Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Please save the Earth!” The cosmos had asked her. She had agreed, why wouldn’t she? It wasn’t like she could just go to another planet, and who didn’t want to save the world?

“Thank you for saving Earth!” They had told her. She couldn’t quite find it in her to correct them. To tell them that she had done nothing. That earth was saved by Godzilla and M.O.G.U.E.R.A’s pilots. That she had been little more than a spectator.

It wasn’t by choice, she reminded herself. It wasn’t her fault she got kidnapped. It wasn’t her fault that Spacegodzilla’s mere presence pressed down on her mind like a vice. She had barely been able to keep her thoughts straight. She couldn’t even think of a way to use her ESP to help, let alone focus enough to actually use it.

But that didn’t change the fact that Mothra and the cosmos had counted on her and she had let them down. Or that she couldn’t even own up to it. If the world truly had depended on her then it would have been doomed. She’d even had that particular thought during Spacegodzilla’s attack.

She had thought that the world was going to end if she did nothing, and yet she did nothing anyway. That, above all else, ate away at her. She would have let the world end because she was scared of what would happen to her if she tried anything.

It had only taken a few days for those thoughts to worsen, getting stronger until it was hard to think about anything else. She had tried watching Junior play on Baas island to set her mind at ease, but the reminder that she had done nothing to help save him only made things worse.

If she didn’t do something about these thoughts soon, they might end up crippling her, even if only psychically. She couldn’t change what had happened, as much as she wanted to. Her shameful past was immutable. But the future wasn’t.

And there was no reason to think that Spacegodzilla would be the last threat earth faced.
As soon as that thought hit her, Miki made a decision. It was impulsive, a reflex need to try and make up for her inaction, and a craving for just a taste of the forgiveness that true atonement would bring.

She vowed to herself, no matter what, that she would stop whatever the next threat was.

A bitter laugh forced itself from her lips. Her words rung hollow. How would she be able to do anything? She’d been too weak to even think about doing anything to Spacegodzilla, and she’d had forewarning that he was coming. The sheer psychic pressure that had emanated from him was crushing and had only let up once the crystals on his shoulders had been shattered…

She paused.

A thought crept into her mind, a dangerous thought. There were still plenty of the crystals in Fukuoka, and with how much of the city had been destroyed in the fight it was practically abandoned. If they had something to do with whatever psychic energy she had felt from Spacegodzilla…

…Could she make use of them?

Now that she’d had the idea, she couldn’t let go of it. She had seen Spacegodzilla throw M.O.G.U.E.R.A with something eerily similar to telekinesis. She hadn’t fully processed the implications at the time, but if some of Spacegodzilla’s powers were psychic in nature…

…Could she learn them?

And more importantly, if some of that psychic energy still lingered in those crystals, could she use it? If she could possess just a fraction of that power, she could face whatever new threat appeared.

It would take time, surely, but she had plenty to spare. She’d been given a whole month’s paid leave from the UNGCC after being pressured into a project she didn’t want to do and subsequently getting kidnapped by someone they had hired for said project. They did not want to lose their top psychic.

She’d take a train to one of the towns near Fukuoka first thing tomorrow, find a hotel and spend as much time exploring the crystalline city as she could. She could make this work.

She would make this work.

Fukuoka looked different by daylight. The crystals, while still imposing, didn’t seem quite as threatening now. But perhaps that was due to the absence of the kaiju that had controlled them, the fact that they were still and not being used as weapons.

Even at her current distance, a ways away from the crystals themselves, Miki could sense them with her ESP. It wasn't the mind crushing pressure of before though. It was the difference between looking at a boulder and being squashed by one. A boulder wouldn’t squash you of its own accord, but if something pushed it, made it roll your way…

Miki shook her head to clear her thoughts. Getting distracted while walking around large piles of jagged rubble was not a smart idea. She had bought a bike to cycle from Nakagawa to central Fukuoka, but had left the thing near the edge of the city, as too many roads were blocked by debris.

Even the clearer paths that she could walk down had a light layer of rubble that would almost certainly puncture her tires, and she did not want to walk all the way back to Nakagawa. Especially with all the walking she had to do anyway.

She turned a corner and saw a skyscraper that had fallen sideways, blocking several roads, all of them leading in the direction she needed to go. She could try and go around, find a less direct route, but the closer she got to the crystals, the more wreckage like this would be blocking her path and she had spent enough time getting this far.

