Chapter Four
Set was sent reeling back from a triple head blow the enemy dealt him; yet he rose on his feet when he saw King of Terror held back by Sobek 's jaws clamped on his hip. Brimming with fury, the chaos child rushed King Ghidorah in a red rage and began a berserk attack. In his weakened state, the Prince of Skyllans was felled again and was at Set's mercy. As for mercy, there was little as Set ruthlessly pummeled his enemy with the brutal strength of gorilla like fists. The space demon writhed on his back as his two outside hydra heads shot forward to clamp their burning jaws and poisoned needle teeth onto the chaos child 's eyes.
The titanic Set reared back and wailed in agony as blood spurt out from his burning eyes. Yet even in this blinded state he returned the blow as he opened his maw and let vomited a torrent of hydrochloric acid from within his bowels on the now standing King Ghidorah. He used his bone-crunching hyena jaws to tear out the ruined flesh; yet even as he did that, the still smoking King of Terror wrapped his constricting inner neck around Set's throat to suffocate him. Set began squirming in his foe's grasp and began gasping for breath as he felt his windpipe throttled. Then with his two outer heads, the ravaged space demon sent full force Gravity Beams at Sobek and Anubis as they tried to help Set.
Sent flying by the blasts and now scrambling amidst the rubble-strewn streets of ruined Cairo to dodge further Bolts, the monsters' ends seemed nigh. Then the whole city seemed to tremble with the force of an earthquake and King Ghidorah's two outer heads began to futilely scan in all directions to see what was happening. Sensing the demon's confusion, Set wrenched free from his hated enemy's grasp and scrambled towards his comrade monsters. If Set was right in his thoughts, then he and his fellow monsters were going to have a bit of help. As for King Ghidorah, his only exasperated thought was that he was to face yet more minions of the serpent lord.
The land bucked and swayed and then the ground surrounding the Pyramids of Apophis seemed to crack open. Blinding light and super-hot compressed air shot out from the cracks; that was when a bizarre slurping sound was heard. Set, Anubis, and Sobek saw the bloody, almost liquefied, remains of the Seven Scorpions fly through the air from their scattered locations and continuously fall into one gigantic pile. The Prince of Skyllans paid no heed to it for all his attentions were focused on the sight before him.
Then, in one final, tremendous explosion, the Pyramid of Apophis burst apart and a blinding surge of light came that illuminated all around. The rush of wind and the surge of light were both tremendous and rubble was sent flying. As it died down, King Ghidorah looked through the haze to see what he hoped that he would see. He saw it and was not disappointed.
Levitating above the crater was the son of Manda, but not as so many knew him. His body was now seemingly tripled in length and his now unending coils wound and wound in the form of golden light. From halfway through his gold glowing form was a pair of wings made of solar energy. Having swallowed the sun, he was now Super Apophis and was virtually a being of pure energy against which no foe could stand. Super Apophis only had three hours before the energy of Ra killed him but he in that time he would destroy his enemy.
Or so it seemed, the King of Terror always did appreciate a challenge and on seeing the son of his enemy come at last King Ghidorah smiled. It was time for battle.
Mubarak saw his master readied for the final battle. He was in the ruined remains of the main laboratory and oversaw the carnage from a cracked and static scrambled view screen. The nameless scientists in their tattered lab coats saw this as they looked blankly towards the screen. They all turned around to see the remains of their workstations. Tables overturned, small fires burning, papers scattered, smoke, rubble; the resultant explosion when their master had taken the Ra star into himself had caused much damage. Then, all as one, the scientists turned towards Mubarak as if asking what to do next.
Mubarak realized this and knew he had to continue in his master 's stead. He dusted off his robes and cleared his throat. "You all now that I am the most powerful being in Egypt after Lord Apophis. He has chosen me to rule as his regent, should he be unable to make his wishes known. For how long he will fight, I do not now. For now we must seek shelter and continue the work of his kingdom, as he would wish it.
"Lord Apophis's orders were clear. He does not want aid in the slightest. The battle against this is his and his alone. However, should the unthinkable happen and he be defeated… we will avenge him. And for that, we have the perfect weapon. We must ready the tool of the master's vengeance."
"Come with me!"
Thus, the scientists in their tattered lab coats silently walked where Mubarak led them. Through winding tunnels and deep corridors, they went with him.
