The Gotengo was a sleek, thickly armoured battleship with a coat as black as the deep ocean. Its angled hindquarters were equipped with propulsion jets powerful enough to lift a Kaiju out of the water and its sloped flanks were armed with a sufficient phaser turrets and missile silos to rival a small country.

The interior of the bridge was short, claustrophobic and marinated in dark, red light, as metallic and detached as its assiduous crew. The captain sat reclined in a large, swivelling chair aft his fellows. He was cool-eyed and bulky, his huge, fat neck bristled with wiry hair, superseded only by an expansive, military moustache.

"Admiral Gyozen! We have visual!"

His iron gaze never faltered. "Has the target altered course?"

"Negative, sir!"

His deep voice was composed and confident. "Lock on and engage!"

The room was filled with a chorus of 'Aye sir's shortly before the nose of the vessel began to whirr and glow.

The afternoon sky was saturated by a cutting beam of harlequin light that stabbed out through the crisp air like a medieval javelin, straight into the unsuspecting monster's side.

The resounding shriek could be heard even through the enforced hull.

"Target is moving on an intercept course, trying to flank us!"

"Fire side batteries!"

The Muto's airspace was immediately engulfed with a barrage of melodramatic explosions; its flight path wavered when a few of the Gotengo's missiles struck home against one of its outstretched wings.

Gyozen took the opportunity. "Evasive action! Focus fire!" A hard bank had him bracing himself on the arms of his chair.

The Muto made a wincing turn that would have sheared Gotengo in half, matching the ship's desperate motions stride for stride; cutting into their intended route with a mighty pull of its wings the monster charged Gotengo over a gust of whistling wind.

Gyozen's subsequent grin was manic. "Engage drill, get me ramming speed!"

"Sir!"

The two bulks converged on each other with a cloud-parting clap; the Gotengo's speed gave it an initial advantage as the colossal momentum drove a violent perforation into the Muto's discoloured abdomen.

The claws of the Muto lunged out and found purchase on Gotengo's hull, both parties tore chunks out of each other. The world began to spin.

"Severe hull damage, sir, we're losing altitude!"

The mass of wings and metal groaned in an incensed choir as it was gracelessly dragged down out of the sky.

"Disengage, disengage! Brace for impact, all hands brace for impact!"

The hard smack of the pacific surf was enough to separate the two combatants and send the men lurching in their seats: Gotengo was amphibious but the damage was enough to significantly hamper her crew's efforts to recover, the Muto on the other hand evidently wasn't naturally aquatic: it's limbs flailed and squawked, stirring up waves large enough to capsize battleships on top of the after affects of the foamy crater their impact had punched into the ocean.

Gyozen pushed down his discomfort, Gotengo's fate was in the hands of his men now.

He placed a sweaty paw on the console to his right "This is Gotengo on a private channel to EDF HQ, what's Godzilla's ETA? Over!"

"Minutes! You've got to kill that thing, admiral! Now!"

Gyozen cursed. "Status!"

"Engines are back online, sir! However, we can't guarantee full power"

Gotengo strained to escape the water, which bubbled and churned into steam under the flare of the port and starboard stabilisers. The Muto was fortunately having similar trouble: great rivulets of pale foam ran down the iridescent colours of its flexing wings; with an almighty heave it pushed itself up from the water and struggled into the air, followed closely by Gotengo, picking up speed and height.

The sky was set alight once again as Gotengo brought its full might to bear on the disoriented Kaiju. The Muto was smothered in explosions, bullets designed to tear through nuke resistant flesh carved whizzing pathways into the angry, black smoke.

The Muto however, taking advantage of the relative obscurity the heat of the explosions inadvertently provided, had now achieved a superior height to Gotengo and, in a move that demonstrated just how far-gone the engines truly were, it allowed itself to drop down through the fire and smoke onto the hulk of the ship, looking for all the world like a demon spawned loose from Naraka: a mass of fat, silver wings and claws that fell upon and grappled with Gotengo like a giant squid might a sperm whale.

Gotengo groaned under the immense weight as it was forced back down, the Muto's scissor jaws drew back and opened wide to reveal a cavernous turtle-like maw, filled with long, alien blades of teeth that ripped a screech out of the side of the ship.

"Hull breech! Reactor's flaring!"

The chittering sounded far too much like laughter as it drew back a huge limb and scythed it across their bow, the end of its claw catching on the wing.

A new voice shouted over the commlink, the man's Japanese had an American twang to it.

"Gotengo, come in! This is Gypsy Danger, can you maintain altitude?"

Gyozen did his best to be heard over the destruction of his prided vessel. "We have the situation under control!"

But one of his crew betrayed him. "Negative, Gypsy, we're going down!"

Throughout the chaos the Gotengo's cannons lined up against the monster's taught belly and punched every ounce of remaining firepower into it.

"Gotengo, break off, you've done your job now let us do ours!"

Gyozen cursed long and hard, there was no way to hide the fact that they were losing the fight.

