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"What?"
"You..."
Dr. Ishiro Serizawa still had more to say, but Alan Jonah swept his gun across the monitoring room's instruments and the line went dead.
The burst of gunfire left the technicians white-knuckled and cowering.
"Bring it out." Alan Jonah looked at them huddled in the corner, hands raised over their heads, and grinned. He turned to the mercenary beside him.
The mercenary produced a large suitcase and snapped it open.
The black Orca Device, screen and all, sat inside. The mercenary worked the controls and it hummed to life.
"What are you trying to do!?"
"If Rodan awakens, hundreds of thousands of people in this city will die!" A bolder technician shouted at them.
Once a Titan woke, it didn't need to be trying to kill anyone. Just moving through a city was enough. The casualty count would be staggering.
This giant bird had been sleeping inside a volcano. If it spread its wings over a populated area, the number of dead would be beyond calculation.
"Exactly."
"That's the point." Alan Jonah showed no remorse. If anything, he looked energized.
"Wake it!" He commanded the mercenary at the controls.
The valve was cranked to maximum. A high-penetration soundwave pulsed outward, flooding the entire outpost and driving deep into the volcano below.
The mercenary finished, then gave Alan Jonah a nod.
"Move!"
Objective achieved, Alan Jonah pulled his men out without hesitation. They were gone before Rodan fully woke.
The technicians scattered the moment they left. Nobody was staying in that outpost to face what was coming.
BOOM. BOOM.
The sound of boiling lava rolled up from inside the volcano. Not one of them wasted another second.
...
"They're going to wake Rodan."
"Contact the local government. Get the civilians moving!" Inside the Bermuda Triangle outpost, Dr. Ishiro Serizawa was already directing his technician to reach the Mexican government.
They all knew what a Titan could do. If evacuation didn't start now, it would be too late.
Military comms broke through.
"Mr. Serizawa, we're taking over the operation. The military has dispatched fighter jets to intercept Rodan, along with miniature Oxygen Destroyers."
"Continue monitoring Godzilla's movements. Report any anomalies immediately." Zeno Rivers, in a beige military uniform, addressed Serizawa through the video feed.
They were going in hard. Military assets combined with Monarch's forces, a full-scale engagement. The plan: wound Rodan badly enough to bring it down, then use the Orca Device to bring it to heel.
The Oxygen Destroyer was the military's classified answer to the Titan problem. Nuclear weapons couldn't touch them. This was the only card left to play.
A single Oxygen Destroyer, palm-sized, could convert every oxygen-bearing molecule within an estimated thousand-kilometer radius into raw energy. Enough to kill a Titan.
During the MUTO battle, the giant's interference had cost them their shot. This time, they weren't leaving without results.
And if Ultraman intervened again, they would move to capture him as well.
"It's too soon."
"Deploying that weapon now could cause irreversible damage." Dr. Ishiro Serizawa was against it. The Oxygen Destroyer didn't just kill Titans. The environmental toll was catastrophic.
Within Mexico's borders, there were still countless living people.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Serizawa. You have no authority over this operation." Rivers said it without inflection and cut the feed.
The screen went black. Serizawa stared at it. His fist tightened slowly.
A deep helplessness settled over him. He couldn't stop them.
He turned to another screen. The one tracking Godzilla's vital signs.
"Now..." He spoke quietly, almost to himself. His gaze was distant, complicated, as if the words were meant for something else entirely, something sleeping far below in the dark water. "What do we do?"
The data spiked.
"Godzilla's awake!" a technician called out.
Whether it had sensed Rodan stirring, or heard something in the silence that humans couldn't — Godzilla left its resting place.
Serizawa was already moving. He crossed the monitoring room at a run, heading for the steel-plated wall at the far end.
"Open it." He told the technician there.
The technician nodded and hit the keys. The steel wall retracted, leaving only the glass barrier holding back the sea.
Through it: deep blue water, pressing in from all sides.
In this underwater outpost, the ocean's weight was something you felt in your chest.
Serizawa stood at the glass and waited.
"There..." It didn't take long.
Everyone in the room saw it. A massive shape, rising slowly from the deep.
Godzilla.
The dorsal fins cut through the dark water, glowing blue, unmistakable. Its eyes found the outpost without hesitation.
No aggression. No destruction. It held their gaze for a moment, then twisted its body and drove forward, accelerating into the dark.
"Get a transport plane ready!"
"We're going to Mexico!" Serizawa turned sharply and called to his assistant, Dr. Vivienne.
...
"Run!"
"Get out now!"
"It's waking up!"
The technicians and guards at Outpost 56 were already gone. Alan Jonah's people had beaten them to it, wheels up on their transport plane before the evacuation even started, already a shrinking shape in the sky.
Alarms were screaming across the Mexican city nearest the volcano. People were running. But moving an entire city is a different thing from moving a few dozen people. The streets were locked solid. Plenty of residents refused to move at all. The whole city was fracturing into chaos.
The last of the Outpost 56 personnel had barely made it onto their transport.
BOOM. BOOM.
The steel-sealed crater shook. The impact sound carried for kilometers.
The civilians on the side of the city facing the volcano stopped. The police trying to move them stopped.
Everyone looked up.
What they saw, none of them would ever forget.
BOOM!
SCREEEEEE!
Outpost 56 detonated. Through the rolling smoke and the surge of lava, something enormous drove its claws into the crater's rim and hauled itself free. It was crimson. It was vast. It looked like a pterosaur born from the earth's core.
It climbed out of the volcano, drenched in molten rock, and stood at the summit.
Then it threw its head back and screamed at the sky.
Rodan.
~~~~❃❃~~~~~~~~❃❃~~~~
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