King Ghidorah and Super Apophis were in a stare down; they were circling each other ever so slowly and the survivors of the big four; Sobek, Anubis, and Set, were surrounding them. Along with the big four was Septimus Scorpio, the titanic combined form of the Seven Scorpions, merged by Super Apophis coming. The final form of the serpent lord then hissed a most hideous screech and fired a blast of light from his energy made wings.
As for King Ghidorah he just stood there and took the full force of the solar beam as best he could, his toes digging groves into the ground as he was pushed back. The torrent of power was seemingly too much for him and he would have been fallen if he hadn't braced himself. Yet despite the agony the attack sent coursing through him, the Prince of Skyllans refused to move, he refused to bend. He in fact stretched his wings to the utmost to embrace the pain that much more.
Incensed by the gall of his foe, Super Apophis increased the force of the beams fired from his energy wings into a blinding fury of nuclear force. He increased his attack's energy, more and more, until he stopped cold and could fire no more. He stopped and his long, seemingly endless coils contracted and expanded with every breath he took. He knew not what he would he see, yet to be sure he turned his golden head and cast a glance to where his foe had stood.
Dust and smoke clouded the air, yet in the haze something moved. As the haze parted, there stood King Ghidorah. Seemingly immortal and utterly uninjured, he silently hovered there. No energy beams save those of a Supersaur could harm him—indeed, others would only feed him. And even for a Supersaur's beams, King Ghidorah could raise a shield to protect himself. Barely hovering above the ground, the Prince of Skyllans shone with a strange glow.
Then the space demon spat out an unending barrage of Gravity Beams and Crimson Lightning from his heads and his wings. Super Apophis wailed in agony and was thrown back by the force of the blast. King Ghidorah was able to do this not because he was an energy absorber to steal his own foe's strength and use it to pound him into the ground. No, there was a far darker reason; the Prince of Skyllans was a sin eater and a sin eater grows fat from his enemies' delicious hatred.
Yet his combined assault of Gravity Beams and Crimson Lightning on Super Apophis was stopped when the reformed Big Four did a combined assault on him! Sobek, Set, Anubis and Scorpio all simultaneously leapt on him, attacking all the while. Buried underneath the crocodile, the hyena, the jackal, and the scorpion, and drowned by their blows; the enraged King Ghidorah blasted them off for what seemed to be the fourth time. Energized from the absorption of Super Apophis's hate, the space demon was ready to deal his maggots their deathblow.
Hugging the ground and with pincers clacking, Septimus Scorpio raced towards his foe. But King Ghidorah surged into the sky in one leap over his foe and spun in the air to crash his club tails into the face of Anubis. The jackal had followed Scorpio to lend aid but was know writhing in agony on the ground. Death itself was dying from the spines the size of eighteen wheelers that had impaled themselves into his skull to deliver their corrosive venom.
Set charged with no fear against his foe, screaming like a devil all the while. The hyena-ape hurled his full weight against King Ghidorah as if issuing some mad tackle. In one fluid move Set swung around towards his foe's back. His hugely muscled arms almost snapped the other necks as they swept them aside and he clamped his hyena jaws onto the left neck to crush it with unmatched teeth. With his gorilla arms holding the foe in a crushing vise, Set's septic iron jaws clamped again and again on the space demon's necks. The King of Terror's blood was pure poison and thus Set was only killing himself, but he didn't care.
Enraged, the demon prepared to electrocute the two by a wave of voltage through his skin but that was then a set of crocodilian jaws clamped with the force of vise on his hips, as if to wrench it off. Having had enough of the killer croc and seeing in Sobek something of his eternal enemy, Godzilla, Ghidorah twisted his necks around Set's jaws long enough for him to fire a combined Triple Beam of such force that he was able to decapitate Sobek. However, the space demon was still in agony due to the head whose iron jaws and iron teeth were stuck on his body. If he only knew that that pain would only be added too.
That was because it was then that King Ghidorah screamed in red-hot agony feeling excruciating pain lance through him. Septimus Scorpio had impaled his mighty stinger through the space demon's soft belly, regardless of acid blood. Hundreds of gallons of burning venom were being pumped in and were already working their torturous wonders. King Ghidorah attempted to move but the scorpion titan was hugging the ground and clamped its pincers onto his foe's feet. Every movement shredded the demon's pseudo flesh. Horus, creation of Isis all those millennia ago just as the scorpion was, whom he had sworn to protect, was dead. For that the Scorpion would have his vengeance.
