They don’t. The saucers fly at us, unleashing everything they’ve got. Taisaur and Xenatlas barely notice. He’s so massive, being easily the highest level out of all of us, that their attacks simply don’t bother him. And Taisaur just soaks up that energy like sunshine. Without all the concentrated force directed at him, the most he’s going to take away from their efforts is a sunburn.
Solrin and Megaptera aren’t so lucky. Their HP is dropping fast.
Solrin’s bellows accompany a litany of profanity to rival Lusitania’s, made all the more colorful by his British accent. Megaptera’s quiet, but not doing any better. Still, they press on, charging straight ahead, pausing only to return fire on the saucers.
It’s Halira though who’s easily the most impressive. She’s torn ahead of us, claws at the ready, like a crystalline missile. She zigzags, darting and dodging and weaving and taking easily the longest route and still closes faster than any of us. I swear she’s moving so fast it’s like the rest of us are moving in slow motion. The ground all around her explodes in showers of dirt and green energy.
She’s almost there. Almost at the pillar. Halira extends her sword-like claws. She’s going to slice right through that pillar like it’s made of cake. I let out a roar of triumph! We’ve done it.
Three hundred feet from the pillar Halira dissolves. One moment she’s there, the next she’s not.
Lusitania’s logged out.
What the fuck? I demand, my question accompanied by Taisaur’s roar.
She flaked, Solrin says. Keep moving. Eye on the prize!
He’s right about the need to keep moving, and I do, but Lusitania wouldn’t flake on this. Not with as much effort as she’s put into staying in Oxford, remaining in harm’s way specifically so she could launch this counterattack. No, something’s gone wrong.
I can’t stop to think on it now. With Halira gone, Taisaur and Solrin are the fastest. We’re booking it, trying to make up for the lost offensive momentum we’ve collectively lost by Halira’s sudden vanishing.
I’m so focused on sprinting headlong for the pillar that it takes me several moments to realize that the counter attack from the saucers has stopped. The sky is completely clear, no more enemies hovering over us. I throw up the Burning Aurora and start to shout out a warning—too late.
The world is awash in light and heat. There’s no up or down. No ground beneath my feet. Nothing but the force of whatever massive ordinance the aliens have just dropped on us crashing against the rippling red waves surrounding me. Taisaur roars his defiance to the attack. It’s lost in the cacophony of destruction.
We hit the ground. My rage meter is steadily draining. They had to have hit us with even more missiles than before. I’ve got less than a quarter energy left before the Burning Aurora ends. Then the missile’s explosions wash over Taisaur and that’ll be it. We’re toast and so is Dallas.
The light vanishes as suddenly as it appeared and Taisaur’s on his side, standing amidst a blackened field of scorched earth. Only the ground beneath us isn’t charred or turned into glass, a sort of inverted shadow where our bulk and Burning Aurora shielded the earth from the alien’s offensive.
What the fuck? Megaptera demands. What the ever-loving-fuck was that?
Airstrike, I say automatically. Despite my shields holding up I’m disoriented. That attack really rang my bell. And I think I’m the lucky one.
Solrin’s gone. The attack blew him away.
Megaptera’s HP bar is flashing in the red, the barest sliver remaining.
Xenatlas is still here, but he’s only just barely any better off than Megaptera. Smoke is curling from his great carapace and he’s missing a shoulder horn.
Green energy rains down and Megaptera topples over, the rest of his HP vanishing and him along with it. The saucers have returned.
Taisaur, move it! Xenatlas bellows, roar reverberating through my bones.
He’s not going to make it. He’s too slow and too far away. Durable as Xenatlas is, his HP will drop before he can reach the pillar. Taisaur is the only one left who can make it. I just hope I can get there before they call in another strike.
The green energy strikes me over and over again. I lose a sliver of HP. Then another. I ignore it. I have to. This attack must work or it’s all been for nothing.
