DOD: Dastruction

Name: Dastruction
Aliases: Das’troyer, T-Wrecks, Engine of Destruction
Pronounced: (Dass-truck-shun)
Faction: Terror – Sunset Blade
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral

Classification: Daspletosaurus torosus
Length: 780 feet
Height: 310 feet
Weight: 870 tons

Weaponry / Abilities:

Bonecrushing Jaws / Armored Skull:
Dastruction’s jaws are strong enough to smash freighters like tin cans, chew boulders into gravel, and crunch through most kaiju armor. His rugged, spiked skull is an effective weapon in its own right.

Armor-Piercing / Scraper Fangs:
Gone from Dastruction are the intricacies of the ancient tyrannosaur bite mechanism: only a mashing jaw of crude spiked teeth remains. Jutting out from his jaws at misshapen angles, the monster’s fangs are cruel spike-like tools lined front and back by coarse serrations; the teeth at the front are especially serrated and D-shaped in cross-section, acting as scrapers that tear flesh and carve bone with horrific efficiency. The largest teeth at the front half of his jaws actually interlock when his mouth closes, shearing off chunks of flesh with each bite. Driving his teeth stake-like through thick flesh and hide, fracturing armor plates, and splintering bones, his dentition can quickly convert a struggling victim into a bloody puncture-riddled hill of flesh.

Prehensile Tongue:
Dastruction has an abnormally long and powerful tongue. Muscular, highly prehensile, and studded with spiny papillae, his tongue is a dexterous appendage designed for manipulating food items and sweeping up small morsels by the mouthful; with enough raw muscle power to hoist nearly 300 tons off the ground, and its surface covered in countless spiny projections as long as a human forearm, this tongue is used for restraining prey and enemies alike.

Mangler Claws:
Dastruction has two-fingered hands typical of tyrant dinosaurs. His thumbs, however, are stunted and resemble the thumb spikes found in dinosaurs like Iguanodon, while his second fingers are larger, more robust, and tipped with a recurved meathook-like claw; powered by his long and enormously powerful arms, these claws can easily tear his victims apart. The large claws on Dastruction’s feet are for gaining traction, but they are potent weapons in their own right.

Counterbalance / Bludgeoning Tail:
Trailing behind Dastruction’s hulking body is an incredibly heavy, muscular tail. Constituting for a little over half his total length, this massive appendage allows him to keep his balance or swim like a crocodile, as well as crush and batter his enemies. Two broad bony plates protruding from the tail help stabilize Dastruction and act as a bonecrushing club.

Sheer Size / Brute Strength:
Thanks to his massive size, Dastruction merely shifting his weight can throw opponents off their feet, allowing his intended blows to send smaller foes flying. Adding to his enormous size is a level of strength rivaled by very few other kaiju. Heaving massive rocks from the ground and hurling them like toys, he can just as easily tear foes limb from limb or crush them into a bloody pulp.

Tyrant In Plated Armor:
Dastruction sports a versatile suit of natural armor. The most obvious part is a thick rhino-like overlapping hide that gives him great resilience and mobility. Underlying this layer is a number of bony osteoderm sheets that act much like chainmail, as well as subcutaneous fat deposits that absorb and dissipate physical impacts. Beneath that still is a set of gastralia (belly ribs) that support and safeguard his organs.

Metabolic Surge:
Dastruction’s metabolism is…unusual. Although warm-blooded – and therefore quite energy-hungry – like all other dinosaurs, he’s notable in that his eating habits have some strange immediate effects on his body; Dastruction can achieve metabolic bursts that let him move and react to stimuli much more quickly than normally possible, but at the cost of leaving him in a “valley” of sluggishness and exhaustion afterwards. Dastruction uses this ability wisely, trading off between it and his normal metabolic state as is advantageous.

Immortal Flesh:
Dastruction is, by virtue of his insatiable eating habits, capable of becoming temporarily immortal. Gorging himself until he nearly bursts at the seams, the monster can shift his body’s metabolism into overdrive and make his natural SGO healing factor virtually insurmountable; this effect lasts for about thirty or so minutes, and it allows Dastruction to weather onslaughts that would normally destroy even a kaiju as large as he is. On more than one occasion Dastruction has entered a city, been attacked by substantial military forces and even several Defender kaiju, lapped up huge crowds of fleeing people with his tongue, and come out of the whole ordeal with hardly a scratch on him….

Bio-Concrete Spray:
Dastruction’s natural ranged weapon is of a fiendish variety: bio-concrete. Generated within a pair of glands at the back of his mouth, this viscous gray sludge is chemically similar to Portland cement and is every bit as dangerous – when mixed with saliva a bio-concrete expulsion will splash against an enemy and soon harden into a rigid stony material, restricting the target’s mobility, slowing movement, and numbing sensory perception. The very chemical reaction required to harden bio-concrete can burn even tough kaiju flesh down to the bone. If inhaled, this material can actually form concrete within the lungs. When this substance gets into a wound it severely hinders the healing process, harbors infections, and worse yet, gives off a deathly stench that Dastruction can use to track down victims at his leisure. Despite its many dangers, Dastruction seems immune to bio-concrete’s effects.

