Godzilla 2000: New Era, PART 23 - FINALE Part 2 · 2:46am May 21st, 2022
PART 22
Proofed by Lance-Omikron
Story ideas by Faith-Wolff and CrystalMaster7
Gabriel Hopkins by Dr1ft3r0I a.k.a C0yot3721
Dr. Joanne Johnson by Corona Blaze
Hina and illustrations by FallenAngel5414
Ami by EvoWizard
Additional illustrations by LordShrekzilla and Zeroviks
Because FimFic has a limit on how big you can make a blog post...
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“You piloted well, you avoided hitting the gate.”
The voice called out to him and Takaaki Aso wasn’t entirely shocked at who it was. He still was plenty surprised and half expected it to be some kind of hallucination brought upon by all the stress, adrenaline shock, blood loss, and medication he’d subjected himself to in the past 24 hours. But, who else would be showing up right about now; and climbing onto the downed X3 of all places.
“Chance luck over skill. I was in a full tailspin, I had lost control,” Aso huffed tiredly, straining as he unclipped his seat belt and let it snap open, gasping harsh breaths now that his chest wasn’t being compressed.
The old commander let a grunt come from his gut when he fully removed his helmet, the tear in its surface and busted top testament to how he’d avoided a lethal concussion from debris. Climbing into the cab of the superplane and putting an arm around his shoulder to help pull the man up, Hina Shinoda weathered the strain to get Aso free of the pilot seat amidst the sparking cockpit.
“I’m surprised to see it was you piloting this, though I suspected it,” Hina sighed whilst helping Takaaki stagger out of the cockpit and onto the slope of upturned dirt and rock the X3 had pushed up when it nosedived into the ground to form a ramp up to the opened port.
“And I’m not surprised to see you here,” Aso grunted in haggard breath, “Where else would you be but showing up in unexpected places, and this city has turned into a magnet for the unexpected as of late.”
“You’re missing a leg,” Hina frowned after helping the man up and towards the somewhat security of the old temple.
“And you’re perceptive,” Takaaki deadpanned back after limping and hobbling along with her help, “Before you ask what caused it, do you need to really guess?”
Almost as if on cue, a flare of yellow radiance lit up the city to sweep through several buildings and detonate them in an explosion of debris. It was swiftly cut short by a jolt of blue slicing out of the darkness and igniting across Orga’s body to force it to avert the attack and block the burning heat with its enormous arm. Godzilla let loose several other quick salvos of the burning brightness whilst charging to close the distance and re-engage.
Takaaki eyed his surroundings, passing through the gateway of the Kiyomizu-dera. He didn’t know if it was chance or fate that he just happened to wind up here after all that had gone through his head. No matter which way he thought and tried to understand what it meant, through the lens of the supernatural, the religious, the logical, or illogical; it didn’t change the fact he could feel the eyes of the temple’s patron kami piercing him. The gaze of the Azure Dragon, Seiryu, represented by the statue he wound up in front of.
“Your Seiryu is trying his best to stop what I failed to.”
“My Seiryu?” Hina grunted inquisitively, bringing Aso into the main grounds of the temple, going over a gravel path and towards the benches that also offered a good view of the city and battle. Aso just shrugged, admitting how much of a loss he was at to fully comprehend fate.
“He was born here, was once green and has a ray of azure blue,” Aso paused and looked at the mountainside bordering the temple, which now had a gigantic hole blasted through it, “Even had a dramatic entrance from the East. Feel vindicated?”
“Why should I?”
“Because- that book you had open in my office. It was marked to the page about the Azure Dragon of the East and this very city,” Aso huffed with a furrowed brow, “I found it right before losing something else.”
Hina only looked at battle within the city, not turning towards the old commander. With a hidden expression of ambiguity, the aged miko was unmoving as azure light illuminated her face. Orga’s bellows rattled the temple, soon shouted out by Godzilla’s as the titanic dragon charged after the alien it had scorched under burning blue wrath.
“That was your book,” she said plainly, not turning around.
Takaaki Aso’s brow furrowed. ‘That was your book’ could be read a few different ways. Either she knew of the pages and had indeed marked them, just not owning a publishing that he himself had lost track of in his office. Or, she hadn’t touched it at all. The marked page had either been a random fluke of the shelf being torn down and the books scrambled, or maybe he himself had once been a different man. Decades or more earlier, maybe he too once looked to the unknown for comfort; after so much pain and fear inflicted upon his life from it. Fate it happened to land on the right page, or forgotten faith from a bygone time in his life as a younger man.
For some reason, he didn’t feel the need to press her for clarity. The powerful bellow of Godzilla again rocked the temple. A glimpse into the darkness of the city confirmed the saurian had the upper-hand, lifting its whole foe’s massive bulk by their arm to repeatedly slam them down into the mainstreet. The tall form of Kyoto Biotechnics Institute was backlit by distant fires and the radiating glow of Godzilla’s dorsal spines shining on his birthplace.
“You know, a little girl once told me his name was Junior,” Takaaki muttered as he looked on, recollecting a very different time in this very city.
The edges of Hina Shinoda’s lips curled upwards slightly, “Seiryu, Gojira, Godzilla, Ryujin, Leviathan, Junior. Doesn’t change what something is because of what it’s called. It only changes how we see it.”
Commander Takaaki Aso tightened his lips into a thin, contemplating line; as he pivoted his head up to look upon the distant glimmer of the incoming warheads he’d failed to stop. He heard through the air and felt through his bones that titanic struggle in the ancient capital before him. And he recollected the times he’d scorned. Times of living storms and unjust death caused by things he could not understand. First time by the nature of the beast of destruction provoked by means he could not understand, the second time when that same beast seemed to defy even death strike back with double the wrath.
Now, staring death in the face by hubris that made that in 1954 and 1984 seem feeble by comparison, he couldn’t help but put his hopes in the same mysteries that once terrified him. When he’d seen this Godzilla come bursting out of the mountain, footfalls creating earthquakes as its brow scraped the heavens; the contrast between now and forty five years ago when he was young, scared, and new was palpable. Even with a greater successor far surpassing the fifteen and twenty-five story tall demons of his past, he felt not dread in that moment.
The moment he’d called Godzilla the name of a guardian, something that could set things right. In a moment that, for the first time since he was a boy from Hokkaido, Takaaki Aso put his hope in the hands of things beyond the capabilities of mankind.
