Work Text:
Ogasawara Island was a war zone.
It had begun with a tremor so violent that Anguirus had rushed out of his den expecting to encounter an enemy, and Baragon had emerged from one of his tunnels rather than risk it collapsing on him. Rodan took to the sky with a startled bellow and looked back toward his home, half expecting to see the mountain collapsing. Varan leapt to the mountain's peak to stare out at the surrounding land and sea, trying to spot the cause.
More and more of the monsters who'd lived there so peacefully for so long had been stirred into a frenzy of mingled panic and rage, recalling previous occasions where past homes had been devastated by geological phenomena or outsider attackers.
In his panic Minilla scurried into Kumonga's territory, but the giant spider was so unnerved that it had extended its legs to stand at its fullest height, and the juvenile monster passed beneath his one-time attacker without either noticing.
The tremor subsided after a tense moment, and normalcy had nearly returned when Godzilla emerged from the ocean. A normal occurrence in and of itself, but...
With a startled screech Godzilla flew out of the ocean through the air, soaring over the beach and tumbling into the jungle, finally coming to a rest near his found family. He let out two roars, first to rally the monster community to defend their home, and then to directly challenge the threat.
Finally, the attacker came from the sea. A draconic head with dark tusks came first, followed by a serpentine body seemingly without end. The monster slithered up the beach, through the jungle and around the mountain until its head had at last reached the summit.
Such was the difference in their enormity that Varan flung himself from the peak and glided down toward the other monsters, even as the intruder roared down at them with a bellow so loud the sound was almost visible reverberating through the air.
Long had the serpent slumbered beneath the island. Perhaps for too long. Laviente was berserk with hunger and with this roar she declared her intention: to devour the island and everything too slow or foolish to flee it!
As one Ogasawara's inhabitants cried out in rage. Many had lost previous homes and here at last they had found respite. Themselves relics from a past age, many had lost the homes they'd tried to create in the modern era. No more!
Laviente would die before they lost this one — or they would.
Godzilla opened fire, aiming at Laviente's eye, but she shifted her head to block the blue beam with a tusk, and then rushed down the mountain as fast as her coils could propel her.
Godzilla gently but firmly nudged his petrified son behind him, and briefly growled reassuringly at him, snapping the juvenile out of his fright. The adult kaiju would be fine, but against a foe so large the child could not be underfoot. Minilla nodded, understanding that he should do his best to keep out of the way, and waddled towards the shoreline.
As father and son shared a moment, the others ran to positions they felt would be advantageous for them. Baragon softened the ground before him with his fire and burrowed to ready an ambush. Anguirus ran to Godzilla's side, seeing that Laviente was focused on his ally.
Rodan soared high above, and as he did so the towering pteranodon called out observations to his comrades below. Where Laviente's body was thickest and thinnest, as well as any protrusions or abnormalities, such as the odd growth that could be a vestigial flipper, or the crystals embedded at irregular intervals along her back.
Godzilla braced himself and caught one of Laviente's tusks as she tried to gore him, but he still slid backwards through the jungle and even left the ground as her incomprehensible weight aided her momentum. She snapped at him, unable to get her jaws around him at this angle, but guessing — correctly — that the atomic breath made him the greatest threat.
But not the only one. She cried out in pain and twisted with enough force to dislodge Godzilla and toss him aside as she looked to see Anguirus tearing at the membranes between her spines. She snarled at the ankylosaur and he let out a challenging honk in turn.
Laviente lunged at him, but the brave ankylosaur merely presented his carapace to her; it was too strong and pointed for her to bite down on without spending more time than she could afford with so many attackers.
As if to emphasize the point, Rodan dive bombed her head, angling himself to strike with his armored belly. With the momentum that came from flying faster than the speed of sound, he struck with enough force to free Anguirus from her jaws.
Varan dashed across her back in a quadrupedal stance and clawed at her wherever he could, searching for a weak point. He had been too young and too small to fight with the others at their last major battle, but he would not allow Laviente to destroy the only home he'd ever known. Laviente jerked her body to dislodge him, but he merely leaped and glided to another spot, scratching at scales and crystals as he did so.