Pain and suffering roared through his body. Wound after wound appeared. But the Prince of Skyllans let himself go limp. He let the pain clear his mind and let his foes send pain upon him. King Ghidorah knew what pain was. He felt it, dealt it, needed it. Hatred was his strength, yet it was the weakness of others. He let the wounds pile on him and closed his eyes. He then let his insane, unholy thoughts flow from his mind towards the mind of the son of his enemy.
Apophis was the son of Manda who had, along with others, imprisoned him in the sphere of orihalcym those twelve thousand years ago. Apophis was the grandson of Tiamat, the dragoness who had had the gall to challenge his might and who had paid for it dearly. Apophis was the great-grandson of the Great Dragon whose children, the dinosaurs, had been the first to suffer King Ghidorah's wrath. Apophis with his lust for power was almost someone whom the Star of Doom could admire, though, admiration or not, he'd still have butchered the wrymling smiling.
As for the son of Manda, his golden glowing form was bleeding golden glowing blood atop a pile of rubble. He was injured from the blow he had been dealt. Injured, but not dead. The mind inside the coral horned and whiskered head was still very much awake. Awake and being poisoned by the hatred and madness seeping inside from an outside source. More hatred, more rage, more evil, they all flowed into his soul. It was hatred for King Ghidorah.
It was hatred for having brought ruin to his land. Hatred for having killed his grandmother. Hatred for his forces having been humiliated on the field of battle. Hatred for being beaten. Hatred for the fact that King Ghidorah, that perverted obscenity that was the enemy of all the children of the Great Dragon, simply was. Beneath golden eyelids, an eye twitched back and forth. The hatred flooded into his mind. Super Apophis's eye began twitching more and more.
Then the eye flew open.
King Ghidorah sent his club tails crashing upwards around Set's waist towards his back and tore the spiny clubs across it. Bleeding and in agony, the screaming Set fell back and was forced to let go as the space demon loosed Crimson Lightning from his wings upon him. Then the space demon clamped the burning jaws of his outer heads on the tail impaled through his belly and shoved the stinger straight through!
Shocked, Septimus Scorpio felt his stinger and tail pulled with such force that he was lifted off the ground and he felt a burning, crushing force on the end of the tail. King Ghidorah had impaled himself all the way through his belly with the envenomed lance and tore it, gore dripping, from out his back with his inner head. As for the scorpion, reeling in burning agony, the force of it left his tail torn off from his abdomen. Septimus Scorpio was dying an ugly painful death from pain and shock and blood loss. What then?
Holding Septimus Scorpio's stinger in his teeth, the masochistic King Ghidorah used it to impale the scorpion through the head and pin him to the ground. The three-headed monster then calmly removed Sobek's still-clamped head from his hips.
The most indomitable of beasts, the bloodied, bruised, blinded, and nearly broken Set surged forwards. Though burned by the spray of acid blood, he shot his gorilla-like fists into the pulpy, shredded wound in the space demon's back and tore it open again; though the beast knew he would die, he'd go to hell rejoicing if his enemy would just go there first! The Prince of Skyllans arched his back and screamed as Set vomited hydrochloric acid from his maw into the wound. Then the chaos child's Kong-like strength tore it open further so that his bile dripping teeth savaged the twenty-foot deep wound.
But then a blinding flash of light blasted Set from his back. King Ghidorah turned his three heads towards the charred, flaming, blackened, smoking corpse atop the rubble. The Prince of Skyllans turned to where the blast had come. Super Apophis was fairly fuming in a mad rage; with power fueled by hatred, he was ready to take bloody revenge. King Ghidorah would be his kill!
It was just as King Ghidorah wanted it. Now it was just the two of them with no one else to get in the way. It was just as the Prince of Skyllans wanted it. Now glorious war would be waged between two enemies. Now at last, seemingly thought the King of Terror, the real game begins.
In the command station of the G-Force ship Freedom, Commander Ahmed was in a heated argument, via vidphone, with his superior officer, Commander Aso. "Sir, I have to go in and do something! I demand permission to go and neutralize the threat immediately!"
"Negative," replied G-Force's ever-grim supreme leader. "Your forces are to remain outside Egyptian borders and not intervene. We have a hard enough time dealing with King Ghidorah without having to deal with both him and Apophis at once."