She walked up to the sideways skyscraper, looking closer at it. The side facing her had crumbled in places, and just about all of the potential handholds she could see looked rough enough to cut her, broken glass littering empty window frames. She kept looking, but she couldn’t make out a clear path she could climb.

Ok, new plan.

Miki closed her eyes and focused. She had only managed to use telekinesis in the heat of the moment before, but there was no reason she couldn’t learn to use it normally. She forced her mind to calm itself.

She didn’t need to worry about how long she had.
She didn’t need to worry about how high the skyscraper was.
She didn’t need to worry about how far she would fall if this went wrong.

She just needed to rise up. A straight line, nothing fancy. Nice and slow.

She felt the burden on her feet lessen, and she quelled the excitement she was starting to feel before it disturbed her focus. Lighter now, even lighter, and then she felt her feet slowly peel away from the ground as she began to ascend.

She kept her calm for a few moments, letting herself rise higher, before easing her efforts slightly and coming to a stop mid-air. She felt weightless. She hesitated before opening her eyes.

She was not scared, she told herself.
She was as high as she wanted to be, she told herself.
She was not going to be scared.

She opened her eyes, and saw that she was just barely above the fallen skyscraper. Its surface was sloped at an angle, but was largely intact compared to the side she had considered climbing, barring the broken windows.

Feeling emboldened by her success, she kept her eyes open as she tried to move again.

Forwards. A simple, straight line again.

She jolted forwards, and suddenly the feeling of weightlessness disappeared. The forward momentum she had granted herself was just barely enough for her to land on top of the building instead of throwing herself against the side.

She threw her arms forward, managed to save herself the brunt of the impact as she fell on the concrete, but still landing roughly on her knees. She let out a grunt of pain and stayed on her side for a few moments, letting the pain subside.

After she was sure she wouldn’t fall, she reoriented herself and rolled up her trouser legs to get a look at her knees. Both of them were red and would definitely leave bruises, but only one of them was actually bleeding and it looked relatively mild. She pressed a hand to the wound, wincing in pain as she stemmed the flow of blood. She didn’t have any bandages, so she sat there for a few minutes until the bleeding stopped.

That was close she thought to herself as she rolled her trousers back down. The moment she had moved forwards, the telekinetic force holding her afloat had vanished, so very nearly making her fall all the way back down the ruined skyscraper. She could only focus on moving in one direction. At least for now. She could practise moving in more when she wasn’t using it to scale buildings.

She limped ever so slightly as she crossed the length of the building, taking care to avoid the empty spaces where the windows had been. When she reached the other side, she sat down on the edge, looking deeper into Fukuoka. There were a few more fallen buildings blocking the way before she reached the first of the crystals, but none as high as the skyscraper she was currently sitting on. If she took things carefully, and her near death encounter made it very clear she should, she would be at the first crystal in maybe half an hour.

But first things first: getting down.

She could only move in one direction with her telekinesis, but she should still be able to move about normally as long as she had something to push off of. With that in mind, Miki closed her eyes and focused on lifting herself again.

It took a little less time than it had a few minutes ago before she felt herself lightening. She kept at it until she felt as light as a feather in a very literal sense. And then, oh so carefully as to not lose her focus, she reached her legs over the edge of the skyscraper and kicked off, pushing her away from the building.

It was an odd feeling, falling so slowly. It was almost as if a harness was wrapped around her torso, keeping her from moving much faster than a snail’s pace. Perhaps not quite like a harness though, as she found that she was still accumulating some momentum even at this slow of a speed. She had to tighten her ‘grip’ every few seconds to keep her speed relatively constant.

She remained so focused on keeping her descent slow that she surprised herself when her feet touched down on the ground, her telekinetic force abruptly disappearing from the shock. Her legs, unprepared to take her full weight, almost gave out but she was able to steady herself just in time, flinging her arms outwards to keep her balance.

She took a deep breath and began walking towards the next building blocking her path. She just had to do that a couple more times and she’d be at the crystals.

She could do this.

Chapter Text

By the time Miki reached the first of the crystals, she was tired. It wasn’t a physical tiredness, for the most part, but a mental one: she could barely focus on anything, she could barely stomach the idea of having to do that all again to leave and she didn’t want to think about what the hell she was meant to do now.

