Chapter Three
Apophis slithered before the twin obelisks and focused his beady eyes intently on the image that was projected between them. His last hopes were on these, the last of his champions. The serpent lord of Egypt had readied Ra as a weapon of last resort and though he was ready to use it he hoped his minions would win.
Apophis saw Anubis, a wolf-man like jackal standing on its two hind legs. His short fur was black as night and as coarse as sandpaper. He was as emaciated as a starvation victim was; he was like a living skeleton because his rotting maggot filled skin stuck directly to his bones. With sunken eyes glaring from his skull, Anubis was seemingly death itself for he could steal the life from anything he touched and any wound he caused never healed.
Apophis saw Sobek, the crocodilian terror, falling from two legs to four and baring his teeth all the way. His body was firm and strong and his armored hide was a dull greenish black. His vise like jaws crashed together, ready to crush whatever found itself between them. His tail lashed back and forth signaling his fury and the spikes strewn about his back were like broken glass. Sobek stood ready for battle.
Apophis saw Horus the falcon stand as nobly as a prince. Fierce and proud, the creature stretched his wings to the fullest in threat and clenched the claws that graced the wings. He opened his savage curved beak to shriek and showed the serrated teeth within. He raked his razor sharp talons on the ground as if in challenge. With speed and aerial agility the likes of which even Rodan would struggle to match, Horus would deal the challenge without fear.
Apophis saw Set, a thing cursed above all things. With the body on and ape and the head and fur of a hyena, Set was a vile, sin clad, rancid creature. His matted, greasy, spotted fur was a disease-ridden cesspool. The cruel beast cackled madly bellowing his wickedness incessantly to all that would hear it. Able not only to crush with jaw as strong as Sobek's, Set could infect with plague and his acid vomit could burn most anything.
The Egyptian descendants of Atlantean refugees had created these four beasts three thousand years ago to battle Apophis when he first arrived. Even murderous turncoat Set fought; his own survival had been at stake. With the help of Quetzalcoatl, they had won. When it began again in modern times, Apophis sought the four in their sleep and, with the power of Ra, had made them his mindless minions. Not until know had he had need for their services but if King Ghidorah had stood against Apophis' father and six others, Apophis would need all the allies he could find.
Apophis saw the four amidst the ruin of the city just outside his sanctuary and he saw it begin.
Sobek lunged forward with his jaws towards King Ghidorah's right leg but the wily skyllan dodged his body to the left. Yet that was what the four wanted because when that happened Set lunged from the side and clamped his crushing hyena jaws to demon 's thigh. The Bane of Life raged and screamed and thrashed but his enemy tore off the pseudo flesh in a vise like hold between his jutting fangs. Set refused to yield one inch even as he felt his energy drained away from the touch of the demon, even as his mouth burned with acid blood, even as bite after bite was rained down on him from the three headed demon 's maws. He tore and shook with his teeth and raked with his claws.
King Ghidorah was about to blast with his Gravity Beams when he reared back in pain. That was when he felt the flesh on his back began to burn; he howled because of it for Anubis had also begun his assault. The jackal had scrambled atop the demon's back to clamp his jaws about the central neck where he hang on for dear life. Every place where one's flesh touched the other's, the skyllan's skin began smoking; every wound, even the slightest cut, would not heal. Anubis felt his own strength wane as the demon leached it away but the skeleton jackal would not yield.
As King Ghidorah lashed his club tails about yet more pain shot through him as he felt those same tails crushed between jaws even crueler than Set's. Sobek impaled his conical teeth as deep as he could through the demon's twin tails and he wrenched them about as fiercely as he could in a horrendous death roll. It was with that movement that he felled the giant and cast him to the ground. The Prince of Skyllans fell to the ground and screamed his agony as Sobek tore a huge bloody chunk of yellow pseudo flesh from his thigh.
Then Horus shot out from the sky and cast his fury unto the demon. He embedded his talons into King Ghidorah's belly and savagely tore at it with them and his toothed beak and his wings' claws. More and more he madly slashed in the hopes to tear open the skyllan's belly and gut him like a hog. Three screams from a damned and unholy thing echoed through the ruined city as the falcon plunged its beak into its belly and tore out its burning yellow innards. Horus knew he would not long survive as the acid blood burned away his flesh and feathers but he still kept up his attack with a savagery to rival King Ghidorah's own.
The four relentlessly tore and slashed and cut again and again over every inch of the space demon's body. He was felled and impotently thrashed in his mad fury against his enemies but it was of no use. However, the Prince of Skyllans was not finished yet.