"But sir," protested Commander Ahmed, "those two monsters will destroy the city unless they're stopped."
"The city already is destroyed Ahmed. That space monster's killed everything in it and he'll kill you if you go; as for the people there, they're already dead. I've been fighting Godzilla for over a decade and I know that the last thing you need is to have your men commit suicide. With the world at stake, we can't afford to lose any men needlessly."
"But-"
"But don't you talk back to me!" yelled Commander Aso. "I outrank you; I give the orders! A general ordering his troops to their deaths to accomplish a mission is one thing, having them march into a deathtrap for no reason at all is just plain stupid. Its hard seeing your city destroyed? Tough! Try being from Japan and seeing Tokyo get trampled by Godzilla every other day! The best thing you can do is let King Ghidorah and Apophis fight and hope they destroy each other. If King Ghidorah does survive, then move in and finish him off."
"If?" There was an angry tone in Ahmed's voice as he spoke. "Sir, that devil has already killed every last one of Mubarak's one hundred Ookondru's, wiped out the entire Egyptian army, leveled two major cities to rubble since arriving mere hours ago, killed off the Seven Scorpions twice, and not only survived the Big Four's assault but ground them into paste!"
Glaring from the vidscreen, Aso growled, "You said it yourself on TV, soldier! You obey my orders. If King Ghidorah has survived all that, he's all the weaker for it and this Super Apophis that Matsu's pictures show might just be enough to finish the that space monster off. I'll be coming to Africa soon enough to oversee the deployment of Tuol; Espinoza's men have confirmed its at the Kenya/Tanzania border and is ready to follow its orders. When I get there, I had better see that you obeyed your orders as well.
"Over and out."
Aso vanished from the vidscreen. When Ahmed saw that, he let his anger out and angrily pounded the edge of the table with his fist. He had joined G-Force to save Egypt from Apophis, not to let Apophis destroy it! He would see Aso hang for this! Until then… Ahmed let himself calm down and his temper cool. A leader of soldiers has to be in control of himself at all times, even if it meant having ice water in his veins, even if it meant having to " 'endure the unendurable.' " This was, of course, true in wartime, especially in wartime.
Ahmed bitterly turned towards the major at his side. "Major, have my forces ready for battle, have everything in perfect readiness and waiting for the merest signal. The battle plans are unchanged; the officers' in the field know what they must do. But also have them know, have them all know, that we will not go in until one of the monsters, King Ghidorah or Super Apophis is dead. Let them destroy each other and we will be the ones to sort them out."
The major had hoped that he would hear that they would be going into fight, but he had known inside that this would be the order. "Yes, sir."
King Ghidorah dodged Super Apophis's lunge and set his own jaws to snap and slash at the serpent lord's flesh. Marshaling all his strength, the son of Manda neither felt nor cared for the space demon's Taint. Shooting through the air by anti-gravity, Super Apophis feigned a lunge to the right and went to the left where his foe's exposed side was. He plunged his ten-foot fangs all the way into his foe's flesh and just as quickly removed them; Septimus Scorpio's mistake would not be his.
King Ghidorah was getting dizzy from having both the serpent's and the scorpion's poisons in him, not to mention the septic, bacterial saliva from Set. Even so, he refused to give into the pain, he refused to be bested by a mere wrymling! He had bested the father; he would not be bested by the son! He charged Super Apophis as he shot his Gravity Beams in all directions. However, the serpent lord with his sinuous twisting coils dodged each attack effortlessly. King Ghidorah stopped his attack and began another one; hurricane winds. The son of Manda fell to the ground with such winds and was battered by the flying rubble.
As glass and steel and concrete rained against him, Super Apophis spread his energy wings and fired solar beams from their flaming tips. They cut through the flying rubble to strike their target head on and left the Prince of Skyllans in pain. Super Apophis may not have been a Supersaur, but, as child of the Great Dragon, he was close enough. Before King Ghidorah could recover, Super Apophis lunged forward and wrapped himself about his foe in a python's grip. The space monster felt his body being crushed from without by the grip and burned from within by yet more venom.
