Diana was a tall, athletic-looking woman in her late thirties. Most of the men on the base had their eyes on her, but they all kept away thinking that she and Luke were having an affair. In reality, Luke and Diana were not romantically involved; they were simply good friends.
Despite the fact that Luke and Melissa had been together for over twenty years, he was still madly in love with his wife. Still, Diana didn’t mind the soldiers thinking that she and Luke were involved. She was the type of woman who was into nerds with a sense of humor and if that kept the muscle-heads away from her, she was fine with that. She and Luke both thought it was funny that the perception that they were a couple kept the soldiers from approaching Diana or even asking Luke about their relationship out of fear of angering him.
While any soldier on the base was more than capable of kicking Luke’s ass, none of them would raise a finger against him with his connection to Chimera. Angering a former teacher by asking him if he was having an affair was one thing. Pissing off the guy who trained the monster that wrecked three different pantheons of gods was something else altogether. Luckily for Luke, Melissa was aware of the rumors and she laughed them off as well. Diana was as much her friend as she was Luke’s friend. Diana ate dinner over their house at least once a week where the three of them joked about what the men on the base must be thinking when they saw Diana go to Luke’s house only to see Melissa open the door and hug her.
Thinking of his friend and his wife caused Luke to laugh. Without even seeing her yet, Diana had managed to do what she did best: cause Luke to smile and help him to calm down. Luke sighed when he was done laughing and then he opened the door to Hangar Eighteen.
Luke stopped in his tracks when he saw both Parsons and Diana standing in the middle of the hangar with two thirty-foot-tall giants in front of them. One giant had bright red hair and he was wrapped in a long white toga. As Luke looked at the giant, he could see bright blue streaks of electricity dancing across his dark brown eyes. Luke had not seen Zeus since the day that Chimera scaled Mount Olympus and reduced the god’s throne room to rubble.
The second figure was much more robust than Zeus. He had wild white hair and a shaggy white beard. The giant wore a horned helmet on top of his head and his clothing was made up of something that resembled a bear’s skin. Most noticeably, the giant had a huge black eye patch draped over one of his eyes.
Luke immediately recognized the being that had captured his wife and threatened to kill her, if Luke did not convince Chimera to stand down while Thor disrupted the planet’s electromagnetic field. Thor’s actions would have let magnetic waves from the sun cascade down onto Earth, effectively shutting down all of the technology that humans had come to rely on. With a shutdown of power on a worldwide scale, billions of people would have died in only a few short years.
Luke was seething with anger as he looked at Odin and Zeus. He was reacting on emotion rather than intellect as he lifted his megaphone to call Chimera.
Diana saw what Luke was doing and she shouted, “Luke, no!”
As much as Luke respected General Sam Parsons, had he told Luke to stop, he would still have called Chimera. Luke wasn’t a soldier. He was teacher and before that, he was a husband and a father. His first thought was to protect his family. It was only the voice of his best friend that was able to stop him.
Luke was still glaring at both of the gods as he addressed Diana, “Chimera is right outside of this facility, and he smelled something he didn’t like. Tell me as quickly as possible why I should not call him in here to tear these things apart before they start attacking us.”
Odin voice boomed throughout the hangar. “Mortal, had we wished to attack this pathetic facility, you would all have been dead before you even had the opportunity to call upon your behemoth!”
Showing no fear of the beings that possessed the ability to destroy entire cities on a whim, Diana chastised the god king. “You came to us for help! Let me talk to Luke and try to call him down.” She looked over toward Luke. “Besides even if you were to do anything, Luke already said that Chimera knows you are here. If Luke was to be hurt or killed, do you really think Chimera would need to be told who to go after for revenge?” Diana shifted her gaze back toward Odin and she smiled. “You know, for someone the Santa Claus myth is based on, you are not very jolly.” With her quick verbal jab complete, she went over to her friend.
Odin didn’t reply. He simply turned away from Diana as she walked over toward Luke. She took her friend by the hand and said, “I know that you feel the need to protect Melissa and the kids. I don’t think they are in danger from Odin or Zeus this time, but something worse is going on. Something that could threaten every living thing on the planet and we are going to need the gods’ help to stop it.”
