by Archer, Mia
I was cut off as something big flashed in front of me. I had a moment to see a giant shadow appearing where there shouldn’t be one based on the positioning of the buildings all around me relative to the local star, and the next moment there was a massive scaly hand wrapped around me.
I stared up at one of the giant irradiated monsters that had been transported to this world. Okay. That wasn’t exactly good, but it’s not like it was the end of the world or something.
Sure it’d be a bad day for anyone else, but not for me. I could take these things. I’d proven that time and again in multiple fights.
“It would appear that we have company,” I said. “They’ve changed up the plan just a bit.”
“Yeah, I’m seeing it,” she said. “Seriously. How did they manage to hide a giant lizard in that city like that?”
“I don’t know?” I asked. “To be honest I’m more worried about the thing trying to take a bite out of me.”
It’s not like I was worried about it trying to take a bite out of me on an existential level or anything like that. I knew even if it chomped down on me it wasn’t going to do much. I’d had two giant creatures try to take a bite out of me so far since coming to this world, and so far they were 0-2.
Still, this was annoying and I was going to have to waste time getting free from this thing and killing it to get the hive mind to scramble the military. This was a precisely timed operation and this thing wasn’t playing nice.
“Do you need any help?” Sabine asked.
“None that you can offer,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m still trying to figured out how the heck that monster was hiding in the city.”
“Is that really important?” I growled.
“Yes it’s important!” she said. “I spent years bitching about the American Godzilla movie online because they had ridiculous plot holes like a giant monster hiding in the middle of a city which seemed ridiculous. If it turns out giant monsters can hide in cities like this then it means all those ranting posts I made online were lies!”
“Wait, so are you talking about the Godzilla movie they made a couple years back?” I asked.
“Are you telling me they made another one?” she said. “Like a sequel with Ferris Bueller and everything?”
Okay. So I didn’t know much about old movies where Japanese guys dressed up in rubber suits and had wrestling matches, but I did know something about classics like Ferris Bueller. And I was pretty sure I didn’t see him in any of the movies Natalie forced me to screen for “research” when it became apparent there were giant monsters attacking Starlight City.
I thought it wasn’t research so much as it was her looking for an excuse to show me even more of those ridiculous movies she was always going on about, but whatever. We almost always ended up making out before the halfway mark so I hadn’t complained too much.
“I don’t think he was in there. It was the guy from Breaking Bad, but then he died and everyone was disappointed and there weren’t really many monsters fighting until the very end so…”
“The guy from what?” she asked.
“The badass bald guy. He used to be the dad in Malcolm in the Middle? You’ve seen that, right?”
“The dad from Malcolm in the Middle is a badass now? The fuck? I don’t know if I want to go back to the world you’re talking about,” Sabine said.
“Well maybe I won’t take you then,” I said. “You can hang out here with the giant monsters and…”
That reminded me. I was totally in the clutches of a giant monster. When I turned to regard the thing it was staring at me like I’d gone completely and totally insane.
“Sorry,” I said. “You were about to try and eat me?”
The things brows lowered. That was a very human looking emotion, but of course the thing was about as far from human as something could get with all the scales and everything.
It was a very thinking motion. Let’s leave it at that. The thing could clearly think, and that made me think it was under the control of a certain local hive mind.
Great.
Its mouth moved a couple of times. Like it was trying to use that mouth in weird ways that it wasn’t intended for.
Which reminded me of some of the things that happened after about the halfway mark during those monster movies when Natalie would…
I blushed. Now was not the time or the place for some of those memories. Not when this giant ugly thing was trying to have a chat with me.
“Who… you… talk to?” it asked.
I pointed to my ear. “It’s sort of a radio communication thing. Invisible light waves make it so… Oh screw this. Why am I trying to talk to a giant lizard being controlled by an alien worm?”
I pushed and kicked with all my strength and the thing’s hand snapped in a couple of places. I wasn’t in the mood to have a long conversation with a giant ugly lizard anyway.
I flew straight up and hit it right in its irradiated jaw. An irradiated glass jaw if the way its chin flipped up as it flew back and landed against a building was anything to go by.
“Good work!” Sabine said. “I’m going to move in while you’re distracting the thing.”
“Wait, has their military scrambled?” I asked.
“Not yet, but there’s no time like the present to get in there and take care of business,” she said. “Besides, distracting their military was more for Korval than anything else. I don’t really care if he and his band of merry men and women get blown to kingdom come.”
I growled as I moved low and slammed up between the lizard’s legs. I wasn’t sure if it kept the kind of equipment there that one would expect to find between the legs of, say, a human male, but from the way it let out a piteous wail it didn’t feel good having someone punching it there.
“I can’t believe you’d leave them to die!” I said. “They helped us!”