Godzilla lifted and threw Orga into the ground, receiving a haymaker of an uppercut to his jaw that staggered the dragon briefly; before a follow-up tail bash to the legs laid the alien low. Pitching his head upwards, he blankly stared at the glimmering eerie glows of the incoming missiles. Even with them being far out of range, he could hear their rumbling in his bones. The ominous march of the army of death and damnation, the very one Japan had been dreading since before Godzilla’s first eruption into the world.
This was the end for them. For Kyoto, Japan, possibly all of mankind. The pessimistic side of his mind considered perhaps it would be preferable to be wiped out instantly in the blast versus the fate many more would suffer in the fallout, the radioactive and societal. So much suffering…
Godzilla’s echoes seemed to bounce across the entirety of the temple, reverberating through every hall and chamber to surround the courtyard he stood in. Takaaki felt it and listened, as he stood in the shadow of the surviving old statue of Seiryu, feeling its stare.
There was nothing he could do. But his body and equipment had been pushed through their limit, and beyond. Nobody could doubt he’d tried. He’d tried harder than most anyone could ask of him, or do themselves.
And yet, the one person who thought he hadn’t done enough was Takaaki Aso himself.
He felt the presence of that great dragon which was born in this very city. Scientists had said it was a heavily irradiated dinosaur, a freak mutation of a fluke chance to manifest a dreadful power. Shinoda’s girl had called ‘Junior’ her best friend, and he himself saw that creature’s gentle nature with his own two eyes. Hina’s faith said it was a kami of destruction, manifested into a new body as it always had before and hence.
And for perhaps a brief instant, seeing that entity of the mightiest nature striding before the torii gate as it marched off to confront extinction; he himself had believed it to be that mythic protector the grounds of this temple were in homage too. It had given him hope in the face of the tears shed over his great failure.
Hina had been right. The names didn’t change it, how one perceived it and felt from that. Godzilla, Junior, Gojira and…
Aso stood in the shadow of Seiryu for a few pregnant moments, feeling the dread surged by the incoming ICBMs and the alien abomination that refused to die. There was only one hope in one thing that set this right. And for the first time since he was a youth growing up, he had to believe in that.
Picking up an old flute laid down by the fountain and statue, Aso didn’t see the battle, nor the missiles that engendered so much dread. All he focused upon, behind his closed eyelids, was doing the one thing he could. Offer his hope, in the form of a rusty old melody he once played so often back in the rurals of Hokkaido. Before he became a man solely of the modern world and what was to come, before he gave up so much of tradition and hope when he saw a city go up in flames. Before he forgot how to put his faith in something besides his fellows of humanity.
This song would do no miracles, but that didn’t matter. This gave him peace, and steeled the nerves nonetheless. It was, perhaps, the best kind of blessing he could ask for from his paid homage.
Seiryu’s old statue and perhaps its living avatar offered no words of thanks for the homage he paid it through song, the silence expected as it was. Kami, ghosts, gods, and hopes; they rarely gave straight answers. It was a curiosity he couldn’t see Hina anymore before he’d closed his eyes, but that hardly was a bother. Old matron was as mysterious as her kami…
Unseen, a smile fell upon him before its bearer slipped away to continue her prayer.
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A wiry tendril of cables snaked up from the streets away from the clashing titans. Snaking multiple hundreds of feet through the air, the mentally-controlled tendril harpooned itself into and curled around a downed maser tank. Gripping it tightly, the coiled mass of metal swung wide in a sweeping arc. The cables easily carved through the windows and concrete of one building, before wrapping about the central support beam. With the centrifical force built-up now spun in a tighter arc, the cable’s speed drastically increased just as the air was taken by an azure glow.
Almost 100 tons of empty maser tank right into the back of Godzilla’s head, causing the saurian to misfire his thermonuclear ray and briefly see stars. Orga, who had been knocked down and was about to have been blasted in the head had the distraction not momentarily paused Godzilla’s onslaught, shrieked as it started its counter attack.
Misshapen, enormous hands grabbed onto Godzilla by the neck and midsection, worked in tandem to wrench the dragon off the ground. Raising its foe up, the abomination bellowed before smashing its greatest enemy through an entire city block. Rubble and steel fell like an avalanche of humanity’s wake. Blue light flickered across Godzilla’s dorsal spines regardless, just as claws gouged and gripped one of Orga’s hands to wrench back on one of the fingers. While the thumb was pried off, Orga still had a grip with the hand across the torso and neck and brought Godzilla closer before he could fire off another plasma ray.
Irregular jaws split open and the abomination clamped down upon Godzilla’s face, blood oozing out whilst it kept the dragon of Odo Island’s jaws firmly shut. The abomination’s neck contracted and then swelled, vomiting up multiple thousands of gallons of viscous green matter. Not unlike the Shigan's corrosive vomit, the incredible pH of the material even started causing Godzilla's skin to smoke. Yellow energy began to gather within the cavity mounted within Orga’s shoulder, as the kinetic force cannon charged up with power in a follow up attack. And yet, even with several fangs stabbing into his brow and snout, the king would not be silenced.
Claws grabbed onto the seam of Orga’s jaws, digging in in tandem with Godzilla’s dorsal spines flashing from tail to head. Crackling blue energy conducted on every point of contact, the nuclear pulse attack combusted into a shockwave that shattered just about every window still intact across half of Kyoto. Amidst the avalanche of falling glass, Godzilla pulled himself free of Orga's mouth. The monster king's body from the shoulders up was still smoking from the corrosive deluge, eyes shut; and yet he still wouldn't stop.
Follow up shockwaves and radioactive energies conducted into the abomination, causing it to rise and thrash while trying to free itself. Its jaws briefly slammed shut on Godzilla's fingers before the dragon wrenched them back open to their fullest extent before it kept going. Orga's lower jaw was completely dislocated, wrenched downwards until the gross parody of a jaw the alien bore had its seams stretch down the entirety of the neck and terminate at the shoulders.
Orga gurgled a shriek, grabbing on to its blind assailant in a struggle to try and get free with the two pushing each other back and forth like a pair of fantastic tidal waves.
Yuji relied on muscle memory from having put this car together with his friends, having not driven it in over a decade. There was a lot he could’ve been thinking about right then, but none of that would help anybody so he remained hyper focused at the task at hand. No attention to the phantom memories of traveling through Kyoto again, nor to almost sensing the presence of bygone phantoms in the car with him, or the flickering angels of the apocalypse streaking through the sky. The Pale Horseman of War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, all riding through the sky, incarnate in the four nuclear warheads en route to their position with only minutes left. In many ways their apocalypse had been engendered when their forerunner generation started all of this half a century ago.
