Chapter Thirteen
In New Mexico, King Ghidorah had made landfall and was already decimating the ranks of the Swarm. Wave after wave of insects was sent against him but, despite their most valiant efforts, they were all destroyed. Some were splattered underneath his heel, and some were exploded by his Gravity Beams, and some were electrocuted by his Crimson Lightning. They crawled over him like maggots to bite and tear with no heed to their own lives. The battle was a huge blur with King Ghidorah seemingly everywhere at once, biting and blasting and clawing. With his Fear driving his foes into madness and destroying all semblance of order, it was all too easy to pick them apart like the maggots they literally were.
That was when he caught sight of them, the first true challenge to be faced on this field of battle; on catching sight of them, the Prince of Skyllans tore this way and that to throw his captors away from him. Then with a mighty leap he launched himself skywards to see his attackers for himself. From far away he beheld the buzzing swarm of hundreds of giant house sized hornets. Savage and cruel, they were armed to the teeth and were ready to deal death from above. King Ghidorah welcomed the sight of the proud and foolhardy flying to their doom yet he felt his mind drift back to when he battled the minions of Apophis in the land of Egypt. Then as before, the skyllan's cancerous mind sensed that another intelligence was directing his foes in their ways of battle. He would slaughter the flying monsters to see for himself just how this intelligence that guided them operated.
The colossal hornets moved in aggressively and began to rapidly fire hundreds of their stingers like bullets from a machine gun. King Ghidorah wasn't nearly fast enough to dodge it and was hit over and over by the unending fire. Working like armor piercing missiles, they imbedded themselves deeply and exploded inside the demon's flesh to release their payload of acid. Enraged, King Ghidorah let his hate give him strength and fired his Gravity Beams at his foes yet they were too quick and dodged the second they saw him demon his necks to aim. They regrouped and began to fly around him in a holding pattern, firing their stingers all the while.
King Ghidorah bit this way and that, firing with his Gravity Beams again and again but his foes were too many to be all destroyed and too small, relatively, to be fired upon. Everywhere the hornets flew firing their weapons everywhere they could yet they did not touch him. Their foe did not know it but Inagos' scouts had seen those who'd perished by the demon's necrotic touch. They were careful to fight from a distance.
They did that because they knew their foe and for it, no matter how many hornets King Ghidorah was lucky enough to destroy there were still hundreds more. The skyllan's shield could only guard against energy assaults while his regenerative abilities were quickly being taxed to the limit. There seemed nothing he could do. Was this the end for the demon, was it all over? Far from it.
King Ghidorah simultaneously released a scatter shot burst of Crimson Lightning and electrified his skin. Those that had been firing their stingers pointblank were close enough to be electrocuted while those from far off reeled in pain and fell to earth. Those among the hornets that survived were stubborn and yet remained; such foolhardiness was to be their downfall because even as they turned around for another assault, King Ghidorah beat his wings and made a hurricane force wind to blow them away. While the hornets were blown hither and yon the Prince of Skyllans opened his maws and from all three shot out balls of fire that quickly incinerated them into so much ash.
The ash drifted to the ground in lazy black swirls soon enough and those that opposed him were dead. With the powers he had stolen from Apophis he had seen their thoughts and knew where their master was; he need only fly there and destroy the leader. It was not to be the African battles once more for these would end quickly though the deaths would be just as painful.
As King Ghidorah shot through the skies like a lightning bolt, another though surged through him. While invading the minds of his foes as they died, he had found someone who hated the leader and who would seek him destroyed. With her on his side, victory would be assured. Her name? Shiigan.
Don and Lisa were in New Orleans's Jackson Square, taking in the sights. Though they'd wanted to visit the place for years, this was their first visit to the famous city. They'd already eaten the crawdads and cornbread and other southern foods. They'd taken in the sights that had no mention of slavery and instead mentioned how humble slaves were greatful for the protection of brave gray clad soldiers in the War Between the States. It had all been quite interesting. Now the pair was content to just walk along and take pictures of the beautiful Spanish buildings of the French Quarter.