In a sudden single movement King Ghidorah tore out life force from the four attacking him and returned it as barrage of Crimson Lightning from torn and tattered wings. Set, Horus, Sobek, and Horus screamed in agony as the pain raged over every inch of their weakened forms. They were blasted off and came to their feet, not taking their feet from their dread foe for the slightest second. They saw that the demon spawn of sin and hatred yet lived; however living and doing so without great injury were two very different things.
King Ghidorah was the made the face of ruin. He hobbled with a huge gaping sore oozing wound left in his thigh; it was already a septic green and showed to the bone. The whole of his back along with the base of his middle neck was scarred and blackened as if he'd been a bondsman scourged with a burning whip. His right tail club had nearly been severed off leaving it to pour out yellow acid ichor while the left tail barely hung from the bones. His belly hung wide open and there dripped not infrequently his hot stinking viscera along with steaming yellow ichor to the burning ground. His whole body heaved and his six eyes glowed with blood red rage.
Did he feel pain? If he didn't it was because hatred screamed like a scarlet flood through him and drowned out all other things. If he did feel pain then he grew strong from it; a demon drinks in the suffering of all things, even his own. And yes, King Ghidorah was a demon.
The Prince of Skyllans surged upwards on tattered wings and screamed his unholy scream down below at the beleaguered champions. Horus looked at the demon. He was now a minion of Apophis and would fight for his master. Yet even if he had been in command of his own mind, he would have fought to rid the world of this cancer. Some vestige of his old self resurfaced and the avenging falcon proudly flew forward to make battle against the evil one.
Even in this exhausted and wounded state, the King of Terror would fight on for even if he were brought to the bitter end, he would still deal death. Horus and Ghidorah surged forward for an aerial battle; they went to make war in the heavens. The falcon followed the demon in an ever-higher vertical climb; they climbed until they seemed able to touch Horus's sun. The ground was a tiny patchwork of lines and scattered buildings from all the hundreds of thousands of feet they were in the deep burning blue sky.
King Ghidorah surged forward to make his assault but by then Horus had used his blinding speed to draw first blood. Yellow poison sprayed out from the demon 's veins and he screeched as a brown and black blur again tore open his side. Struggling to stay aloft as his simulacrum of life bled away, the space demon fairly foamed at the mouth in his sick fury. Horus then froze in one place; he hovered there, his clawed wings beating ever so slowly, as if daring his enemy to attack. Said enemy responded with a hellish barrage of Gravity Beams but they instantly stopped because their target disappeared. King Ghidorah looked back and forth with all three of his heads and scanned with all six of his eyes and then caught sight of a brown and black blur and fired upon that.
The scene repeated itself again and again but no matter how quickly the space demon fired, no matter in how many directions, he couldn't strike the falcon! King Ghidorah screamed in mad fury; as if saying, stand still so I can destroy you! Such mad fury was what Horus wanted; he took advantage of the space demon's madness to strike yet another hit-and-run strike. Before his foe could recover, the falcon plunged his talons into the festering necrotic flesh on the demon's back left by Anubis and tore chunk after rotten chunk out, ignoring the poisonous Taint and the acid blood as he did so.
That was when King Ghidorah arched his outer necks back and clamped his jaws Horus' left wing. There was a sickening crunch of hollow bones and a horrific falcon's shriek of pure pain as he was cast forward. However he was not released. Instead, bite after crushing bite was delivered from three mouths and from scores of burning teeth. Only then was the falcon released. Yet, instead of savoring his victim's awful cries of misery, the Prince of Skyllans looked to his wounds and then turned to Horus to see his flesh, to see his blood dried on him. King Ghidorah saw the gore and knew that this was intolerable!
The falcon's body had been built for speed, not combat; thus every one of his foe 's attacks counted double. Said foe was ready to send more than double as was seen in his flight towards him. As for the falcon, to know that King Ghidorah could yet rain such blows despite all the punishment dealt to him broke the falcon 's mental shield and allowed the Fear to seep in. Mere moments ago a flier with speed and skill to rival the Rodans, Horus felt red-hot agony with every limping beat of his broken wing as he tried to escape his pursuer. He felt the burning heat of the space demon's fireballs as they shot inches past him and singed his feathers. Horus swerved and dived as he tried to dodge the attacks; he barely could since his mind was possessed with Fear. King Ghidorah felt the equivalent of a smile; the fear of a broken and humiliated "hero" was the sweetest of all. Now it was time for the final blow.