The only thing he could pay attention to, besides trying to navigate the pitch black and in many ways debris riddled streets to try and find his way to CCI Tower, was the thundering earth.
"Yuji, they're two blocks to your right and rapidly moving- Left left- turn left!" Katagiri’s voice sputtered and shouted through the radio.
Without thinking, he complied while his subconscious registered what might have happened if he hadn't. The old diesel engine rumbled and groaned, the car fishtailing around a corner and barrel into the left just as the right turn he was about to take became instantly unrecognizable. In the darkness the enormity, if it had been still, could have easily been mistaken for the foundations of a building that it rivaled in size. Instead the irregular flesh and bulging muscle heat glimpsed on the edge of the headlights indicated it was the lengthwise edge of the abomination's foot.
Yuji spun the steering wheel in hand, causing the car to fishtail again in a desperate gambit to avoid the avalanche of falling rubble from crushing him like it was the road. The sound of another enormous footfall off to his right was deafening as it crushed hundreds of tons of concrete and pavement in but a mere step. A blackness overtook the near pitch darkness of the sky, only indicated by it smothering out and obscuring the light of the incoming warheads. A mere foot, and yet it blocked out the whole of the heavens in a simple step; an enormity his mind couldn't grasp even after all these years.
“Yuji?! Yuji!? Shinoda if you can hear me-”
Yuji was trying to hear him through the explosive footfalls and loud bellowing from the two enormities battling it out all around him. Shoving each other into buildings, stomping the roads into craters, and shattering several of the car’s windows with the shockwaves. The near pitch blackness of the world beyond the headlights became a blinding gout of eerie yellow. Pitching his gaze very briefly out the shattered window to his side, Yuji glimpsed the source. The brilliant radiance was billowing out of Orga, chiefly from the vacant cavity left behind in the shoulder after one of its heads was blasted off. Another equal glow became clear when Orga, who had apparently been biting Godzilla, was forced off the bitten shoulder and exuded the same dead light from its remaining maw. Numerous cuts and gouges carved into its body similarly lit the alien monstrosity up like a horrific parody of a Christmas tree.
A massive shadow loomed over the car, blackening even the light of Orga’s charged up attack. Shinoda caught the outline of a reptilian head and dorsal spines as powerful arms grabbed onto Orga’s face to direct their aim away. It was uncanny to witness, but he registered a sense of skill in the movements of the dragon unseen in his predecessor. Even with its enormity, Orga was lifted off the ground by the head and midsection before being spun about and thrown. As it lazily careened through the air, Shinoda could only passively try and comprehend the distances involved. For it to be multiple times its height airborne and cast, and to already be around 100 meters tall to begin with, he’d just glimpsed Godzilla pick up and throw something larger than himself a sizable portion of a kilometer.
Orga was one of the few things plainly visible due to being lit up, casting alternating amounts of light from turning about in a spin from the throw. Through the chaos and motion, Yuji almost thought he glimpsed a jagged maw grinning; but it easily could have been a trick of his mind’s eye. It was the only thing he could have possibly seen as the flash that followed dazed his eyes. The car careened trying desperately to avoid the piles of rubble he’d attempted to remember the positions of prior to losing his vision. There was a violent tremor that rattled every bone in his body, something big slamming into the ground but in his disoriented mind he couldn’t tell which direction.
“STOP!”
He didn’t comprehend, just obeyed the voice screaming at him. It even took him a few moments to fully realize that it was Katagiri shouting at him. He just threw on the brakes and obliged. The car screamed and the brake very likely sparked, but he could scarcely hear any of that as the torrent of brightness that had blinded him was as overpowering to the other senses as it was to sight.
The roaring engendered by the torrent of energy was still omnipresent, as were the vibrations coursing up and down his body from vibrational tremors; but sight gradually returned. A truly gargantuan shape, one that seemed to span the width of all within view and extend up to touch the sky, was blocking the destructive torrent. It took several long moments, which felt like an eternity despite only fractions of a second actually passing, for him to realize what he was glimpsing. Just part of a hand and forearm.
As the car sped past, making a sharp turn to divert into another road, he rolled past Godzilla’s arm smashed down into the road. The car’s tires thumped and the chassis jostled, rolling atop the broken concrete jutting out in lines from the limb at the impact point. The half of the arm facing the torrent was glowing and smoking, kinetic force jostling its scales and rattling the street. Through the shudders and shakes, he glimpsed a sight that sent him back fifteen years. A massive orb, this time a span of gold surrounded by a sea of red all beginning to be swallowed up by blue. Godzilla had been crouched down, absorbing and withstanding more of the span from Orga’s horrific beam and keeping it from hitting the streets. Whether this was by design or accidental stumbling in battle, he couldn’t know.
Yuji didn’t fully comprehend how the living mountain was looking right at him, having just recently opened with the skin around it still smoking from corrosive vomit, until Shinoda had driven away and got clear after several seconds. The enormous orb eye swiveled to look upon him, a brief glimpse within their depths left him recollecting of a sleeping, kind youth dozing before him in a nest whilst listening to his wife’s music box.
-How did I never recognize it was you immediately?..-
Weathering the hit as Shinoda drove away, Godzilla retaliated and threw his upper half upwards. Orga’s assault burned and chipped away at hide and sinew, but like was met with like. Azure wrath flew from Godzilla’s maw, a blue torrent encircled in white spirals thanks to the greater charge time. The beam intercepted Orga’s onslaught, cutting it short. If the numerous glowing burns and dented ribs on Godzilla’s chest belied stuttering pain, it was not on display. The dragon maintained his fires at the still-airbourne alien, a small sun rapidly forming at the epicenter of where the attacks collided.
The luminous mass glowed and swelled in span, but didn’t remain idle long. Godzilla threw his head forward with a throaty snarl, and the beam outflow from his maw seemed to double in width. The intensified flow quickly broke the tie just as Orga started to land. The clashing rays oscillated briefly before the sphere between them rapidly went rocketing at the shocked Orga just as the alien abomination’s feet touched the ground.
There was an echoing shriek as Orga went flying backwards so quickly the scraping of its back on the pavement sounded like tires burning out. Godzilla’s spiral ray rammed through the exploding sphere created by the clash, completely overpowering Orga’s kinetic energy cannon and continuing to blast out the back of Orga’s shoulder even as the sphere detonated.
