The city had fallen still.
No more rumbling footsteps. No screeching titans tearing into metal and steel. No walls collapsing beneath seismic roars.
The dust had begun to settle across the battlefield, a kind of post-apocalyptic snowfall that danced between fractured beams of late sunlight cutting through the smoke, the ruins of San Francisco finally reduced to echoes and ruin.
Somewhere far beneath that silence, however, something else stirred. Something ancient and cold.
Mark did not move at first. He stood atop the carcass of the Female MUTO with a mix of exhaustion and bitter triumph etched across his massive, mutated form. Every fibre of his being screamed at him to attack the figure now looming before him; the living monolith, the final predator, the bearer of dominion over this ruined world.
Godzilla.
he Monster's form was mountainous, blackened with scars from ancient battles and centuries of continental slumber. His dorsal fins still glowed with the faint embers of atomic fire, their eerie blue illumination flickering like torchlight behind thick fog. The ground trembled softly with each exhalation, a subterranean growl not born of hostility, but of unyielding judgment.
And Mark knew it. He knew that if Godzilla chose to release that terrible breath of his; a weapon so saturated with radioactive death that it could melt steel and bone alike, then there would be no escape, no defence, and certainly no survival.
He had seen it once before, in a movie; Godzilla grabbing the Female MUTO by the jaws and pouring that radiant wrath down her throat until she was nothing but a glowing corpse.
{AN: That came out really wrong… but it was the truth… Anyway, how is the new Cover?}
That image had not faded from his recollection. It had been seared into his brain like a prophecy.
Mark could not win. Not yet.
He was fast, yes. His mind was sharp. His muscles had been enriched and his skin hardened through countless mutations; gifts from the crocodile, the wolf, the ape, and soon the female MUTO; but against a creature born from the earth's radioactive marrow, he remained a challenger.
And so, with great effort, with instincts conflicting and evolution screaming to dominate, Mark chose to submit. His body uncoiled; not in defiance, but in recognition of sovereignty. Two front tentacles stretched forward, then arched upward just slightly, forming a pose that felt both instinctual and ceremonial.
The rest of his bulk, once lifted in aggressive readiness, collapsed into the dust in a gesture of surrender, his mass flattening into the crater like a tamed storm bowing before a stronger gale.
For a moment, Godzilla did not move. Then, with a huff like tectonic plates shifting beneath the sea, the King of Monsters took a single step forward, lowering his massive head just enough to study Mark with eyes older than civilization.
There was no pity in that gaze. No empathy. Only cold judgment, honed by eons of survival in a world that had never known mercy.
And then Godzilla roared.
It was not just a roar, it was a sound designed to shatter resolve, to break even the strongest-willed creatures and reduce all lesser beings to terrified ash. The frequency of it struck something deep within Mark's nervous system; a primal, encoded urge to retaliate, to fight or die trying.
For one harrowing moment, Mark's body surged with coiled tension, tentacles flexing, barbs clicking open like spears ready to pierce.
But he stopped himself. He resisted, and as the echoes of that horrific roar dissipated into the shattered skyline, Godzilla gave no further attention.
He turned slowly, his immense tail sweeping wreckage and water in his wake, and began the long, deliberate march back into the ocean, the sea parting around his girth as though welcoming back an emperor from war.
Mark exhaled a shuddering breath he had not realized he was holding. His gaze then drifted to the body of the Male MUTO, sprawled against a ruptured tower, metal still skewering it from the tail-slap that had ended its life.
He knew, without even having to ask the system, that the genes were useless to him. It had not been his kill. And though the creature's DNA was rich, saturated with valuable evolutionary potential, the system rejected it.
In the quiet, digital voice embedded deep in his consciousness, the answer was simple and final.
[Unqualified. Consumption without kill provides no evolutionary yield.]
Mark's frustration rose like a tide, only to be calmed by the satisfaction still lingering from the battle he had won. The Female MUTO had been his. That genetic prize, at least, would soon yield new abilities.
But it would not be enough; not yet.
"Even after consuming her completely… I will still need at least two more creatures of comparable genetic saturation to evolve again," he mused quietly to himself, his thoughts echoing through the system interface that lived within his mind.
"This is going to take far longer than I hoped."
With that, he began dragging the Female MUTO's body toward the shore, leaving a long trail of black blood and radioactive residue behind him. The ocean accepted them both, and with a final glance back toward the ruined skyline, Mark disappeared beneath the waves.
…
Far away from the surf and shadows, within the temporary military shelter established near the smouldering heart of the city, Ford Brody sat amid flickering lights and ruined hopes.
He had survived.
Somehow.
Despite the destruction, despite the monsters, despite the nuclear horror waiting to detonate, he had made it out alive. But not all had. The moment the transmission came in; grainy, staticky, hollow, he knew something was wrong. The voice on the other end of the radio was flat, almost numb.
His wife, Elle, had not survived the collapse of the hospital. Her body had been found beneath the remnants of a parking garage, crushed before rescue teams could even reach her. Their son had survived, carried off earlier by evac teams.
But for Ford, everything else was now ash. Something in him broke. When the report came through, and the military's disaster recovery operations resumed, Ford simply stood still for a while, then walked out of his post. He took his sidearm. He kept his boots on.
And he ran.
Not from duty, but from grief.
With his finger still on the trigger and his sidearm raised, he barrelled through a cluster of survivors being escorted to a secure checkpoint. He screamed, wept, shoved; a man collapsing beneath the weight of everything he had failed to save.
He didn't hurt anyone, but his behaviour was enough to cause panic. People fled from him, believing something was wrong since a military man was running.
It took four soldiers to bring him down. He was disarmed, restrained, and dragged back inside as shouts echoed around him, as the screams of people still haunted by monsters were drowned only by the anger in his heart.
Later, the tribunal did not hesitate, "Endangering civilians during post-battle evacuation. Dereliction of duty. Disobedience of orders during an active warzone recovery."
He was court-martialled, dishonoured not for cowardice, but for emotion, for allowing grief to override duty in the wake of unimaginable horror.
And so, even as the monsters retreated into the deep… the ruin they left behind continued to burn in the hearts of men.