The pair was admiring the lacy iron grillwork, looking at the trolleys, and listening to the jazz. It was a breathtaking mixture of old and new and they loved it. Lisa especially liked the vacation; it was a relief from all the privations that she and her husband had had to endure since the Monster Wars came to the US. It was becoming harder every day to imagine that America was the land of plenty with how she and Don had had to put up with powdered milk and canned foods for weeks. They had to put up with that and with the gas rationing, and the meat rationing, and the sugar rationing, (water rationing too in their home state of California since King Ghidorah had destroyed the Shasta and Hoover Dams.) There was also the scrap metal collecting, and the growing of Victory Gardens, not to mention how hard it had been just to go anywhere since martial law had been imposed—sure took Emmerich long enough to get things n gear.
As she walked, Lisa grimly mused that this had to have been how folks on the American home front felt during World War II. That or more accurately the British home front because it hadn't been the US fighting a war for survival that time. It was strange comparing the Monster Wars to "the Big One." Back then, America sought to avenge how it was "suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan," and to free the tens of millions enslaved by the swastika.
Back then, the US had wanted to defeat Japan for its treachery and the Nazis for their evil but that wasn't the case now. King Ghidorah was just some mindless monster; that he had to be stopped was true but wanting to punish him was as pointless as wanting to punish a hurricane for the damage it causes (or so they thought). There was neither righteous wrath that sought to vanquish evil nor any desire to fight outside mere survival. It was really quite pitiful and was in no way helped by how the current president was no Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Reflecting on the national, nay, global crisis, Lisa almost felt guilty that she and her husband could be enjoying themselves while there was so much suffering all around them. She walked past a shop and saw in the window a silver star; it showed that someone dear to the shop owner was serving in the armed forces. It was next to a gold star and that showed that someone dear to that family had died. On seeing it, Lisa was reminded just how much pain there was. Her friend at work had just lost an uncle to King Ghidorah, how long would it be before she lost someone too?
That was when they saw the Le Petit Theater and Don knew he just had to take a picture of it. When he checked the camera, however, he saw that it had run out of film.
Don turned to his wife and asked, "Honey, do you have any more film?"
For a minute, Lisa just looked at her husband in shock at his seeming shallowness. After a while, she just sighed in resignation. "Yeah, I think I do." Stopping in the sidewalk, she removed her backpack and begun rummaging through it, disregarding the crowd that milled about them. She checked this way and that and finally found the roll she had been looking for.
Lisa gave it to her husband and said "Don, I think that was our last one. After this we should go to that store we passed a while back and get some more."
She was about to say that she saw a store just up ahead when she was cut off by a sound truck that drove past them on the cobblestone streets. They heard it blare out the same words repeatedly. "ATTENETION, ATTENTION, THE US BATTLESHIP MONTANA SIGHTED GODZILLA JUST MOMENTS AGO HEADED TOWARDS THE GULF COAST OF THE UNITED STATES. HE WILL ARRIVE IN NEW ORLEANS IN A MATTER OF HOURS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. YOU MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY."
Stunned at this, Don and Lisa looked at each other. They continued listening to the sound truck and were told to go to designated areas where they would be taken to safety. Everyone that heard was afraid and many people began running wherever they could. Lisa asked her husband, "Honey, you don't really think that… that… THING is coming here, do you?"
He shook his head. "I heard about this on the radio this morning. It was said that Godzilla might come here. Might. They said he could pop up here or in Florida or maybe not at all. Forget about it Lisa. I bet you that in two seconds they'll cal it off and say that he's not coming at all. Heck, the odds of it coming here are a thousand to—"
Fate having been sufficiently dared, everyone, Don and Lisa included, froze at the tremendous roar that shook the entire city. It was a feral gong like roar so loud that people's ears hurt and even bled. The roar shook the city again, louder and longer this time. Most everyone in Jackson Square turned southeast to where they heard the roar. They all turned less than a quarter of a mile towards the mighty Mississippi River that flowed through the city of New Orleans and saw a black mountain of flesh and bone arise from the brown muddy waters.
Her face a grimace of fear and anger, Lisa struck her husband's shoulder. "Darn it Don, you jinxed this!"