King Ghidorah loosed a current of electricity through his skin and that managed to loosen the son of Manda enough for him to pry off with his heads. Quicker than lightning, he wheeled about to clamp Super Apophis between his two club tails and tossed him aside like a rag doll. Super Apophis was sent flying and was about to fall onto a pile of rubble than had been a hospital when he slowed down and stopped himself in midair. Wincing in pain from the bleeding, gore oozing sores in his sides dealt from King Ghidorah's clubs, he nonetheless steeled himself for another assault.
"This is Connie Matsu, live on the scene!" screamed the reporter over the sound of helicopter propellers. Barely audible, she narrated what her cameraman filmed as she leaned out from the helicopter door. "As you can all see, King Ghidorah and Super Apophis are engaged in a battle to the death amidst the flaming field of rubble, that mere hours ago, was Cairo, Egypt." Indeed, people watching the broadcast from United World Television News' Godzilla Watch Network could see the two monsters make war below the reporter's helicopter. The people at home saw the two monsters firing energy blasts at one another or striking with fang and claw. "The battle has gone on for hours now with no decisive victor in sight. Strangely enough, it is this reporter's sincere hope, indeed Commander Ahmed's hope, that Apophis win."
Connie Matsu bit her lower lip and brushed her short hair from her face. "At the moment, King Ghidorah, weakened from all his earlier battles, is reeling from Super Apophis assault. However, we have seen the space monster seemingly on the brink of defeat before only to see him attack more fiercely and claim victory. If in the event that the space demon should win, Commander Ahmed's forces stand ready to continue where their former foe left off." Matsu turned back towards the inside of the cramped helicopter to face the camera.
"This has become an increasingly common sight around the world. Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, all God's children join hands and work together. Even if for no other reason than that they want to live, enemies become allies and old grievances are forgotten. United for one goal, all men stand together against a common enemy.
"So please, if you hear this, stand ready together and protect one another. There have already been too many cases of global riots and chaos and the breakdown of all order. The fears and hatreds that cause this madness are just what King Ghidorah wants and we cannot let him have them. We must band together and join as friends. Only by putting aside our petty differences and joining as one people, as one planet, can we hope to beat King Ghidorah and win the Monster Wars."
Super Apophis crashed to the ground and saw a looming shadow above him. He just barely managed to dodge King Ghidorah's talons in time yet he still felt the force when his foe's talons struck the rubble next to him. The son of Manda then snapped his whole body like a whip to trip his foe. Unwilling to be felled again, King Ghidorah leapt up to dodge and then fell down to rake his talons across the serpent's body. Gritting himself through the pain, Super Apophis struck upwards and plunged his fangs into the space demon's thigh to deal his venom.
Intolerable! The Prince of Skyllans would have no more! If the wrymling wanted venom he would have venom! With that rage, King Ghidorah cast his heads onto his foe's neck and clamped his burning teeth onto the serpent lord's neck an in attempt to pry him off. Super Apophis wouldn't budge and braced himself through the pain of the demon's Taint as it withered his flesh. King Ghidorah would tolerate no such things and ripped the son of Manda from his thigh with a piece of thigh still in his mouth. The force of it tore Super Apophis's fangs out; he was in agony for that and for the acid blood that washed over his face for it.
King Ghidorah then reclamped his jaws along the length of Super Apophis's body and plunged his own needle teeth straight to the bone. The serpent lord was in pain as his head smoked and his skin was pierced. The son of Manda then wriggled like a fish on a hook as he felt his strength sucked out and necrotic corruption seep in. King Ghidorah then raised his necks high with Super Apophis on them, as high as his 150 meters could go, and he brought them crashing down. He rose his necks up and brought them and Super Apophis crashing down.
Again and again the Earth was made to shake until Connie Matsu thought that the ground would be purple with a bruise. This was her last thought before she was made to leave by Mubarak 's orders. Yet, as her helicopter pilot took her away, she never knew how fortunate she had been. Even if she had survived what happened next, if she were to have stayed any longer, she would have either gone mad in a few months from the Fear or would have been sickened and died from the Taint.
One last time was the serpent lord brought crashing down; then that was it. King Ghidorah had pounded his foe into submission long enough and it was time to end it. Pinning Super Apophis to the ground with his feet and ignoring the burns from the serpent lord's energy wings, King Ghidorah brought his heads together and had them come to the middle of his enemy's back. The son of Manda then writhed in agony and wailed the banshee wail of things long dead at the bloody pain caused by having his very spine torn out from his body. The Prince of Skyllans wrenched it out with gore splattering all over him, wrenched it out past the shredded skin, and wrenched it out past the mutilated flesh. King Ghidorah had torn Super Apophis's spinal cord out of the body, and was dripping scarlet across both all the while. The three-headed monster pulled and tore with all three heads until with a wet sickening sound the spinal cord finally snapped.
