Titanomachy, Chapter Eleven

Outer space, just beyond Earth’s moon.


The Tyloban Empire’s worst fears had been realized.

Down below, upon the war-torn crust of their homeworld, their greatest champion had called for backup. They knew what this meant. They all knew.

The Imperial Council had opposed it, of course. They had condemned it in the public forums, demanding that another way be found. They couldn’t sit idly by and watch their race’s strongest ally and dearest friend destroy himself, not in such times as these. But regardless of what they thought about it, the nine Council members lacked Emperor Tylobite’s political clout by design. He was the Council’s tenth member and leader, their people’s Emperor – what he said, went. And now, his best friend in all the post-Cycle world was living on borrowed time.

The Tyloban Empire’s backup strategy took a page from their first encounter with humanity. Their turning point in the Human-Tyloban War was – as it was in so many wars – using a weapon of last resort. They remembered that day well; the humans’ calendar listed it as February 13th, 1977. It was the day the Empire dropped a Glasscaster atop the island nation of East Timor, wiping it from the face of the planet. They had dropped the Glasscaster then out of revenge and wounded pride, but now they would use it in desperation. This was their world, their home…and they would fight the Horde to the death to prove it.

Meanwhile, on Earth, humanity’s worst fears had been realized.

From just beyond the moon, a Tyloban ship was now approaching the planet. They hadn’t done this in decades, not since the close of the Human-Tyloban War. All traffic since between the fleet and Earth was on a small scale, a couple hundred Skrag or a few Tylobans at most, but this? This was unprecedented.

What was the Empire’s intent? Mankind had no way of knowing. Were they going to attempt an evacuation of their people? Were they coming to aid humanity in their fight against the Horned Horde? Or worse, was this the beginning of a second Tyloban invasion? Fear and uncertainty overcame all else; the collective decision was inevitable.

But no matter the outcome, no matter what happened next, humans and Tylobans and Skrag everywhere knew and agreed on one thing.

The events to come would forever change life on post-Cycle Earth.

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Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong.


A pair of HR-7A Shantaks approached the ongoing kaiju battle with caution. Dikorus was known all throughout the SGOC, and to them he was something of a celebrity athlete, a marvel to watch in glorious action against the enemies of humanity. But this was no risk-free altercation, no battle in the remote wilderness where bets would be made and enjoyment would be had – this was the real deal. They would not risk firing upon their ally; they waited on the outlier for an opportunity to intervene.

Through Cyberanha’s dented and broken helmet, through the occasional scampering of myrmidons over the cracked lens, the Tyloban Empire watched. From their New Guinea stronghold they had witnessed his battle against Indrike in Mumbai, and then his battle against Diaborus in Hong Kong after that. They had seen it all. They would also see what came next, men, women, and children all. Standing head and shoulders over most of his species, Emperor Tylobite could see the Shantaks hovering into view now. He wished it hadn’t come to this. No one deserved what was coming, most of all Cyberanha….

Suddenly the camera feed turned skyward. Cyberanha had craned his head high, away from the fighting kaiju, away from the two Shantaks; he heard it long before he saw it. It was the distant, faint rumbling of an engine the likes of which humanity had never devised. It was near…the time was coming.

Innumerable myrmidons congealed in the ruins around the battling monsters in a frothing and angry mass, seemingly oblivious to what loomed on the southern horizon. None dared approach, whether by their own caution or by Diaborus’ telepathic will warning them away. They gnashed their jaws and spat insults, swiping black talons, waving their guns, but they had no idea what was coming their way. No idea at all. Looking out on them, Cyberanha took a strange pleasure in that.

Ten minutes later…and it was there. It was time.