The saucers are clearing out again, pulling back to allow another airstrike. I pour on every ounce of speed I can muster and draw upon my barely replenished rage meter at the last second before impact, surrounding Taisaur in the Burning Aurora once again. We hit the pillar. The world explodes again.
But it’s over more quickly this time.
My rage meter isn’t full enough to stop another attack like the last. It doesn’t have to be.
Disoriented as I am, I land on my feet, upright and relatively unharmed. My rage meter is completely depleted. My HP bar is still missing a greater chunk that I would like. But those aren’t what gets me.
I’m not standing next to the pillar. There’s destruction around me, but not that of the scorched alien landscape. No, this is all too familiar. I’m in Dallas, maybe a half a mile from Mom’s apartment complex. All around me smoke rises from burning buildings.
And maybe a mile away, rearing up into the sky, is Titanocobra.
I’m still Taisaur. And I’m on earth.
TITANOCOBRA
Chapter Thirty-Six
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For the first time, playing Taisaur is more than disconcerting. It’s disorienting.
What really hits me before anything else is the scale. This isn’t some videogame level on an alien planet. This place is real. I know this city. I’ve been on the ground looking up at some of these buildings. Driven past them on my way to visit Mom or do a repair job. I’d never really thought about it before, what being this big would do to change my perception of the world. It seems like it should all be fake—like in the kaiju movies where the buildings are obviously models and the tanks remote control vehicles.
This, all of this, is so real. There’s so much detail that I can’t even pretend that it isn’t. There are apartment complexes and roadways around me. Little vehicles and people pointing and staring from cars and balconies. There are fires. Titanocobra has already wreaked so much destruction here and that makes the sense of realness all the worse. There’s no way to detach myself from my surroundings.
My senses are on overload, every single one of them telling me that this is my reality now. My movements are both slower and faster than I expect. Taisaur still reacts instantaneously to my will, I’m cognizant enough now to know there’s no button mashing going on here but being so hyper-aware of my scale makes me just as hyper-aware of his body. A single swipe of his paw covers hundreds of feet in a second.
Whatever’s about to happen, it’s not going to be anything like those movies with the lumbering, poorly coordinated giants. Speed is distance over time and Taisaur’s size lets him cover a ton of distance quickly. And yet it doesn’t feel that way. That could be adrenaline talking though, because I am definitely flooded with that stuff.
Or it could be that my senses are more in tune with Taisaur than ever. My senses of hearing and smelling have gone up exponentially. I can hear the screams of scared people and tires on asphalt. I can smell the asphalt and burning buildings. And blood. It’s not the strongest scent on the air but it’s there. It makes my mouth water and my stomach rumble and once my rational brain realizes that I actually stagger, smashing a bus into oblivion beneath Taisaur’s paw. God, I hope that was empty.
I shake my head, trying to reorient myself and get my bearings. I’m on earth. I am Taisaur. I did not destroy the pillar. Somehow, I must have activated it instead and it delivered me here. To Dallas, Texas. Where Titanocobra and my mother both are.
This is not ideal. Not in the slightest. Not the least of which is because I’ve been standing here, staggering in
place for way too long adjusting to the new sensations.
Fortunately, Titanocobra seems as baffled by my sudden appearance as me. His massive, hooded head shakes, filling the air with a clattering sound as his armored hide and blades rattle. Then he’s slithering for me, crushing trees, small buildings, and vehicles beneath his obsidian coils.
Taisaur is standing next to multiple apartment complexes. There are people still inside of them. Including Mom.
My rage bar is still too low to matter. My HP bar shows that Taisaur’s already taken a beating. I don’t have time to process more than that. I have to act or Titanocobra’s going to smash me and these apartments to pieces. I do the only thing I can think of that makes any kind of sense.
I rush forward to meet his charge with a bellowing roar that shatters the glass lining the nearest buildings.
My forward assault brings Titanocobra up short, except not really. I realize only at the last instant that I haven’t surprised the bigger kaiju—he’s just pulling up to deliver the most powerful cobra strike he can. That motion is the only thing that gives me warning, and I throw Taisaur suddenly to the side.
