Godzilla Earth: Origin (Patreon)

Volume 2 Chapter 114: Destoroyah - Kill

It moved forward in the darkness.

Melting the steel walls, its size was now not much smaller than its mother body.

In the darkness, the joints at its front cut open the walls. Electricity coursed through its body, and soon after, in the control room more than a hundred meters away from the storage room—

The alarm sounded.

The induction panels had been destroyed.

It seemed to hear the alarm from a hundred meters away in the darkness. Its blade-like tip sliced through the massive metal wall as if cutting through butter.

Its feet pierced into the wall, and it burrowed its way out.

Within the hard rock layer, it crushed the rocks as it moved forward, until it found a spot that felt slightly weaker.

Then it began cutting downward, slicing through the metal below.

The metal panels could not stop it. In the darkness, it silently slipped into the ventilation duct and looked downward within the pipe.

The humans' detectors did not notice its escape, so it quietly hid in the ducts.

It split its body into several different selves, then moved through various parts of the duct system.

Some parts of the ventilation ducts in the underground laboratory were equipped with surveillance.

And there were protective nets sufficient to block most particles.

When building this laboratory, humans had accounted for the potential escape of foreign organisms. They had anticipated the future emergence of alien viruses or microscopic insect-like lifeforms.

This created difficulties for its splitting. Even its tiniest forms were still a few tenths of a millimeter in size, far too large to slip through the filters in the ducts.

However, it wasn't a major problem.

If the original holes weren't big enough, then it would simply make them bigger.

The sound of tearing metal echoed through the ducts as the split-off micro-creatures tore through the filtering nets, infecting the adjacent passages.

The holes they tore were very small, less than 5 millimeters wide in both length and width. In the darkness, even the surveillance cameras could not see the damage.

Countless micro-creatures poured through these holes into the next rooms. When they had spread through seven or eight rooms, the largest one stopped splitting.

Then, its surface began to change.

The dark red body gradually turned pure black, absorbing all light and blending perfectly with the surroundings.

It started to conceal itself.

Its shell had already become heat-insulated earlier. Now, with the addition of the pure black body blending into the environment, it became even harder to detect.

It moved within the ventilation ducts, with the surveillance unable to distinguish its form.

Following the pathways, it moved in all directions. Whenever there was a filter, it would split itself again and tear open a small hole to pass through.

While constantly assembling and disassembling itself, it continued along the ventilation system and exited the passageways.

Meanwhile, the people in the control room were inspecting various parts of the biological sector, trying to find where Destoroyah had gone after escaping through the rock layers.

Not all areas outside were covered with induction panels.

But there was no sign of it in the surveillance footage.

Neither the monitors inside the ventilation ducts, nor those in the passageways, nor those in the rooms, could find any trace of the Destoroyah sample.

Where had it gone? Had it re-entered the research facility?

The people in the control room are on their edge.

. . . . .

Hunt, capture new prey, reproduce, grow stronger.

This is the original goal of all life, and Destoroyah was no exception.

What it needed to do now was hunt, reproduce, and make its species stronger.

Even in this brand new world, this primitive instinct still dominated it.

When it awakened and first saw this primitive world, it had already started hunting.

Its own box, other boxes, wires, light bulbs—

It devoured everything it could, but there were too many things among them that it couldn't digest. Even now, it still hadn't finished digesting them.

Thus, it needed to find food that was easier to digest.

Where was the prey?

Back in the dark corners, the flesh of those upright beings had been the easiest food it had ever digested.

It needed to find such things again.

And then—

It found them.

In a research room beneath the ventilation ducts, people who had previously come into contact with the Destoroyah sample were now temporarily isolated.

Because of the potential aggression of the mutated individuals, those who had been exposed were now kept one per room in the physical research sector.

Most of these research rooms were designed for multiple occupants and were equipped with surveillance cameras. However, in the many rooms of the physical sector, there were some narrow areas without cameras.

This was mostly because they had only a single entrance, and the hallways and ventilation ducts already had cameras, so it was deemed unnecessary to install more.

Now, inside one of these rooms, there was an isolated researcher.

Plop

Something fell onto the ground.

The researcher, sitting on his chair, heard the noise and turned his head to look behind him, but there was nothing there.

Could it be Destoroyah?

The researcher felt a bit frightened. He stood up, moving away from the cluttered area toward the door.

With no clutter in the way, he could see more clearly.

He looked at the place where the noise had come from, but after a long moment without a second sound, he finally let out a long sigh of relief.

It must have been just a file falling or something, not that creature.

He sat back down in his original seat. As he did—

Something climbed onto the bookshelf.

Right behind him, a presence filled with malice curled itself up, and then—

Pak!

Bang!

The table was splattered with red.

Blood spilled across the floor.

Something was feeding.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

It ate quickly.

The shattered skull was chewed like potato chips, crimson blood lines crawling across the white brain matter. After eating the skull, it let out a sharp, gleeful cry.

Then it continued to devour the contents of the shattered head.

Protein was one of the easiest structures for it to digest.

The chewed brain and flesh were broken down by countless tiny organisms within its stomach. Its body gradually began to swell, growing larger as it fed.

It crushed bones, drained blood, devoured flesh and brain, and sucked veins one by one into its body.

Its body grew bigger and bigger. It consumed the researcher's entire body, carrying a bloated egg sac on its back, filled with the yet undigested remains.

Now, having acquired enough food, it was time to begin reproduction.

The creatures within its body began to breed and multiply. What was once the size of a human forearm gradually transformed into a new entity.

An arthropod nearly half the height of a human now stood atop the remains of the corpse.

Its body was no longer black. On its brown-red carapace, a new pair of scythe-like limbs had grown, along with pincers entirely different from before.

Supported by four sharp legs, its orange-yellow eyes were filled with a ravenous hunger for food.

The slaughter had begun.