The fiery explosion enveloped most of Orga’s body, spurring flaming chunks and body parts to rain down in clumps big enough that they were flaming meteors upon downtown Kyoto over several blocks. The fires burned and illuminated the district with an eerie glow that reflected off Godzilla’s scales and blazed in his eyes. Watching the sight for a time, as plumes of smoke began to build up, Godzilla turned.
Mitsuo Katagiri, watching from the rooftop of Kyoto Institute, staggered as the after effects of the explosion rocked the structure and split some of the roofing. Hobbling to keep his footing, he brought the radio to transmit to Yuji’s earpiece to himself whilst keeping a pair of binoculars trained upon Godzilla for a moment.
The kaiju was looking upwards, letting a low rumble of a growl bellow from his gullet. Katagiri pitched his view upwards to try and spot what was in Godzilla’s line of sight that had his attention. It took some wavering, but the twinkling, burning light of one of the incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with a megaton payload came into view so brightly it hurt his eyes.
It had to be only several minutes out, at most. It and the rest of its kin come to wipe this city off the face of the map and then some. An airburst explosion would make for a bigger shockwave to destroy most on the onset, a ground-impact would mean multiple tons of radioactive debris flung upwards as fallout that could blanket over half of Japan. One meant a quick death in a certain area, the other meant a crueler fate and damnation for the entire region.
He had no questions in his mind which the Millennian had intended for the pests it saw mankind as, no good exterminator doesn’t salt the earth and poison the food for the prey they don’t immediately catch.
His question, instead, was as to why it got Godzilla’s attention and it left his mind buzzing with honest, scientific queries for perhaps the first time in over a decade without them being colored by pain and hatred. Did Godzilla see them coming as some kind of threat? Did he detect the radioactivity in the warheads? Or did he somehow see them for what they were, with understanding beyond Katagiri’s means to understand?
For now, he’d have to focus on what could be known and acted against. Katagiri brought the radio microphone to his mouth.
Mitsuo muttered morosely, “Yuji, the missiles are still incoming…”
“I can see them through the buildings,” Shinoda gasped, the sound of the roaring engine audible through the radio earpiece he was wearing, “Godzilla just killed it though. Shouldn’t they be able to disarm or divert them now?!”
“Nobody got control back even when that thing came bursting out of my building. It takes very little time to avert what’s coming. If the missiles are still coming, the kill-command signal is still being jammed.”
Yuji shouted whilst he revved the engine more, and Katagiri felt half compelled to warn him overclocking could spell disastrous risks if he hit something, “Could the UFO be sending the block command to keep them out?”
“Doubt it, else it might have been disrupted when it was dogfighting Aso in the X3. The UFO must have other systems.”
“So what’s that leave us?”
The fires continued to burn in the downtown area and from his vantage point, Katagiri’s eyes strained as he tried to look for any changes or movement. Flames licked up several buildings ominously, and blue radioactive energy sparked across several surfaces but he thought he glimpsed something. Or somethings. Godzilla slowly turned towards the fiery district and growled deeply.
Dr. Katagiri frowned grimly, “That it’s not dead yet.”
===============
Yuki Ichinose cried out as she was thrown over a bolted down table hard enough her back snapped the projector mounted atop it. The sharpened base shallowly, but painfully cut her across the flank to begin to stain her jacket red. Flopping across the floor in a daze, she forced herself to refocus her starry vision and shrug off the pain. The bare feet were stepping away from her and heading for the stationary girl in the center of the room.
Walls and ceiling started to groan with the strained telekinetic bonds holding them against collapse. Io Shinoda had her eyes closed tightly, repeating her mother’s lullaby as the bastardization of her memory started to stalk closer with an uncannily wide grin. The quiver in Io’s tone spoke of how she knew what was coming, she could sense it all the same as she could back at the fisheries. That uncanny ‘wrongness’ of the mind just like the drone that stalked her in the apartment. Perhaps because this was, in some ways, the very same one.
Io, knowing the danger, took a step aside and her appearance flickered, phasing out of existence as she projected the floor in her place within the mind’s eye. The fact everyone in the room would simultaneously see her vanish instead of just one at a time like normal, was testament to the boost Belvera’s last act had given her. And that was alongside trying to hold up a building.
But a millennia-old mind, even fractured and driven to insanity, still was a learned one in some ways. The drone could feel its prey’s touch upon its mind, having felt this before and knowing how it was a defense measure. One that went both ways and wouldn’t work twice.
In full truth, it didn’t actually have access to the memories it projected in its thoughts. None of Asuka Shinoda’s brain tissue remained to copy, only her records. But fragmented pieces of what the collective had learned from absorbing the data of G-Force and CCI’s terminals was useful for an approximation. It helped that Io herself didn’t know what the cabin she was born in looked like, just the impact such a place had.
The stormy night.
A heartbroken husband.
A dead woman in a bloody bed.
And the little murderer nestled beside her.
That word projected time and time again across any face Io might have known from the records, thought of with such strength within the mind of the drone that the psychic felt them as if they were her own.
Classmates, teachers, associates, even the sobbing and hateful visage of her own father.
She murdered her own mother. She ruined her father’s life. She was worth nothing but pain and she caused nothing but.
Io Shinoda. Coward. Painful. Cold. Bastard daughter. Curse. Murderer. Murderer! MURDERER!
The lyrics to “Beautiful Dreamer” wavered and a tear hit the floor from Io’s face.
The boost Belvera had given her was great; but she had her limits and her distraught mind was not helping with focus. Her distinctive camouflage ability fizzled out, revealing the girl only a few steps from where she had been. Io had fallen to her knees and started to sob from the assailing images combined with mental pains of overusing her powers.
The Millennian drone, face wreathed in frayed and draping hair, pounced for where the half-present girl was. The blunt force impact of a thrown desk striking them across the shoulder diverted their lunge and caused the disturbing emulation of Asuka Shinoda to stagger for their footing.
A crack from broken foundations split the room’s flooring and the entire structure groaned.
“GET AWAY FROM HER!” Io gasped when she heard Ichinose screaming at the top of her lungs as she jumped over the crack with a half broken chair in hand.
She smashed it down onto the drone’s elbow, snapping it with a wet crack that didn’t phase the abomination beyond making it stagger from the blow.
