Ahead, he saw a black object hovering above the churning water, and recognized it as the Kuroga firing at the approaching Kaiju. Although it raised a lot of questions in his mind, since he had not ordered the fighter’s launch, he decided that answers could wait. Whoever was in there was an ally, and that was what mattered until the threat was resolved.
A horde of arrow-like reptilian heads atop serpentine necks broke the water’s surface like deadly harpoons reaching up for the onyx craft. One of them managed to clamp its jaws on the wing, but was not quite strong enough to overcome the upward pull of the rockets. The ship executed a barrel roll that lifted the serpent from the water and sent it hurtling through the air like a discarded tube sock.
Impressed, X made a mental note of the maneuver. Whoever was piloting the Kuroga was really good.
In the bay, beasts resembling especially large gharials pulled themselves ashore, guttural cries oozing from their unusually narrow jaws.
X flicked his wrists and caught his custom gun-swords in his hands.
He aimed and fired.
Richard watched in frightened awe from the shuttle as the Kaiju made landfall, but his concentration on the scene was broken by the hurried footsteps of General Tsujimori behind him. He turned, and watched as the old war vet stepped with clear determination out of the open hatch.
“What in the…?” Richard turned to Nancy, agog. “Does he have a parachute?!”
Nancy shook her head in the negative. “He doesn’t need one.”
Static filled the air again.
Lightning arced from General Tsujimori’s entire body, reaching up to the shuttle and out to the metal within the buildings around him. The jagged blue-white bolts twisted and crisscrossed, forming the vague shape of a net which slowed his descent. It required less energy than he had expended to pull himself up to the shuttle earlier. He was not defying gravity here, but rather resisting it just enough to avoid injury when he landed.
Tsujimori never knew if electromagnetism was meant to be part of his power set or an unexpected side effect, but at times like this, he was glad it was there. Secretly, he also liked the dramatic flair it gave him as he descended from the heavens like an avenging angel on wings of lightning, and this time, he had an audience to witness it.
He came down at an angle, his goal to land as close to the bay as possible. If he could deliver a powerful enough strike to the water and fry the brutes in the bay, the problem would be nearly solved. Even if he did not kill the beasts, he would likely hurt them enough to send them running.
That was the ironic trait which predators and bullies had in common. They could inflict pain on others for eternity, but rarely could they take it themselves.
X was already blasting away at the creatures that had made it onto the land, so Tsujimori altered his trajectory away from their fight. Meanwhile, the pilot of the Kuroga, whoever it was, kept the monsters still in the water occupied. Excellent. The General would be met with little resistance on that front.
Once he was close enough to the street, he cut the power surging through his body and allowed himself to drop the remainder of the short distance. Once more on solid ground, he marched toward the shore. Walking was an unfortunate necessity for the moment, as he had to build his energy back up before he could deliver his finishing move. He paid no heed to the few citizens who had yet to flee, and were now staring in awe at both him and the spectacle playing out in the bay.
Still one block from the shore, he stopped dead in his tracks as he felt the ground begin to tremble.
He knew this kind of quake. It was coming from right below the street, like it had been in the clearing outside of the city mere moments ago.
Tsujimori’s eyes widened in terror. “Oh, no…”
The street behind him burst open, and a veritable horde of dinosaurs erupted from the bowels of the Earth like lava.
The question of how and when the brutes had managed to dig tunnels beneath the city, though important, was not what immediately mattered. It was the nature of the attack itself that filled General Tsujimori with dread.
This was a coordinated attack from land and sea.
They were surrounded.
*****
Chakra whipped the Kuroga around as another set of jaws nearly closed on the wing. Though she had continued firing nonstop, the hail of bullets she rained down on them was not stopping the attack, or even slowing it down. They just kept coming, undeterred by the onslaught. On top of that, her ammunition was running low, so she would be defenseless soon.
Another Kaiju lunged straight for the cockpit, only to stop suddenly in midair as if it had gotten caught on something. Then it was pulled backwards faster than it had come, vanishing beneath the waves with a terrified expression on its face.
Chakra paused for a moment, confused by what had just happened.
She looked down through the Kuroga’s bubble cockpit at the water. One by one, she saw the Kaiju get yanked beneath the surface. In their place, a spreading plume of dark red tainted the sea until it filled her entire field of vision.
There was a mighty surge as something moved beneath the waves towards the city.
Something much larger than the beasts that had been attacking her.
The water parted for just an instant, revealing a pair of knifelike blades and rows of spines slicing through the surface.
A wide smile spread across her face, and her tail wagged excitedly, smacking against the back of her seat.
“It’s him,” she whispered in awe. “He’s here!”
Pandemonium reigned in the streets.
The shuttle had risen up to a height where the Kaiju could not reach them, but it was still close enough for Richard to see everything. X and the General were surrounded, fighting for their lives as prehistoric nightmares poured from the ruined street. He could not even begin to count how many dinosaurs had emerged from the newly-formed crater, nor could he begin to identify all the different species on display.