“And they’ll make convenient cannon fodder which will help us again,” Sabine said. “Trust me. I’m very aware and appreciative of their sacrifice.”
I moved around and got ready to hit the monster with another blast between the legs, but its tail slammed into me sending me flying into yet another building. Then its claws wrapped around me and it pulled me up to its face again.
“You can’t do this,” it said. Its voice was a little halting, but it was a lot better than before.
“Um, excuse me?” I asked. “Because I totally can do this. You’ve enslaved a whole planet! That’s not the kind of thing any villain gets away with for long!”
“What are you talking about?” it asked.
“Law of villainous conservation,” I said. “It’s something I came up with on my own. The universe won’t let any bad guy get away with something for too long without a good guy coming along to kick their butt.”
Natalie might think she had a monopoly on villainous and heroic narrative conventions, but I was an English major with a journalism double major, thank you very much. Which meant I’d studied this stuff even more extensively than she had.
I’d come up with this theory all on my own. I’d never brought it up with Natalie because she seemed so proud of all the theories she’d come up with for the ways that heroes and villains interacted with each other. I knew she wouldn’t appreciate a theory that posited villains were destined to lose.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” it said.
“Of course you don’t,” I said. “Because you come from a world where you don’t have stories. Why bother sitting around telling yourself the same old boring things?”
I assumed that was the case. From the way it cocked its head to the side and looked decidedly confused I figured I was onto something.
“If you do this you will regret it,” the monster, no doubt attached to the hive mind, said. “If you do this then you will unleash…”
I looked over the thing’s shoulder and saw Sabine flying towards the tall building. The monster seemed to realize that I was looking at so
mething other than it.
I’d give the hive mind monster this. It was aware of its surroundings and not one to ignore threats. Then again if it was connected to the hive mind then there were probably thousands of other pairs of eyes out there that were looking at Sabine flying through the city and sounding the alarm.
“I think you finally got the thing’s attention,” I said.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
The monster let me go. One moment it was giving me the old squeeze and the next I was coughing and waving some dust away. The stuff couldn’t do permanent damage to me, but that didn’t mean it was pleasant to have the stuff in my lungs.
I looked out where the monster had been. Though of course the thing wasn’t there any longer. Why would it be? The hive mind had seen a threat, and it was sending the biggest thing it had at its disposal to fight off that threat.
“Sabine, you might want to be on the lookout,” I said. “Because I think you’re about to have some oversized company.”
25
Kaiju Explosion
“Good call,” she said. “Looks like the military finally decided they were going to get off their butts and do something.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” I said.
I extricated myself from the building I’d been thrown into. Not a pleasant experience, but I’d live. I waved some of the dust away from my face and coughed a couple of times.
Not pleasant breathing it in, but again, I’d live.
“Sabine,” I said. “You need to listen to me and you need to listen now. I wasn’t talking about the military. One of those giant monsters is coming for you.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Could you please take care of that and I’ll worry about getting this thing set up?”
“You don’t understand! That thing is booking it!”
I flew up. I figured it was going to be easy enough to find the target, at least. She was on top of the tallest building in this city, after all.
Which also meant it was going to be easy enough for that thing to find her. It’s not like she was making herself hard to find or anything.
Sure enough there she was off in the distance standing in front of a massive tower on top of the tallest building in the city. And sure enough there was a giant lizard heading right for her, moving way faster than I would’ve thought possible.
If there was one thing I’d learned the hard way since I started doing this whole hero bit it was that big things could move way faster than most people thought possible.
“Could you maybe get over here and take care of that thing?” she asked. “Because I’d really rather not get devoured.”
“I’m on it,” I said. “I’m not letting my ticket off this dirtball get devoured by a giant monster.”
“Awfully nice of you,” she said.
The giant irradiated lizard slammed into the building and the whole thing swayed. For a moment I worried the building might go down, but apparently whatever engineers had built it had put in a heck of a lot of tolerance.
I thought about the Great Yorp I’d run into when I arrived. Maybe that was the sort of thing they thought about on a world where there were already giant creatures even before the giant irradiated lizards were introduced to the ecosystem.
The lizard didn’t wait for the building to stop swaying. No, it started scrambling up the thing looking for all the world like a cat trying to climb a tree. It dug its claws in and ripped at the side, and I tried not to look at the blue aliens that were occasionally ripped out of the building screaming their last as the mind control was broken just in time for them to plummet in terror to their certain doom.
The less I thought about that the better. No, I needed to take care of this thing and eliminate the hive mind. That was the best way to help the people. All the people of this city, and not just the ones in that building who were finding a long drop to a short stop.
“Why does this building feel like it’s about to topple under me?” Sabine growled.
“Probably because there’s a giant monster climbing the thing,” I said.