A Tyloban ship, bigger than the city it hovered over, came lumbering into view above the early morning clouds, parting several against its unspeakably immense metal frame. In the long dawn light, its shadow alone stretched for several miles. Though it could be seen in clear detail, its parts slowly ratcheting and shifting, the ship hovered at a comfortable six miles overhead, just barely penetrating the planet’s troposphere; any closer and the ship would be dragged into Earth’s gravity well. The upper portions of it still protruded out into cold, empty space. The rumbling, shimmering noise its engines emitted was more felt than heard, rattling through even the three kaiju’s thick bones. Now the Horde took notice; they began to back off while staring up at the sky, fearful yet defiant, as if daring the ship’s crew to rain death down upon them. Cyberanha too watched it, silent and alert as the craft slowed to a northerly crawl overhead. Receiving orders to evacuate, the two Shantaks hovering nearby scattered.

Towards the rear of the hull a hexagonal port half a kilometer wide irised open, revealing a crackling blue energy the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Human-Tyloban War. All who had witnessed those terrible times knew what it was: the Tyloban Empire’s weapon of last resort. A weapon of unimaginable power.

All across Hong Kong Island trash and litter began moving, whipping towards the ship, as if being drawn there. Strong gusts of wind suddenly tore southward through the streets, dragging with them cars, rubble, myrmidons, people, anything that wasn’t bolted down. Sucking in vast volumes of atmospheric gas, the Glasscaster drew them in to be superheated into raw elemental plasma, that most enigmatic state of matter. There, held fast in the void of a strong electromagnetic field, the plasma would be packaged and sent back from whence it came, meeting the city below in a blast that, luck willing, would annihilate Diaborus and any trace of the wretched Horde.

All of Hong Kong had fallen silent; they watched and waited for what came next.

The guide rail came down first. Plunging like a lance into the flesh of the earth, the thin blue stream of electromagnetic energy was in truth as wide as a four-lane highway, crackling and hissing vibrantly as it bored explosively through skyscrapers and burrowed deep into Hong Kong Island’s bedrock. It would lodge itself there and act as a tether, growing wider and wider, guiding a perfect sphere of barely-contained plasma to its first and only destination. Once dropped the plasma ball would swell to twice the port’s width, sucking in gases to grow even larger and deadlier. When it detonated, everything within a thirty-mile radius would be completely vaporized. Hong Kong would soon be a lifeless crater.

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From all across China they scrambled. Nearly a hundred combat aircraft took off from runways, carrier decks, and remote mountain bases, all converging on the titanic threat that had just shown itself on the horizon. Helicopters of numerous make and size followed behind, together creating a sprawling airborne force rivaled in strength by few and outnumbered by none.

The People’s Liberation Army was on high alert. Their country was under attack by the greatest of all possible threats: a Tyloban spacecraft. They would not stand for this; action had to be taken.

Converging on Hong Kong, the next hour was spent trying to drive the monstrous intruder away. Shooting the plasma stream itself did nothing. Small-arms fire proved useless against a hull that was designed to endure asteroid collisions. Heavier ordnance did little better, and while the heaviest ordnance of all – nuclear ordnance – was considered, no one knew how they might interact with the ship’s unknown fuel source, and so the idea was shuttled back as an absolute last resort.

All they could do now was hope to find a chink in the great metal dragon’s armor, and until then…they prayed.

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The city of Hong Kong was a scene of pandemonium.

On Hong Kong Island to the south Diaborus and Dikorus continued to clash for the fate of mankind, while all across the city myrmidon packs and goliaths continued to stalk and battle, engaging Skrag and human belligerents at every opportunity, their conflicts dissolving only when the brawling titans drew too near to ignore. Chinese fighter jets and drones from a dozen different nations zipped back and forth, opening fire on ground targets and the single airborne one; SGOC Shantaks hovered where once towering skyscrapers stood, peppering large myrmidon congregations with lead and searching for the rogue kaiju Nalhest. Tanks, cars, Tyloban drones, and UAP-90s littered the streets in varying states of destruction. Saurocyde’s carcass still lay there somewhere in Kowloon, burning in the ruins. Hovering in dread silence above it all was the Tyloban ship, a moving mountain range that now poured down a river of scorching plasma in preparation for a final, decisive strike against the monster who had so gravely endangered their homeworld.