Yet something about this turn of events scratched at his brain, for it made no sense to him. If the Kaiju were so bent on destroying cities, as Nancy had told him, why had they bypassed most of Fukuoka, getting to this point so close to the bay without causing any destruction along the way?
Unless…
The thought was one that he nearly dismissed as too absurd to believe, even for him, but that was only because he regarded reptiles as dumb, brutish creatures incapable of complex thought. That was bias, and he had conditioned himself to never succumb to personal bias. In the presence of his idol, it would be especially ill advised.
He hazarded to voice his thought out loud. “They planned this, didn’t they?” he asked, still shocked by the very notion. “The dinosaurs planned an attack just so they could get X and the General. Right?”
“Impressive deduction,” Armitage nodded, which prompted a shout of victory in Richard’s mind. “And unfortunately true, from the looks of it. Unfortunately, the plan seems to be working. Even they might be overwhelmed by this many Kaiju at once.”
Richard bit his lip as it struck him just how high the stakes were. “God help them, then.”
As if on cue, a very low, yet eerily loud moan washed over the city. The entire world seemed to stop at the sound as everything and everyone froze in place. Even the raging battle below screeched to a halt, its participants turning towards the bay, where the sound had emanated from.
“Guys,” said Nancy, who was staring out of the opposite window towards the sea. Her voice had a tinge of anticipation in it. “You’ll want to see this.”
The water boiled with intense heat, then swelled as if rising to form a mountain. A thick mask of steam filled the air.
A large Plesiosaur attempted to drag itself out of the water in a blind panic, its diamond-shaped flippers scraping uselessly against the smooth concrete of the pier.
The cloud of steam parted, and the mountain of water fell, creating waves that crashed upon the shoreline with tremendous fury
.
And there he stood, burning bright red like a living pillar of magma.
He opened his mouth and roared. It was a terrible, primal sound. A cry from the very dawn of time itself. The call of a god made flesh.
At his cry, the air trembled, and windows all across the city of Fukuoka shattered into fine powder.
All who heard this horrible sound, whether human or Kaiju, knew in an instant just how tiny and pathetic they really were.
“Th-That…” Richard stammered as he beheld the arisen titan. “Not a dinosaur… It… It…”
“He, Richard,” Nancy corrected, even though she was every bit as amazed as him. She reached up to grab the cross which dangled from her necklace. “That one’s a ‘he’.
“And his name is Kozerah.”
CHAPTER 10
Nothing else in the whole world equaled the majesty of Kozerah. At least, that was what Richard thought as he watched the beast wade through the bay towards Fukuoka. He drank in every detail as the giant approached.
It – no, he; Nancy had said the beast was a “he” – was clearly reptilian, but he was most definitely not a dinosaur. His shimmering scaly skin was smooth and so red that he almost looked as though he were made of fire. His snout was long and pointed, more akin to a lizard or a snake than the dinosaurs below. A pair of long viper-like fangs hung from his upper jaw, and when coupled with the twin knifelike horns above his eyes, he almost looked demonic. Yellow armor plating covered the front of his torso, and as the shuttle orbited around him to a new angle, the short serrated spikes on his back came into view. These gradually gave way to a single row of needle-like quills that ran down the length of his long, sinewy tail, at the end of which was an array of curved spikes arranged like the petals of a deadly flower. His arms and legs were thin compared to the rest of him but looked surprisingly muscular in spite of this. Both of his large hands sported three long fingers and an opposable thumb, each capped with a sharp fishhook claw as black as night. The three-toed feet that rose from the bay were like Egyptian pyramids stamping themselves into the ground.
There were two details in particular that really impacted Richard. First was how incredibly massive Kozerah was. True, the other Kaiju he had seen were large, but Kozerah towered above them all. Judging by the buildings, he was at least two-hundred-and-fifty feet tall, maybe taller. It was difficult to wrap his head around, even as he was seeing it with his own eyes.
The second detail was how eerily human Kozerah looked in spite of his reptilian nature. His posture was completely upright, not hunched over like the dinosaurs, with his arms hanging at his sides, and the eyes….
The eyes…
Richard had seen plenty of lizards, snakes, and crocodiles over the course of his life, and he knew them to be dull creatures. To look into the black slits most lizards had for pupils revealed that very little was happening behind them. A lizard had no higher thoughts beyond seeking whatever it needed to survive.
But looking into Kozerah’s eyes, which were every bit as reptilian as the rest of him, Richard saw intelligence as plain as day, but it was not human intelligence. No, what he saw was a different kind of intelligence, the kind he could not even begin to comprehend, and likely never would.
It was this detail which filled Richard’s heart with fear for the whole human race.
From the corner of his eye, he saw X and General Tsujimori leave the battle, retreating deeper into the city.
“Where the heck are they going?” he asked, a bit shocked at the retreat. “What about that red thing? Aren’t they going to fight it?”