Mothra and Kumonga kept their distance. Her hide and his legs were too frail to endure more than her weakest attacks, so they tried to support the others by spraying their silk at her, hoping to glue her to the ground. They knew their efforts would bear fruit in time, but Laviente's enormity made it a herculean task.
Manda slowly crawled out of Laviente's line of sight. In a way he was jealous of her sheer mass. Momentum alone allowed her far greater speed on land than he possessed once she got moving, but he lacked the speed to safely attack her without assistance. Once he judged himself to be out of sight, he called to Rodan, and explained his plan as the faster monster landed.
Meanwhile, tunneling upward into the mountain, Baragon found himself strangely excited. Though he recognized the threat Laviente presented to his life and home, as a hypercarnivore he found himself giddy at the thought of killing her. Even sharing with his fellow meat eaters, they'd be eating her carcass for years! The island's hunting had been harder in the recent decades, but he just needed to get in the right position and wait for his moment to fix that.
In the active combat area, Gorosaurus first ran for her head, trying to maul her oversized face. He snapped at her tusk as she pivoted her head trying to snatch Varan out of the air. She largely ignored Gorosaurus and continued raising her head in pursuit of the gliding kaiju.
Not wanting to get too far off the ground, the theropod used his powerful legs to kick her lower jaw as he let go. The same strength that had floored King Ghidorah all those years ago was sufficient to make Laviente yelp, and to launch Gorosaurus out of the immediate danger zone.
He roared in frustration. That had done nothing! He couldn't kick through her hide and her neck was so vast that his jaws were simply not wide enough to tear out her throat. Weighing his options, he decided to go for Laviente's tail.
He bit down on on the tip of the tremendous tail, and discovered that he'd made a grave mistake. Laviente clearly felt his sharp teeth and lashed the appendage to and fro, at first dragging him across the sand and eventually flinging him out to sea with enough force that he skipped like a stone across a pond.
Godzilla stood up from where he'd been tossed and ran right back in, jumping at the last moment to slide on his tail and drop kick Laviente while she was trying to dislodge Anguirus, who'd managed to climb atop her head in the chaos. The attack caught her off guard and hit with enough force to slam her head against the mountain.
Adding to the onslaught, Rodan arrived with Manda in tow and released him just as they'd planned, launching him at the speed of sound. Manda's coils struck Laviente's neck and he reflexively began to constrict around it.
Baragon had been waiting for Laviente's head to get forced against the rock, and he burst out of the mountain in a shower of boulders and flames! Laviente shut her eye against the shrapnel, so she did not see Baragon's maw open as he bit into and tore off her eyelid! Laviente screeched in pain, and now unable to close her eye she did see Baragon swallow it and lunge at her vulnerable eyeball.
Laviente's scream of agony — even muffled by Manda's coils around her throat — carried Varan away with the air it displaced, and even disturbed Rodan's flight as he passed through it. Godzilla's ears bled and he went momentarily deaf due to his position beside her gripping a tusk, his world going silent before his eardrums regenerated.
Pain and lack of air activated Laviente's defense against smaller attackers, bolts of energy arced from her head across her entire body, going from crystal to surviving crystal. Each pulse made the monsters' muscles seize for a brief moment until several successive shocks induced total paralysis.
Varan fell off of her coils and tumbled away. Mothra and Kumonga's silken snare was undone as the energy burned it all away. Anguirus collapsed where he stood and rolled limply off of her head. Godzilla fell away from her tusk onto his back, his body twitching erratically as his regeneration fought the paralytic energies. Manda lost control of his coils, allowing Laviente a deep breath. Worst of all, Baragon fell, eyeball still in his mouth, directly into Laviente's remaining line of sight.
Laviente loomed over Baragon vengefully and drove her head down with full force, skewering him on her tusks and diving into the Earth at the same time. For a moment, all any of the monsters could do was lay helplessly on the ground, even as they heard the sound of Baragon screeching as whatever Laviente was doing to him made plumes of flame erupt like hellish geysers.
Gorosaurus crawled out of the ocean as his comrades recovered enough to stand, in time to see Laviente's head breach the earth beneath Manda, throwing him into the air. Manda's momentum carried him skyward even as Laviente swallowed the last of Baragon's bloody, burned carcass.