Luke shook his head as he misplaced his anger by screaming at Diana, “Their help? They are the ones that tried to kill us all in the first place! Why should they care if the human race is in danger again? I would have thought our extinction was something they would have jumped for joy over! It was only two years ago that they tried to wipe us out! They also kidnapped and impregnated all of those women only to let their damn nymphs run off with them!”
Diana placed her hand on Luke’s shoulder. “The extinction of the human race would be something they want, but the death of the entire planet is another thing.” She leaned in closer to her friend. “Remember what Odin told us? Remember what we have been training for? The coming of something older and darker than the gods. It’s happening right now. A wave of kaiju have attacked the planet. We can absolutely confirm that. We were just starting to plan our counter-offensive when Odin and Zeus suddenly showed up inside the hangar. They are claiming that we will have to work with them if we hope to prevent Armageddon.” Diana softened her voice even more. “For the sake of Melissa and the girls, try to listen to what they have to say.”
Luke nodded as deep down he realized that the best chance he had of protecting his family was to work with the same beings who had once endangered them. He hugged Diana and whispered into her ear, “If they try anything… If I even think they are planning to attack us or to hurt us in any way…”
Diana whispered back to him, “Then unleash Chimera on them and don’t call him off until he has torn those supposed gods to shreds.”
Luke let go of Diana and they looked into each other’s eyes. They both nodded and Luke whispered, “Thank you.” She smiled and then two of them turned around and started walking back to where Parsons and the two gods were standing. As Luke walked through the middle of the hangar, he could see armed guards all along the walls with rifles and larger weapons. He guessed that the larger weapons were rocket launchers, aimed at the two gods. He shook his head and said to Diana, “Good old Parsons. He is willing to listen to what they are saying, but he is not taking any chances, is he?”
Diana smiled. “You don’t make it as far in the military as Parsons has by leaving anything to chance. I like to think of him as our own personal Nick Fury. I think right now he is looking at the gods with the old enemy of my enemy is my friend idea.”
Diana walked past Parsons and the god kings toward the main computer screen in the center of the hangar. When she reached the main screen’s computer console, she turned and looked at Zeus and the electricity that was dancing around his body. “It would be extremely helpful if you could keep the electricity that you are giving off to a minimum so as not to accidentally send out an EMP that shuts down everything.”
Zeus first glared at Diana and then he turned his gaze toward Luke. “The monster he controls destroyed the pillars which helped me to regulate and recharge my electrical powers. I am forced to now slowly pull ambient static electricity from the environment. Absorbing energy in this way is not the most efficient manner nor is it conducive to me controlling my powers.”
Diana smirked. “Maybe you could just put yourself in a giant laundry dryer for a few hours; that would help you to build up a static charge pretty quickly.”
>
Zeus’ eyes flared up with power as General Parsons stepped toward Diana. “Ms. Cain, perhaps our time would be better focused on the monsters attacking the planet instead of on flippant remarks.”
Diana shrugged. “You’re the boss.” She then pulled up a monitor showing multiple cities with different monsters rampaging through them. She began explaining what was happening. “According to Zeus and Odin, we are now facing an attack from the beings that they warred with millennia ago for control of the Earth. While these beings have had many different names including the Titans, we can refer to them as the Dark Ones, which is the name that Zeus and Odin use to identify them. As you can see, multiple cities around the US and Africa are being attacked by mythological monsters or kaiju.” She looked Odin and Zeus. “When you attacked Earth, you primarily used your monsters to protect whatever it was you were using to try and wipe out humanity. Zeus, you used the Charybdis to try and kill humans by creating an energy vortex specifically focused on humans with the Scylla protecting it. Marduke sent the Colossus of Death to spread a plague and he sent Anzu to protect it. Conversely, these new monsters are being used as a primary method of attack by the beings who are controlling them.”
Luke jumped into the conversation. “Hey, that reminds me. If you guys are here, where are Marduke and his other gods?”