His weary face illuminated by fire and the glowing pillar across the bay, Goro Ukusagami sighed a heavy sigh and sat down on the dented frame of a car, joining the rest in watching the Tyloban ship from the streets just outside Sunset Blade; Genocyde lay somewhere off in the ruins, recovering from the wounds he’d sustained fighting to protect his people. In the wreckage of Hong Kong these survivors of Sunset Blade watched as the city they once called home crumbled and burned, its population hellspawn, its ruler an ancient and horrifying lord come to retake what he’d long ago claimed as his own. All now watched the Glasscaster’s guide rail as it dug ever deeper and bulged ever wider, spitting up dust, searching for the right spot in the rock to latch on. There was no point in running or hiding; when the ball dropped, it was game over. They took a strange form of solace in watching this, this one last spot of beauty before the sudden, inevitable end.

Suddenly, commotion turned their attention back to the two fighting kaiju. Something was happening down there.

In a mile-wide arena of absolute ruin, Diaborus and Dikorus continued to fight. His psionic powers starting to tire, Diaborus went all-out, telekinetically hurling what few buildings were still standing in Dikorus’ direction, the enormous projectiles tumbling and rolling away into razor-edged fragments that exploded like meteors, missing their intended mark every time. While Dikorus may’ve been severely wounded, and while he too was panting from exhaustion, his tired legs could still carry him out of harm’s way.

With Diaborus at his front and a gleaming, ever-widening plasma stream at his back, Dikorus was trapped. Diaborus knew this and, advancing, was eager to capitalize, but when one of his wayward missiles tumbled its way past Dikorus and into the plasma stream, the enormous structure almost immediately burning down to cinders, an idea formed in the Defender’s feathery head.

Once more the two clashed in close-quarters, slashing claws against piercing horn, crushing fists against snapping beak, their monumental strikes throwing blood and scraps of hide wherever the monumental battle went. In time Dikorus managed to get Diaborus between himself and the plasma stream and then, as his throat began to glow a faint and misty blue, let loose with a pulsing thermonuclear blast at close range, forcing back Diaborus with the whooshing air and searing-hot roar of an irradiated inferno. Diaborus was pushed to his hands and knees by the blast, his skin beginning to peel and his quills set ablaze, but he wasn’t the only one suffering under the heat of Dikorus’ mighty breath, for Dikorus himself was slowly starting to burn as well, his open wounds steaming and emitting Cherenkov radiation, his body now a living, breathing, leaking nuclear reactor. Every second of every use of his thermonuclear breath accelerated his condition, taxing his ruptured reactor gland to the breaking point, and if he kept this up he wouldn’t last much longer. Dikorus had to end this. He had to end it now.

Charred, bleeding, and desperate, Diaborus mounted one last attack, his huge lungs heaving as he tackled into Dikorus, slinging the Defender to his knees before sinking the ends of his razor-edged beak into either side of Dikorus’ head, causing the monster to shriek in sudden pain; pulling Dikorus up and back Diaborus tugged his thick neck and thrashed it side-to-side, carving deep wounds into Dikorus’ flesh and ragged furrows into the bones underneath, attempting to tear the monster’s head off of his body, but his grip slipped loose and Dikorus’ head shot up on its long neck like a striking serpent, screaming a horrific battle cry as his claws lashed out and his beak slammed its sharpened tip into the meaty side of Diaborus’ neck, twisting and ripping and returning the grisly favor. As Dikorus broke free, strands of muscle fiber in his mouth, one of his enormous hands swept over and clawed Diaborus hard across the face, slashing his cheek wide open, finally snagging onto one of his eyes and popping it like a grape, painfully blinding the beast.

At last the two combatants parted, but now it was Diaborus that stood trapped between an enemy and the indifferent, all-consuming plasma stream, half-blinded and flayed by savage claws, his stance shaky and his movement reduced to a pitiful hobble. Dikorus too was reaching his limits, for he now also stood on trembling legs, his body steaming with heat, his wounded shoulder threatening to burst, his pierced reactor gland seething clouds of escaping radionuclides, his breath and his blood stained luminous blue by an excess of Cherenkov radiation, his red eyes even more bloodshot, patches of his feathers sizzling and soon igniting.