Super Apophis screamed and thrashed like an epileptic in a mad seizure, blood sprayed out and the ground trembled. Yet this was only for one moment. When that moment was past, the son of Manda went limp for he was no more. The golden glow left him and the energy wings disappeared. After so many battles, Egypt's last defender was dead.
Yet this was not enough for King Ghidorah.
King Ghidorah reversed the polarity of his Gravity Beams and ever so slowly levitated Apophis into the air. He then kept using the Beams from his outer heads to suspend the mutilated corpse of the serpent while the central head reverted to its function of augmenting gravitational forces. The central head's beam would have to be applied ever so gently and it would take several hours to achieve the desired effect. What effect would that be? That effect would be a most gruesome one. King Ghidorah had sensed from the first that Super Apophis's energy signature as one similar to that of a star and that struck him as most interesting. This was why.
When the Archao Space Hunters created King Ghidorah all those millions of years ago, they programmed him with a great deal of information to make him totally self sufficient and thus more efficient a killer. Part of that information was the evolution of stars. When a star dies it will often fold in on itself and implode by its own gravitational force. So, by logical extension, if intense gravitational force were to be applied to Apophis who had absorbed a miniature star into himself…
"Done."
"And not a moment too soon," retorted Anwar Mubarak. He looked across the laboratory towards the scientist that had said that. "Are you sure that it is ready? Are you sure that it will work."
"Yes, sir." The Egyptian scientist looked up from his computer station. "I would stake my life on it."
"We all are." With that, the viceroy of Apophis looked down from the raised platform he was on to those gathered around. "Well men, this is it. This is how it's all going to end. I was once a soldier in the Egyptian army and placed all my faith in it. Thus when Egypt lost the war I was without purpose, without reason for being. Yet when I found Lord Apophis, I found a new faith, and it was faith in the serpent lord. He promised a world free from worry and responsibility. He gave us everything we have yet now his sweet kingdom is at an end. It is because the master is dying and without Apophis, there is no Egypt.
"Despite all out efforts, despite our best warriors—both human and monster—, we have failed. King Ghidorah has won. Yet this is but one battle of the Monster Wars, the Monster Wars that can still be won in Earth's favor. And they will be won, for all who would defy Lord Apophis must die, if not by his hand than by another. We were unable to ready this final weapon in time to aid the master and his other servants. Yet it will still be used for if the master's kingdom cannot be saved, then it will at least be avenged."
The lab they were in was rather identical to the one where they had held Ra. Yet what was held there was a far greater secret than what had been held in the Pyramid of Apophis. Here was none other than the sleeping form of Apophis's own brother: Quetzalcoatl. The men and women remembered their leader's words and looked to their feet. The ten-foot thick glass that they stood on covered the gigantic one hundred-foot wide and deep pit Quetzalcoatl was in. Though the glass obscured the winged serpent's features, none could say he was not Apophis's brother. That the two were enemies, it was true, but blood connected them and each would have revenge for the other.
Or so it was hoped. All that Mubarak knew was that the stasis chamber holding Quetzalcoatl would open if Apophis died. Perhaps the youngest son of Manda so hated the eldest that he would be glad that his brother was dead. But no, Mubarak knew that that would never happen; one brother would not leave the other unavenged. Thus there was only one thing left to do.
"My fellow servants of Apophis, our master will soon die and we have no purpose in life other than serving him. So then, if that purpose is lost to us, what reason do we have left to go on living? None. Thus my fellow servants hear my words and know my actions. Let us do one last act of service to our beloved master."
Having said that, Anwar Mubarak, alleged dictator of Egypt, leader of armies, and most loyal of slaves to the serpent lord took a vial of his venom from his coat. He held it out before him for all to see. The men and women who had served Apophis alongside him and who had sought to make the last weapon of vengeance for their master held out their vials of venom as well. Mubarak smiled. "DIE FOR APOPHIS!" he screamed and with that drank the venom of son of Manda.
The others drank their poison as well and screamed "DIE FOR APOPHIS!"
