Godzilla moved.
The command center fell silent. All cheers ceased, every breath held in anticipation of its next move.
The city lay in ruins. Everything that could be destroyed had been reduced to rubble. Surely, it was time to stop. Time to retreat. Time to return to the sea.
Go back, Godzilla. Your body is overheated. Cool yourself in the ocean. You've expended so much energy. Return, recover, evolve. Just leave.
Go back!
This was the silent plea of everyone watching.
They had studied every scrap of data, analyzed every possibility. They knew the truth—Godzilla was an unstoppable force. Humanity wasn't prepared to fight it yet. They needed time. Time to develop weapons, time to prepare defenses. They needed Godzilla to leave.
Go back and slumber.
But Godzilla had other plans.
Standing amidst the smoldering wreckage of Nagoya, it reviewed the objectives on its mental checklist. The mission to withstand nuclear bombardment was nearly complete. The destruction of naval fleets, army forces, and air bases was two-thirds finished. The goal to increase its size? Only one more city remained.
It wasn't done yet.
But there was a problem—overheating. If it continued using its atomic breath, if it pressed forward without a solution, it would self-destruct.
It needed a way to keep fighting. And then, Godzilla found one.
KABOOM!
A blinding nuclear flash erupted. In the Osaka command center, hundreds of kilometers away, jaws dropped. No one had predicted this. Not in any simulation. Not in any worst-case scenario.
"Commander... what is Godzilla doing?"
Someone voiced the question on everyone's mind. It was madness. Unfathomable.
Why was Godzilla self-destructing?
On-screen, a fireball consumed the monster where it stood. It was as if a nuclear bomb had detonated at point-blank range.
But no human had fired. No missile had struck. No bomb had been dropped.
Godzilla had done it to itself.
It had fired its own atomic breath directly beneath its feet.
Why? Why would it do that?
All eyes turned to Commander Sato Hirozumi, the mastermind behind humanity's countermeasures. He stared at the screen, his mind racing through possibilities.
And then, when the fireball swelled and shimmered, realization dawned. He let out a helpless sigh.
"We underestimated you, Godzilla." He turned to his officers. "Begin evacuations. Osaka. Every surrounding city. Now."
The weight of his words crushed the room. Confusion turned to horror as the truth clicked into place.
Godzilla wasn't destroying itself.
It was shedding.
A monstrous roar echoed from the fireball. The air vibrated with the sound. Godzilla stood within the inferno, engulfed in flames hotter than 6,000 degrees Celsius. Its own atomic breath had turned against it, melting its skin, boiling its flesh, sublimating everything down to its raw, molten form.
The outer layers of its body liquefied, cascading down in molten streams. It looked like a titan drenched in sweat, only instead of water, it was burning steel dripping from its flesh.
For ten agonizing minutes, the monster stood motionless. Then, the fire dimmed, and its molten shell began to cool.
It exhaled. The temperature was dropping. The plan had worked.
The insulating material that had trapped its heat—the very thing preventing it from fighting at full power—was now gone. Incinerated. Burned away in a self-made nuclear hellfire.
Now, it could continue.
Godzilla wasn't just a mindless force of destruction. It wasn't just an unstoppable monster.
It was intelligent.
It understood physics.
It had sacrificed its own flesh to regain control of its power. The outermost layer of its skin had been obliterated—burned away to a depth of several inches—but beneath that? It remained intact. Ready. More dangerous than ever.
To kill Godzilla, it would take hundreds, thousands of such attacks. And even then, they couldn't be concentrated blasts. A single 50-megaton bomb wouldn't cripple it. But five hundred smaller ones, spread across time, might.
The battle wasn't just about raw power.
It was about endurance. And Godzilla had more of it than anything on Earth.
The operation to stop it—the carefully crafted plan to trap and neutralize it—was now a total failure.
In the southeastern region of Japan, there was no force left to challenge Godzilla's might.
The final phase had begun.
The true rampage was only just starting.