inagos knew not what to do. The Great Tyrannosaur had promised that the Locust King would awaken in a world free of the saurians… but what were these? He didn't know what humans were and so, feeling hungry, he ate them.

It was a joyous day for the Swarm when they saw Inagos come to rule them. The greatest one of them, he towered above all them near three fold. Countless feuding clans laid down their rivalries to serve him together. Inagos saw this and was pleased. Yet now he was worried. That was then.

As the mammoth bloated locust waddled into the waxen hive where the grubs were kept, he feared how much longer his Swarm would last. He had seen the flies and beetles having to recycle the corpses of the dead and had seen the bee-hornets bring less and less honey. In times past he and his Swarm had flown and plundered at will but the little pink things, living in colonies as fine as that of any ant, made the cruelest of stingers to send against them. The humans had confined him to the borders of his land; the humans waited outside the borders as if daring him to go. With food less plentiful, the humans were seemingly hoping to starve him out.

In times past that would have been no problem; he would have just sent wave after wave of ants from the ground and bee-hornets from the air to break through their blockade with superior numbers. Yet for some unknown reason, his beloved queens could not produce so much as a tenth of the grubs they could before. Even worse, they could produce no queen eggs. There was no way for Inagos to know that the humans sterilized them.

Even so hope was not lost. He walked through the larval cells where the countless children of the Swarm were tended to in their hexagonal chambers by countless nannies. The cells were set in the walls and the floor; Inagos walked on the edges as he saw the bloated, pulpy, maggot-like larva squirm below his feet.

It was then that he saw his little one. Unlike the other children whose skin was wet and soft and pale and pulpy, the child was strong. She was already larger than many of the adults and could hunt her own food. The other grubs had to squirm to have food regurgitated into their mouths. In many ways she was an adult but Meganuron would bide her time until her metamorphosis into adulthood from the earthbound little insect she was into Megaguirus. As Inagos' heir she knew she would become ruler soon enough. When that time came she would rule the Swarm and lead it to greatness; she would be queen. But until then she was happy to be "daddy's little girl."

She was resting in a small, round, roughly walled room made of wax and paper. Inagos looked down at her and stroked her with his antenna. He regurgitated food from his clacking mandibles into Meganuron's and watched intently as the vomit dribbled out from the young one's maw. He loved feeding her. She was alright; despite the nightmare, his heir was unharmed. After turning his head for one last look, he and the Kamacuras left, content to leave her in the care of Shiigan.

Though seventy meters tall and once with power to rival that of Inagos, Shiigan hobbled subserviently towards Meganuron. When Inagos came all those years ago, she had been one of the only ones to resist his rule. As a female mantis, she despised males, such as Inagos, for being pathetic and weak. Males served no purpose other than satisfying a female's lust and to be cast aside or eaten soon after. Thus she had been appalled by how other insect queens, such as the ants and the bee-hornets, groveled at his feet and begged to serve him. Only Megaguirus had not bowed before him but that had been because the Locust King had not wanted her to.

Like Inagos, Megaguirus had also been a survivor of ancient times. The egg from which she had hatched had come from the mine where the Rodans had been found. In the Cretaceous extinction, her mother, the current Meganuron's grandmother, had left her egg where her old enemy, Rodan, had left her egg. Dr. Yamani brought that egg with him from the Japanese mine to America where, in time, it hatched to produce Meganuron's mother. When she and the rest of her swarm were killed, Inagos took pity on the orphan and made her his heir.

He also made Shiigan her nanny. To humiliate Shiigan to the utmost for her rebellion against him Inagos made her a lowly slave to guard the child of her worst enemy—the previous Megaguirus had repeatedly made war against her clan. Now repeatedly doped up by bee-wasp venom, the bright yellow, claw footed, sickle handed, four limbed, winged, spine backed insect dominatrix was less than a shadow of her former self. With broken limbs that had never healed, a scar across her abdomen from having her stinger torn out, and an ever-empty belly, she was pathetic. Her power broken and her traitorous Kamacuras deliberately serving their "liberator," Shiigan was less than a memory.

But that would soon change. Inagos would die and she would make him suffer after uniting with this new player in the Monster Wars. She looked down at the Meganuron grub as she wiggled on the waxen floor of the hive. Shiigan too had sensed the psychic surge on the other side of the globe and was pleased by the madness in it. She knew that a new world order was coming. It would come and soon.

