The air above the fractured ruins of San Francisco was no longer air in the traditional sense. It had become something else; a churned medium of debris, heat, and the howl of war, as if the very sky had decided to grieve the dying city.
Amid this tortured firmament, the male MUTO soared like a dagger cut loose from a hand, darting between broken towers and shattered cranes with a shrill cry that cracked like dry bone. Each beat of its wings scattered ash across the horizon, each dive a calculated strike meant to bleed a titan.
Godzilla, massive and worn, lumbered through the streets beneath the shadow of this harrying predator, his body marred with gashes and smears of blackened blood. Every time the creature above swept low to gouge at his sides, Godzilla would twist with a snarl, teeth flashing, claws swinging with the weight of tectonic plates, but always too late.
The MUTO, as if woven from mockery itself, remained just out of reach, escaping upward in a screeching cyclone of wings and spite. For several minutes this cycle repeated, an endless torment where the king of monsters could only defend, never strike.
The buildings surrounding them shattered like eggs beneath their footfalls and wingbeats, and any lingering structures that had miraculously survived the earlier phases of battle now began to collapse from the sheer pressure of movement alone.
Then, just as the male MUTO dove again, curling its wings like scythes and aiming directly for Godzilla's exposed throat, the ancient leviathan made no effort to dodge. Instead, he shifted subtly; his great tail coiling with purpose.
The creature never saw it coming.
In one single, perfectly timed motion, Godzilla's tail swung with the force of a mountain breaking free, the sheer velocity of the strike compressing the air before it like a silent detonation.
The tail collided with the airborne MUTO in mid-dive, the sound of impact eclipsing all other noise, as if thunder had been caged and then suddenly loosed. The MUTO was flung sideways, its cry still caught in its throat, as it hurtled toward a skeletal office tower already half-eaten by flames. The twisted metal bones of the structure greeted it like waiting spears.
The entire city seemed to freeze as shattered steel pierced through the beast's body, emerging from its chest and abdomen like grotesque iron branches. The MUTO jerked once, twice, and then fell silent, twitching only slightly as the final air escaped from its lungs.
It hung there, impaled like an offering, its wings limp and dripping with oil-dark blood. The sky had lost one of its monsters.
But while the heavens quieted, the earth and sea convulsed, for elsewhere in the city, at the edge of the flooded streets where the ocean had claimed neighbourhoods and piers alike, a different battle had begun.
One of hunger and vengeance.
The female MUTO, no longer concerned with the dying roars of her mate, had now locked eyes with the newly emerged behemoth who loomed just beyond the flooded highway. Mark, monstrous and terrible, stood in the deep water like an ancient serpent crowned with the ruins of the world.
His form glistened with salt and battle-scars, some still raw from his previous conflicts. The female, driven mad with grief at the loss of her eggs, shrieked with a sound that shattered windows and sent cracks racing through the concrete beneath them. She charged, massive legs hammering the ground with primal rage, but Mark did not move.
Not yet.
Only when the distance between them narrowed to a few hundred feet did the colossal octopoid warrior react, not with a roar, but with motion. Two tentacles lunged forward with unnatural speed, each one tipped with retractable barbs, now extending fully with a hydraulic snap. The first wave of these tendrils crashed against the MUTO's chitinous armour, leaving long grooves but failing to penetrate. The second wave adjusted, curling beneath her legs in an attempt to throw her off-balance.
The female screamed and jumped sideways, her movements remarkably agile for her size, retaliating by slamming one of her massive forelimbs onto the tentacle beneath her. Mark jerked it free before she could crush it completely, the pain registering but not slowing his pace.
He began to adapt instantly. Skin flaps; another gift earned from the wolf, unfurled between several of his rear tentacles, turning his underwater base into a hydrodynamic anchor, allowing him to pivot and twist at unnatural angles.
He slid across the flooded concrete with the speed of a reef shark, circling the larger beast with unrelenting precision. The MUTO lunged again, aiming to crush his centre mass beneath her massive bulk.
But Mark dipped backward, folding his outer muscles in a ripple that absorbed and redirected her momentum. Then, almost casually, he unleashed another set of strikes; this time from smaller tentacles tipped not with barbs, but with sharp-edged suckers, each lined with barbed, jagged teeth derived from the giant squid he had consumed so long ago.
These suckers latched onto the side of her armoured head, tearing strips of organic plating free with every pull.
Snarling, she retaliated with a glancing blow of her own; her forelimb crashing into Mark's side with enough force to send concrete flying into the sky. Mark slid back several meters, dislodging chunks of debris as he absorbed the impact.
Despite the blow, his mind remained cold and calculating. Within the dense network of his distributed nervous system, adapted from the cephalopod DNA he had long ago absorbed, Mark processed the angle, velocity, and structural weakness of the creature before him.
He was not fighting from instinct alone; his brain had been upgraded, enhanced with the simian intellect of George the ape, now functioning on a level that could comprehend motion as vectors, not threats.
As the female MUTO charged again, he met her full-on, this time shaping part of his body like a wave, curling the mass of his tentacles inward, channelling all that momentum into a single retaliatory slam that caused both creatures to tumble into the shallow sea, upending several blocks of road in the process.
The water turned black. Oil, blood, and seawater churned like a bubbling cauldron. From above, to any survivor still watching, the clash appeared like the battle of gods; one armoured in insectoid rage, the other a living storm of limbs, teeth, and cunning.
But the fight was not yet over. And now, they were in Mark's territory; the ocean!