Odin shook his head. “The wrath of your monster was too great for the Mesopotamians. While Zeus escaped Chimera with his life and we formed a peace treaty, Marduke, Anzu, Asag, and numerous other gods from that pantheon were slain by Chimera. It is due to the loss of the Mesopotamians and the loss of our own monsters in the war with Chimera that we now turn to you for help. We currently lack the strength to defeat the Dark Ones ourselves. We need to work with you and your monster if there is any hope of the planet surviving this incursion.”
Luke nodded in reply as Diana briefly looked at the giant gods standing behind her. “If I am wrong in identifying any of these kaiju, please let me know.” She zoomed in on one section of the computer screen to show a huge crab-like creature with multiple tentacles writhing around its body laying waste to Boston. “The Kraken has risen from the Atlantic Ocean and he is attacking Boston. The monster has immense physical strength and its thick shell makes it extremely resilient to physical injury. The monster is roughly two hundred feet tall and three hundred feet wide. So far, military helicopters have been bombarding the creature with no indication that they are injuring it or even slowing it down.”
She then moved the focus of the screen to lower right section and she zoomed in on some kind of maelstrom of arms, legs, hands, and heads that was attacking a city and seemed to be scooping people up as it came across them. “Baltimore is under attack by the Hecatonchires. A creature with fifty heads and a hundred arms. The monster stands at roughly two hundred and seventy feet tall. Aside from its size and strength, the creature has the ability to create tsunamis by thrashing its arms when it’s in the water and tornadoes by thrashing its arms when it is on land. The Hecatonchires also appears to be eating people as it comes across them.”
Luke asked, “Does anyone else’s head hurt when you look at thing?”
Zeus replied, “The human mind and eye is not equipped to behold the movements of a creature with so many limbs. To stare at such as the Hecatonchires is disorienting to some humans and in others it can cause madness.”
Diana shrugged. “Kind of like what Lovecraft wrote about looking at Cthulhu and his writhing tentacles. I wonder if the Hecatonchires is what inspired that part of his mythos.” Diana saw Parsons staring at her and she quickly refocused on what she was doing. She zoomed into the upper-left quadrant of the screen to show an immense giant that was towering over the buildings he was crushing with his bare feet.
As he was processing the scale of the giant he was looking at, Luke gasped. “My God, that thing has got to be at least three times bigger than Chimera!”
Diana shook her head. “Try more like over four times larger than Chimera. This is Atlas, the titan that was once cursed to hold up the sky. He stands at slightly over one thousand feet tall. He obviously has tremendous physical strength. With his size and power, he was able to destroy the entire the entire city of Dallas in less than half an hour. These images are from a half hour ago so that we have something to scale him with. The monster is currently making his way across the desert. I have no idea how at that height he has not been crushed under his own body weight or passed out from the thin air that he must be breathing.”
Odin said, “The ways of gods and titans are beyond your mortal understanding.”
Diana looked back at the screen and zoomed in on the images on the top right-hand corner of the display. She sighed. “This kaiju that appeared in Africa is the one that I can’t figure out. The kaiju does not fit the description of any mythological creature that I can find. It stands at just under two hundred feet tall at the shoulder. The monster looks like some kind of a giant theropod dinosaur with notable differences from a theropod aside from its size. The kaiju has long powerful arms and claws that look much stronger and more functional than a typical theropod’s more or less useless arms. The creature also appears to have a protective caprice on its back, again a trait not associated with theropods.” She shook her head in disbelief as she explained the final aspect of the strange creature. “The most amazing aspect of this creature is that the kaiju has been reported to unleash some sort of dome of energy from its body that is highly radioactive. With a single pulse from this attack, the monster destroyed an entire Egyptian defense battalion.” She looked toward Zeus and Odin. “Is this monster one of your monsters, that humans never recorded in mythology?”
Odin waved his hand in front of him, creating what looked like a shimmering distortion in the air. In the center of the distortion was the image of a devastated landscape. Odin looked at the humans. “This Earth is but one of many Earths. We gods can exist in the planes between these many Earths. In our plane of existence, we are able to draw the life energy that we need to sustain ourselves from these Earths. We are able to do this by the absorbing ambient energy that life gives off as it grows and reproduces. The Dark Ones that you know as titans access life energy in a different manner than we do. They require the consumption of life in order to draw energy from it. Both the Dark Ones and our kind evolved on the same Earth. It was an Earth that was much older than yours. We were sustaining ourselves off the ambient life energy of the planet while the Dark Ones were consuming it.”