Horus had flown so far and so fast that he no longer knew where he was. The falcon slowed and looked around. He ignored his furiously beating heart and rising panic to see that King Ghidorah was gone. No matter how much he searched the burning blue desert sky, the Prince of Skyllans was nowhere to be seen. There was just sky above and desert below. It was all so calm, so peaceful. Horus almost lost himself in the false security and felt as if he could just drift passively in the thermals. He didn't know why, he just wanted to rest.
That was when he felt his world shatter in an explosion of pain and the dizzying rushes of being shot upwards like a rocket. After his mental communion with Apophis, King Ghidorah had glimpsed the knowledge of influencing the minds of monsters. After lulling Horus into complacency, it was child's play to come in from in behind and capture him in his feet's talons for a trip to the edge of the mesosphere.
Well reader you might be asking, what is a mesosphere? The thing is earth's atmosphere, that is to say the air around us, is made up of several layers such as the troposphere, the stratosphere, for example. The borders between layers alternate between hot and cold and at the edge of the mesosphere it is icy cold at some –150 degrees Fahrenheit.
As a result of this, when King Ghidorah flew his enemy upward to that place, Horus was frozen to ice. At the fifty mile height blue sky turned to black space and there was no air for the falcon to breath, air in his lungs froze into white mist. Everything seemed to slow to an infinite crawl as the falcon gasped for breath, but there was no air to pass through his fanged beak into his lungs. Not just that happened, but ice formed on Horus's body and frost fused his feathers. As for King Ghidorah he didn't need to breathe and neither heat nor cold bothered him. Thus, in the frozen soundless blackness of space where the Earth hung like a green jewel below, the last thing the falcon lord saw was the face of Nut and the stars that were her jewels before he fell from the sky.
Amazing what a little science can do for you.
As for Sobek and Anubis, they knew not where their winged comrade had gone. All they had seen earlier was that he had flown off into the sky to do battle and had traveled beyond where their eyes could follow. Even Set, who had held feelings of enmity for the bird since ancient times felt something akin to worry. Then the three saw it. It was a streak in the sky. Was it a shooting star? They knew not but it strangely seemed to be falling towards them; then the three noticed that it was. It was shooting down and Sobek, Set, and Anubis ran in panic from the falling thing.
It was just in time too for no later than they did that it crashed with the force of a bomb. Smoke and dust hung thick around ground zero; the ground had been made into powder and there was nothing but powder in the two hundred-foot deep, six hundred foot wide crater. The three waddled, walked, and knuckle-walked, towards the rim of the crater, ready for anything. Then they heard it. They heard a mad laughter crueler than any laugh that Set had ever cackled and as blood chilling as the gates of hell. The smoke and the dust began to clear away and then they saw him.
King Ghidorah was still alive! His wounds were still open and raw, his flesh still hung in tatters from his ravaged frame, but he was still alive. And bloody, though not all the blood was his own. He was splattered in scarlet gore and crimson soaked feathers, as was the entire crater. One of King Ghidorah's heads turned away from Set, Sobek, and Anubis to the decapitated hawk's head under his heel. The Prince of Skyllans then placed all his strength into a stomp that splattered Horus' head beneath his foot as if it were a rotten cherry. The space demon's foot made crimson with the blood of his enemy, he turned towards the terrified survivors as if saying, who's next?
"Tuol, why are we stopping?"
Ramon looked at the stone giant from his perch on the giant's hand. For hours now he had ridden in his monster's palm on his arrival on Kenyan shores. Tuol had marched noiselessly across the Tsavo National Park after emerging from reefs at the coastal city of Mombassa for days, stopping only at night for his human guides to rest but to suddenly stop in mid stride… Ramon Bolivar didn't understand. They had stopped just a few miles northeast from Mt. Kilimanjaro. They could even see it from across the Tanzanian border.
The boy got to his feet and looked upward at the giant's ugly leering face. "Tuol, what are you doing? We can't stop now. King Ghidorah is further north. You have to go fight him!"
There was no reply.
"Tuol!"
"Stop it Ramon." The boy looked to the side to see Lora on Fairy zip in front of him. Mere inches away from his face, Lora looked at him from her saddle. "You heard me, stop. Listen, your shaman grandfather might have chosen you to be Tuol's guide, but you have a lot to learn about fighting in the Monster Wars. And for that matter, being a guide to a monster."
