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"GRAAAOOOOH!"
Golza went on a rampage the moment it fully materialized.
Luke couldn't tell if the creature had any intelligence. It moved like a force of nature—destroying everything in its path without apparent purpose or strategy. Just raw, primal devastation.
Then Golza's forehead began to glow.
Purple energy gathered at the beast's skull, building intensity for a fraction of a second before releasing in a devastating beam. The Supersonic Wave Ray—Golza's signature attack—lanced through the air and struck a high-rise building.
The structure didn't collapse. It shattered. Concrete and steel reduced to fragments in an instant, debris raining down across blocks of downtown Los Angeles.
The ground cracked and split. Fissures spread from the impact point like a spiderweb, chunks of earth heaving upward as if the planet itself was rejecting the assault.
"Open fire!"
The infantry didn't bother. Soldiers scattered, abandoning their positions with the desperate speed of people who understood their weapons were useless. Their rifles might as well have been water guns against something that size.
But the aircraft and armor kept shooting.
Missiles streaked toward the kaiju. Tank shells arced through the air. Everything the military could bring to bear in the immediate area converged on Golza in a symphony of explosive ordnance.
Fire consumed the creature. Smoke and flame obscured its massive form.
When the barrage ended, Golza stepped out of the inferno completely unharmed.
Not a scratch. Not a scorch mark. Not even superficial damage to indicate the attack had registered.
"Target undamaged! Repeat—target undamaged!"
The pilot's voice cracked over the radio. This was beyond anything they'd trained for. A living thing that could shrug off anti-ship missiles wasn't supposed to exist.
Nick Fury watched the satellite feed with growing horror.
What the hell IS that?
He'd seen things. Aliens. Enhanced humans. Technology that bordered on magic. But this... this was something else entirely.
Those missiles could penetrate aircraft carrier armor. They'd bounced off that creature like raindrops.
"Sir, we have no effective countermeasures," an analyst reported helplessly. "Current conventional weapons are having zero impact."
Fury's mind raced through options. Call in Captain Danvers? She was off-world, might take too long. The military was clearly outmatched. SHIELD didn't have anything in their arsenal that the Pentagon didn't already have pointed at the monster.
Then his phone rang.
An unknown number. On his personal line—the one maybe eight people in the world knew existed.
Fury answered cautiously. "Who is this?"
"Director Fury, I presume?"
The voice was familiar. Fury's eye narrowed.
"You. Luke Foster."
"You remember me. I'm flattered."
"How do you have this number?" Fury demanded. "Who in my organization is feeding you information?"
Because someone was. Getting this number required access to the highest levels of SHIELD—or a penetration so deep that Fury's entire security apparatus was compromised.
"That's not important right now," Luke replied calmly. "You've seen what's happening in Los Angeles."
"I'm looking at it. What do you know about this thing?"
"It's called Golza. An alien bioweapon deployed by a civilization known as the Forerunners. They don't build machines for warfare—they breed monsters."
Fury felt his stomach drop.
"You're telling me this is an invasion weapon?"
"You've met the Kree. You know Earth isn't alone in the universe. This is just another variation on the theme."
The Kree. Carol Danvers. The cosmic reality that Fury had spent years trying to prepare for.
But one kaiju was manageable. Terrifying, but potentially containable. If this was part of a pattern—if more were coming—
"Is it alone?"
"For now. But civilizations that use bioweapons as their primary military force tend to have lots of options."
Fury processed that grimly. "Can you stop it?"
"Of course. We're professionals." Luke's tone carried quiet confidence. "Just tell your people not to shoot at anything unusual in the combat zone. Friendly fire incidents would be... inconvenient."
The line went dead.
Luke pocketed his phone and looked up at the rampaging kaiju.
Golza was moving through LA with disturbing purpose, heading northeast. Toward New York, if its trajectory held.
More specifically, toward Luke.
He'd figured it out during the initial chaos. The creature wasn't randomly destroying—it was tracking him. When he moved, Golza adjusted course. When he stayed still, it moved directly toward his position.
The system had spawned a hostile drop that was literally hunting its creator.
Envy's stealth capabilities had kept him invisible to military surveillance and prevented Golza from pinpointing his exact location. But the kaiju could apparently sense him in some general way, enough to know which direction to go.
"We need to fight that thing?" Tifa asked, still holding Luke's arm as they hovered on Envy's bat-wing configuration.
"Eventually. Let me see how this plays out first."
Luke had learned something from Ultraman lore. In those stories, heroes who intervened to save humans were often resented for it. Property damage. Collateral casualties. The public blamed the defender as much as the monster.
He wasn't interested in being a martyr.
Better to let the military exhaust their options, let the authorities acknowledge their helplessness, then step in. That way, when he saved the day, it would be undeniable. No room for the usual "we had it under control" revisionism.
Skadi shifted beside him, hand on her weapon. "This creature is formidable. Even by my standards."
"It's a bioengineered war machine designed to destroy civilizations," Luke said. "It's supposed to be formidable."
The explosions were deafening even from a distance.
Ordinary humans would have died from the shockwaves alone—internal organs liquefied by acoustic pressure. Luke remembered watching Ultraman as a kid, wondering how the defense teams could stand so close to battles between fifty-thousand-ton combatants.
Maybe humans in that universe are just built different.
In this universe, Envy was absorbing the worst of it. Sound waves, pressure differentials, even heat—everything converted to magical energy and fed back to Luke.
The cape was proving even more useful than he'd expected.
He extended its protection to cover Skadi, Tifa, and Riven, the dark fabric wrapping around them like a cocoon while maintaining enough transparency for them to see.
"Alright," Luke said finally, watching Golza brush off another volley of missiles. "Time to make a dramatic entrance."
Envy's wings spread wider. Luke began his descent toward the monster that had come specifically to kill him.
He was going to enjoy this.