"The Muto has a hold on the ship, we can't escape! Thrusters and weapons are at minimal capacity and if I'm not mistaken we've just been gutted hard enough to agitate our power core!"

"Eject! You've done enough! The evacuation is almost complete!"

There was a pause long enough to hold a few lines of overshadowed prayer before…

"ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP!"

The mass of ship and beast plunged, like a comet shrouded in smoke, back into the ocean.

Gyozen's last conscious thought before the entire room collapsed into a foamy, snaggletoothed maw was that he'd failed.

The Muto had escaped him.

Godzilla was coming.

.,.,.,.,.

Gypsy Danger stood grand and impassive in the surf before Avila beach, a bulk of shipping crates and makeshift housing squatting quietly at the Jaeger's back.

The radio had been silent for approximately three minutes post Gotengo's presumed destruction, though it felt like much longer.

"Do you think they made it?" Raleigh's voice was tentative, a far cry from his characteristic boisterousness. Yancy's stoic posture did nothing to betray his own unease; he'd always been the pessimist between the two of them.

"I don't know." Part of him wanted to believe that the Japanese had had a plan B for this sort of thing but if that were the case then why wouldn't they at least have the decency to let people know they'd survived.

"I think they made it." For brief a moment Yancy Becket caught the image of a small boy standing defiantly before the howling storm, refusing to surrender his hope.

"Just be ready, the reinforcements are holding but they were made last minute, we can't know how long they might hold up, which means we have to finish this quickly."

"Yeah, I hear ya."

"Gypsy: status!" barked a sharp voice.

"No sighting, what do the readouts say?"

"The Kaiju's electromagnetic dark zone is about to make it very hard for us to talk to you."

"I'm lonely already," quipped Raleigh.

"How long have we got?"

"Five minutes, give or take, I only have a rough approximation of its airspeed."

"All systems green!" announced Yancy.

"Don't worry, we're ready for this guy!" proclaimed Raleigh.

Five minutes passed and the system caught sight of the Muto gliding amiably over the horizon, the brothers watched silently as multifarious graphs and texts swept over the creature's sunburnt silhouette and drew away estimates of size and muscle strength.

Gypsy Danger raised a pair of fists and sounded a challenging horn.

The Muto answered as its claws stabbed into the shallow ocean and stood hauntingly strong with the fast-fading sunlight at its back.

.,.,.,.,.

"Marshall, we've been picking up some anomalous readings I think you might want to take a look!"

The Marshall took care not to spill her coffee as she manoeuvred her way past a large, black swivel chair to scowl worrisomely down at the monitoring equipment.

Along the latitude of the viewing screen, a weedy LOCCENT technician half-pointed to a fat, ovular blob of heat and numbers climbing towards the amorphous mass of readings that was most certainly now the Muto and gypsy danger battling across the coast.

"What are we looking at here exactly?"

"I can't get any specifics; before the Gotengo engaged, the Muto picked up speed and the dark spot moved away from something we wouldn't have picked up otherwise."

The image enhanced on a series of small intravenous blobs cut into semicircles by the periodic lines of the Muto's dark zone.

"What is it?"

"We can't be exactly sure ma'am but if any of our projections are to be believed it's massive, bigger than any Jaeger or Kaiju on record."

"And this thing is following the Muto?"

"It very much looks that way, ma'am."

There was a very angry pause.

"Get Serizawa back on the line, he's got some fucking explaining to do!"

.,.,.,.,.

"I told you it wouldn't work!" The old man, who she had recently been underwhemled to learn, was named Joe.

Kupuna strafed the breadth of her office like a vigilant kestrel, her eyes downcast, burning holes into the floor.

"I guess this is what I get for being trusting"

"Marshall…" The good director tried to interject.

"Shut up!"

He failed.

"This latest Kaiju might just be the greatest threat the world has ever seen, we've already lost a prime battleship and thousands of innocent lives and now you're telling me something worse is following in its wake?"

"Yes but…"

"I can't abide your organisation's backwards mandate of secrecy, if you'd allowed us to intervene we might have destroyed both of these creatures before they became a threat!"

"I don't think…!"

"No, you didn't think and now, thanks to your short sightedness, we have two incredibly dangerous Kaiju about to steamroll their way through the states."

"Marshall, please!" His plea wasn't hostile but it was nonetheless forceful and sharp; for a moment she considered chewing him out but thought better of it, she wasn't ready to completely burn bridges just yet.

"It's been three years since Gojira last appeared and over sixty since he attacked a human settlement."

The pause this time was contemplative but no less tense.

"…Maybe you should start at the beginning."

.,.,.,.,.

The Muto almost seemed surprised when Gypsy Danger leapt off a nearby cliff like a parkour artist off a park bench and snatched it out of the sky.

But when they collided with the coastline and turned the shallow waters deep it was Gypsy who was scrambling to keep a frantic claw from gouging out her visor.

The pilots might have made a joke about how ridiculous they looked if they weren't still apprehensive about testing this unknown Kaiju's strength.

