Chapter Text
I remember the smell.
Smoke, certainly. That was most of it. It burned at my throat and lungs as the fires refused to die down. But mixed in, the scent of death. The acrid aroma of human flesh, burned beyond all recognition.
I gagged on it every so often, but I had no plans to get myself to safety. Anyone alive in this living hell had to be saved, had to be given a chance. I couldn’t have known that even the survivors were doomed to pass before their times, so I searched on.
I pushed aside smoldering timbers, chunks of plaster, searching frantically for someone, anyone , who might have made it. To my momentary relief, there was movement, but the relief faded when I saw the little boy’s condition.
As I cradled a barely breathing child, I felt it for the first time.
A tremor beneath my feet, shifting the rubble around me and forcing me to rise from my crouch for balance.
It came again. Then again, and again. I looked around frantically as I backed away, my neck prickling as instinctive terror lifted the hairs on the back of it.
That’s when I saw it.
The strongest tremor yet rang out as a shadowy something slammed into the earth. The light of the flickering flames reflected off a set of dark and wicked claws, each bigger than a car. And all of them attached to a charcoal colored foot, which was attached to a leg like a massive tree…
I craned my neck as I peered skyward through the clouds of smoke. I sought the face of this improbable monster that had somehow reduced Tokyo to ashes in a matter of hours. I met its eyes, glowing orange, so very like the fires that surrounded us on every side. A horrible, misshapen reptilian head, towering over the remaining buildings.
It stood upright like a man, muscular arms held in front of it as clawed fists clenched and unclenched. Its skin was a lumpy mess of what looked like immense keloids, and I was reminded in that moment of the survivors of the bombs.
It glared down at me in the wreckage, and the primal instinct to flee screamed in my mind louder than ever.
I stood my ground, knowing that a sudden move like running might very well provoke it.
Its black lips contorted into a purposeful grimace as it beheld me amidst the destruction. Misaligned teeth glinted under the moon. The cavernous mouth opened, and I could not cover my ears with my arms full with the dying child.
There was a sound.
A terrible sound.
These days, kaijuologists often call it the monster’s roar. To me, that deep, howling, echoing noise, so full of hate, betrayal, pain and world-shattering fury, will always be Gojira’s scream.
In my arms, the child’s chest rose and fell one last time before it stopped.
Excerpt from The Half-Century War , autobiography of JSDF Lieutenant Ota Murakami, published posthumously in 1998 after his death of lung cancer three years prior.
^~The New Age of Monsters~^
OTA MURAKAMI
1936 - 1995
Ishiro Serizawa paid little heed to the icy nighttime temperature as he stared down at the headstone. The grave itself was plain, nondescript. And yet, here in a cemetery full of dead heroes, this man’s resting place still received the most flowers, the most gifts, so many years after his departure. In the world of kaiju, there may have been nobody more famous than Lieutenant Ota Murakami.
Having survived K-Day was a claim to small fame for pretty much anyone, of course, but Murakami had been different, distinguished among them.
Out of all the men who had been there that day, who had witnessed Gojira’s raid and fought with the utmost futility to push it back, Murakami was one of the few who stayed. He was among the only survivors not to hang up his uniform, and he dedicated the next several decades of his life to fighting the kaiju, even as Gojira’s radiation had begun turning the man’s own body against him.
“Truly,” Ishiro whispered to the grave, “There was nobody like you, Ota-san.”
There was a certain poetic irony, Ishiro mused, to be found in the fact that the Age of Monsters had ended in the same year as Murakami’s death.
A quarter-century of relative peace had ensued. Relative, of course, because the world was downright infested with monsters. Even this period of quiet was occasionally broken here and there, but the incidents were small, isolated. In the twenty-five years since the End, more people were killed by lightning strikes than by kaiju. The worst incident had been six years back, with the disasters in Honolulu, Las Vegas, and San Francisco.
With the lull in the chaos, innovation, forced to advance by leaps and bounds in the last century to combat the threat of giant monsters, was now progressing more smoothly, refining what technology they already had. Space travel was regular; alternative energy had nearly replaced fossil fuels entirely, though that shift had come a bit too late to halt climate change entirely.
Ishiro supposed that certain things could be a lot more wrong with the world, if not for the kaiju.
“Though I am a little biased,” Ishiro chuckled to nobody, pulling his scarf over his mouth as he checked his emails. Gojira’s radiation was increasing, exactly on schedule. In the leviathan’s comatose state, his radiation levels remained low most of the time, only rising around the same time each month. They couldn’t get up close to figure out why, for fear of awakening the great beast, but the popular theory was that the cause was his heart beating, just once a month.
This pattern had gone on since it was first observed shortly after Outpost 54’s completion, and it showed no sign of changing. And if it ever did, it would mean one of two things: Gojira was either dying, or waking up.
