Godzilla Earth: Origin (Patreon)

Volume 2 Chapter 122: Catastrophe

The ground melted, and not a glimmer of light shone in the sky.

Dust fell like ash, settling upon the green peaks of distant mountains.

A terrifying and boundless force cleaved through mountain ranges and erupted across the barren desert.

From the farthest reaches of the eastern hemisphere to the satellites in the heavens, every eye in the world bore witness to this overwhelming display of power.

An unparalleled force...

A fireball with a diameter exceeding a hundred kilometers exploded above the inland sea of Australia, its light so intense that it turned night into day on the opposite side of the Earth. The radiance stunned all who beheld it.

The earth cracked and crumbled, clouds of deadly toxins were blown aside by the shockwave, and the ocean surged into a towering tsunami over a hundred meters high.

It didn’t feel real.

It felt less like something that could happen in the real world, and more like a cataclysm pulled straight from ancient mythology.

What kind of power was this?

A massive mushroom cloud swallowed the monster’s silhouette as it pressed forward through the roiling gases. When the cloud lifted and revealed the creature again, it had already arrived at the Australian coastline—next to the massive crater it had just blasted.

From the mountainous inland, a single beam of energy had struck the shore and gouged out a crater over 15 kilometers wide.

What terrifying might.

At least with current human technology, such destruction remained completely out of reach.

Poisoned seawater rushed into the massive pit, with billions—tens of billions, even hundreds of billions—of tons of water surging inland like an apocalyptic flood.

Satellites overhead captured it all and transmitted the footage to the eyes of humanity.

The result: silence.

The power far exceeded anyone’s expectations.

Whether in terms of Godzilla’s might or its implications for humanity, it went well beyond initial projections.

Had they known, they would’ve scaled things down.

Standing amidst the Australian wilderness, the massive beast looked upon its work. The heat-wind swept over its body, and it couldn’t help but regret using so much force.

That was… too much.

The shockwave might’ve reached areas where life still clung on.

Residual radiation still lingered around its mouth. As it calculated the force of its previous attack, Godzilla simultaneously reevaluated the plan it had made before arriving.

The original plan was to arrive in central Australia and unleash a more powerful version of its breath as a warning—to see if humanity would back down without a fight. If they refused, then it would engage in a decisive battle in the central wilderness.

The Earth-Wide Radar allowed Godzilla to “see” what humanity was preparing—their assets, movements, and intentions.

From this information, Godzilla had a fairly accurate idea of what the humans were planning.

It knew they wanted to end it with super-nuclear weapons and a dense, rapid orbital bombardment.

It figured that humans would activate their remaining satellites to launch a tight barrage of nuclear strikes, trying to overwhelm its senses. While these attacks wouldn’t truly threaten it—since they occurred within the atmosphere, limiting the ability of nuclear blasts to stack their power—there was a bigger concern.

While the bombardment might be meaningless to it personally, it could completely destroy the natural ecosystem it had created.

And that mattered.

There was no doubt: a concentrated nuclear bombardment could cleanse that region, paving the way for the next phase of humanity’s plans.

After that, once the nukes cleared the way, if Godzilla showed itself—or if they confirmed its location—they would drop a super-nuke.

And as for how they planned to deliver it… Godzilla’s heightened senses had already picked up the massive rockets giving away their strategy.

Humanity intended to strap a nuclear bomb to a huge block of tungsten-steel and redirect a rocket from outer space—accelerating it to crash down from orbit directly onto Godzilla’s head.

A creative idea.

They’d probably use small nukes to harass and distract it while the real weapon was inbound.

Godzilla’s response to humanity’s plan was to head for central Australia, the place where it had previously cleared out the orbital debris. That would be the site of battle.

There, most of the orbital nuclear missiles wouldn’t be able to reach. After all, small nukes were limited by their size and fuel reserves. While they could travel vast distances in the vacuum of space, they were nowhere near as effective within the atmosphere.

And in that place, Godzilla had already created a large crater.

If it ever became impossible to intercept the incoming attacks, it could simply leap into the pit and bury itself.

Don’t underestimate that move. When going up against human nuclear weapons, retreating into a pit and collapsing the surroundings with its atomic breath was actually quite a practical tactic.

A few hundred meters of earth and rock might not seem like much, but they were an insurmountable barrier for nuclear weapons.

Even if a hundred-billion-ton-class super-nuke exploded on the surface, the layers of rock and soil would absorb most of the blast. Godzilla would hardly be scratched.

That’s why it had chosen central Australia as its battlefield—a location where it could perfectly neutralize humanity’s nuclear onslaught.

But now...

It seemed like that might not even be necessary.

Hundreds of billions of tons of seawater were pouring into the crater. Trillions of tons of rock collapsed, blasted into the sky, then rained down as incandescent meteors—superheated chunks of stone piercing through thick black clouds and crashing into the Earth below in a second wave of explosions.

Flame-colored clouds stretched across the sky. Even from nearly a thousand kilometers away, Godzilla could still see the remnants of its own masterpiece: a massive crater nearly 20 kilometers wide, swallowing seawater and debris without end.

The mushroom cloud blotted out the sky. It could see even distant mountains beginning to melt. Just a thin outer layer, yes—but still enough to grasp the terrifying heat of that single breath.

It must’ve been the extreme temperatures. That’s what had caused the distant melting.

Tsunamis, hundreds of meters tall, surged in all directions. Heavy leaden storm clouds followed, like the prologue to the end of the world. And all of this—

All of this had been caused by a single attack from Godzilla.

Mountain collapses. Tidal waves. Sky aflame.

All of it, from just one strike.

And yet…

That wasn’t even one ten-thousandth of its full power.

By human measurements, that one attack alone had exceeded 600 megatons of TNT—and because it happened in just one second, the energy output equaled 2.5 exawatts of power.

That level of power was something Godzilla once had to risk its life to achieve.

And now? It had done it… effortlessly.

No, perhaps that’s not the full story, Godzilla thought.

After all, this explosion hadn’t originated within its body—it had detonated outside.

Its internal energy output hadn’t changed significantly.

What had changed was its destructive potential.

The sheer destructive power had increased to… ten thousand times stronger than before? 

Probably more.

It had underestimated the change.

It hadn’t expected its breath to have grown so powerful.

Originally, it had only estimated the strength of that breath to be about 1% of what it just witnessed.

But the result…

Seawater surging inland. The earth trembled. The shockwave from a single breath had blasted from Australia’s coastline deep into the central wilderness, reaching all the way to the mountains where Godzilla stood.

The plan had been to use that one attack merely to intimidate humanity.

But now, seeing the result…

It found a new path.

A path it had never even considered before.

Perhaps, before humanity could unleash its full arsenal—Godzilla could wipe them all out first.