By this time, King Ghidorah had been applying Gravity Beams to the levitated Apophis for hours and said monster was now a twisted into a crushed bloody ball of ground meat. The son of Manda was now totally unrecognizable; his skin had exploded underneath the stress to reveal the flesh within. Yet a golden glow came from within him and it increased as the intensity of the Gravity beams did. It grew brighter and brighter until it finally exploded.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. In a matter of seconds, the stellar energies of Ra inside Apophis went nova and brought forth a nuclear explosion the likes of which had not been seen since time began. The resultant holocaust was as if the sun had come to Earth, and it had, it had. Every home, every hospital, every building was atomized by a destructive force the likes of which even man, in all his destructive genius, had never equaled. The effect was nothing less than complete and utter devastation.
The people of the world had been frightened when a bomb fifty times that of Hiroshima nearly struck Tokyo in the year 1985? The explosion that rocked Egypt was a thousand times that of that first murderous weapon. There were none to see though, but if there had been they would have been blinded ten miles away from the searing light. The mushroom cloud, however, could have safely been seen from a far enough distance. Though God knew that that distance extended to space and that many a satellite was shorted out by the sheer glare. Thus, all Egypt and its entire ecosystem were instantaneously shattered forever and all the millions who dwelled therein… died.
Egypt was not the only one to feel it. Seismologists from across the Philippines recorded it as an earthquake at ten on the Richter scale, an earthquake felt across the world. In Saudi Arabia, buildings across the capital of Riyadh trembled and fell. Turkey and Greece were inundated by tsunamis generated by the explosion. From eastern Libya to the Sinai, the firestorm came in a wave that incinerated all it touched for hundreds of miles around. Across the globe, the fall out fell like gray poisoned snow and the Middle East, already dying from the radiation, wouldn't see the sun shine for ten years.
Then at last it was done.
Back in what had once been Egypt, the explosion had turned the rubble-strewn ground of the blast site into a smooth crater of glass with shadows burned into the glass as the only indicator that anything had ever been. All that, not to mention that there was radiation to poison the land for a hundred years sixty miles in all directions. Everything was silent amidst the dust choked, hazy, grayness, everything save for the soft sound of a mourning wind. All was calm. The glassy ground seemed utterly unblemished, especially at Ground Zero.
But then it cracked. The glass cracked and was pushed upwards by something from below. Amidst the seemingly endless area made perfectly smooth by the blast wave, this was nothing, just an infinitesimal speck. In fact, it was the world's worst nightmare still alive and still ready to make the Earth bleed.
The ground had been made smooth as glass and breaking from beneath that glass was King Ghidorah. He had survived; he always survived. He pulled himself up and stood in the state of seeming nothingness, yet he was not King Ghidorah as so many knew him. His face was even more hideous than before and seemed even more dangerous. His crown of horns was replaced by just two backward curving horns on each head and strange tufts of hair behind the horns. They were almost manes, much like that of Apophis.
This was no coincidence, for in the explosion King Ghidorah had absorbed much energy from Apophis's exploding form and in that some of his physical appearance. Not only that, but his powers as well. King Ghidorah had before been able to command the thoughts of others and induce Fear. With the mind control abilities stolen from the son of Manda, the Fear that King Ghidorah would be able to induce in others would truly have no equal, as would be the command of monsters.
Apophis had been a fool to oppose him as had been his father and his grandmother. With the land made desolation all knew it. King Ghidorah began to appreciate the powers he now had and would use them for the sake of beauty. Indeed, King Ghidorah saw beauty in the ruin he caused. Although the smoke and dust and fallout and debris in the air were still the likes that he couldn't see more than a few feet in front of himself, that in itself was enough to make demonic grins spread across his evil faces. The destruction, all of it, was so absolute, so all consuming, that it was beautiful.
Making gravity warp beneath him, King Ghidorah spread his wings and rose in a slow spiral from the ground. Cloaked in the dust and smoke and hellish heat like the Prince of Darkness, the Prince of Skyllans tilted his heads back and drank it all in. He was a true sadist, obtaining a perverse sexual satisfaction from the pain and death wrought by his hand. Yet this was but the beginning. King Ghidorah shot into the sky and was soon a speck in the air from ground zero where he had been. The rest of the Earth would soon join Egypt in ruin, for when King Ghidorah would be done… Earth… would… be damned!
Egypt was done. The world was next.