Even at Mach 1.5, Rodan was too slow to intercept Manda's flight path, and Laviente ignored Godzilla's atomic breath burning at her neck to snap her jaws around the smaller serpent's midsection. With the sickening sound of flesh tearing and bones breaking, Manda was cloven in two, a portion of him joining Baragon down Laviente's gullet and the others falling to either side of her.
Even as her own blood flowed from her ruined eye down her scales and into her mouth, Laviente was emboldened by two kills in quick succession. She let out another air-distorting bellow, renewing her promise to devour the island's inhabitants one and all!
The monsters mourned their fallen friends, but their response to Laviente was not of fear, but fury. They would tear her to shreds and her remains would bring new life to Ogasawara!
Laviente ignored their trumpeting and posturing to accumulate fire in her maw, the flesh caught in her teeth cooking and creating a delicious scent. Godzilla blasted her again, blistering scales and melting crystals, but she powered through the pain. If her prey refused to flee then they would learn true hellfire.
At last she hurled the ball of fire down at her attackers, and an explosion blossomed where it struck. Their cries of horror and sudden death were music to her ears.
In an instant the jungle adjacent to the battlefield became an inferno. The flesh burned from the remaining halves of Manda's corpse, and the heat charred even his skeleton. The nearest sand on the island's beach turned to glass, and the force of the explosion threw the monsters not at ground zero away.
Anguirus was the first to charge out of the flames. His hide had burned black and his spikes were still hot enough to distort the air around them, but his courage never wavered. His horn stabbed into and exposed section of Laviente's underbelly and the trickle of blood from it boiled against him.
Godzilla came next and stopped Laviente from biting his oldest friend's head off, grabbing one of her gargantuan teeth and using it to pull her head off course. She retaliated by biting down on Godzilla's arms, and though he screeched in pain, he struck back even harder, blasting the teeth stabbing into him and burning their gums to the root, and then tearing the one he gripped completely out of her mouth.
Rodan flew past and the winds that followed him buffeted Laviente's injured face with embers and debris her own attacks had created. She hissed and her tail erupted from where it had previously sat beneath the earth and attempted to swat him from the sky.
Rodan banked hard to avoid the vast appendage, but Gorosaurus and Varan narrowly avoided being crushed as it came back down with a thunderous impact.
At last Kumonga leaped into the fray. Keeping in the enormous serpent's blind spot, the titanic spider still felt small in comparison to his target, but his numerous eyes had spotted something.
All of the attacks at Laviente's head had broken or ripped off a number of the armored scales that protected her neck, exposing soft skin and tender flesh. Chittering with excitement he could not contain, he extended the barb in his mouth and envenomated her.
Laviente immediately and violently whirled to attack the spider, already feeling the massive dose of venom sapping her strength, but nearly every surviving monster tried to prevent her from doing so. Godzilla, Anguirus, Varan, and Gorosaurus were all gripping her tusks in their own way and trying to hold her head down. Rodan descended from above and landed directly on top of her head, the impact pushing her down further. Even the larval Mothra attempted to help, spraying silk in a desperate effort to glue Laviente to solid ground.
Fighting the venom's influence, Laviente pushed her muscles to their absolute limits and threw herself into a death roll, throwing the opposing reptilians off of her face and crushing Kumonga like a bug beneath her enormous girth. The arachnid scarcely had time to let out a panicked squeal before he was reduced to oozing ichor and chitin fragments.
Minilla, previously frozen in horror by the sights before him, was startled into action as Laviente's tail came to a stop right beside him. The adrenaline rush prompted him to fire his own atomic ray at the murderous invader in a panic.
Laviente had all the other survivors in view of her good eye when she was struck, and let out a booming yelp of mingled pain and surprise. She turned her head and spotted Minilla, waist deep in the sea and terrified. She slithered towards him eagerly; the juvenile looked pudgy, slow, and bite sized, an excellent combination.
Godzilla let out a terrible roar of rage as he saw this and reached never before seen speeds as he ran to protect his son from the all-consuming intruder. Despite the vast difference in mass between them, Godzilla's strength and momentum managed to topple Laviente and interrupt her charge.