As fascinated as Ishiro was by the reptile, he would personally prefer the former.
Of course, watching Gojira wasn’t the most dangerous kaiju-related job on the planet. That honor went to the Hollow Earth teams, or the Skull Island staff. Then there was what happened off-world.
The remains of dead kaiju were taken to space stations to be studied, so that in the case of sudden regeneration, a very realistic scenario when it came to these creatures, a monster would remain trapped up there. There was also the recent manned Mars mission, sent to the distant red planet to study what was believed to be a kaiju, trapped in the permafrost of Mars’ northern ice cap.
That one worried Ishiro most of all. Scans at a distance were inconclusive, only revealing that the monster was massive. They couldn’t even tell its body type, just that it was there and bigger than anything they’d seen.
Thank God it was frozen.
Ishiro chuckled again at that phrase: “Thank God”. Religion had been another aspect of the world that had been thrown into utter disarray due to the kaiju, after all. Christianity had taken a bit of a hit, and according to recent polling and censuses, about 5% of the global population claimed to be Mothraist. “Thank God” had come to have quite a few meanings. For some little religious splinter cells, the term had even morphed into “Thank Godzilla”.
“Thank Godzilla,” Serizawa snorted into the frigid air, mocking the phrase as he began the short walk to his car.
Of course, Dr. Serizawa wasn’t the only one with Godzilla on his mind. All of the three thousand occupants of MONARCH Outpost 54- nicknamed “Castle Bravo” by some- had thoughts of the radioactive titan floating around constantly. That tended to happen when one lived within the same 125 cubic miles of the ocean as him. Well, technically the same 125 cubic miles of crust, as Outpost 54 had been constructed almost entirely beneath the seafloor, even as that floor sloped downward into the Japan Trench, known to few as Godzilla’s current resting place.
Nothing put Godzilla on the brain faster than looking at him, and that was the only job of one young woman by the name of Io Shinoda. Down there on the bottom level of Outpost 54, she spent her shifts staring out through a massive fiberglass window at the jagged outline of Godzilla, covered in silt and sediment and chunks of igneous rock cooled from the lava he rested just above.
26,000 feet down, at the bottom of the Japan Trench, a massive plate of rock slowly slid underneath another, subducting into the Earth. The action heated the rock, melting it into hot magma.
Heat is radiation, so it was no wonder that the lizard had chosen to rest there.
Io sighed, drumming her fingers on the desktop to some tune she couldn’t remember the name of. Her empty coffee mug sat a fair distance away, acting as a paperweight for her observational notes. For whatever reason, MONARCH still insisted on storing information on paper as backup for the digital info; Io thought that was a waste of time, but she didn’t make the decisions. She just rested her head on her elbows and glared at the big goddamn lizard, occasionally glancing at the radiation monitor that only changed in any way once per month. It was never a substantial change either. Just a tiny spike, more like a bump really, that didn’t even heat the bone-chilling water this far down.
It was so boring that she sometimes, like right then, wished the big lug would wake up to break the monotony.
As if on cue, the monitor beeped.
Io jolted, as if lifted from a stupor. Turning her head almost robotically, the young woman inspected the readings.
They were higher than usual. Generally, for Big G’s monthly “heartbeats”, the radiation gradually climbed to a set value over several hours, plateaud at a regular maximum for about fifteen minutes, and then declined back to its minimum.
The initial climb had begun a scant two hours ago, and unless Io’s sleep-deprived eyes were playing tricks on her, the radiation value had just exceeded the regular maximum.
Io suddenly had the mental image of a monkey’s paw curling.
“No, no, no. You are not doing this to me right now,” Io snarled through the two-feet-thick glass at the camouflaged leviathan, fishing through her pockets for The Key. The Key she would need to pull the alarm if Godzilla was in fact about to wake. At that moment, despite the well-earned negative reputation that “Goji Duty” had, Io realized just how much responsibility had been put on her shoulders when she was assigned to it.
As she whipped out the innocuous silvery key, she realized that the lives of every person on this base were in her hand. If she turned that key and pushed that button, it would trigger a full-scale evacuation of the facility AND alert the world that Godzilla still lived. If it turned out Godzilla was just having a bad dream and she had issued the alarm for nothing, she would be fired, and there would be global panic. On the other hand, if she waited too long, and the great beast really was about to wake, the evacuation might not finish in time.
Io turned the key, and the glass case over the button lifted with a hiss. She turned her eyes not to the radiation monitor, but to the colossal shape out in the faint illumination of the Outpost’s floodlights. She hovered two fingers just above the big red button, the only sound her heart hammering in her ears.
Until it was joined by another heartbeat.
Ba-bump.
The monitor beeped angrily as Godzilla’s radiation spiked.
Ba-bump.
The sound reverberated in Io’s core. It rattled her bones and turned her breaths sharp and panicked.
Ba-bump.