In his chamber, Apophis, serpent lord of Egypt, had regained consciousness, even though it felt as if his head had been made into ground meat. And it had, it had. As his head swayed back and forth in the darkness, he heard a tremendous buzzing in his skull; part of the buzzing seemed to come from outside though. As he focused his attention he realized that the noise was coming from the human. What now?

Mubarak looked up at his master with utter disbelief. How could this be happening? How could there be someone stronger than Lord Apophis? Shaken and frightened he asked, "Master? Master are you all right?"

Apophis hissed. He tossed his head and his golden mane sifted back and forth. He was in pain but he would live. This King Ghidrorah was seemingly as strong as the legends said. He would have to summon all his forces to claim victory, however costly it might be, for victory was the only outcome.

Mubarak wasn't so sure of that being the only outcome. He craned his neck back to see the face of his beastly master. "Lord Apophis, as much as I wish the same, we cannot be certain of victory. Your forces are already diminished; the Ookondrus have all been killed, every last one, and your human soldiers were all made to turn on each other. It wasn't a battle; it was a massacre. There are others I can call if you so command, but… but, I'm not sure they'll be enough." He turned away full of self-loathing for what he was about to say. "Sir… oh, I can't believe I'm saying this… Ahmed has already offered his aid. Nothing but our word keeps him from sending his soldiers to fight. Please, let me call him for the aid he offers us. Let him suffer King Ghidorah's wrath not we."

Towering above the human, Apophis hissed so loudly that the whole cavernous room shook and he slammed his claws to the stones on which he and Mubarak stood. Ahmed? That presumptuous insect? Apophis would never accept anything but a corpse from him

Mubarak face turned into a grimace of panic. "If not him then what of Quetzalcoatl? That he is an enemy it is true. But master, your pride would not be sacrificed in calling him. He is your brother. Please know Lord Apophis that I would never wish to say this, but the Star of Doom is such that there is no other way. Your people are suffering; I've called for the evacuation of the cities but if so much as half your father's legends are true then all that is doing is delaying the inevitable."

The serpent silently hissed his loathing. Never. Yes, his people were suffering, yes, the King of Terror's might was beyond all things seen before… but by the snake goddess Vertigo Mu would rise to the surface and sink again before he let the world believe him, Apophis, to be so weak! He telepathically sent his command to Mubarak. The command was to send forth the Stone Guardians and Seven Scorpions and ready Horus, Sobek, Anubis, and Set, even cursed Set.

Mubarak knew he had no choice other than obey. He nodded in silent defeat and sighed. "Yes… my master. Is it your wish to for me to ready Ra as well?"

Apophis closed his eyes. He had not even wanted to think of that possibility. To call on Ra would be suicide. Yet if Apophis could not have Egypt, no one would.

Far away from them in the Himalayan Mountains, a small crew made their way through the near knee deep snow. They had been trudging through the bitter cold for hours now and their fatigue was beginning to show. Although Salno had promised them that they would reach shelter within the hour, Kyle and Miki were very worried. Yet despite the ordeal, all those present hiked in awed silence.

Kyle was no exception. While he had seen snow growing up in Chicago and had been briefed on what to expect, to actually be there was to be left breathless. He was already higher than most nations were; he only had to look at the clouds below that skirted the mountains to believe it. He looked at how the mighty mountains were beyond anything men could ever make and how those mountains made men believe in things greater than themselves. Kyle clutched his backpack with his thick snow gloves and, shaking off the snow off his thick red parka, gave a whistle through the green scarf he wore over his mouth.

Without breaking his snow-crunching stride, Yetrigar turned back to look at human behind him. Not wearing his human mask and revealing his white furred ape face and in thick warm clothes, he spoke and the words left as soft vapor. "What did you say human?"

Kyle lowered his scarf to talk, though even then he had protection against the cold; he had smeared petroleum jelly on his mouth to keep it from drying. He looked at Salno's Prime Minister and said, "I said that it's beautiful. The mountains are so amazing that they really make you believe that there's something bigger than you out there."

Yetrigar nodded. "That they be." He looked across the even slope they were on and where it made itself into sheer cliff. He saw the evening sun shine upon them from the west and how it made the snow into a field of diamonds. He nodded and continued. "I, too, never grow tired of this miracle. As a boy I played on these slopes and frolicked in the snow and dreamed of being a Watchika. Kyle, do you know how Mothra fairs?"

