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"ROOOAR,—"
"SCREAA,—"
Both Titans saw the giant materialize and instinctively dropped their volume. Damn... he's really stepping in.
Kong remembered Skull Island clearly. The giant had hit him with an Ultra Slap in one hand and a Full Moon Rect in the other , a full double-whammy moral rehabilitation , and Kong had walked away knowing exactly where he stood in the power rankings.
His proud physical strength meant nothing in front of this guy. The giant carried a whole arsenal of abilities on top of that, and he used them with the kind of practiced technique that looked almost human.
Kong would never yield. But... this guy was one of the good ones. He could tell. That had nothing to do with whether he could win or lose.
As for Godzilla.
They'd already thrown down back in Mexico. He'd figured it out then , this guy had the stats and the tools to back them up. What really burned him was that the bastard could fly. No wings. Just flew.
In the battle against King Ghidorah, the power gap had been just as obvious.
He was Earth's natural guardian. He had few rivals on this planet. Hundreds of millions of years of growth and evolution, and he still couldn't measure up to something that had dropped in from beyond the sky.
Still.
Godzilla had his pride. If I leave the moment you tell me to, what does that make me in front of the other Titans?
He held the giant's gaze. He didn't board the ship, but he didn't leave either.
Kong, for his part, was considerably more cooperative. He planted himself back down on the deck without much fuss.
"So — do you want to go another round and wait for Mothra to come break it up, or do you want to stay and protect the surface while we're gone?" Natsuki's voice surfaced directly inside Godzilla's mind.
He wasn't going to hit Godzilla too hard. If the big lizard stayed stubborn about this, it was going to end with Mothra showing up to mediate, and that was the only way it ended.
"Roo...ar..." Godzilla sat with it for a few seconds. He understood what the final answer looked like. It made him even more reluctant.
He looked at Kong again.
He could see it , this one hadn't been an adult for long. He hadn't lived through the prehistoric wars. And he wasn't the same Kong who had taken over his territory in the ancient days. Different individual entirely.
Fine. I can't just take out old grievances on this guy. No point.
I'm reasonable. I'm not like the other Titans.
And there's no need to drag Mothra all the way out here over nothing.
"Thank you, my friend." Dr. Ishiro Serizawa watched Godzilla sink back beneath the surface and said it quietly, with full sincerity.
Natsuki's Telepathy had worked directly in Godzilla's mind. Serizawa hadn't heard any of it. In his eyes, Godzilla's image , the great, majestic natural guardian , remained completely intact. If anything, watching him choose to leave made that image feel even more worthy of awe.
Humanity genuinely had a chance at something like peace with Godzilla.
The island-like ridge of dorsal fins receded into the distance. The giant's form unraveled into motes of light and drifted apart on the wind.
Every member of Monarch on that ship exhaled at once. They had made it out with their lives.
"See?" Natsuki walked up to Kong and smiled. "I told you I'd handle it."
"Roo...ar..." Kong scratched his head. He genuinely hadn't expected this guy's pull to work that well.
The moment Godzilla had surfaced, he'd confirmed it , that thing was operating on a completely different level. Fighting at sea was already terrible ground for him. If he'd gone in and fallen into the water, he probably would have drowned.
At least the Ultraman had both the stats and the kit to abuse them. Kong had neither. He was off-meta and he knew it.
"Don't worry. We'll find your people." Natsuki looked over at young Jia beside him, rested a hand on her head, and spoke directly into her mind.
"I promise."
Jia's eyes went wide.
She had been born unable to hear. Not once in her life had sound reached her , and now a voice had appeared inside her head, clear and immediate, like it had always been there. It was the strangest, most extraordinary thing she had ever experienced.
You... how did you do that? She signed the question to Natsuki.
"Telepathy." He smiled. "It's one of our abilities."
He couldn't read sign language, but the translation function in his bracelet handled it, converting what Jia wanted to say into something he could understand.
His body had recovered significantly. His combat power was in a different class compared to where it had been. But healing rays were another matter entirely , that kind of technique demanded an almost surgical level of energy control, and that precision wasn't something he could just switch back on. Relearning it was slow, careful work.
Basic healing , feeding energy into cells to promote activity , he could manage. But curing congenital deafness was a different problem. He would need to restructure the cells inside her ears, alter them at the architectural level, and simultaneously stimulate the language centers in her brain for deep repair.
That carried real risk. A mistake didn't mean nothing happens. A mistake meant making things worse.
Destructive techniques were easy to calibrate , reduce the output, or increase it. Precision barely mattered because the whole point was to destroy something anyway.
Creation was always harder than destruction. It always had been.
And the Full Moon Rect, for all its purifying energy, didn't heal. It had restored the monsters from Kafka's world because it purified the corrupted energy driving them. For something like Jia's condition, it had no mechanism to work with. It simply wouldn't apply.
They're going to face something terrible.
I couldn't see them clearly. But they were big. And there were a lot of them. Jia signed, the memory of her dream pressing back in.
What she had seen was the fate waiting for the Iwi people , not something that had already happened. But it wasn't far off either.
The Hollow Earth had no shortage of threats. Titans as large as Kong were common down there. What counted as a monster up here was just the landscape down below.
"Don't worry."
"The power we Ultramen carry exists to protect lives that can't protect themselves." Natsuki said it gently, one hand still resting on her head.
---
Inside APEX Corporation.
"They're transporting Kong. They ran into Godzilla en route, but there was no engagement."
"So..." Simmons leaned back in his office chair, eyes on the report open in front of him, and looked up at the young woman standing across the desk in a sharp black uniform. "They're heading for the Hollow Earth."
He had been tracking Monarch's movements for a while now.
The energy sources available on the surface couldn't sustain Mechagodzilla for any extended operation. Their Hollow Earth aircraft was functional , it could make the descent , but the energy samples they'd gathered were ordinary. Not what they actually needed. Not true Hollow Earth energy.
The real source was somewhere they hadn't found yet. Somewhere only a Titan could lead them to. Kong's ancestors had lived in the Hollow Earth before an accident brought them to the surface. That ancestry meant one thing: instinct. The pull toward home was built into him at a genetic level.
"Following Kong gives us a strong chance of locating the energy sample we actually need."
"Take a team in through the secondary entrance. Stay with Kong's pace." Simmons said.
The woman across from him gave a single, clean nod.
"Yes, Father."
➤ Next: Through Time and Space
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