~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!
The next day.
San Francisco. The ruins of the war.
"Alpha Squad has reached the target area."
"Beta Squad has reached the target area."
"Gamma Squad has reached the target area."
Night had passed. The sky was still choked with dark clouds, but natural light had finally returned. Military transport planes swept overhead in formation, and soldiers trailing parachutes leapt from the open hatches one after another.
They hit the rubble-strewn ground across a dozen sectors, their voices crackling through the comms as each team checked in.
Their mission: sweep the entire San Francisco underground. Find any Kaiju eggs left behind by the female MUTO. And find any trace of the mysterious Giant of Light.
"This world has completely lost its mind."
"What kind of thing could do this?"
A soldier in Alpha Squad tilted his head back and stared toward the heart of the ruined city. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. He couldn't make himself believe what he was looking at.
Running straight through the center of the city was a massive circular channel , a void carved clean through the urban core, stretching all the way to the waterfront. The buildings flanking it bore curved hollows along their sides, their edges faintly glazed with the residue of melting. As if something had fired a beam of incomprehensible power straight through ten kilometers of steel and concrete.
Under the oppressive sky, the battlefield felt both surreal and grave. The skyscrapers , towering monuments by any human measure , were either collapsed into rubble or standing in ruins, riddled with holes, barely holding themselves together.
"This is what those giants do when they fight."
"Five years ago. Now again." The squad leader didn't sound surprised. He'd been there five years ago. He knew.
When Titans went to war, the damage they left behind was no different from dropping a nuclear bomb directly on the city.
"That humanoid Titan." The squad leader's eyes settled on the long scar burned through the city center , the mark left by the Spacium Beam. There was a wariness in his gaze that he didn't bother hiding. "He might be the most dangerous one of all."
"Command's designated codename for him is — Ultraman."
---
West of the Atlantic. The Bermuda Triangle.
Monarch Outpost 56, maritime station.
"Any news on the giant?"
Dr. Ishiro Serizawa walked into the monitoring room still carrying his briefcase, barely through the door before he was already asking. The technicians at their stations turned toward him.
After last night's battle, every government with enough clearance knew the giant existed. A being powerful enough to put down the female MUTO without breaking a sweat , that kind of power didn't stay quiet. The curiosity from the top was immediate and intense.
And because of that giant, Serizawa hadn't slept. Not a single hour. He'd spent the night fielding military brass that the government had forced into Monarch's structure, then coordinating personnel to join the search operation. By the time he made it back to Outpost 56 from the American mainland, it was nearly noon.
"Nothing yet." A woman in a lab coat turned from her workstation. She was somewhere under forty, with a composed, unhurried manner. "Whoever — or whatever — it is, they vanished completely."
"Our instruments can't even detect residual energy at the battlefield. Nothing."
Dr. Vivienne Graham. Serizawa's assistant.
They had all seen what the giant could do. And Monarch wasn't the only organization looking for it.
The military's interest was just as sharp.
"How are things going with the Senate?" Vivienne asked. As Serizawa's assistant, she didn't stand on ceremony the way the junior technicians did.
For the past several months, the US Senate had been applying steady pressure on Monarch. The military had gone further, embedding their own people directly inside the organization, seizing internal data, quietly absorbing authority that had once belonged to Monarch alone.
Serizawa had been fighting it. He wanted Monarch independent again. But the people above him weren't interested in compromise anymore. They wanted Monarch tied to the state, completely and permanently.
"Not well." He exhaled slowly, the kind of sigh that came from too many conversations with people who had already made up their minds.
Monarch sounded formidable from the outside. In practice, when a government decided to squeeze, there wasn't much to push back with. The organization had been built decades ago with US military backing. The generation that had championed it was gone , retired, dead, irrelevant. There was no one left in the upper ranks of the military who would go to bat for them.
What Serizawa couldn't figure out was why the military's appetite for control had gotten so aggressive, so suddenly.
"Rivers sent a team yesterday. They witnessed the giant's battle firsthand." Serizawa's frown deepened. "But he's not sharing the specifics with us."
The man the military had planted inside Monarch was named Zeno Rivers. He knew Titans , knew them well , and his interest in them went beyond professional. There was ambition underneath it, the kind that made Serizawa uneasy.
Lowe's squad had been Rivers' operation.
"What's Godzilla's status?" Serizawa let the subject drop. He moved toward the main display.
Every Monarch outpost existed to observe a Titan. Outpost 56, anchored in the Bermuda Triangle, existed for one purpose: to watch Godzilla. The creature Serizawa believed, with more conviction than he could fully justify scientifically, was a guardian , a natural counterbalance built into the world itself.
It slept in a submerged temple somewhere beneath this stretch of ocean. It always came back to it.
"After San Francisco, it returned to rest." Vivienne glanced at the semi-transparent display beside her.
Serizawa looked at the same screen.
His expression was hard to read.
"Conserving energy..."
Dr. Emma Russell , one of Monarch's own , had developed the ORCA, a device capable of influencing Titans through targeted sound wave frequencies. Then she had been taken by terrorists, and the ORCA had gone with her. The military's man inside Monarch had tracked down Emma's husband afterward, applied whatever pressure it took, and used the ORCA schematics to build a new version.
Now multiple organizations had working ORCA devices. Including the terrorists.
The number of Titans that were going to be awakened , it wasn't a question of if. It was a question of how many, and how fast. The world was going to become a battlefield. A global one.
Serizawa had seen it coming. Godzilla had too, almost certainly.
The dormancy made sense. It was preparing.
"Who will their next target be?"
He looked up at the largest screen. It displayed the full map of Monarch's global outpost network , every monitoring station, every slumbering Titan under observation. If the terrorist organization moved against any of them, Monarch would know quickly.
And as he studied the map, the other question settled quietly in the back of his mind.
When the next Titan was awakened , would that mysterious giant appear again?
➤ Next: Next Up, the Big Red Bird
~~~~❃❃~~~~~~~~❃❃~~~~
Read up to (50+ ) advanced chapters on Patre\on
Visit us here: patreon.com/DarkGolds
Happy reading, everyone!