As much as she wanted to put that aside and force herself to start learning anyway, she knew that would only be counterproductive. Trying to use her psychic abilities, especially new ones, without carefully focusing… well, that had nearly gotten her killed earlier. And she knew the destructive potential these crystals held.

So she sat down, after finding a mostly clear patch of road, and tried to relax. Even at rest, she could sense the presence of the crystals. Closing her eyes didn’t help either. It was like being in a forest of dimly glowing trees, seeing in all directions at once, with no means to look away.

She needed something to distract her if she wanted to regain her focus. Maybe now would be a good time to eat lunch-

Oh.

She hadn’t thought to bring anything to eat with her. In hindsight it was so painfully obvious that she should have brought a meal with her or at least something to snack on, but her need to do something as soon as possible had blotted out such practical concerns from her mind.

She hadn’t actually been all that hungry before, but now that she realised she wouldn’t be eating until dinner she was starting to feel a few hunger pangs. Not particularly strong yet, but something that she was keenly aware of, and knew would get worse as the day progressed.

Ironically enough, her growing hunger ended up proving a sufficient distraction from the odd emanations coming from the crystals. It didn’t outright banish her curiosity, and it certainly wouldn’t stop her from exploring those feelings, but the bodily sensation was enough to keep her mind grounded in her current physical situation for a while.

Once her mind felt sharp again, like she could put an actually meaningful effort into something, she got up and walked over to the nearest crystal. It was intact, spared from Godzilla’s shattering spree, which made it about as tall as the few skyscrapers that were still standing despite its angle. It was white with a faint pinkish hue, but there were flecks of darker red she could just barely make out near the tip.

The edges seemed rounded rather than rigid and between those edges its surface was mostly flat, bar the slight curvature towards the singular sharpened point at the top. This meant that Miki could easily press a hand against it without worrying about cutting herself.
Normally she wouldn’t bother with such a physical measure, given the extrasensory part of ESP meant she could work well beyond her normal senses’ limitations, but this was something entirely new. It was easier for her to learn new skills on their own before combining them with others.

She had learnt to share her senses with someone she was touching before doing so with her telepathy. Her first attempts at mental manipulation, in those mock fights at the psionics institute, had been done with someone she was touching, and even now she still needed close proximity to do it well.

And besides, the physical contact would help her focus on just this one crystal and not the dozens of others in the area. She took a deep breath, and poured her focus into the crystal, no longer ignoring the strange sensations but letting them in.

The first thing that struck her was the sensation of power. Great power. While it wasn’t too dissimilar to what she felt when reaching out to Godzilla, it was much harder to quantify; the power in Godzilla was living while this power was not. It was much more power than she herself possessed, that much was certain. She felt like a raindrop in the face of a lake.

The second thing was much subtler, something a less experienced psychic might miss. This power was… layered, or perhaps patterned in a certain way. If it were a lake, it would be one that did not conform to gravity’s demands, upright pillars of water that refused to flow down, motionless whirlpools that refused to level out.

This energy wasn’t living, but perhaps it had been.

She could pick at that energy, try to use it, but that would ruin the cryptic pattern. She doubted that this crystal was the only one with a pattern to it, but whether the others were the same or different was a whole other matter. So she decided to focus on the pattern first.
She delicately reached further in, as if walking out onto that lake when she had previously stayed on the shore, seeing more of the strange patterns within. The further she went the more she felt… something. The sensation was alien to her, but less so the further she went, a vague sense of familiarity edging its way in.

That familiarity got more and more defined as she went further and further, though the alien element refused to fade completely, until she suddenly recognised it: memory. All of that power was in the shape of a memory.

She hesitated for a moment, before pushing onwards. If she was going to learn anything, this was how. The further she went, the more of the pattern she saw and the more she started to feel sensations that were definitely not hers. Just a little bit more and-

Suddenly, she was in the depths of space. A cold vacuum against her scales, only the light of distant stars making it more than the black void she had broken out of. Her eyes were unused to such darkness and she did not know why. She had not known anything brighter.
Her eyes were unable to make out much, and her ears even less so, but she had other senses. She pushed out with her mind, scouring the vast cold of space for anything living. Nothing.

She pushed further, felt the dim warmth of one of those distant stars. It was not living. She pushed further. More cold, a few more stars. Nothing living. She was no longer patient.