His muscles are my muscles and they protest the sudden shift in direction and fighting against so much momentum. Feeling the immense mass is totally different from remotely controlling it and much harder to stop. So I don’t.
Instead I use all of that momentum. Taisaur leaps and spins, transferring all the energy of his charge into a tail-strike. Titanocobra’s lunge throws his head into Taisaur’s oncoming spikes. One of those spikes penetrates his armor and erupts out of Titanocobra’s skull in a shower of gore just behind the monster’s eye.
Time seems to slow down. I can feel Taisaur’s tail-spike—my tail-spike—inside of Titanocobra’s head, the same way I can feel my own fingernails. I can feel all the mass that spike has lodged into, the power of it. For that instant I feel like I’ve won. Surely, with the combined force of our two strikes colliding, driving that spike all the way through Titanocobra’s head, I have just delivered a killing blow.
I’m disillusioned instantly.
Taisaur’s only just hit the ground with a resounding crash before we’re lifted up again, dragged into the air by our tail as Titanocobra thrashes about. I see sky, then earth, then a strip center full of restaurants and small businesses. Then I hit. I hit hard.
My HP bar shrinks. Not so much I think as it would have if that first strike had hit. But still.
The buildings are gone. So’s the parking lot. So are the cars. Not the people though.
Those who weren’t killed outright by my landing are screaming and crying in pain and fear, covered in debris or clutching broken limbs. I can smell their blood. Smell their pain. I’d never realized that pain had an actual scent until that moment.
I push myself unsteadily to my feet. Paws. It’s getting harder and harder to distinguish myself from Taisaur. Is Taisaur a separate being or is this just me? I can’t tell and the thought is too ludicrous and out there to warrant any further thought. If I don’t keep my admittedly shaken wits about me I’m going to get more people hurt and killed.
Then I taste blood in my mouth and have to wonder just how ludicrous the idea is. If I die as Taisaur, will I die for real? I’m not in some videogame world now. People are actually dying around me. Because of me. If I’m not careful I could very easily join them.
I’m shocked at how much distance that throw covered. Titanocobra is thrashing about in place, exactly like an injured snake. It’s more animal than not, I think. More instinctive. This is a weird thing to realize. And maybe there’s something there worth more thought. But I can’t spare the brain power for it now.
While Titanocobra’s distracted by its own pain I have to move. So I do. Taisaur’s limbs are heavy and sore but move they do and together we charge across the city, leaping over small buildings and a highway to reach our enemy.
Titanocobra must feel us coming—our running shakes the very earth with our bulk—because he rights himself and pulls back for another lunge. He’s hurt but I don’t think his wound is critical. I wish he had a damn HP bar that I could gauge.
And speaking of bars, my rage meter’s recharged. It’s not at 100% but it doesn’t have to be. Taisaur leaps. Titanocobra lunges. I activate the Burning Aurora.
At the last instant Titanocobra shifts its attack and instead of meeting Taisaur head on, it swings around, bringing its multibladed side into our path. There’s no dodging or deflecting. One instant Taisaur’s on a collision course with the giant cobra’s open maw, the next those wicked blades.
We hit and the Burning Aurora holds, shattering the first blade we careen into. Cracks appear like spiderwebs up and down Titanocobra’s armored length. His bulk is pressed back by the force of our charge. We’ve wounded him again! But we haven’t stopped him. And those coils are suddenly around us.
He wasn’t trying to impale us on a blade, he was trying to trap us. And he succeeded. Wiley reptile.
What follows is like being given a bearhug by a chainsaw. The blades slide over and around us, shoved inward by the massive coils. The Burning Aurora holds, cracking and snapping several blades, widening the cracks in Titanocobra’s armor. But the kaiju is so big that those wounds mean very little.