The Asuka drone took two steps back but stood up straight, whipping its arm out and snapping the bones back into place. Ichinose took the moment to quickly get between it and Io, holding the broken chair by the backrest as equal parts shield and bludgeon.
“Io- remember! Remember you gotta keep focused! No matter what happens, you-!” she was cut off by the drone moving so quickly it was practically a blur after dropping on all fours and barreling forward in a crawling bound.
It slammed into her midsection and knocked the air out of the photographer’s lungs. Pain and shock spun her head around in a delirium, having fallen onto her back with the weight on top of her. The drone pinned her down under its mass, the shrieking witch grabbing Yuki by shoulder with one hand and shoving her down into the floor. Through her spiraling vision she caught a glimpse of the drone’s deranged visage lunge for her throat. On reflex, she caught the insane mosntrocity’s face in her right hand and desperately tried to shove the horrible wretch from her.
The dim eyes, black in sclera and pure white in iris encircling contracted to give a visage of utter insanity; glared down at her through the mess of bangs and the span of Yuki’s fingers. The fact it was bare and yet without attributes or detail, skin uncannily smooth like living marble or the flesh of a beast of the sea; only made it more disturbing to look at. The drone sneered and thrashed, clawing at her cheek and side with gaunt fingers.
Through the mess and blur of motion, multiple stabbing sensations and a sense of gnawing jolted through Ichinose’s arm and Yuki held in a scream. Groping about with her free hand in pure desperation, she seized the first thing she got a hold of with manic strength and swung it around. Muscle tore in her arm from being overtaxed, but the small desk table struck true with enough force it shattered into pieces upon impact with the Asuka drone’s face and back.
Violently tumbling off its human prey, the silent drone flailed about for footing; limbs bending and twitching unnaturally and more like an insect than the woman it had taken the form of. Still keeping hold of the leg of the desk she’d grabbed, Yuki swung it several more times like a bat to beat the writhing mass across the limbs or head several times.
Haggard breath expelled itself from her throat as she stabbed the makeshift bludgeon downwards; impaling the uncanny flesh with the sharp, broken woody end. She’d lost her grip and felt a wet slide when her hand ran against the desk leg, red staining the wood. At first she’d thought she’d cut herself on the edged and jagged fragments, but even through the endorphins she could feel something about her right hand felt different than her left. Lighter perhaps.
Backing away, Ichinose panted and looked to her hand in horror to see something missing. Her ring and pinkie finger refused to be moved, and at first she thought them broken and bent down out of sight when viewing her palm from behind. But turning her hand over, sick bile surged in her throat when the bloody stumps of those fingers’ first knuckles were all that was there.
The drone ripped the desk leg jammed into its stomach free, Asuka’s horrific echo was still mute upon turning its head up to look at the troublesome interloper. Yuki’s bitten-off fingers were clenched within its still human-looking jaws, muscle spasms causing the severed pieces to twitch. The gaping hole in its gut started to writhe and convulse. For a moment Yuki Ichinose thought it would be like the drone she’d had to contend with at the fisheries and highway, where every wound seemed to be another means of warping its mass into any myriad of shapes to continue the attack with. Tendrils smacking the windshield as claws dug into the hood of her car; both engendered by a crushed arm.
The biomass of its body extended from its opened wound, but the moment it began to form into possibly another limb; the tissue disgustingly swelled out of control and became cancerous. The drone sectioned off the uncontrolled growth before it could spread, even going so far as to rip it free and toss it away. The wound was closed, but only that same, almost plastic-looking basic skin had sealed it.
The blood dripping down from the unnaturally-still Asuka’s lips seemed to fade for a moment, being absorbed into the skin just like how Ichinose had seen the drone at the fisheries re-absorb tissue spattered on the wall after she’d rammed into it. Only for it to quickly remain still no longer. Black hairs, totally unlike Asuka Shinoda’s but just like Yuki’s, started to erupt from the neck and scalp. The drone thrashed like it was vomiting, spitting out the severed fingers and ejecting bile containing the absorbed blood. It wrenched at the black hairs, ejecting a chunk of its scalp to do so and purge all traces of Ichinose from its system.
Yuki didn’t fully comprehend what was happening, what had caused the change. She couldn’t know the devastation Godzilla had wrought upon the collective mind and genome bank had resulted in unbridled chaos inside and out. The only thing keeping this drone from turning into a rotting mass of tumors was ejecting off any of the fraying genetic information save for the last genome it had assimilated. Asuka Shinoda was the one DNA sequence it had yet. Anything short of what was desired; the perfect union of Terran and alien DNA with an unknown agent making her immune to the very energy that had been the Millennian’s bane, was toxic.
She was an only semi-fit photographer, had broken multiple ribs, was subject to a splitting migraine and vision tremors from adrenaline, and the blood loss was leaving her light-headed. That was the short list even before getting to the fact she was down two fingers. She understood the drone seemed like it couldn’t pull its normal bag of tricks like they could before, and that coupled with sheer conviction had to keep her drive going.
After all, someone was still giving a good performance.
“Beautiful dreamer…” Io Shinoda wept as she continued to sing, head bowed and hands holding her face as she trembled.
Asuka remained silent, glaring at the interloper as it pulled a broken chair leg off the ground to heft like a club. Ichinose held her bloodied hand in front of herself and curled the remaining three fingers into a fist.
“Out on the sea…”
===========
Yuji Shinoda felt the roll of the roads, bump as they were with loose debris, abruptly begin to quake. Violent tremors rattled the car and everything inside of it to the bone, so much it was hard to drive straight.
“Katagiri, what’s happening?!”
“Yu-ji there’s- it’s growing and-” Mitsuo was at a near loss for words as he tried to adjust his binoculars. Godzilla was facing the pyres Orga had been torn asunder within, grumbling quietly whilst clearly looking too and fro.
Several buildings quaked, shrinking into the cityscape and blowing up enormous clouds of dust and smoke that blotted the streets. Something moved within the masses and Godzilla jolted back in clear surprise and disgust. Mitsuo Katagiri’s mouth dropped and he also lost hold of his binoculars at the same time.
Yuji Shinoda coughed and hacked inside the car, closing the air vents as dust and smoke rushed past the car with some of it flying into the cab. He could barely see the road, much less obstacles in his way for a moment. He could only drive forward to try and get clear of the smog whilst listening to the panting breath of Katagiri through the earpiece radio he had in.
“There’s more than one.”