This was it, Dikorus realized. No matter what he did next, there would be no surviving this. But if he was going to die today, here and now…he was going to take that horned devil with him.

And so with open and trembling arms, and with one last, final roar to the heavens, Dikorus charged.

Focused on all this, the Sunset Blade refugees ducked in surprise as a low-flying sonic boom suddenly roared overhead, passing the hills and then what used to be the Hong Kong skyline, rattling distant windows and forcing eardrums to be shielded. There were four of them – Xian JH-7 fighter-bombers – streaking south-southeast across the early morning sky, the Chinese military aircraft making a beeline for the Tyloban ship that hovered like a monolith over Hong Kong Island. The Glasscaster continued digging.

As a single tumultuous mass Dikorus and Diaborus tossed and turned in mortal conflict, Diaborus fighting to survive, Dikorus fighting for death. The final battle was as swift as it was decisive, as Dikorus sunk his talons deep and dragged his foe kicking and howling into the blue pinnacle of light that hissed and churned so very close by, illuminating the monsters’ struggles like stage lights on a performance epic. Together they marched headfirst into that blindingly blue hell, one earth-shuddering step after another, until, finally, they were through.

Dikorus burned. Diaborus burned. Nothing, not even the mightiest of kaiju could survive a direct bombardment from a Glasscaster, not even the guide rail that preceded the main event, the awaiting cataclysm that loomed high above. They like all kaiju were freak accidents, the products of countless chance occurrences in the hot bubbling murk of an ancient atom bog; they spent the next millions of years in intermittent bouts of slumber and pointless violence, battling for territory and for power with their own monstrous kind, and then, just like that…they were gone. The would-be king of post-Cycle Earth, and the Talon of Salvation that slew him, were dead.

The Horned Horde’s response was immediate. All across the world myrmidons and goliaths dropped to their knees and moaned, pulling out hair and quills, clawing madly at their faces, kicking frantically, shaking uncontrollably. Some voided their bowels in shock; others beat their fists against the ground until they bled. All these howled and screamed in an unknowable, indescribable mental agony. A few others simply fell over dead and limp, their brains fried from the synaptic backlash. Only a small fraction of the Horde managed to survive.

But it was not over. Diaborus’ death had come but a few seconds too late. The greatest of mistakes was yet to be made; the chiefest of all possible calamities would very soon begin.

From under each of the Xians’ angular wings there shot out a fusillade of gleaming white projectiles, propelled by rocket fuel and guided by GPS to their first and last destination. The jets split off and flew away as the barrage of missiles neared, glistening white like the teeth of a snarling beast, sweeping under and up into the gaping hexagonal port beneath the Tyloban ship. It was there that they disappeared.

And it was then that the belly of the Tyloban ship exploded.

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On the ground below, Cyberanha shielded his eyes and broken visor from the concussive force of the explosions, flecks of shrapnel scouring his hide; he lowered his arm only when the metal hail and the blinding flashes of light ceased. The shockwave alone had caused even him to adjust his footing. What he saw made his nuclear-heated blood run cold.

The Tyloban ship had suffered a critical blow. The missiles had ventured into and detonated deep inside the hull, negating its outer armor plating. The ship’s great many engines now sputtered and roared as if in pain, their strange lifeblood seeping out of wounds rent by the humans’ firepower; its monolithic hull shuddered and bloated outward from explosions that went unseen. Black oily smoke roiled from the Glasscaster port and fresh rents in the hull. The ship could not stay airborne for long, not like this. And no matter how much he wanted to be wrong, Cyberanha and all the Tyloban Empire knew that it was going to crash.

High above him, chaos had broken out onboard the Tyloban ship. Tyloban and Skrag technicians struggled to take control of the situation, putting out fires as soon as they popped up, but the planet’s gravity well was now working against them. Each rattling explosion caused the ship to tilt further to the left, exposing its ravaged underbelly to the Pacific Ocean beyond, dragging the Glasscaster guide rail along with it. The crackling lance of plasma carved a long gaping furrow through the ground as it was being pulled aside, spitting dust plumes and parting clouds of smoke, erupting in billowing clouds of steam where it met the sea. But the weapon remained active: crippling damage to the hull or not, it was going to fire.

