The roiling battlefield was no longer simply a shattered city; it had transformed into something older, something primal; a hunting ground submerged in sea foam and shadow, where concrete skeletons of buildings leaned like broken monuments around two titans locked in brutal war.
As the sun dipped below the Pacific horizon, casting a blood-orange hue across the fractured skyline of San Francisco, Mark surged once again from the surf-choked ruins with a soundless, predatory grace. His tentacles flexed around him like coiled serpents, his entire mass shimmering beneath a skin soaked in blood, seawater, and venom.
Across the flooded crater that used to be a residential district, the Female MUTO dragged herself upright with an exhausted shriek, her plates cracked, her posture ragged. But she was far from defeated. Rage had become her armour now, and loss her only fuel.
Her children, the eggs she had nurtured inside her with ferocious maternal instinct, were gone; incinerated in a single, calculated act. In Mark, she saw only the killer of her lineage.
And so, in one final spasm of fury, she charged with every remaining ounce of her colossal weight.
Mark did not retreat. He never had. Instead, he launched forward as well, twin coils of muscle releasing stored tension like ballistae, his barbed tendrils snapping forward with an audible crack, sharp as lightning and just as fast. Each projectile; long, needle-like harpoons laced with paralytic venom, shot through the broken air, aimed directly for the soft orbs of her insectoid eyes.
A hit here would blind her, disable her perception, and deliver a precise flood of toxic compound into a crucial neural cluster. But the barbs failed. Though his aim was flawless, the result was anything but. The Female MUTO jerked slightly at the last moment, not from anticipation or intelligence, but because her eyes were not where he expected them to be.
His barbs collided not with unguarded tissue but with a dense mesh of translucent chitin, a defensive layer so refined that it diffused even the sharpest impacts across its surface. The venom did not penetrate. Her vision, distorted perhaps, but not lost.
Mark barely had time to register the failure before the creature lunged again, her bladed limbs slicing through a tower behind him as though it were made of paper and glass. He dodged to the side, his body twisting through mid-air as his skin-membranes flared outward for a controlled descent.
Then, as she exposed her underside in the momentum of the swing, he saw it. There, below the thoracic arch, just behind her front limbs, was the egg sac cavity, now empty and hollowed out, yet still biologically softer than the rest of her body.
The site was raw, inflamed, a vulnerability born from grief. And that, Mark knew, was the opening. Like a harpoon from the deep, he coiled a thick tentacle and drove it forward, its barb-head extending mid-thrust, piercing through the exposed underbelly with a sickening crunch.
The Female MUTO screamed, her voice a tremor that fractured nearby glass, but she could not dislodge him fast enough. The venom entered. It surged through her circulatory system like fire through paper, every drop targeting nerve clusters and soft tissue.
She stumbled back, stumbling through the skeletal remnants of what had once been a financial district, dragging blood across rooftops and subway entrances alike.
Mark pressed forward, no longer cautious, no longer surgical. He became relentless. Barb after barb lashed out, each one targeting the same vulnerable location, not for the purpose of immediate death, but to flood her system with enough paralytic and necrotic venom to overwhelm even a creature of her scale.
Each injection drew another scream, another convulsion, another desperate blow from the dying titaness. But Mark's body danced around her with all the precision of an underwater predator, guided not just by instinct, but by a refined intelligence born from George's neural legacy.
His power was not without strain. As his internal heat began to climb from continuous effort and exertion, plumes of steam erupted from across his glistening form, a shimmering mist rising from his rubbery skin in curling tendrils. Where most surface creatures would have collapsed under the weight of their own overheating muscles; crippled by fatigue and the inefficiency of mammalian thermoregulation, Mark had adapted.
He had evolved. Channels beneath his flesh opened like gills, venting liquid across his outer membranes, evaporating into vapor the moment it hit the air. The heat that would have killed a lesser beast became fuel for his resilience.
He cooled, and continued.
She boiled, and faltered.
The Female MUTO's strikes grew slower, her breathing became ragged, and the whites of her eyes; those hidden, shielded orbs, began to cloud. Her limbs twitched with every pulse of venom. Her cries had turned from fury to panic.
Still, Mark did not relent. For nearly an hour they battled; a cycle of pain and retribution, of poison and percussion, until finally, the Female MUTO stood still for too long, her weight shifting one last time without recovery.
She lunged, but her body betrayed her; the limbs buckled, the eyes rolled, and she fell—not with grace, but with the broken collapse of a beast whose body had been overridden from the inside. She struck the ground hard enough to rupture the earth, creating a shallow crater of bone and debris.
Her chest rose once, twice… and then no more. One final breath escaped her lungs like a sigh of resignation.
She was dead.
Mark stood over her fallen form in silence, his tentacles curling slightly as the evolutionary interface within him flickered to life, ready to catalogue and assimilate the MUTO's DNA.
But his mind, sharp as ever, caught something else before he gave in to satisfaction.
A presence; still, silent, and unmoving.
There, not twenty meters behind the fallen MUTO's hulking carcass, stood another giant, one who had watched the entire duel unfold with the patience of mountains and the judgment of kings.
Godzilla, ancient and immortal, now fully risen from the ocean's depths, regarded Mark with an unreadable expression. His chest heaved with the rhythm of continental plates shifting. His eyes burned; not with hatred, but with recognition.
He had not interfered. He had simply waited.
And now that the battle was finished, and the pretender slain, it was clear that something older than either war or science had come into play. Now, only two apex predators remained.
And the earth would not allow both to rule.