The gyrations of the cockpit's gravitational appropriation mechanisms quickly worked to accommodate for each strike and especially when the Muto exhibited a surprising amount of strength for a wounded creature when it violently threw Gypsy Danger out of the full nelson hold she'd managed to snare it in.

Powerful rockets stabilised the Jaeger as her enormous boots stirred up waves enormous enough to flood the lower parts of the nearby town.

"I think this asshole's had enough already, he's trying to bail out on us!"

"This isn't a fucking cage match, Raleigh!"

"I swear you are no fun anymore!"

"Raleigh!"

"Ugh, fine! Plasma cannon!"

The Muto screeched as a bolt of white-blue light lanced into the dry, flaking remnants of its ruined belly before it flattened the better part of an extensive refugee shanty.

Before it could completely regain its footing Gypsy sprinted gallantly before sending a rocket propelled football kick straight into the Muto's jaw: there was a satisfying whip-like cracking sound that resonated around the battlefield as well as the monster's keen grunt that proceeded it tumbling up the hill and then scrambling as it spread its wings once again, braying as if frightened.

"Alright one more shot should keep it down for good, you seeing that tear in its wing?"

"You know I am."

This time the Muto flattened a hill before it rose to its feet and turned to them, dragging its ruined wing along the ground, it bellowed at them, looking very much like an alien out of the horror movies that used to scare twelve-year-old Raleigh, (and secretly Yancy too).

They became genuinely nervous however when it rose its foreleg and stamped it against the hill sending out the aforementioned electromagnetic pulse.

Gypsy barely braced in time and groaned as her body whined and sparked, blowing out industrial fuses to prevent a major system from giving way.

"We've lost power to all our weapon's systems, engines have been reduced to thirty percent capacity, we couldn't even hop if we wanted to!"

"It's trying to run way again!"

"It's headed for the power plant!"

.,.,.,.,.,

"You're saying this… 'Godzilla' is some kind of great equaliser?"

"In a sense." Assented Vivienne.

Serizawa almost looked morose as he continued. "Marshall my organisation has spent the greater allocation of our budget silencing palaeontologists, geologists and so many others who have tried to announce the existence of Kaiju before the world is ready: deep in the dark coils of the planet there are fossils, some buried so deep that most of their bones have been washed away into the liquid layer of Earth's outer core, the implications of many of them are… more than unsettling: incidentally, we've not so recently discovered that the Circum Seismic Belt, previously thought of as a ring of naturally formed volcanoes, is actually the remnant of a war that was waged long before reptiles had even taken their first steps."

Serizawa let the information sink in.

"…Go on. A 'war' you say?"

His shoulders slumped as though shouldering some familiar weight

"Indeed, this was before my appointment as head of Terrestrial Kaiju Research but our information says that the various teams assigned to study this phenomena were ordered to find the remains of this so called 'war,' in the form of either the soldiers or their weapons: we found both."

.,.,.,.,.,

"We've got to keep it away from the plant! The techs said this thing feeds on nuclear energy, he might get a boost enough to get away" Yelled Yancy.

"Or kick our ass. Divert all nonessential-!"

"We've lost all nonessential power"

"Then let's leg it!"

"Raleigh, we can't take another EMP, the modifications were designed to survive the dark zone itself not a precise application!"

"What choice do we have?!"

Gypsy could only amble.

"Augh, fuck!"

The sea started to rumble at their backs.

Then it started to growl.

"Hey… do you hear that?"

,.,.,.,.,

Kupuna was getting a distinct sinking feeling that she was about to be dragged into something well above her depth, though she didn't show it in her unnervingly stable tone.

"Dr Serizawa, in our talk so far you mentioned that Mr Brody's readings revealed that the Muto was calling to something… what was it calling to?"

"We believe it to be another of its kind"

"I just got word of a Kaiju that stormed its way out of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository… it's a cat 4 and boasts a similar description to our friend out there."

The quiet was as still and cold as a silent funeral.

This time Graham answered and she answered coldly.

"From what we can tell barely three percent of the ancient Kaiju survived the war, ninety percent of those remaining are either dead or the last of their kind, the logical conclusion is that we are looking at the remaining zero point three percent, and their exhumation has awakened Godzilla"

"We believe that in the past Gojira fulfilled the role of an apex predator, an agent of balance, keeping any one species from growing too numerous."

"Marshall nature has an order, a power to restore balance, I believe he is that power"

Graham had her head in her hands now "We assumed the female's spore was dormant, but I suppose a great many things were assumed that have not held true."

There was another cutting silence before anyone dared to speak.

"So does anyone else have a plan besides me?"

All ears turned to Joe Brody.

.,.,.,.,

"Sir, there's been a beech event"

"That's not possible! Vegas is under attack by the unidentified Kaiju as we speak! I thought you told me these things only come out one at a time Herman"

"They do!"

"Sir, I don't think this is the sort of Kaiju we're used to dealing with"

"Do tell, Newt."

.,.,.,.,

"So apparently Gypsy Danger is otherwise occupied so they sent in Brawler Yukon to take care of the breech."

"What are they calling this guy?"

"Knifehead"