All across Hong Kong and the world at large, people responded to the sudden attack on the Tyloban ship. Some cheered. Others cried. Most were silent. They weren’t sure how to react to this, and how could they be? Not once in history had one of the Tyloban ships ever been attacked directly – they were simply too large to threaten. Or at least they were thought to be. But for China at least, the chink in the great dragon’s armor had at last been found: it was a weakness that, in defense of their country, their military was about to exploit for all its worth.

Without warning, the Glasscaster fired.

A crackling, writhing ball of plasma squeezed out of the hexagonal port and bloomed to twice that size in seconds, gorging itself on Earth’s atmosphere as the mile-wide sphere shot far out to sea, disappearing in seconds over the mid-morning horizon like a small blue sun, illuminating clouds brief instants before vaporizing them. The port sizzled and jumped with electrical sparks as long as lightning bolts, its mechanical doors moving erratically as the ship slowly lost self-control. After that came the Glasscaster’s logical conclusion: the detonation.

The explosion itself was spectacular. The curvature of the Earth blocked much of the explosion from Hong Kong’s view, but not all of it. The upper lip of a ball of light appeared on the distant Pacific horizon, outshining the rising sun itself for a few brief seconds before erupting in a searing spherical flash that shook walls and blew out windows hundreds of miles away. While the explosion was felt several seconds before it was heard, the sound that followed simply defied words. It was rumbling, roaring, shaking, earth-shatteringly loud, as if the Earth itself had recoiled in fright from the sudden attack. Shockwaves rippled across the vast waters of the Pacific, most losing strength until they became only small lappings at the shoreline, while others slammed into distant islands with destructive force, scouring them of all life.

In Hong Kong, anyone not sitting or otherwise braced was toppled by the shockwave. Then, to the surprise of many, it began to rain. No, it was not rain, but seawater displaced by the detonation, thousands of gallons hurled hundreds of miles in all directions from the point of impact. The hissing torrent fell hard for several seconds before dissipating, the entire city and its occupants now unexpectedly soaked, the air humid but cleared of some of its dust and ash.

Up above them all the Tyloban ship began to eject its passengers. Fearful Skrag families tossed their children into escape pods, jettisoning them as soon as they were able. Women, the sick, and the elderly came next, shot off many miles away to land in parts unknown. Valuables too large to carry rounded out the lot, launched in their own pods all across Earth to hopefully be later retrieved. The larger Tylobans fought their way to their own escape pods, but the destruction unfolding onboard made it impossible for most to make it in time. The majority were doomed, pinned by toppled equipment or consumed alive in roaring chemical fires that swept through the halls and compartments with a seemingly predatory intent, scorching and burning anything that would hold a flame. Screams and roars punctuated the dark, thickening air, while blurred shapes split the smoke as they ran, jumped, and climbed, frantic to find their families or recover their most prized belongings.

For nearly twenty minutes the crew fought hard for control of their vessel; if they could get the floundering ship back into space maybe, just maybe they could reach the rest of the fleet in time. There they could escape their attackers and make repairs, suffocate the fires raging onboard, maybe even save their ship. But to get back into orbit they needed to move…they needed to head up. Pushing the dying engines hard, the crew slowly forced the listing ship upward, away from the city beneath it. First feet, then meters it moved, picking up altitude as it desperately climbed to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. In time the looming shadow of the Tyloban ship left Hong Kong airspace altogether, bursting through clouds and scattering air-jungles of oblivious cidarags, penetrating the boundary of true outer space, the immense ship heading north along Earth’s surface and away for the safety of the Tyloban Fleet. It seemed as if the ship was going to make it.