Nancy laughed as if she found the statement adorably naïve. “There’s no way either of them would stand a chance against Kozerah,” she said. “Even if they could, they’d never fight him anyway. Their job is just to run crowd control now.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because Kozerah’s not our enemy, Richard.” She pointed to the dinosaurs below. “He’s theirs.”
Kozerah bellowed a challenge at the horde before him. Just as all the demons in Hell knew God and trembled, so too did these creatures know and fear this mighty titan. If they were smart, they would leave the human settlement and not challenge him to a fight. Their brethren had tried that many times, even as recently as a few years ago, when Kozerah had descended from the sacred mountain, and it had not ended well for them.
Yet none of the Kaiju in the city fled. Instead, the horde responded by roaring back in unison, declaring their intention to fight. It seemed they thought their strength was in their numbers.
Kozerah grunted half in resignation, half in disappointment. Some creatures just never learned.
The ceratopsians in the horde charged, horns aimed low at Kozerah’s ankles, the intent to cripple him all too clear.
With the grace, but not the form, of a martial arts master, Kozerah spun on his feet. His mighty tail swung out, tearing up the pavement as it went, and caught the charging line in one blow, sweeping them into a nearby hotel as a broom may sweep away dust.
As he turned back again, he was caught off guard when the sauropods, who came the closest to equaling his tremendous stature, reared up and wrapped their long necks around his limbs and torso, binding him.
Kozerah was surprised at how effective the sauropods’ attack was. He struggled against them but could not move or break their hold. They had caught him in just the right way to make movement difficult.
Following close behind them, the tyrannosaurs leapt like panthers, clamping their jaws on him wherever they happened to land, their teeth sinking into his thick flesh, though no bite was quite deep enough to draw blood.
Kozerah closed his eyes and clenched his fists.
His red skin began to pulse with light, slowly at first, but growing quicker with each second.
The air around him rippled with intense heat.
One by one, the dinosaurs released their grips on him, smoke rising from their seared flesh as they pulled away.
Kozerah’s mouth twisted into something which, on a human face, might have been a triumphant smile. These creatures could only be a challenge to him for so long.
The wounded beasts began to retreat, only to be stopped when a web of lightning arced between the buildings, stopping them dead in their tracks. They turned for a different route through the city, only to recoil as a flying human draped in black peppered them with bullets. The combined attack kept the horde in Kozerah’s sights, forcing them into a close huddle.
It seemed to Kozerah that the humans had corralled the brutes into one place so he could finish them off in one blow.
Very well.
He felt the energy course through his veins as he channeled it where it needed to go. His horns flickered with light that grew steadily brighter and brighter.
He inhaled deeply.
When he exhaled, his breath was a brilliant stream of violet flame.
The ray washed over the mass of prehistoric nightmares and culminated in a blinding explosion that rocked the city for miles around.
Then it was over. The beam vanished, and nothing remained where it had struck but charred bones and a wide patch of ground that smoldered with ash and melted tar.
Kozerah turned his gaze heavenward and bellowed a victorious roar that shook the shuttle above him. This completed, he turned and wandered back into the sea. There was little reason to stay now that the threat was gone.
Fighting the dinosaurs was child’s play. Kozerah almost felt like battling them by himself was unfair.
Almost.
Besides, the only way to stop their constant attacks was to destroy their masters, and he knew the day that they would finally take to the battlefield themselves was close.
Beyond the horizon, he could sense one of them already stirring, heading for a different continent on the other side of the ocean. He was too far away to deal with that one.
His allies there would just have to take care of it.
CHAPTER 11
As he flew
high above the island, CIGOR’s blue eye detected nothing but wreckage in the water around Rabu Nii. No human signatures registered below; not that he was surprised. The Kaiju of this island were incredibly dangerous, hence the quarantine. The humans who had landed here were long dead already.
Strangely, there was more debris than a small research vessel should have left behind, and the pieces looked incongruous with each other, as if they came from different vessels. He switched his scan to a higher resolution, and saw a broken panel knocking against an offshore rock. It bore the unmistakable emblem of the United States Navy he had seen so often at sea. A distress signal must have been sent from the Delta, and the Navy ship, whatever kind it had been – the debris was so mangled that even CIGOR’s enhanced vision could not identify it – had sailed to its doom with the best of intentions.
CIGOR had half a mind to descend upon the island and unleash vengeance upon the murderous beasts that resided there. Though the prehistoric Kaiju were all hostile toward mankind, the creatures on Rabu Nii had been left alone because the place was so isolated. Rabu Nii had been stricken from all official maps, and the waters around it were considered a Q-zone. Since the dinosaurs never went into the water, and would have been unable to swim very far even if they did, they were essentially trapped.
However, Kaiju that attacked humans were to be punished without mercy. As both a member of Operation Red Dragon and as one of humanity’s caretakers, CIGOR was not about to let this heinous act stand without delivering swift retribution.
Yet when he scanned the island, it was devoid of any Kaiju signatures.
This absence was very disturbing. The place should have been teeming with those wretched monsters, and yet there were none.
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