"Yeah and it's not good. She managed to lay one small, deformed egg before she died. That's how she keeps coming back; she returns as her own daughter. But as weak as the egg is, the Elias aren't sure if it'll hatch. If it doesn't, then Mothra won't survive. And if she dies now with Battra dead too, then that means that the two of them will be dead forever. Tenzin, I just keep thinking about what you're going to do. Are you absolutely sure that you're going to go through with… with that you're going to do?"

"You mean become a 'monster'?"

Kyle, very reluctantly, said, "Yes."

Tenzin flared his large simian nostrils. "I am sure of it Kyle. I have studied the customs of nations beyond Selginia and have seen that many are the peoples who fear the giants and few are they who love them. It is quite unlike the days of the Ancients when such Guardians were loved and revered."

Tenzin then grew slightly sad and silent. "Even among my people where the great Watchika's are admired, they are also feared. The Watchika that chooses the path of protector chooses to walk a lonely road without friends or recompense. He is doomed to watch his charges live in happiness while he has naught but his loneliness. It is a hard road to choose, but I have chosen it if it can save my people… and yours."

Tenzin saw that Kyle and Miki were beginning to tremble. Though the mountains were of course cold, they were now colder than usual; that wasn't surprising with how King Ghidorah's evil presence was poisoning Earth's mana and with that disrupting weather patterns. On seeing Kyle Tenzin and wrapped his long ape arm around him. "Do not worry, we will soon reach Meh-Teh where you will be warmed by the hospitality. I and my princess know these mountains as if they were the back of our hands."

"You said Meh-Teh has a geothermal energy source?"

Yetrigar smiled at the curious one. "That it is, not unlike the Muvians I believe. We even have an entire ecosystem inside our mountains as they have in their sub-oceanic cities."

"Really? Can you tell me more? How is it that the science behind it works or when it was made? Please, I want to know…"

Miki saw the two men talking among themselves. She smiled and was glad that her sweet Kyle had found someone to talk to. For seemingly the hundredth time, she checked a small pouch on her parka; it was where she kept her Mothra earrings that he had been suggested she remove for the climb. Being Miki she had been in good spirits ever since she set out from the Selginian Palace. She was only happier when she saw Kyle happy.

Yet, her happy thoughts evaporated when she thought of the condition of the world—though it was worth saying that, for some unknown reason, Japan, and America, had so far been spared the skyllan's attention. G-Force, even reinforced by the DFE and virtually all the armed forces in the world, was being torn to shreds by the space demon's assault. Miki especially despaired at how the armies of the world spent more time fighting Godzilla than they did King Ghidorah.

Not for the first time, Miki thought about how Anne Darrow had had the same problem concerning the US Government and Kong all those years back. Miki should know; she had asked Anne about it as a child. In any case, even if Godzilla fought for his own purposes, didn't they share a common foe? Most everyone held the thought that G-Force Alpha Supreme Commander, Commander Aso, had given them. It was the thought that "Having Godzilla fight King Ghidorah would be fighting fire with gasoline."

Yet even with that thought, the fire was so great that no amount of gasoline could make it worse. That was what Miki had thought when she asked Kyle to give a dying Godzilla the antidote to the Toxin he had been shot with when the Monster Wars had just barely begun. The King of the Monsters was perhaps the only thing that could stop the Prince of Skyllans.

But even if Godzilla and the humans were to unite, could they win? With all Miki had seen of King Ghidorah in her two visions and with what she had seen him do in the waking world, she knew that he would be Earth's greatest challenge ever. She tried to believe in what the Elias had told her, that she and the world had a chance, however slim, of surviving. Even so she still despaired and feared that the she would fail the task that the Elias claimed God had given her. To speak of God… and the devil… King Ghidorah's creators had aptly named him "the devil's hammer" because the three-headed monster was evil incarnate; Meru had said so.

Early on, G-Force had wanted a psychic to probe the mind of the Bane of Life; it had been standard procedure ever since Miki had telepathically stopped Godzilla for the first time all those years ago. Aso had asked that Miki go in first, after all, she was the best and brightest they had but Hayashida had said no; he said that was the reason they couldn't risk her. So they sent in another psychic, American trained Meru, to test the waters.

Even so, Meru didn't like the idea of being sent is as a sacrificial lamb but she knew that she had her duty and that she owed Commander Raschell of G-Force North America her loyalty. So she had gone in and had tried to mind read King Ghidorah but alas it was in vain. Seconds after making contact, she began screaming so loudly that her throat bled and she foamed at the mouth. Afterwards, she fell to the floor of the psychic building in epileptic spasms and went into a coma.