“Well get the damn thing off of it then!”
“Working on it,” I growled. “Though it would help if you maybe didn’t boss me around so much.”
“We can talk about it when you’re done saving the day hero,” she said.
I was half tempted to let her get squashed by the nice giant monster if that’s the way she was going to be about this. Only that went against my personal code. I was going to save her whether or not I thought she deserved saving, dang it, because if I didn’t then it would make me no better than some of the villains I’d met in my heroic career.
I tried to think of the best way to get that thing off the building. The only problem was I was having some trouble thinking of anything that would be easy. Finally I focused on the thing’s tail which was twitching back and forth as it moved up.
I grinned as I suddenly thought back to when I was younger. My dad had always been a big fan of what he called “the classics,” which seemed to be code for video games that’d been popular when he was a kid. Including Mario 64.
I’d never been big into the video games myself despite him trying to indoctrinate me into the gamer life, but I did have fond memories of watching him play that game. I still remembered watching that little red and blue plumber grabbing a giant dragon by the tail and spinning him around before tossing the creature into bombs that’d been inexplicably placed around the edge of the boss platform.
If I was a villain trying to take over the world I probably wouldn’t put such an obvious weakness within throwing distance, but whatever.
That fight might not have made any sense, game design over reality, but it gave me an idea of how I could take care of the giant lizard threatening my ticket off this world. I grabbed it by the tail and yanked back with all the power I could muster.
That was a lot of power. The lizard slid down, pulling great chunks of the building down along with it, but it wasn’t enough for the thing to let go.
Dang that thing was tenacious.
“What the hell are you doing down there?” Sabine shouted. “It feels like you’re trying to pull the whole damn building down around me!”
“And you’d deserve it with the attitude you’re throwing around!” I growled right back at her. “Could you please just shut up and let me do my work?”
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m close. I don’t need a giant lizard bothering me while I’m working!”
I was tempted to let the thing climb the building and devour her. The only thing that stopped me from letting nature take its course was the sure knowledge that if I let that happen I’d be stuck on this world forever.
If I was stuck on this world for any appreciable length of time then we were going to run into a situation where I became the villain sooner rather than later. There was something frustrating about this planet that made me feel a little crazy after being here for maybe a week, and I didn’t want to think about what might happen if that stretched out into months or years.
I took all that annoyance and poured it into yanking on the giant lizard’s tail. Something snappped and it let out a horrific roar of pain. I yanked harder and harder until the thing couldn’t keep a hold on the building any longer.
Finally it busted free and fell. Only I wasn’t going to let it fall.
No, I had other things in mind for this thing. I was going to show it what it meant to go up against me, darn it. I was frustrated and I was ready to take out that frustration on something!
“You’re not getting away that easily!” I said.
The thing fell until its tail took over and there was another loud crack followed by another pained cry as several bones in the thing’s tail broke. I worried for a moment that this might be one of those lizards that had a habit of losing its tail when it was threatened, but thankfully this one’s tail stayed firmly in place.
“Okay then,” I said. “Time for us
to take out some angry energy on you.”
I flew up. The thing flailed and tried desperately to claw at the nearest buildings, but I swung it this way and that to keep it from getting a good hold on anything.
I wasn’t letting this jerk go. Not after I’d just wasted so much energy trying to catch the thing. Not after I’d watched it casually end so many blue aliens who probably hadn’t wanted to die today even if they were jacked into the worm network on this dustball and probably didn’t realize they didn’t want to be ended until they were falling to their doom.
I pulled up and there were more cracks as more bones in the thing’s tail snapped, crackled, and popped. I really hoped its bones would hold up against the stress I was about to put it under.
Sabine turned and blinked a couple of times in obvious surprise when she saw me floating past her with a giant lizard in tow. Then she shook her head and muttered something that was too low for me to understand, even over the connection.
“Taking care of some business,” I said. “Don’t mind me.”
“Would you stop playing with that thing already?”
“Hey, you told me to take care of this, and I’m taking care of it. There’s no shame in having a little fun while I’m at it!”
Sabine rolled her eyes. I was close enough that I could see that much, at least, but otherwise she kept her thoughts to herself.
“Hurry up,” she said. “It looks like the military is going to be here any moment, and I’d rather have you around to run interference when they show up.”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. It seemed like no matter what I did it wasn’t good enough to satisfy her. Whatever.
I kept flying up until the giant lizard was well over the city. I really hoped it wasn’t the kind of lizard that could lose its tail now. It would be really awkward if I dropped the thing down on the city below while I was trying to save everyone with a little bit of showboating based on an ancient video game no one on this world had even played so it’s not like they’d appreciate the reference.
Huh. Maybe this was how Natalie felt when I dismissed her references. I had a new appreciation for that frustration now.