She tensed herself, the mass of crystals on her back flooding her with energy and she reached out as far as she could in every direction. Many stars, more every second, warm but not living. Further. A mind, far from the stars, living but singular. Curious. But further.

More stars, and then a soft glow so very close to that warmth. Life. Multitudes of it, planet-bound. A grin crossed her face, but faded as she realised it felt… off. Not familiar.
…Why would it be familiar? She had not known other life until this very moment. But something, some buried instinct told her it should be familiar. That there was life like her somewhere.

She redoubled her search, looking further, more Stars, more Worlds, more WaRmTh, more LiFe, more LiGHT-

Miki physically recoiled, falling away from the crystal onto the rough concrete road, her head spinning with far more information than a human mind was meant to process. She slowly sat up, looking down at her hands.

Skin, not scales. For just a brief moment that felt wrong, but the feeling passed the moment she caught it. She was human. Not.. She shuddered as she realised just how immersed she had been in the memory. She had been Spacegodzilla, for just those few moments, glimpsing so many stars, so many worlds full of life. There had been no distinction between them in the memory, she had thought his thoughts, felt his instincts like they were her own.

She took a deep breath, and tried to make herself calm down. It took more time than usual, but after a few minutes the dread started to fade. It was just a memory, something far away in both space and time.

Once she had calmed down, she started to go over what she had just witnessed.

Spacegodzilla had used telepathy, first and foremost. She wasn’t sure just how refined it was, given that he had only sensed the presence of life rather than any emotions, but she would be able to determine that by looking at more memories.

A brief shudder went through her at the thought of doing that again. Apparently she didn’t get rid of her fear quite so easily. She would be better prepared next time, she told herself. She would try to keep some separation between herself and Spacegodzilla, not get so consumed by it all. Regardless, that wasn’t something she needed to do just yet.

Second thing: Spacegodzilla had been able to use the energy in the crystals to enhance his telepathy. He had already been able to sense stars from unfathomable distances away, but he could use the energy to push well beyond that limit. This energy could be used for psychic abilities.

There were other revelations she should probably give at least some thought to, like the unexpected confirmation of alien life in the universe, but she felt like that would not help her ability to focus. She could think about those implications later, when she didn’t have work to do.

For now, she was going to focus on the things that she would be able to learn. While she had felt Spacegodzilla use the crystals on his back to enhance his telepathy, that had felt almost instinctual, something he didn’t pay attention to. She could learn, yes, but she would need to pay more attention to detail than she had from Spacegodzilla’s perspective.

And that meant she had to replay the memory and figure out how to keep herself separate from Spacegodzilla. Hopefully the fact that she knew what was coming and wouldn’t be blindsided by the memory this time would help.

She could try and press into the memory with her sense of self, similar to what she did when trying to control Godzilla. That might work, but there could be a risk of disrupting the energy’s pattern and wiping the memory. She didn’t exactly know if living and non-living energy would react the same way. Still, it was the best idea she could think of, and the fact that she was already familiar with this should help.

Miki pressed her hand against the crystal again, feeling its energy. This time, instead of only reaching in with a small part of herself, she thrust in with her whole consciousness. The pattern was familiar and as she walked further out onto that metaphysical lake she began to recognise familiar parts. She was reaching both harder and faster than last time, less cautious now, and she was able to tell just before the memory started and braced-

Suddenly he was in the depths of space. A cold vacuum against his scales, only the light of distant stars making it more than the black void he had broken out of. His eyes were unused to such darkness and he did not know why. He had not known anything brighter.

Miki was watching.

His eyes were unable to make out much, and his ears even less so, but he had other senses. He pushed out with his mind, scouring the vast cold of space for anything living.

Nothing.

Miki didn’t focus yet. She could already do telepathy.

He pushed further, felt the dim warmth of one of those distant stars. It was not living. He pushed further. More cold, a few more stars. Nothing living. He was no longer patient.

Miki readied herself.

He tensed himself, the mass of crystals on his back flooding him with energy, and-

Miki pressed her will against the memory, forcing the flow of events to a stop. She waited a moment, to see if it would start playing again, but the snapshot of sensation remained still. She wanted to focus in on that moment he had used the energy, and on instinct (one of hers this time) she pulled on the memory and felt it judder back a few moments.

She loosened her grip, but didn’t fully let go, and the memory played again, but it was slower this time, more detailed.