When she finally awoke, gaunt and pale and glassy eyed, her hair had gone completely white and she began to mumble incessantly of doomsday. Her only clear words, though cracked and strained, were at the end. "King Ghidorah's going to kill you all and there isn't a thing you can do stop him. He's burned whole solar systems to ashes; what makes you think that you can win?" She then escaped the orderlies' grasp and bit off her own tongue. She then gave one last scream, as she died of shock and blood loss. Yet despite that she somehow began to chant, and with no tongue, through the blood that poured from out her mouth and spilled out upon the floor. She chanted:

One, two, Ghidorah's coming for you.

Three, four you better lock your door.

Five, six, with your bones his teeth he'll pick.

Seven, eight, he is incarnate hate.

Nine, ten, never live again…

She died soon enough but the chanting continued. The men of the Psionics Research Center were in for a rude awakening when they saw the source. It was the children's dormitory where the Center's child students slept because there, Miki's young charges were in a standing position, though their feet dangled from where they hovered. They were all in their pajamas and as pale, glassy eyed, white haired and gaunt as Meru had been. When they all turned around in one motion, they all looked at the men who had supposedly come to protect them. Then, all in perfect synchronization, the levitating children chanted:

One, two, Ghidorah's coming for you.

Three, four, you better lock your door.

Five, six, with your bone his teeth he'll pick…

The children were saved by the Elias' psychic intervention; they used their power to heal their weak and wounded minds. Even so, many of them had to take drugs that would inhibit their powers. Young though they were, a mad psychic is a dangerous thing. Miki didn't know when, if ever, those poor children, most of them her students, would recover completely. They weren't the first and certainly would not be the last of King Ghidorah's victims.

Princess Salno also had thoughts considering King Ghidorah and the battles ahead; to prepare for them, she ready to do anything. Even as Tenzin was readying himself to be the Watchika, she was teaching Miki in the ways of psychic power. For many years, the royal family of Selginia had cultivated what little power remained them after centuries of intermarriage with humans; Salno's grandmother, Selena Sulna, had been a prime example of this. Salno had spoken at length with the Elias about how Miki, and with her Godzilla, might well be Earth's last best hope. Even as the Elias were augmenting Segeusa's power, Salno was planning to teach the young psychic Martian telepathy now that the she had the chance. That was why she had insisted that Miki be brought along. Not that those were Salno's only thoughts…

As a leader, her first responsibility was to her people, and, with her family having fought the demon, was especially worried. From the moment when she had sensed that something was wrong and she saw it confirmed by reports of a sphere in the news, she had held a secret fear that the enemy of all life would descend on her country. After all, the Martians had helped the Ancients of Earth defeat him all those millennia ago and she was the only surviving descendant of the Martian race. Had she not in the present day given the humans all she knew of him so that they might defeat him?

She had held that fear from the start and it had not diminished, regardless of all which Moll and Lora had said to comfort her. She had feared that King Ghidorah would destroy Selginia to wreak his vengeance. After all, he had destroyed Mars. That was when Belvera had gone straight to her face and said what Moll and Lora had not wished to say. "King Ghidorah destroyed Mars? So what? He won't attack Selginia any sooner that another country. That's because he doesn't care. He'd remember Manda or Kong but your ancestors or, better yet, you? For your ancestors, the death of Mars was the worst day of their lives. For King Ghidorah, it was Tuesday."

Salno knew that she should be glad at the thought that her people wouldn't be targeted but she was still stunned by the realization on what she had been told. The thought that she was nothing, less than nothing, in the Monster Wars frightened her. Were her training and years of preparation wasted? Was the idea then that she could make a difference a fool's gesture? It probably was if for King Ghidorah the death of Mars had been "Tuesday."

"We're here." All the hikers stopped at Yetrigar's command. However, they were confused; there was nothing in front of them. There was just more snow, more ice. It was just one huge glacier.

"Are you sure this is it Yetrigar?" asked Kyle. "I don't see anything. All I see is the flat top of a mountain, nothing more."

Yetrigar smiled. "That's because that's all we want you to see. What you see before you is a holographic projection meant to conceal the city from prying eyes." With that Yetrigar pulled out a small device from his coat. He looked towards the field of snow before them under the blazing blue sky and pushed a button on the device. At first nothing happened but then the miles wide plain of snow began to shimmer and shake. The snow then disappeared altogether leaving Kyle Martin and Miki Segeusa to look downwards in slack-jawed awe at the city that stretched out below them.