A writhing horde, that is what came erupting from the streets and buildings. A mass of animate bodies, all of which having grown huge after uncontrolled growth and absorbing radioactivity from Godzilla’s attacks and blood. It was like when the arm was severed earlier in the battle, multiplied. A half dozen Orga, ranging from the same size as the last one to half the dimensions, but all equally malformed and disgusting in their asymmetry, thrashed and contorted. Some were missing limbs, others had regrown the malformed human face, others had multiple jagged, maple-leaf shaped spines erupting from out-of-the-norm places.
Some grabbed hold of one another, trying to stuff smaller forms into their gullet to reabsorb them whilst the independent smaller forms mauled their attackers in a frenzy.
The entire city block was abruptly leveled when one, even larger than the prior form, shrieked into the night upon erupting from two buildings. Composed of the blown-off upper half of the original and lacking legs, the ugly brute clawed its way across the ground in an ungainly manner one could compare to a rabid animal. Grasping and crushing a smaller, human-faced orga into a pulp between a gigantic hand; it drank up the crushed tissue down its widened gullet and began to regrow one of its legs from the char of its torso.
Others worked to thin their own herd, tearing each other apart and cannibalizing one another. Godzilla witnessed the grizzly self-slaughter and sneered briefly, before charging in with a trumpeting roar. One smaller orga was cleaved in two and flash-fried by an onslaught of his azure beam, as the dragon stomped closer. Another quick-fire of the ray seared a gaping wound within the back of the largest of the orga horde, engendering a scream of pain thrown skyward.
Even with a hole blown through itself, the greatest of abominations didn’t stop. It still ignored the dragon to focus on reabsorbing some of its fellows. Cables sprung free from the ground once more, now in a greater number than ever before. The crisscross mass of flexible metal snared around Godzilla’s legs, spines, and wrists to try and impede his movement. Even as Godzilla’s brute force of a quick burst of azure energy snapped or seared through their number, more kept coming. Entire buildings exploded outwards, their wiring gut conjoining to create new tendrils; as if the very city of Kyoto itself was trying to chain Godzilla down.
Fighting against the cables, Godzilla nonetheless turned his head and less loose an almost napalm or mist-like torrent of burning plasma. Less meant to blast through as per the usual atomic ray and more incinerate, the azure blaze did flash-fry one of the smaller orga. The writhing mass that used to be an arm contorted and blackened as it burned away to ash. When the pyre was directed upwards at the central mass however, the incineration was stopped and washed over a wide surface.
The barrier shield from the UFO was back, as was the craft when the broken-off front end slammed into Godzilla’s face and carried him back several dozen meters. Having gotten itself freed from the Kyoto Tower by ramming through several buildings, the once-pristine ship was completely marred by gouges, dents, and burns. Worth little more than a bludgeon, which it served the purpose of. Between the cables and craft, Godzilla was finding it difficult to loose the blasts he needed to burn down the chaotic growth. The growth which was renewing itself, the largest Orga consuming another of its smaller kind as two smaller ones tore into each other.
Katagiri’s eyes caught a flicker of light not far from where Yuji had been in the dust clouds, one identical to the dim glowing energy crisscrossing the controlled wires and dead lights within the broken UFO. He looked and he studied.
“Shinoda, Godzilla’s being impeded by the cables and craft. The biomass is trying to form something big.”
Yuji swore under his breath and swerved the car, avoiding the barely visible mass of a cable network ripping itself out of the pavement in front of him just after the headlights illuminated the breaking roadways through the dusty air. Turning the car in a wide bank, he managed to keep on the section of road ahead of the splitting ground and not get totalled. The sound of the growing Orga’s groaning bellow reverberated down the streets.
“How big?!” Shinoda yelled through the earpiece, his ears still ringing from that roar.
A hunched back, with irregular dorsal spines, was arching up over the edge of several smoking ruins. It was already almost double Godzilla’s size.
Katagiri swallowed a rock in his throat, “Big. Knowing him I doubt Godzilla can’t kill it, but the more he gets stalled the worse this gets. We’re minutes from impact. It has to die, now.”
A glance at the sky confirmed it. The clouds high above were beginning to brighten, and not from below but from above. The four missiles had finished their arc and were rapidly falling to place. The one chance to stop this, stop the extinction of mankind and who knew what else was rapidly counting down... There was a lot of temptation to despair, a strangulation of cold within his chest. To throw himself down and curse fate for giving them this cruel hand. Give up, die, accept fate. This world didn’t belong to them, and their time in it was over.
The Millennian at G-Force’s headquarters had been right when it spoke to them. Their best and brightest, in martial might led by noble leaders and wisdom of the learned; it hadn’t been enough. They were ants fighting extermination, insects before a firestorm. The temptation to accept that, to wallow in their fallible nature, festered.
The echoes of Godzilla’s enraged roar reverberated down the streets, sundering the air and blowing back much of the dusty smog. In doing so, it too disrupted the cold strangulation of Yuji’s own breath. His mind subconsciously recalled the look in those deep, fiery and yet calming eyes of yellowed bronze and burned reds. The very same he’d once seen on the gentlest creature on the planet, now the most powerful upon it.
He could see where the stories of your life flashing before your eyes came from, as well as those of ancients who looked into the eyes of dragons. His own mother once told him of a few.
The presence of his colleague, Ichinose, with the tactile sensation of her holding his right hand as she helped him to pray and steady himself.
The laughter of his daughter, Io, when she used to laugh and play in this very city years ago in a life bygone to them both and yet so yearned for.
The last smile he ever saw on Asuka’s face, when they held their beautiful dreamer in their left hands with the omnipresence of their wedding rings still felt.
Plenty others joined them, friends old and new like Chapman and Katagiri; respected fellows and leaders like Aso and 023. It was a reminder he’d needed a few times tonight, but when put up against such impossible odds... He was grateful for the blessing given.
“What can we do to help him?” Yuji noted with his brow furrowed with conviction, “Help Junior.”
“...” Katagiri was going to bring up the lack of time and weapons, but something about his friend’s tone proved infectious, “There’s an odd flashing of light a block to your next right. It’s similar to what I see in the UFO and cables. If I were to bet, something there is controlling it.”
Yuji maintained a speed and turned hard on his next right. A few hundred meters away, he could see it clear as day in the flickers of light. Obscured as it was by those brief, blinding flashes, the other half of the split UFO visibly lay still in the road. A combination of the missile strike and Godzilla’s stray blasts had disabled it from the active fight and part of a building had collapsed on top of it, but the stubborn Millennian craft seemed to refuse to stay down and out. It was up to something.