In the Swarm Hive, the mantis monster Shiigan was taking the grub daughter of Inagos through the dark, dirty, subterranean tunnels under the Hive. A horrible monster had been seen and it seemed determined to wage total war against the whole of the Swarm and even from that deep, the ground shook from the demon's onslaught. For that, Inagos had instructed his heir to be taken to safety in the vast tunnels under the ground where the egg laying insect queens were as well.
Now she was doing just that, taking little Meganulon to safety. Yet as Shiigan crouched low to the ground and held the pulpy squirming grub between her scythes, she imagined how easy it would be to just kill her. Even now, the one time ruler of the Kamakuras still hated Inagos for the defeat she suffered and vainly plotted against him. That was when she stopped and realized why not?
Shiigan stopped and for the first time realized that he had come. It was the destroyer of worlds whom she had felt; it was the three-headed monster. Though she didn't know it, King Ghidorah's wicked, cancerous thoughts were polluting her mind and making her think the very darkest thoughts that it could. With this madness, she knew at that moment, who needed Inagos! With great and terrible callousness, Shiigan lifted the squirming grub up above her head and threw it to the ground. Whatever the species, babies are babies and the child screamed and wept at this.
Though weak and crippled by the beatings she received daily from the Locust King, Shiigan should have the power to kill a baby. She raised her broken scythe hand and tried to strike Meganulon but the baby squirmed away. The brutal scene repeated itself again and again yet the maggot child child fearfully squirmed away each time. Soon enough, the babe could do no more and the cripple would slay it. The exhausted Meganulon could move no more and she saw Shiigan raise her scythe for the final blow; it was all over. She looked to the squirming thing and remembered its mother that defied her in the past. She would punish the daughter for the sins of the mother and—!
That was when she knew she couldn't. It wasn't that she felt any pangs of remorse at the idea but it was that Shiigan felt the voice saying that the child was unimportant. There were more important things to do. Hurling one last snarl at baby Meganulon, Shiigan strode off to meet her destiny.
As for Godzilla at that moment, he strode back and forth past the Spanish buildings of the French Quarter, casually destroying them with each step. With each movement of his body, more and more priceless buildings that recorded the history of the ages became one with the ages. The Presbytre, once a famous courthouse; the Cabildo which one time was the seat of Spanish power; and the Le Petit Theater (which Don had so wanted to take a picture of) were all stamped flat. That the King of the Monsters meant no malice in the destruction he caused, that "it wasn't personal," was small consolation to the terrified and panicked people that called the city home and had revered those buildings. But what was going to happen next was indeed something to offer consolation or at least it would have been if not for what happened right after it.
Already out of the French Quarter, Godzilla looked to the vast megalopolis in which he was and saw that his foe was not there but to the west. The King of the Monsters had no quarrel with these humans; he would leave them be. After all, he had bigger to fish to obliterate from existence. So with that thought he turned back towards the Mississippi River. He would take the vast waterway west until it curved back and took him into the Gulf again; from there he would go until he made landfall where it ended.
But just as he turned his back to face the water, he felt something blast him from behind. In shock more than anything else, Godzilla looked back and saw a gleaming, metal giant come to do battle. It was one of the humans' robots and was piloted by humans and was ready to fight. Godzilla could see that it would be the first human shaped giant robot that he had had to face since Angela those years ago and that it was of an entirely different style. As its wings retracted into its gray metal legs and it lowered itself to the ground in a standing position the King of the Monsters was able to truly appreciate the difference of style.
Its silver and blue trim body was made up entirely of edges and corners and was box shaped more than anything else. On its back was a buzz saw like thing and there was a tail next to the legs. Its impossibly stubby, massive legs were placed atop tank treads and the upper body was small in comparison. As for the upper body, the arms ended in cone shaped weapon pods and the narrow pinhead sported a drill nose reminiscent of the machine's Mysterian namesake. The name of the machine was MOGUERA—Mobile Operations Godzilla Universal Expert Robot Aerotype.
Never one to shrink from battle, Godzilla saw his foe and knew the battle was on. He lowered his head and charged the steel colossus in a head but to knock it down but was sent flying backwards by the fire from the Plasma Laser Guns situated in the robots eyes. From his place on the ground, the saurian immediately moved his head and fired his Atomic Ray but the MOGUERA lifted its arms and used them to block. Godzilla scrambled upwards and let his silver spines glow fiercely as he loosed his stronger Red Spiral Ray, which struck home on the robot.