Weaknesses:

Lumbering:
Dastruction isn’t what one would describe as being “fast” or “agile”. Fat, slow, and incapable of leaping, he’s forced to plod his way over and through obstacles, and his girth makes it difficult for him to move through enclosed spaces.

Personality:
Dastruction is a walking appetite. He will eat virtually anything that moves and quite a few things that don’t. His appetite for food is equaled only by his appetite for destruction, and it is a hunger like no other.

Crushing, tearing, breaking, smashing, Dastruction loves it all. He lives for the sound of twisting, burning metals, the pin-prick sting of shattered glass, the crumbling of stone and concrete beneath his feet, the wet tearing of flesh, and the splintering crunch of bones between his jaws.

Although Dastruction dislikes his enslavement under Sunset Blade, he does admittedly enjoy the perks that come with it: a free license to kill, conquer, and destroy with minimal consequence is just too good an offer to pass up.

It should also be noted that Dastruction’s NLD sometimes malfunctions; he normally doesn’t notice until it’s long been fixed but, every so often, he’ll escape Sunset Blade territory because of it.

Combat Strategy:
Dastruction is an utter nightmare to face in kaiju-to-kaiju combat. Thundering headlong into battle, the gigantic tyrannosaur will quickly bring his most fearsome weapon – his jaws – into play, ramming them into his opponents and inflicting as much immediate damage as possible, crippling limbs and inflicting severe tissue damage. His meathook-like arms hold his victims within range of his savage jaws, and he will periodically kick out his massive clawed legs to smash ribcages and spill forth intestines. His huge armored tail is an effective bludgeoning weapon as well as a balancing limb that lets him hold and take ground in combat. At a distance Dastruction relies on his bio-concrete spray to disorient and immobilize his opponents before moving in for the kill.

Under Sunset Blade, Dastruction is a shock trooper through and through, leading Sunset Blade’s charges onto the battlefield when there's something exceptionally tough that needs to be smashed.

History:
It’s presumed that Dastruction was native to the World Below cavern known as Stygia, although when he first made it to surface-world North America is unknown. Similarly, it’s a mystery as to how Sunset Blade managed to enslave the monster so early in the corporation’s kaiju-hunting history.

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On the late morning of May 23rd, 1995, Dastruction suddenly appeared just off the coast of southeastern Oahu Island, Hawaii; his NLD had malfunctioned again, letting him roam free without consequence. Lumbering inland into the extinct Koko Crater caldera, the gigantic dinosaur was soon met midway by an airborne SGOC task force stationed out of Bellows Air Force Station, resulting in a terrific firefight on the outskirts of the Hawaii Kai residential area.

Despite seemingly winning his two-hour battle against the SGOC, Dastruction nonetheless fell prey in the end to a classic anti-kaiju strategy: the avalanche. Focusing their fire on the looming caldera wall, the airborne task force managed to set off a massive rockslide that completely buried the monster. Presuming him to be dead, the SGOC task force headed back to base to pick up a liquidator squad that could prepare the giant corpse for proper disposal.

When the task force returned to the site about an hour later, all they found was a set of enormous three-toed footprints leading back into the sea….

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Artist's Commentary:
This is Dastruction, one of the earliest kaiju created for the Days Of Dikorus kaijuverse. It’s been so long since I created Dastruction that I can’t recall what first inspired him, but I will confess something that I’m not proud of: his original name was “Little Das”, a blatant and goofy reference to the juvenile daspletosaur depicted in an episode of the “Dinosaur Planet” documentary series. Anyways, I based Dastruction on the tyrannosaur Daspletosaurus from the start because of that animal’s oversized teeth and unusually long arms, and because T.rex is severely overrated in popular culture.

The monster’s original design sported a few random dorsal spikes, horns formed out of his cheekbones, and strange “wrist lances” that emerged from between his fingers; his second design was of slightly better quality, but was way too lean and had virtually identical features to the original. After a few years of letting design #2 stagnate, I finally had the opportunity to revisit Dastruction and give him his third, current, and final makeover; this entailed making him much, much fatter, doing away with all of the spines, totally revamping his abilities, and giving him an actual personality. Dastruction’s name is a play-on-words between “destruction” and his base species’ name. Dastruction originally had bio-napalm as a ranged weapon, but I reworked it into a fearsome “bio-concrete” that he uses to immobilize and crush his foes.

Dastruction was initially very underdeveloped in terms of character, but I’ve recently imagined him as being a simple “horror hunger”-type monster, motive by little more than his appetite. Simple but effective, methinks.

Artistic Notes:
— Dastruction has four clawed toes per foot, the innermost of which is vestigial.
— Dastruction has two fingers per hand; the innermost is an iguanodont-style thumb spike, while the outermost is elongated and tipped by a meathook-shaped claw.
— Dastruction’s teeth are misshapen and interlocking, akin to those of a V.rex.
— Dastruction has two flattened, rounded-edged plates near the end of his tail.
— Dastruction has a row of short primary feathers down along each of his arms.
— References: 3.bp.blogspot.com/-M9YH_yPo9Q0… , img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20… .