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"There's a Hollow Earth entrance right in the Antarctic glacier."
"The previous battle did some damage to the area, but it's still usable. If we want to reach the Hollow Earth, that's our best option."
Inside the monitoring room of the Skull Island outpost, Dr. Vivian was walking the group through their options.
Over the decades, Monarch had tracked down several Hollow Earth entrances. Most were underwater. The Antarctic glacier entrance was one of the rare few on dry land.
"So we just came out of Antarctica," Jared said, eyebrow arching, "and now we're going back?"
That place was genuinely brutal. And he and Old De had just crashed two fighter jets out there, so he wasn't exactly swimming in good memories of the location.
"That's right."
"Every Hollow Earth entrance sits close to a Titan's habitat. We just dealt with Ghidorah in Antarctica, so going back directly cuts out a lot of unnecessary complications," Serizawa explained.
"Can Kong swim there from here?" Old De asked, arms crossed. "Or do we ship him over?"
"I'm arranging a transport vessel to carry Kong to Antarctica," Serizawa said.
Having Kong swim the whole way wasn't remotely realistic. He'd be dead tired before he got halfway there.
"There's still one more problem."
"What are you doing about Godzilla?" Dr. Andrews looked around the room and asked, her tone serious.
Five years on Skull Island had given her a thorough education. She knew every corner of that place, and she knew the history between the Kong lineage and the Atomic Dinosaurs , all of it.
Thousands of years before the Common Era, the two Titan species had gone to war. Both sides had taken catastrophic losses. Countless giant apes, countless Atomic Dinosaurs, all dead. Both races had slowly declined from there, and the grudge from that war had never faded, carrying itself forward through the long centuries to the present day.
Kong was young enough that he'd never lived through that war himself. Godzilla was a different story. It had been walking this planet for hundreds of millions of years before the Common Era even began.
As the most powerful of its kind, Godzilla had outlasted every extinction-level event the Earth had thrown at it. Every time, it had survived, fulfilling its instinct as a guardian of the natural order , and never forgetting the wars of the distant past.
Skull Island's unique magnetic field masked Kong from Godzilla's perception, which was what let Kong grow up there in peace. But the moment Kong set foot off the island, there was a very real chance Godzilla would come looking. Two species with a blood feud between them: if they met, they would fight.
And it would almost certainly be a one-sided beating.
"No need to handle it," Natsuki said. "I trust he'll show me some respect."
"We've fought each other, and we took down Ghidorah together. That makes us something like friends."
Comrades-in-arms, anyway. Natsuki figured that counted for something — enough to mediate, at least.
"You can actually communicate with Godzilla?" Dr. Andrews asked, clearly curious.
This alien's skill set just kept growing.
"We've communicated. He's just not particularly interested in talking to me," Natsuki admitted, a note of resignation in his voice.
Without Mothra around, Godzilla was ice-cold to everyone. Didn't matter who you were.
Natsuki had been about to joke that Godzilla had no respect for its elders , then he'd gone through Monarch's internal records and found out the creature was hundreds of millions of years old. That put things in perspective. Godzilla was the actual elder here. It had been around long enough to make the concept almost embarrassing to think about.
"...You're sure he'll show you respect?" Dr. Andrews looked at him again, skepticism creeping back in.
"Let me rephrase that. I'm hoping he knows what's good for him," Natsuki said.
He'd already put an elderly dinosaur on the ground once. If it decided to be difficult again this time... well. Once or twice, what was the difference.
"Fair enough."
"I suppose the law of the fist is still the most practical thing for Titans." Dr. Andrews caught his meaning and felt something shift in her thinking. Even Kong, who never backed down from anything, had ended up making peace with this guy.
She'd been looking at this too narrowly.
That afternoon, Kong boarded the transport vessel under Jia's gentle persuasion. When he dropped himself down onto the deck, the hundred-thousand-ton ship visibly sank deeper into the water.
Everyone inside felt the whole vessel lurch.
"Speaking of which — whatever happened to that terrorist group?" Natsuki stood on the deck with the sea breeze at his back, watching Kong and Jia communicate in the distance, and turned to Serizawa beside him.
The group that had awakened Rodan in Mexico and Ghidorah in Antarctica , their leader was still unaccounted for. If they started waking up more Titans, things were going to get complicated fast.
"Every country is throwing resources into hunting them down."
"They shouldn't be able to move on anything major for a while," Serizawa said.
The group had awakened two catastrophic creatures back-to-back, nearly leveling a city in Mexico. Multiple nations had thrown the full weight of their pursuit behind finding them. Nobody wanted a Titan woken up on their own soil; the damage would be staggering. With Monarch's outposts all reinforcing their defenses and several governments actively hunting them, they had no choice but to go quiet for now.
"It's not an easy seat you're sitting in," Natsuki said, looking at Serizawa , at the gray threading through his hair.
He was a man who wanted humans and Titans to coexist, and the list of things standing between him and that goal was long. Pressure from half a dozen countries. The U.S. military, which would love nothing more than to absorb Monarch into the Department of Defense entirely. A band of eco-terrorists crisscrossing the globe trying to wake Titans and end humanity. And a company called APEX quietly doing something in the background that nobody had quite figured out yet.
Serizawa stood in the middle of all of it, under all of that weight, and kept moving forward. One step at a time, toward wherever the path happened to lead.
"Someone has to step up. We can't just stand still forever," Serizawa said. He managed a smile , tired at the edges, worn in a way that had nothing to do with the day. "Besides, I've been ready to give my life for this a long time. I want the life I've lived to have meant something."
The reason he put himself in harm's way, the reason he stood at the front lines when the fighting started: he had already made peace with dying.
Only now... the Giant of Light had arrived. And with it, the death that was meant to find him had been turned away.
"I'm not going to stand by and watch any of you die," Natsuki said, meeting his eyes. A promise, plain and simple.
"I'm honored," Serizawa said, and smiled.
The transport vessel's route had been plotted to deliberately avoid the waters where Godzilla had last been spotted.
But after they'd been sailing for a while —
"Radar contact! A Titan closing on our position, fast!"
"It's... it's Godzilla!" The crew member in the bridge stared at the radar display and reported it immediately.
➤ Next: Give Me Face
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