Inside said robot, the crew endured the lurching of the machine and the shower of sparks that rained down. Lieutenant Santos checked his screen and sighed in relief as he saw that mechanical integrity still held. "We're still good to go men. Tactical attack C-13!"
Glen and Fuji nodded in unison. "Right!"
As per their orders, Glen made the robot go full speed ahead on tanks treads even as Fuji fired the chest mounted Plasma Laser Cannon. It struck the King of the Monsters with full force and left his hide blistered and peeled yet even as that happened he dropped to the ground to do a sweeping tail whip. Glen saw this and had MOGUERA leap up and stomp down on the beast's tail. Infuriated at the pain of that and the PLC as it back shot him, Godzilla hurled his body forward and sent the machine sending backwards.
The robot suffered even more as the King of the Monsters clubbed it with his tail to break it apart like an egg. He would break this monument to man's hubris apart like the filth it was and show the no force men could bring against him could win! As the men inside cursed their luck, their commander ordered the deployment of Spiral Grenade Missiles and it was done. Godzilla howled in pain as the shells shot out from their weapon pods and drilled into his skin and exploded underneath but nonetheless picked up the MOGUERA by the neck and, after hoisting the machine over his head, hurled it in the direction of Louis Armstrong Park. There would be nothing there to get in the way of their battle and there would be no risk of innocents in danger there.
Making the Earth tremble as he did so, Godzilla went to where his enemy was and waited cautiously to see if the fight was over. The robot seemingly exploded upwards and the spread legs of the machine struck out in all directions as the lower body spun independently over the upper body which was on the ground on a handstand. Godzilla felt his blood drawn at this and by the time he countered MOGUERA was already on its feet, boxing with its weapon pods.
With her hair blowing wildly from the helicopter blades held above where she stuck out her head, Miki was there above the Park, watching the fight happen below. She was inside a UNGCC helicopter to record the battle as a military observer; as was often the case, Miki had been one of the only people brave enough—or crazy enough—to volunteer for it. At least a soldier has a gun to protect himself with! Not that her death was what worried Miki, far from it.
She bit her lip and kept focusing her camera on the battle. It was always difficult for her to see such violence; she knew that Godzilla had to be stopped but it pained every time her to see it done like this. There was Godzilla to whom both she and her grandfather owed their lives on the one side. Tomas Santos, her friend, and, very soon, Kyle Martin, the man whom she loved, were on the other.
As was always her prime directive, Miki had tried to reach Godzilla's mind and convince him to leave—God knew that he would have already done so of his own volition if those military idiots had just let him do so—but she had been unable to. That he listened to her was true, but when the bloodlust filled him, she could not stay his hand. He had blocked her out and would not hear her voice; he would hear no voice save that of rage. Miki knew that when that happened there was only once choice left and that, if she truly loved him, it had to be taken. But if only there was some other way!
At least she could say in Godzilla's favor that he had taken the fight away from the city though who knew how long it would be contained there in the park. Suddenly, with her mind disconnected from the monster and shifted towards the city, she heard the scream and it was the psychic scream of thousands. Miki shifted her powers towards to the city and, horrified, mentally saw countless people running for their lives in mad panic. The city hadn't been evacuated; people were still there!
Miki gasped at this. One of the most difficult things in keeping a kaiju from destroying a city was how to do so without causing more destruction than the kaiju itself. Only in time of greatest need was military action taken, such as when the destruction was already so great that the city was forfeit or when it was seen that the monster would only go on to cause further damage if not stopped then and there. Considering that the survival of the world was at stake, the loss of a city thought to be evacuated was acceptable and in sending the robots of Steel Reign II to do battle in New Orleans, UNGCC had been promised by the US that it was just that, evacuated. However, Miki knew that it wasn't so and that she had to call this information in order to stop the carnage before it began.
That was when she heard the whine of engines in the distance and looked with her binoculars to where the sound came from; she saw that it was the other robots of Steel Reign II, Red Ronin and Cyber-Saur. With that Miki knew that it was already too late to stop it and knew that it was only going to get worse. Heaven help them all.