The silt covering the monster shifted, ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, right where she knew his head to be. Io’s throat felt as dry as the Sahara desert had been before Biollante.
Ba-bump.
It was so deep. Such an impossibly deep sound. A heart the size of a bus, pumping nuclear fire through blood vessels wide enough for her to crawl through. She knew that could only mean that it was alive, it was awake and it was going to kill them all but that sound that horrible sound froze her brain and her hand would not move to push the button -
The silt shifted again. It slipped from its place, drifting almost lazily to the seafloor. In its absence, an oval of charcoal skin, divided lengthwise.
Godzilla’s eye opened, flooding the observation chamber in an orange light that was so like the flames of hell, and Io pushed the button.
Godzilla blinked. He did not remember it being so bright here when he arrived. Ever since his birth, he had always sought the depths as a place of dark solitude, but now some kind of light blinded him. His regenerated eye, in use for the first time, burned under it, and this made Godzilla angry. He blinked again and squinted. He let whatever-it-was come into focus.
A silver tower stretched up the wall of the trench, vanishing into the rock. The whole entire thing glowed, dispelling the natural darkness. Godzilla felt that familiar rage bubble up inside as his awakening brain connected the dots.
Humans. As usual. Disrupting nature for their own ambitions. It seemed he needed to remind them of their place once again.
At his eye level, he could see one of them at the very bottom of the structure. Even at a distance, he felt her fear. He felt fear in the rest of the structure too. Evidently the human had made the others aware of his awakening.
Her warning would not save them.
The alarm was loud, shrill. Drills as to what to do when it played were frequent, so everyone knew what the evac plan was. Things were meant to be orderly and neat, so that Godzilla would find little more than an empty Outpost. However, drills and the real thing are never the same.
The immediate reaction was that Io had to have fucked up somehow and pulled a false alarm. But when the alarm continued, and Io herself sprinted past, climbing the emergency stairwell looking paler than a ghost, it began to sink in that yes, this was happening.
Godzilla was awake, and pandemonium reigned. All across the base, people dropped what they were doing and got up, moving as quickly as they possibly could for the stairwell. But in their rushes, it wasn’t long before the halls of Castle Bravo were clogged, and the shoving and screaming began.
If Godzilla were so inclined, he would smile. At the very least, they maintained their fear of him down here, in his domain. For a moment he was tempted to just go back to sleep, having reminded them that he could wake up and wipe them out any time he wished. Instead, Godzilla decided that he had rested long enough. Whatever that blast of theirs had done to him before had somehow strengthened and hastened his regeneration; he most certainly had not been capable of regrowing from bones before the humans and their firestorm. Even if he had been, he would not have grown back in such a short time.
What was more, he had become… different. After the fire changed him, all he had known was pain and rage. He had felt as though he was dying every second, and yet he had been unable to perish for all the raw power that burned in his core. Now all that power was there with none of the pain. It was as though his body had adapted to the changes, and turned the horrible mutations into powerful assets.
He felt unstoppable as he moved, truly moved , for the first time in sixty-six years. His skin was no longer riddled with cankers and growths, but armored by thick scales that stretched smoothly over powerful muscle. His gills worked , funneling strength to every inch of his immense form. The form that had grown larger .
Silt cascaded off him as he braced his strong arms on the seafloor, his tail swishing and kicking up clouds of murk in the inky depths. He put his weight on one titanic leg, then another, and pushed himself to his feet as the panic within the human structure reached a fever pitch.
He took a step, relishing how sturdy his stance felt. The humans had taken everything from him in their pursuit of power, but they had also given him every tool he needed to bring about their perfect demise. It was time for them to reap what they had sown, and bear the full brunt of Godzilla’s rage.
The heat gathered on his back.
Io Shinoda supposed there was one perk to the job she had been given; she was first to the stairwell, and below her she heard the clamoring of the other staff hurrying up after her. She could only hope they had been given enough warning to make it out after her.
No sooner had she thought that when the entirety of Outpost 54 shuddered as an explosion ripped through the lower levels. The stairwell rattled, and Io lost her footing with a cry of shock. In the back of her mind, she knew what would come next: the ocean would claim this place.
Io scrambled to her feet and moved with speed she didn’t even know she had as the roar of the water rushing in reached her ears. To make matters worse, the bulkhead to the upper levels was sealing. She would make it through, but who else would?
She reached the slowly closing doors, gasping for breath, and staggered through. Safe.
Nobody followed hot on her heels like she expected.
The doors were almost shut and all she could hear was the blare of the alarm and the now-deafening roar of the sea flooding in.
“Please,” she whispered to no one. “Just one of them, just one…”
“WAIT!”
Her heart stopped. Scrambling for a foothold came none other than Kenji; the only other person with her job. The only other person who understood her.
He would not make it. Tears spilled freely down her cheeks.