“I see the other half of the UFO…” Yuji Shinoda noted as he watched the dim pulses of light inside the craft, turning and seeing the same kind of pulses on the cables tearing themselves from the ground. The other half of the UFO swung wide over the roadway, knocking the top off another building in its path.
The interior of the craft still airborne pulsed twice before glowing for a long span. Shinoda caught a glimpse of the same sequence in the other half of the ship up ahead, “I think you’re right, it’s controlling the defensive push. There is some coordinate program inside the downed half ahead of me.”
“Great, now we just need several hundred kilos of explosives…” Katagiri sighed, “I’ll see if there is any downed craft nearby… I know what you intend to do.”
Sap or detonate inside the craft, wreck whatever internals within the mostly hollow cavity were permitting it to still function. With the ship split wide open and armored seemingly entirely on the outside, it made sense.
The voice on the other end of the radio sighed into Katagiri’s ears before chuckling, “No you don’t.”
“...Shinoda?”
Yuji stomped on the accelerator, the car’s engine overclocking to a dangerous degree as it began to barrel down the road. He tried to avoid stray debris, but swerving too much would decrease speed. Speed he needed for this plan.
“... Yuji?! Yuji?! Damn it, what are you doing?!”
“I’ll have to pay you back for the car!” Dr. Shinoda yelled as he angled the car towards a slight incline in the split street, “Because I’m paying him back for what we’ve done to him!”
The interior of the craft was in view and there was only a small spot producing the blinding flickers of light to indicate activity; much of the rest was damaged and frozen over by the Super-X3. Aso had really given this thing hell, he just intended to finish the job. A few hundred kilos of explosive might do it, so hopefully a few thousand kilos of speeding steel and highly flammable oil might do the trick.
Godzilla’s booming calls seemed to shepherd him along on his collision course. In a way, he could almost feel the titan’s conviction feeding his resolve. Blue brilliance ignited across the air and Shinoda glimpsed upwards, catching sight between the smog and ash to see the beam strike the airborne half of the UFO across the side. With the armor compromised as it was, it wreaked havoc upon it and blasted over a third of the seemingly unending ship clean off.
Such power.
They’d been developing weapons for decades to surpass or destroy it, and their honest best went far but didn’t finish the job.
It was beautiful, the same way a hurricane or volcano might be despite the possibility for devastation. The same look one got in an azure dragon’s eyes. That grandeur that made small mankind, that foolish genius of a species that achieved and fumbled in potentially equal measure by understandable and stupid reasons both.
They’d gotten themselves into this situation, as they had with so many before. Maybe they’d improve, maybe they’d diminish, or most likely they’d plateau eventually. For the worst maybe, but probably, possibly, for the better. Maybe advancement or power for its own sake wasn’t their best drive nor their destiny?
Because right now, thinking of all he’d ever want past this, Shinoda wasn’t thinking of a future where they reached the stars and surpassed their home world. Not of life immortal or strength of arms to level foes. Not even more down to earth goals he once chased or longed for of esteemed respect or conquests of knowledge. He just wanted to save others, and hold his daughter one last time.
Potentially one last realization; that he’d had all he needed to be happy long ago. Ever since his wife gave him her last gift.
The burned-down ship crashed into the buildings and Godzilla resumed his struggle to fight his way to the biomass even with seemingly half the city fighting him every step, stomping through the roadway to cross the mainstreet in Yuji’s rearview mirror. The visage of the titan looked all the more mythic, obscured by smoky mist and indicated in how he moved in front of the glimmerings of the incoming warheads.
Such power. The most powerful creature on the planet. A kami, for all intents and purposes.
He feared it once, ever since the nightmare from fifteen years ago. But now? Shinoda felt humbled and yet perhaps enlightened. A lesson in the eye of a dragon, one Io had learned years ago that he could now feel.
And what a discovery, that he got to see the Apex of the New Era come at last.
Shinoda stomped on the accelerator for as far as it could go, clicking into the final gear. The engine roared even through the radiopiece, as the speedometer ticked higher and higher. Only moments left now, moments that might decide a lot of things. He couldn’t win this day, no man or army could, but he could help the one who could.. The one who would.
“It’s up to you, Gojira…”
The pavement pitched upwards slightly due to the breakage of the road, and he was dead on where the controls for the ship had to be. At the last moment, not risking hitting the steering wheel, he yanked the door open and threw himself aside. Tucking himself into a ball, Shinoda hit the ground hard.
There was a resounding crash within the ship. A gout of flame, sparks, and otherworldly yellow energies flew out of the broken ship. It engendered a scream of whiplash and pain from multiple sources. The greatest was in downtown Kyoto, from the hulking biomass trying to reform into a gigantic Orga.
The second loudest was from inside CCI Tower. The Asuka drone, having grabbed the meddler by the throat, had been both trying to throttle Yuki Ichinose whilst battering her with a bludgeon. Yuki’s kicking legs started to go slack as they dangled off the ground, before being abruptly dropped when the drone violently wrenched a hand off her neck to drop her.
The Asuka copy shrieked at a pitch so loud and shrill that it tore its throat. Its other hand dropped the bloody bludgeon it had been using; the chair leg clattering on the ground, the drone thrashed whilst gripping its head. Yellow sparks glimmered in its quivering eyes, reflecting the image of Yuki’s blued and bruised, but snarling face as the woman lay sprawled out on the ground. Bruised and more than half choked to death, blood ran down her scalp and lips.
And yet, it was something else’s blood she had it out for the moment she saw the chaotic drone get a hold of itself for a moment to dart its attention to Io.
The photographer pounced and tackled the bastardization of a woman, only able to see out of one eye as her right one was kept shut. It was enough for her, as she had a good aim even without depth perception. Squeezing a fist to get more of her blood on her hand, she swung with everything she had and jammed it down the drone’s gaping mouth. Its eyes bulged and Yuki bit back the pain whilst glaring at them. Black hair began to erupt from its body, the skin tone of an average complexioned Japanese woman beginning to flush across its Mysterian hide. But that was the orderly parts.
It was growing and grinding her teeth in its joints, copies of her ribs sprouted from the back to form spines, and its left eye split as a copy of Yuki’s and the previously existing emulation of Asuka fought for space in the socket.
Ichinose gasped and grimaced, but tried to hang on and keep her bloodied, three fingered hand inside it. Make this thing take her DNA and choke on it!