He tensed himself, started pulling the energy from the mass of crystals on his back, directing it to the crystals on his shoulders and along his spine. The energy was easier to use there, the more direct contact with his body making it easier to fuel his telepathy with it.

He reached out as far as he could in every direction, the energy like gasoline poured straight onto a fire, the resulting light illuminating so much more for him to see. Many stars, more every second, warm but not living. Further.

A mind far from the stars, living but singular. And she recognised it. Miki forced the memory to a halt again, as she realised what it was. This wasn’t a detail she noticed because of her slower, more detailed review of the memory, but because of the separation. Spacegodzilla hadn’t recognised the mind, so she hadn’t. But this time, she was still herself and Miki did recognise them.

Mothra. Which would explain how she had known that Spacegodzilla was heading for Earth: she had sensed his search for the original Godzilla. She also realised her earlier hunch had been right: Spacegodzilla’s telepathy had a greater range but was less precise. He hadn’t sensed the two Cosmos with Mothra after all.

Miki pulled herself out of the memory, already starting to get distracted by this new revelation. She should have what she needed anyway. Physical contact with the crystals was apparently the key to using their energy well. The crystals on Spacegodzilla’s back were touching him, but the ones on his shoulders were more deeply interwoven with his body, so it was easier for him to use energy in the shoulder crystals. The moment the energy entered his actual body, he immediately used it, funnelling it directly to his telepathic senses.

She should be able to use the energy in the crystals if she was touching one, but it might be harder than it had been for Spacegodzilla. Then again, perhaps her more precise psychic abilities would offset that. And she would have to already be using her telepathy, if the way he didn’t want the power to linger in his body was any indication.

She paused for a moment and wondered if she was really going to do this. A part of her suddenly wanted to avoid it, trying to convince her that she should check the memory for any more details that might be useful before damaging the pattern with her experiment. She knew that there wasn’t anything else that would be useful, the end of that memory being far too much for her to handle. A part of her still wanted to do it to delay using the crystal’s energy.

As silly as it may sound, given the effort she went to to get here, everything up until now didn’t quite feel real, and Miki knew that if she actually wielded the power in one of those crystals that would change. She’d cross a line from having learned to having done, and she knew that line couldn’t just be uncrossed.

But she had made a promise to Mothra and to herself.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and began to reach out with her mind. She was slow at first, partially because the crystals were blurring her perception, but mostly because there was still some lingering hesitancy.

She could sense all of the crystals in the city at the moment, a series of bright lights that would make it harder to see the smaller lights of other people beyond. She reached further, passing over the empty ruins of Fukuoka and sensing nothing, until she could just about make out other lights.

They were small, and much blurrier than usual, but there were enough that she could see them through the crystals’ own brightness. There were a few separate clusters, points forming the loose shape of a semicircle. People, still living in the towns outside Fukuoka.
Normally she would be able to make out individual people at this distance with relatively little effort, but the crystals’ own light made it harder to separate the individual pinpricks. Still, she didn’t need precision right now.

She pushed further, still using only her own strength. For a short while she didn’t sense anything new, but it didn’t last long before more clusters of light appeared in her sights, larger this time. Perhaps proper cities, like Fukuoka itself had been, bustling with people.

She reached even further, going faster now as more and more dots of light appeared, passing the point where she could sense individuals even without the crystals’ interference. A single, large light revealed itself, to remind her that there was an exception to that: Godzilla. Barely a moment later a smaller light, fainter too but just barely visible to her appeared next to him. Junior.

Miki wasn’t exactly sure why, but the minds of kaiju were much easier to sense than human minds. She had once been able to sense Godzilla all the way in the Bering sea while she was in Tokyo. She hadn’t realised just how far away that was until she looked at a map a few days later. She’d never been able to sense humans at a distance anywhere near that far.

Soon Miki found herself reaching her limits, so many clusters of light burning in her mind’s eye. She was probably aware of most of Japan, albeit with little detail. She was less aware of her body, but reaching out to touch the crystal wasn’t a particularly trying task. Splitting her focus between maintaining her telepathy and grasping the crystal’s power took more effort, but it was doable, if slow.

She didn’t need to delve too deep for this, she didn’t need to see the pattern or rewatch the memory. Every part of the crystal held its energy and that was all she needed. She poked and prodded, and felt some of the structure melt away, leaving the energy in a more raw state.