“Io, please you have to get it-”
She didn’t hear the next part, because the water was right there .
Face twisted in a mask of anguish, all she could mouth to him was I’m sorry.
Kenji’s mouth opened in an inaudible scream as the doors shut.
It had always fascinated Godzilla, the way the crushing pressures of the depths squashed even mighty explosions. No evidence of his atomic blast existed other than the debris floating out of the gash he’d made in the structure. Nothing still in there would live long, but he was sure there were more of the wretched little creatures at the distant surface.
So he kicked. Thick legs and a massive tail quickly brought him up to his fastest swimming speed- and then passed it. Cruel joy flashed in his mind. This strength bordered on unbelievable. Indeed, he wouldn’t believe it if he didn’t feel it flowing through him. As a kaiju, his superiority over the humans had never been in question, but this was something else entirely.
Io hugged her knees in the corner of the transport. She had made it out, ascended to Castle Bravo’s innocuous oil-rig top floor, and would be evacuating safely with the other 1500 MONARCH staff.
And she’d done so at the cost of everyone else. 1500 more people, crushed and drowned below. All her fault. She had one responsibility, and had failed to uphold it.
And that was why she sat silently as the crew of the transport shouted orders, trying their best to get out of the area as quickly as possible. In her heart Io knew it wouldn’t matter, because Godzilla was faster than any ship they had. The evacuation plan had every ship going a different direction so that he would be unable to catch all of them, but whichever vessel he chose to follow would certainly be doomed. Against all logic, Io felt certain that he would pick hers. The chatter of the captain as he eyed the radar wasn’t helping.
“Shit, he’s coming up fast-”
A deafening sound reached her ears then, the horrible shriek of twisting metal. A quick upward glance allowed her to catch a last-second glimpse of Outpost 54 slipping beneath the waves, churning up a whirlpool as the top levels of the facility joined the rest in the depths. Castle Bravo was no more, and the sea continued to bubble where it had once been as the beast approached.
There was no explosion of water, no towering spray of the leviathan breaching like a whale. Instead, as the ocean boiled like a cauldron, a row of jagged spines lifted from below the surface. Charcoal black in color, the outer edges a pale bony white, they glistened under the sun for the first time in decades. Steam rose where the extreme heat of the reptile’s body evaporated the seawater, and all still present just watched. Beating a hasty retreat at this point would be futile.
The spines were joined by a tail, and what a tail it was. It exited the water tip-first, and the onlookers could only gasp in shock as the heavily armored limb revealed itself. Thick plates of rough bone covered the entire thing, forming a heavy, jagged whip that only grew wider as more and more of the tail rose. It hung high in the air, swaying in the sea breeze like a charmed snake for a moment, before the massive appendage slammed back down into the water, capsizing a nearby lifeboat. That got more of a reaction, startled cries ringing out all around the boiling patch of sea. The tail did not return, but the spines shifted.
A pair of strangely mammalian ears, small but prominent, left the water next. They were shortly followed by the rough scales of a great dark head. A heavy brow, a blunt snout and a powerful jaw. A thick, muscled neck, covered in a coat of thinner, almost needlelike spines. Broad shoulders rose up next, revealing in short order the powerful arms attached, ending in massive hands. An enormous chest rose and fell like a bellows with each breath as Godzilla rose from the sea.
Orange eyes like the fires of hell snapped open, and a god surveyed his kingdom.
Io looked up at him with the same expression as everyone else: one full of awe and fear. Godzilla’s eyes swept this way and that, narrowing as he took in his surroundings. The humans were still here. He felt insulted that they had not fled his power.
He decided they needed another reminder, and let the heat gather on his back again.
Io’s heart skipped a beat at the first sound, and her gaze snapped to the maple-leaf spines.
Thu-thump thump
With each thump , the spines changed, flashing from black and white to a baleful blue. Smoke of a similar color hissed from Godzilla’s mouth and nose. Everyone there knew what was coming, and none of them felt like trying to escape it.
The great black jaws opened up like a cavern, atomic fire lighting the back of Godzilla’s throat. The massive lizard straightened his posture, drew in a breath, tensed his muscles-
And fired.
A beam of nuclear fire, superheated plasma, and charged particles erupted from his mouth, the largest transport ship was blown to nothing in an instant, and all hell broke loose.
Godzilla cast his glare all around as the humans took flight, fleeing for their lives in his domain after willfully trespassing in it. There was only one thing left to do. He took another breath, filling his lungs to the brim with the salty air of his home sea, the sound of his chest expanding audible as a low rumble, and then let it out as a mighty roar. This was not the scream of pain and hatred and betrayal he had released all those years ago. That Godzilla was gone. What left his mouth that day was the roar of the new Godzilla, a monster among monsters, and it contained just one thing: pure rage.
SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOONNNNK!
The New Age of Monsters had begun.
CHAPTER I: RESURGENCE