A small fleet of Chinese fighter jets now moved swiftly to pursue the floundering, smoldering craft like hunting hounds, parting thick clouds of smoke and ablating metal particulates to assault it further with bullet and rocket and missile, slowly chipping away at its defenses. Windows were shattered; engines died. Late-arriving Tyloban drones struggled to keep up, frantically documenting the scene. Escape pods were being shot down almost as quickly as they were launched, some of the attacking jets breaking off to pursue those that managed to escape. As long as the ship was in their airspace they would continue to attack, scrambling ever more jets and launching swarms of missiles from the ground beneath, each strike dislodging a scale from the great metal leviathan’s hide. They were very nearly victims of Tyloban invasion four long decades ago…terrified by that possibility ever since, the Chinese would not take any more chances.

To the northern reaches of the country the Chinese jets pursued their quarry from below and behind, taking potshots and chasing down escape pods as they jettisoned, only to fall back when the red-hot rods of metal came raining down on top of them, dropped from outside Earth’s atmosphere by the remaining Tyloban Fleet, doing all they could to protect their struggling brethren. Jets were annihilated on contact with the great tungsten lances, bursting into shrapnel and flame with even the slightest grazing of a wing, leading to dramatic tumbles to earth and the occasional midair collision that saw ejection seats launched and parachutes unfurled. But the projectiles were meant for larger targets than these; most missed the jets entirely, whistling down to the ground where further destruction unfolded. From hidden bases in Beijing the nuclear option was nearly ordered -

But it was then that the engines decided to die.

The Tyloban ship had at last given up the ghost. It still sputtered and coughed but that didn’t matter; it was the plaything of gravity now. And soon…it fell.

It was incredible how fast the Tyloban ship could move without power. Several miles were covered in as many seconds, the deadened craft’s momentum building and building as it fell from the heavens and back towards Earth, its outer hull steaming red from its grind against the planet’s atmosphere. The daring escape attempt turned very quickly turned south, or at least it had in the metaphoric sense. The dying ship’s true course lay in the northeastern hemisphere of the Tyloban homeworld, toward a vast and frigid land where few people lived. The fact that the nation of Russia was sparsely populated would bring them no solace, even if they had known that to begin with. The only thing that mattered now was their fall, both from the skies and from their position of power over the planet they had fought so hard to protect.

Its trapped passengers cried out for rescue, and prayers to Sögwen were uttered. But no matter how wildly they fought, no matter how hard their fists pounded, no matter how loudly they screamed, they could not be saved. Their home would now be their coffin and their funeral pyre.

As the ship punctured back into Earth’s lower atmosphere its midsection erupted in an explosion unlike any other, the shockwave visible through the flame and peppered with ablating debris from the hull, scattering alien metals and elements unknown on Earth all across the planet’s surface, free for the taking as soon as they cooled. It was a rare gift in a moment of utter cataclysm.

Falling ever lower the Tyloban ship grazed the jagged pinnacles of the Baikal Mountains, which gutted it like a gargantuan fish; not even Tyloban metal could withstand such solid stone. Twisted wreckage tumbled down along the mountainsides like a landslide, sparking and clanging, most of it falling into the great watery receptacle that was Lake Baikal, sinking down to its deep and ancient depths, seemingly lost forever.

Emperor Tylobite could not revel in his victory over the Horde. Standing with his people thousands of miles away to the south, he could only look upon the screen as the great Tyloban ship – a flaming pinprick low on the distant horizon – fell to its doom, taking a chunk of his civilization down with it. Where exactly it fell he could not say, but wherever it was he knew would be obliterated; he pitied anyone standing underneath its looming hull. He grieved for anyone who was still trapped inside it.

One last explosion ravaged the innards of the Tyloban ship before it hit, this one carrying with it the final cries of a people about to face extermination. It was the sound of death, the sound of a cultural blow whose resulting wound could never be healed.

Then, impact. It was magnificent and horrific all at once, so strange and so wrong that the sight of it simply defied belief.

Some crashing to their knees, others weeping, the Tylobans of the capital threw up their heads to trumpet their mournful roars, the lenses in distant Cyberanha’s visor having been fried by the sheer brilliance of the impact. It lit up the skies of the northeastern hemisphere like an angelic beacon, but this was no gift from benevolent higher powers. Far, far from it.

And for a moment after, a very brief moment, all of post-Cycle Earth went silent.