"What do you mean?" asked Ramon. "I don't understand?"
Lora rolled her eyes and sighed. She had hoped to go with Moll to the Yeti City but because she was the youngest, she was stuck with the boy. "Darn it Moll…" she whispered under her breath, "why'd you stick me with baby-sitting?"
"What?"
The youngest of the Elias growled. "Listen little boy I've been doing this ever since my mother guided the Prehistoric Mothra. My mother, Dragon Queen, raised me to know this. You have to be as one with your kaiju. After all, he depends on you to be his voice, his guide, and his friend. You have to understand what he's thinking and that means you have to put his judgments first!"
Hurt, Ramon spoke with a shaking voice. "Yeah, well sorry I've only been at this for a few months instead of 12,000 years like you!"
On seeing tears of hurt on the boy's face, Lora sighed. What was happening to her? She loved children and in past adventures she had welcomed them because their cheer and innocence are what gave her the hope to carry on, even in the darkest times. Now she was going to hurt one because of her own lost temper? "No Ramon… I'm sorry. Its just with, with the Monster Wars going on, and with Mothra dead, I can barely keep things in control."
"Is she really dead?" asked the boy. "Can't she come back like she always does?"
"I don't know. Normally she just does but this time that might not happen. She was almost killed by King Ghidorah when he first came. Before she died she laid an egg to be reborn from, but it's so weak that me and my sisters aren't sure if it will hatch. If it doesn't, then Mothra dies forever. And if she dies, Battra dies."
"I'm sorry," said Ramon. "Mothra was like family to you, wasn't she?"
"She's the other half of my soul," Lora weakly said. "I really don't know where I end and she begins. Her joy is my joy and her pain is my pain. If she is cut then I bleed."
"Then maybe I know how you feel. King Ghidorah destroyed my town and left my family homeless. They're alive, thank God, but it went loco when my abuelo woke him up." He slapped Tuol's stone palm. "He marched off into the ocean and then when G-Force came to what happened, abuelo said that I should go with them to be with Tuol. Oh, I miss my grandpa… all this time I though he was just some dumb old man telling crazy stories!"
Lora leapt from Fairy 's back onto her ward's shoulder. She sat down and placed her tiny hand on it. "Don 't worry. Your grandfather wouldn't want you hating yourself for that. And I know that your family is alright. Not just that, but I know that they're very proud of you."
Ramon sat on Tuol's hand and buried his face in his arms. "Sure. Last I saw they were in a refugee camp. I haven't heard from them since."
Lora just smiled and tapped her forehead. "Aren't you forgetting something?"
The boy from Lima smiled. "Oh, of course."
He then looked out to see the vast countryside. He couldn't help but be in awe of the majestic mountains and the vast grasslands all around him. Ramon had considered joining the army when he grew up so he could see the world; thus to be in Africa amidst the savanna was a dream come true. Thus while he wished that it could have been under better circumstances, he was still uplifted to be here of all places. He had seen lions and zebras and elephants. He had seen giraffes use their long tongues to eat the leaves of the acacia trees; he had seen baboons chattering in the baobabs; he had seen gazelles prancing among the tall grasses. He had seen it all along the unending unspoiled savanna. Unspoiled, but for how long?
Not long ago, Ramon's only world had been a slum where people lived in shanties made of scrap metal and cardboard. Yet when his grandfather had sent him away to guide the stone giant called Tuol, Ramon had seen that the world was a far larger place then he had ever imagined. He was now half way around the planet from his home of Lima, Peru. He had traveled to Kenya; in doing so, he had seen a hundred different peoples and a hundred different ways of life in going. It had only been then that Ramon had realized everything that was at stake and that he had to be ready to do whatever he could, no matter how small, to save his planet.
His legs were dangling from where he sat at the edge of the hand of Tuol, who was now frozen still as if but a statue once more. He looked over the edge and saw the military men under the command of one of Commander Espinoza's many lieutenants swarming below at the stone giant's feet. They were looking up, yelling why had Tuol stopped and undoubtedly cursing the fact that they were working alongside a boy and his monster. Not to mention the fairy that had been sent to be his keeper.
Ramon smiled and sadly looked up from the scar on his hand to the horizon. "Well abuelo, looks like Tuol's fight is going to be here. When it comes, it'll be for you."