She pulled on that raw energy at the same time as she pushed her telepathy against its limits. For just a moment she felt the energy flow through her like she was a conduit, running up her nerves and into her brain where it was used immediately before it had a chance to stop, but that sensation was quickly eclipsed by her telepathy surging outwards in every direction.

There was empty space for just a few moments, before suddenly more lights hit her, still those masses of hazy light. She didn’t have a chance to ponder which country it would be, as more and more of the lights kept flooding into her mind’s eye.

They were getting less detailed the further she saw, clusters that were presumably entire cities starting to become less distinct, boundaries blurring, but Miki was still seeing further and further.

Individual details were becoming hazy, but she no longer needed such precision: she was seeing so much that she could actually witness the Earth’s curvature. Most of Asia was in her vision, by her guess, Australia too. Despite how far beyond her normal limits this was, she didn’t feel strained or overwhelmed.

She kept pushing, curious just how much of Earth she could see like this. She had seen so many planets at once in the memory, but they had only been vague impressions, with even her current, blurry vision being far more detailed, and there had been a limit.

She felt her pace slowing down, but soon realised that it wasn’t why she thought it was and that the sheer scale of what she was doing had its tricks. She could see almost half of Earth now, a halved sphere covered in lights and she was on top of it. The rest of the people were below, and most of the ‘empty space’ she felt underneath her was Earth’s inner layers.

Which meant that she would feel the other half of the world in a much shorter time-

So much more light flooded her vision, whole continents in the span of only a few seconds. She very nearly lost her focus, the lights dimming even as they kept entering her sight. If it had lasted just a bit longer than it did, she might have fully slipped out of her telepathy, but it was as brief as it was shocking and once no new lights were entering her vision it was simple enough to turn her attention back to the unchanging sight.

She was looking at the whole world.

But that dimness had remained, and she knew that she could see it at the brightness she had had only moments ago. She slowly tried to intensify her focus, letting her mind wander further from her body’s own natural senses. The lights brightened again, as her awareness of her hand on the crystal dulled.
The world was bright again, bright as it would have been if she hadn’t let her focus slide. She had assumed this would be her limit, a bright but fuzzy image of every mind on Earth. And yet, she still didn’t feel overwhelmed like she had in the memory.

Could she see more?

She wondered if she could use the energy from the crystals to sharpen her vision in lieu of her own focus, as she wasn’t sure just how much more she could do without excluding everything else from conscious thought. Not an easy feat, even for her.

There was still plenty of energy she could feel, the small amount of the molten memory more than enough to fuel her current endeavours. Unsurprising given how far Spacegodzilla had been able to see.

Miki didn’t exactly have a guide on what to do this time, so she relied on her instincts. Instead of trying to reach outwards from herself, she tried to reach inwards from the edge of her perception without narrowing it.

She felt the trickle of energy flowing into her mind again as it increased in strength just a fraction, and a moment later the lights started to become more clearly defined. They were still in clumps and clusters representing cities, a far cry from individuals, but better than the blurry masses that were probably whole counties or prefectures.

She let herself feel just a little bit of the excitement at how unexpectedly easy this was, but not enough to distract her. She tried reaching a little harder and again, her vision became clearer. Aside from clusters separating as they became more distinguished, smaller ones started to become visible, no longer hidden by the glow of the larger clusters. Smaller towns presumably.

Miki kept pushing further, slowly enough, trying not to let the excitement get the better of her, curious just where her limit lied. She couldn’t see individuals yet, but she could faintly see connections between some clusters, highways connecting the larger cities-

She paused. There was something else that was starting to become visible and this was not something she had an explanation for. It was just barely perceptible and she needed to sharpen her sight a little more to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, but it was indeed there.

There was a faint glow coming from the center of the Earth.

Her curiosity had a new target, no longer interested in what her limits were but in what this… presence was. She kept sharpening her vision, siphoning more energy from the crystal, the unexplained light growing brighter and brighter. She shifted her focus away from the billions of lights on the surface and, and the light below suddenly seemed much brighter. It was as if it wasn’t insignificant, merely hidden.

Her view of it was clear now, but she still had no idea just what this light represented. But it was presumably some kind of mind and if that was the case… she could speak with it, ask it what it was. She gently reached out towards the light-

Before she made contact, something slammed against her mind and suddenly she was panicking. She tried to pull away, to return to her own body, but whatever it was wouldn’t let her go.