And my rage meter is dropping fast. Too fast. As soon as it reaches empty all those blades are going to rip Taisaur, and by extension, me, to pieces. I push back, fight as hard as I can, but my muscles, Taisaur’s muscles, are suddenly weak. They don’t respond to my command.
I look up into Titanocobra’s face, then see a ceiling fan. I’m moving. But I can’t be moving. I’m pinned in place by Titanocobra. There’s motion around me. The world blackens. I see a pale ceiling with a fan. Catch a glimpse of Lusitania and Isabella standing over me.
I’m fading.
Everything goes black.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
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Lusitania awoke to the sight of a man in a cheap suit with a bloody lip standing over her with disgust in his brown eyes and a gun in his hand. She started to jerk upright and the man held up his hand to silently instruct her to hold still. The gun wasn’t pointed at her but she obeyed anyway. Following the trajectory of the weapon’s barrel she realized that it was pointed at Isabella, who was sitting on the living room floor a few yards away, her hair disheveled and her hands handcuffed. Her friend glared murder at the man in the suit.
Beside her, lying face down in a pool of blood, vomit, and what might have been piss, lay another man in a suit. One arm was twisted funny and a familiar shoe stuck out of his arm. Someone had slammed the shoe into his arm hard enough to bury the spiked heel into the meet between his radius and ulna. A stun gun lay on the floor where it must have fallen from the man’s hand.
Lusitania glanced from the shoe sticking out of the man’s arm to her feet, wiggling the toes of her single bare foot. She looked back to Isabella. “If you wanted to borrow my shoe the least you could have done was ask.”
Isabella laughed. Lusitania almost felt bad for the man on the floor. Almost.
“Yeah, you two are real cute,” the suit still standing said. He reached behind his back and produced a pair of handcuffs, then tossed them into Lusitania’s chest. “Put those on and shut up.”
Lusitania glanced at them as they tumbled off of her and to the floor and made no move to pick them up. “They don’t really go with my outfit.”
“Bitch, I don’t care,” the man said. “Do you have any idea how worried your father’s been about you crazy—” he cuts himself off, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling as if praying to a higher power for the strength to keep a civil tongue in his head.
“So worried he sent a man with a gun after me,” Lusitania said.
“In case you didn’t notice, Sweetheart,” the man says. “This place is a little dangerous right now.”
Lusitania looked poi
ntedly at the broken man laying a pool of his own fluids. “Sure is.”
The man kicked her. It wasn’t a kick meant to be disrespectful. It struck her in the ribs, hard, knocking the wind out of her and doubling her over. She coughed and thought she tasted bile as she clutched her side. Lusitania had never been struck like that before.
The man crouched down next to her. “You’d better pray to whatever God you think is real that Bert wakes up soon or so help me you and your friend are in for a world of hurt.”
Lusitania tried to talk but was barely able to choke out the words, “My…father…”
“Yeah, your daddy’s a hotshot senator, but I don’t work for him,” the suited man said. “I work for Mr. Skavos. Bert and me are only here as a favor to your very important daddy. He can’t be seen diverting government resources to drag your stupid, stubborn ass back, so he asked my boss to help out. Only you know what, Oxford’s so dangerous right now, maybe you and your friend went missing before me and Bert found you? Want to think about that for a bit?” The gun extended out from him to point over at Isabella. “And that’s far enough you.”
Lusitania looked up to find that Isabella had started to make an attempt for the stun gun fallen on the floor. Fast as she was, there was no way she could dodge a bullet. Her friend leaned back, glaring at the suited man.
“You know what, maybe I just found one of you,” the man said, taking a step over to Isabella. “Maybe you just went missing, yeah?”
Lusitania was about to open her mouth to scream at him when something caught her eye. A name, HP bar, and rage meter hovering over the television screen. She blinked at looked past the suit to the news. The television on the other side of the living room had been playing this whole time, showing footage of Titanocobra live in Dallas. Where Aaron’s tiger-like kaiju, Taisaur had just appeared, looking battered and severely outmatched by Titanocobra.
How To Train Your Kaiju Page 19