Odin stopped talking for a brief moment as he could see that the humans he was talking to were having difficulty understanding the concept he was explaining to them. “Perhaps if you correlate the Dark Ones and us to the plants and animals that are on your Earth. The plants take energy directly from the sun to sustain themselves while the animals such as yourselves must consume life that has already processed this energy in order to utilize it.” Parsons, Luke, and Diana all nodded, signifying that they understood the analogy Odin had made.
Satisfied that the humans were following him, Odin continued on with his explanation. “We fought to drive the Dark Ones from our Earth in order to preserve it and sadly at first, we were defeated. We were forced to travel the multiverse, gathering the life energy from other Earths. We used this energy to increase our own power. In our travels, we encountered Earths where the creatures that you refer to as monsters or kaiju had developed. Much as you were able to train the beast you call Chimera, so too were we able to train these monsters to do our bidding. With these monsters under our command, we were able to attack and defeat the Dark Ones. The Dark Ones went into hiding and we placed the monsters that we had trained on different Earths at early points in each planet’s development. While you humans would see these monsters as threats to local populations of your kind, in truth, they were placed here to dissuade the Dark Ones from attacking each planet. Had the Dark Ones attacked an Earth that our creatures were on, they would have risen up, not in defense of you humans, but rather the planet
itself.”
Odin switched the view in the distortion he had created to show some of the creatures that Chimera had slain such as the Scylla and Cerberus. “As the human population on a given Earth evolved and increased the power and technology of their weapons to the point where we felt that they could at least fight back against the Dark Ones long enough that we became aware of the attack, we would move our monsters to a less-developed Earth that was in need of protection. This removal of our guardian beasts is what led to them being regarded as legend and myth as the generations passed.
“In that time that has passed, the Dark Ones’ power has slowly grown as Earths have died a natural death, or they have been killed by the human populations that had grown there. In that time, the Dark Ones also followed our example by traveling to different Earths, capturing monsters, and training them.”
The distortion began to show more versions of Earth that were devoid of life. “We knew that with each dying Earth, the Dark Ones’ power grew. When we suspected that their power was starting to rival our own, we decided to act and to prevent more Earth’s from dying and increasing their power. Across many Earths, you humans have caused the death of your planet through its misuse. As such, we destroyed your race on several Earths before coming here where our efforts were rebuffed by Chimera, a monster far more powerful than any beast we have encountered thus far.”
General Parsons gestured toward the screen. “Thank you for that backstory, but lives are being lost from these attacks as we sit here and talk about it. I assume that the loss of human lives also makes the Dark Ones more powerful? Can you explain to us what that dinosaur monster is?”
Odin shifted the distortion, showing a variety of giant monsters battling. Parsons, Luke, and Diana saw huge cybernetic birds fighting what looked like a giant Sasquatch. They saw a colossal lizard man, a Chinese dragon, and a massive polar bear with horns and a long spiked tail battling a gigantic black robot, and finally, they saw the saurian monster that was in Africa fighting a giant turtle. As the distortion settled on the saurian beast and the turtle, Odin said, “The appearance of giant monsters on multiple Earths has been increasing exponentially lately. Sometimes these creatures are created by you humans to battle each other, sometimes they are created to protect your species from interplanetary threats, and sometimes they occur by mistake. The creature you now behold is the result of the latter method of creation. On his Earth, the beast is known as Atomic Rex. Atomic Rex was the bringer of death to his planet. Humans on his Earth conducted nuclear experiments on an island that still held what you would call dinosaurs. Many of these dinosaurs would change into kaiju when they were exposed to this power. The monsters would leave their island and lay waste to their planet not only through physical attack but by spreading the deadly power that emanated from their bodies to the planet itself. This power would either change or kill all that it came into contact with.”
Atomic Rex_The Conquest of Chimera Page 5