King Ghidorah was in Cairo and was venting his fury on its defenders. He had slaughtered every last Ookondru and had utterly destroyed the entire Egyptian Army back in Alexandria and now he had to face still more of Apophis's minions. In his march from the last city, air force pilots had suicidally crashed their planes onto his body as latter day kamikazes on running out of missiles. At first he had tried to destroy them but on seeing that, if anything, they were just trying to slow him down, he merely ignored them. He chose to let them throw their worthless lives away as if it were confetti. Their pathetic attacks hadn't hurt him in the least and had just made him angrier. He took the fury out on all the towns and villages he destroyed in his march from Alexandria to Cairo. On reaching the outskirts of Cairo, he met up with the Stone Guardians—he had made them rubble quickly enough. So know he was facing down Seven forty meter high Scorpions.

King Ghidorah was madly thrashing back and forth, destroying many buildings in the process, as three of the Scorpions dangled from their pincers on his necks. One on each, they held with one pincer and slashed with the other. Two more Scorpions were on his two wings slashing the skin membrane apart with their pincers and poisoning it with their deadly stings. The remaining two were on his legs, pumping their deadly burning venom for all their worth. King Ghidorah raged back and forth as the wretched things crawled over him. The Seven Scorpions wouldn't let the demon pass so long as they lived; Dr. Shirigami had made them from the plans of the Ancient Egyptian scientist, Isis, to guard until death.

For King Ghidorah, however, this was intolerable! He thrashed as savagely as he could but the wretched maggots would not leave. So be it then; if they wanted to face his fury then they would! The Prince of Skyllans loosed a rage of electrical current through his skin that blasted the Seven Scorpions off. Though at first disoriented, they all gathered together before him. Each of the forty-meter high creatures nervously clicked his pincers and blinked his eight eyes. By this time, Cairo was in burning ruins; virtually the entire city had been razed. Mubarak had been clear in relaying the master's scorched earth policy: fight and kill, fight and kill, the city and its people be damned just fight and kill. Yet, as the Seven Scorpions were engaged in a stare down with King Ghidorah, it gradually began to dawn on their simple minds that it would be they who would be fought and killed.

With nothing left to lose, the Seven Scorpions rushed forward in one last banzai charge. With a power fueled by his hatred the space demon loosed a barrage of Gravity Beams from his mouth and a rain of Crimson Lightning from his wings. Its power was the likes of which that the Seven didn't stand a chance. They were exploded and their body parts bloodily strewn about everywhere. King Ghidorah looked at them and crushed the nearest corpse, or remnant there of, under his heel.

As the scorpion's exoskeleton cracked like an egg beneath the demon's heel, said demon had hoped that he might now do battle with the son of Manda. Except for Godzilla, the Supersaurs had all been slain by his hand, as had been the Guardians save Kong and Manda. Like Godzilla, it had been Kong that dealt him the final blow in their battle. Unlike Godzilla, however, King Ghidorah felt no respect for the stupid drooling ape. This was because King Ghidorah had not been able to find Kong after their initial battle at the start of the Monster Wars. He'd simply… vanished. The coward had run away! And so with Guardian he hated the most gone, Manda, son of Tiamat, was the only one left for him to wreak vengeance upon. Yet he knew not where the serpent lord was so in this case his son would have to do. King Ghidorah couldn't believe it. He was the King of Terror and had to content himself with sham vengeance? Intolerable!

That was when he felt the ground shake and shake. What few buildings that hadn't been made ruin in his battle were immediately made rubble with the earthquake. King Ghidorah knew not was happening and so, puzzled, he stretched his senses to feel what it was. That was when he saw the jackal faced Anubis burst from the ground. King Ghidorah heard a shriek and looked upwards to see the falcon like Horus streak out from the sun and land with the force of an explosion. Where it crossed the city, the Nile River began bubble and churn as the crocodilian Sobek came out. From between the rubble came a mad cackling laughter, a cry of insanity and bloodshed. Thus did the hyena-ape called Set explode from between the last two standing buildings.

Damnation! By all the fires of hell, how much of this drivel would he have to endure! Would the son of Manda not fight his own battles? How dare Apophis call himself the son of the serpent lord of Mu? That the son of Tiamat fought alongside others, he had; but he had fought! King Ghidorah was almost reluctant to kill Apophis; if it were to come to that then all he would do would be to take from Mu a coward's name. But as King Ghidorah sneered his hatred at Anubis, Sobek, Horus, and Set, he would make the wretched Apophis pay with blood for his insolence.