Outside, sparks and arcs of yellow energy shot across all of the cables, the bundled masses trying to constrict Godzilla like an army of pythons and drag him away whilst wrapped around every limb. In a single motion, they went slack. And not a moment later, flashes of azure greatness came exploding through them. Now without the energies coursing through them, Godzilla had seized his chance and unleashed a nuclear pulse strong enough that the shockwave eviscerated his bindings and leveled several nearby buildings.
The biomass recreating Orga’s body was a disgusting sight, one that easily tripled Godzilla himself in sheer size and mass. Malformed legs began to take hold, with the upper body mostly completed. Multiple sets of yellow eyes glimmered and glowed with a growing charge of energy.
Stomping through the last distance between him and the biomass, the still-forming Orga screamed and lashed out. An enormous fist, one as big as Godzilla himself, uppercut the dragon in the jaw whilst its sheer mass almost meant it slammed dead-solid against his chest. It was enough to dent-in the dragon’s chest, breaking a rib or ten. It didn’t do much more beyond pause him for a moment however. Digging his feet in to avoid getting thrown back, Godzilla grabbed onto the limb. Taking either of the main fingers in hand, titanic strength wrenched them apart before Godzilla’s dorsal spines’ omnipresent glow flared to a new height.
The spiral ray, azure encircled in white, cleaved through Orga’s arm between the fingers, through the wrist, and exploded off the shoulder; with such an intensity it instantly fried the muscle and skin. The charred limb hit the ground, and before Orga could even react Godzilla was already clearing the last distance.
It tried to put up the barrier shield, but Godzilla was already inside its range and it shattered instantly whilst trying to reform. Knowing it could blow him back or impede him, Godzilla gave no opening. Spying the hole blasted into it earlier through the torso, the dragon bit down on his own hand quickly before withdrawing it. Red ichors spilled out of the toothy wounds self-inflicted by his fanged maw. Blue energy from a nuclear pulse arched across the limb, and the motion which was halfway between impalement and a punch struck home.
The shockwaves, carrying massive amounts of radiation, reacted with both the new blood injected into Orga’s system as well as all of the cells already existing within it. Limbs melted into cancerous masses of tissue, the face dissolving into the out of control growth. The yellowed hues of the abomination’s own building wrath convulsed through its body and reacted violently with the azure destruction coursing through it.
The resulting explosion leveled the heart of Kyoto for several blocks, more than enough that everyone pulling away from the battle could see it even far outside the city.
Hina Shinoda stood within the gateway of Kiyomizu-dera, despite having long wished she could make it to try and help beyond what she could. Even with her, there were limits; much as they were wished against.
The old Shinto priestess gazed upon the mixing blue and yellow explosion, remorsefully frowning deeply as her old radiation burn seemed to ache. Forty-five years later, and she was still to be reminded of one of her greatest failures. Her and mankind’s whole. The warheads were only a minute or two out, still coming fast.
Hina wept as she bowed her head to pray.
This was it. This was the turning point for mankind, and the world at large. The split seconds that would decide fate, as forces beyond human comprehension and complexity would decide. In 1995, she’d remarked to Akira about how they were to be judged. At the time, she was remarking on boorish drunks and misplaced celebrations or sentiment. That hubris, arrogance, and pride; it wouldn’t speak well for their judgment and she’d dreaded the odds.
But now was the time. The dawn of a new era, and the judgment for mankind on if they’d live, thrive, suffer, or die on its cusp. And that judgment all came down to what happened in this old city years ago.
Because it wasn’t over yet.
=======================
I like the use of the psychic cables in the fight to add a bit of variety to the fight.
I also see the use of the Pipeworks game venom spit. Nice. And Junior remembers his mentor's signature move. Like the brutality of the fight.
Meanwhile, Yuji is rushing to the rescue. The end of the world is still oncoming and all he can do is try to reach the ones he loves. Which is easier said than done when you're in a massive kaiju fight.
Always do enjoy these kinda things where you see these things from the human perspective as the battle rages around you. And ambigious if Junior did notice and save Yuji on purpose, but I imagine he certainly did. I do like him wondering how he didn't recognize Junior before.
Also, beam struggle. Always enjoy that, especially with Junior winning and dealing a massive amount of damage.
I like Katagiri genuinely considering the possibility that Junior knows exactly what the incoming nuclear warhead. We know he most likely does.
I also like the realization that must me Orga's still alive.
Meanwhile, Yuji is doing her best to hold off the Asuka Drone, who is for all intents and purposes the human scale main antagonist at this point, While Io's boosted psychic illusion protects her, the remnant of the hive mind manages to distract her by returning the telepathic attack.
Fortunately, Yuji is still there to fight and defend Io from the perversion of her mother, losing fingers in the process but the damage Junior's DNA had done have severely weakened it and prevent it from absorbing anymore biomass.
Meanwhile, Orga being blown to pieces results in them regenerating into horrifically distorted abominations...and then begin to turn into something much, much worse. Once again, love the show of how the hive mind has legit gone completely and utterly insane.
Yuji struggles not to fall into despair...but Godzilla helps snap him back and remind him of everything driving him.
Turns out that it's the other half of the UFO responsible for controlling the city trying to stop Godzilla from interupting Orga's One Winged Angel transformation...so Yuji just decides to ram the car into it while overclocking the engine enough to blow the dang thing up. I mean when all you have is a huge car filled with flammible fuel.
Not only does it do what was intended and frees Godzilla from the bindings, it distracts the Asuka drone and allows Yuki to drive her DNA into it and start damaging it.
Despite Orga now being much larger than him, Junior is unfaized even after taking a massive punch. Doing the same thing Yuji, Junior drives his blooded hand and nuclear pulse into Orga and does his best impression of his future buddy Gamera's Plasma Fist, overloading Orga on every level and causing the abomination to explode.
I like Hina putting her trust in Godzilla and where the judgment of humanity goes.
On to part 3!
The opening Convo between Aso & Hina was nice. Compelling analysis of the themes from Aso's perspective.
The on the ground perspective of the battle with Yuji was great. We rarely get that sort of thing with Kaiju battles.
The Drone emotionally manipulating Io was a great vile touch to the scene. And Ichinose continues to prove why she's a badass.
And Orga's actions in the battles are seriously grisly.
Finished this one. All I can say is, Jr and Yuki taking their opponents with their blood be like. “CHOKE ON IT! CHOKE ON IT!!!”