Apophis was coiled in his vast cavernous chambers amidst the dank darkness and the cold gloom of the stone place. From this place, he watched the battles waged outside through the images made by the twin obelisks. Horus was dead and the others were fighting in desperation. The son of Manda had controlled their minds with his strange powers through the entire battle and was increasingly dismayed by what he saw. Not only was the falcon dead, but the others; Anubis, Sobek, and Set; were wounded and quickly reaching exhaustion despite their having been empowered by Ra. The battle outside was reaching such fever pitch that even in the stone sanctuary, the ground still trembled. If the four were to die, then Apophis would have no other hope.
The serpent lord knew that if his reign were to continue that he would have to take a more… personal approach to the situation. Yet to claim victory there would need to be a distinct advantage and he knew where to find it. So the serpent lord slithered along the ground, pushing his yellow body with his tiny legs, as many a thought spun in his gold colored, antlered, long whiskered head.
His big four had been made by his own rebellious slaves from long ago to stand against him. They had succeeded with the help of his brother, Quetzalcoatl. For King Ghidorah to be now winning against such an onslaught, he would have to be stronger than Apophis. It was a realization that the vain and arrogant serpent lord of Egypt had been loath to realize. Yet to say only that was truly an understatement.
In his youth in the capital of Mu, human priests had sung the songs of most ancient times when King Ghidorah had razed the land and caused suffering untold. The priests had chanted the legends of how Manda 's strength had not been enough to defeat the King of Terror and not even the strength of his mother the dragon goddess Tiamat, daughter of the Great Dragon and mightiest of all the monsters of the Ancients, had been enough. In the end, great Manda had had to join with six others to defeat the Prince of Skyllans and avenge his goddess mother.
However, the humans had never needed to sing their songs as Apophis knew it all for himself. Though he'd been but a hatchling when it happened, Apophis remembered seeing his grandmother brought back to Earth, bloody and broken, from her battle with the King of Terror amidst the skies of Planet X. She sensed the wretch had come to kill the world as he had done so when he had slain her father's children. Though determined to destroy King Ghidorah and avenge the death of the saurian race, she was already at death's door when she returned home. The tiny wrymling had slithered up to Tiamat's face to be with her in her last moments. There, he had felt love and hope from the daughter of the Great Dragon as if knowing that her death would not be in vain. As the mighty titaness went to join her father in a land beyond death, the child Apophis had shed the only tear he would ever know.
It was partly for this that he had left Mu all those millennia ago. Manda had sought only to guard the humans, as has his mother before him. Yet, in Apophis's sight that was not enough. As if he were Vertigo, the snake goddess of madness, he thought that to be truly protected, the humans had to be protected from themselves. If they had to be robbed of their wills and have a perfect one imposed upon them to receive that protection, so be it. When Apophis was thwarted, he'd been exiled as had his brother Jormungand, or Reptilicus as humans called him. In making a new empire in the land of Egypt, then as now, Apophis had thought to make a perfect world that he would be able to protect if disaster were ever to strike.
Yet the same disaster that had taken away his grandmother was at his doors now. King Ghidorah was a beast of chaos against whom not even the chaos god, Set, could compare. Ironic, during Apophis's sleep the humans had chosen to depict him as being an all destroying monster that would seek to swallow the sun itself, as a thing so terrible that even Set fought against him, if only for his own survival. Strangely enough, it was a sun that he sought to swallow now.
Apophis had wound and slithered through the hugely titanic corridors of his mammoth pyramid and, though dust had fallen from the roof and walls had shaken from the battle outside, he was now in sight of his goal. Now at the center of said pyramid, he saw a huge stone archway through which was the greatest prize of the serpent lord. He slithered under the arch to see scores of human scientists scurrying back and forth between their computer banks. All in their lab coats, all indistinguishable from each other. Mubarak, the serpent lord 's viceroy, screamed his orders at those in the huge laboratory and they complied as best they could as the laboratory trembled. They were all so intent on making the final plan ready and ignoring the sounds of war outside, that they had not even noticed Apophis coming.
As for the son of Manda, no, the grandson of Tiamat, he looked up from the minuscule little humans and upwards at a huge ball of fire held in a force-field chamber. It was Ra, the living sun whose power the first peoples of Egypt had used to form Anubis, Horus, Sobek and Set so long ago. As a miniature star, only an energy wall had been capable of holding it; a wall of solid matter would have been vaporized. The generators making the field were as large as buildings and dominated the room. Ra shone as a sphere of pure white and would have blinded all those had not been obscured.
In Apophis mind ran the thought that, though it would be the death of him, if the myths were to say he would swallow the sun, it was time for everyone to know why.