Anguirus saw an opportunity and took it, quickly turning around and launching himself spikes first at Laviente's exposed neck. With her armor compromised and soft spots exposed, Anguirus created a hundred bleeding holes with the strike of his carapace.
As Godzilla focused all of his strength on beating Laviente's face to a pulp and kept her distracted, Rodan and Gorosaurus joined forces. The pteranodon dug his talons into the theropod's back, and though it stung Gorosaurus readied himself.
Rodan carried them both forward as fast as he could, to the speed of sound and beyond as they accelerated down the beach, and at the last moment Gorosaurus kangaroo kicked the tusk on Laviente's blind side.
His legs went numb from the force, but with that much power at that speed, even the impossibly tough material of Laviente's body could not resist, and the tusk snapped! Laviente shrieked as she was further mutilated, but her self pity was cut short as Godzilla used the opening to blast her tongue.
Rodan carried Gorosaurus back as the landbound dinosaur was unsure if he could still stand. Meanwhile Varan had switched to a quadrupedal stance, keeping his right hindleg off the ground. Careful to avoid his sharp spines, Mothra had crawled onto his back, and used him to get a better angle to spray her silk.
Seeing the broken tusk embedded in the ground, she chirped at her ally-turned improvised mount, communicating a plan to him. Hearing it, Rodan also landed nearby to assist.
As their allies planned, Godzilla and Anguirus kept Laviente focused. She was in a truly berserk state now and murderously focused on Godzilla to the exclusion of almost all else. When Anguirus bit her one time too many she slammed her remaining tusk down on his head hard enough to break his crest of horns and knock him out cold.
Knowing that his friend would not mind, Godzilla grabbed the unconscious ankylosaur by the tail and swung him like a flail. The spikes in conjunction with Godzilla's strength ripped and tore at armored hide with every strike. After six such strikes Laviente finally caught Anguirus by the carapace, ripped him from Godzilla's grasp, and then threw him at Minilla.
The young monster cried out in alarm and Godzilla turned to be certain that his son was alright. Anguirus's unconscious form flew over the juvenile's head, but Laviente capitalized on Godzilla's momentary distraction.
She scooped the monster king into the her jaws and tried to snap them shut to bite him in half just as she had done to Manda! Godzilla raised his arms and even though her teeth stabbed through his palms and out the back of his hands, he still dug his claws into the roof of her mouth and refused to let her jaws shut, even though every moment of resistance meant her bottom jaw stabbed deeper and deeper into his back.
At this critical moment Mothra's plan came to fruition. Varan leaped out of the ocean, propelled by his undamaged tail, carrying the broken tusk. As Mothra had explained, he threw it sharp end first at Laviente's good eye!
It struck true and Laviente tried to clench her teeth as the pain and the gravity of the situation set in. She'd been permanently blinded!
Eyes gone, she failed to notice Rodan, for once flying slowly so as not to dislodge his passenger. Mothra was astride Rodan's back, just as one of her forebears once had been, and had to wait for Rodan to line up just right...
Now!
Mothra launched herself forward, using her head as a battering ram to drive the tusk even deeper into Laviente's eye socket! On Laviente's other side, Minilla and Godzilla fired together into Laviente's other ruined eye.
At last, the pain, blood loss, and venom became too much for her. Laviente collapsed face first into the ocean, dropping Godzilla even as her body and tail continued to thrash blindly on land.
Standing up, Godzilla planted one foot on Laviente's jaw, kicking a tooth out to make room, and with his powerful arms he pried her jaw open.
Baragon, Manda, Kumonga... too many had died today. There would be no mercy for Laviente. He opened his own jaws and fired the atomic ray down her cavernous gullet.
The serpent never had time to scream again. Flames not her own erupted from her eye sockets and nostrils, her lungs burst as radioactive plasma superheated the air within them, and organ after organ melted, burned, or exploded depending on its durability and composition. Godzilla continued to fire until he heard his weapon strike Ogasawara Island itself after bursting out of Laviente's midsection where it bent in a different direction.
Silence fell, but for the crackling of lingering flames, and the crash of ocean waves. The survivors of the battle roared victoriously, declaring that now and forever Ogasawara Island was their home!
Laviente's skull would lay where it had fallen as a reminder of the dire consequences of not respecting that.