Suddenly her senses shifted, but not how she had hoped. She was in her mindscape, the mental image of Earth glowing with the lights of every mind on it surrounding her like a cage. The mysterious light was hovering far above her, right at the sphere’s center. Everything else was dark. She knew she had a ‘physical’ form in here, but she couldn’t feel her real body at all.

“DESECRATER!” A voice boomed, and she had just enough time to turn towards it before being tackled and pinned to the ground by something larger than her, many limbs holding her down.

“WHAT WERE YOU GOING TO DO TO EARTH’S LIFEFORCE?!”
“Nothing!” Miki frantically replied, trying to wriggle out from under the figure. They were well disguised by the darkness, with two glowing red eyes being the only details she could make out. “I wondered what it was and wanted to find out, that’s all!”
The figure leaned closer to her, and she could just barely see yellow markings along the being’s face. Between that, the red eyes and how easily they blended into the darkness, Miki suddenly realised just who this was.

“The last ones who wished to know of Earth’s lifeforce were not content to merely know.” Battra glowered, his voice no longer shouting but no less stern. “And that did not end well.”

“Please, I didn’t even mean to find it!” Miki pleaded. She could feel the scepticism and distrust radiating from Battra, but he would in turn be feeling the truth behind her words. It was hard to lie in a mindscape, and outright impossible when she was bound so effectively.

The scepticism lessened, but did not disappear, nor did he release her.

“Earth’s lifeforce is well hidden for a reason. How could a single human stumble upon it?”
“I was experimenting with… something that enhanced my telepathic power.”
“You seek power?” He asked, distrust flaring up. Miki wanted to deny it, she knew what Battra was implying, but found she couldn’t outright say no. She did want power, but not for her own sake.

“Only to protect Earth!” she burst out after an uncomfortably long pause. She brought memories to the front of her mind, offering them to Battra, of the Cosmos’ plea, of failing them, of needing to be better, of promising that she would matter next time. Of exploring the ruins, finding the remnants of Spacegodzilla’s power, something that would let her fulfill that promise.

Battra was quiet for a while, probing those memories. She knew he was judging her, deciding whether she was worthy or not, whether she would be punished or released.

“There is something off about that power you wield. However, you are sincere in your desire to protect Earth, and I will not judge you for doing so with… unconventional methods.”
Miki chose to remain silent and not point out what his own ‘unconventional methods’ had meant for the Cosmos civilization.

“But on the matter of Earth’s lifeforce I will brook no argument. Give your oath, here and now, that you will never touch Earth’s lifeforce again.”
“I swear, I will never touch Earth’s lifeforce again.” As soon as she spoke the words, she felt some part of her psyche contract and she knew she was no longer able to do so.

“Give your oath, that you will never tell another of Earth’s lifeforce, or guide them to it.”
“I swear, I will never tell another about Earth’s lifeforce or guide them to it.” Again, Miki felt herself giving up a tiny sliver of her free will and her capacity to speak of Earth’s lifeforce.

“Give your oath, that you will never allow another to exploit Earth’s lifeforce.”
Miki hesitated. The first two oaths were easy enough to swear despite the unease they brought. She had no desire to wield Earth’s lifeforce, and keeping a secret was easy enough. But this was a duty she would be bound to for the rest of her life.

“Do you wish to protect Earth or not?” Battra asked, displeased at her silence.
“I swear, I will never allow another to exploit Earth’s lifeforce.” Miki Answered. This oath felt different from the others. They would prevent her from taking certain actions, but this one could compel her to take action. But it was… dormant, at least for now.

“Very well,” Battra rumbled as he leapt into the air with a single flap of his wings, freeing Miki “for the promises you have made, I will forgive this trespass.” He looked down at her for another moment before disappearing.

The moment that happened Miki found herself back in her own body, her focus long gone and Battra’s attack no longer holding her in her mindscape. She was standing. She still had her hand on the crystal. Her hunger had grown unignorable and she really needed to eat something. And now that she didn’t need to focus on anything, all the emotions she had been mostly suppressing flooded her all at once.

There was a mixture of excitement and pride at just how far she had been able to push her telepathy, but it was quickly eclipsed by fear at her encounter with Battra. The Cosmos had told her about how Mothra reincarnated, but she had not considered that the same might apply to Battra. His body may have died, but his mind clearly lived on and was none the weaker for it.

He had ambushed her, gotten the advantage and pinned her before she even realised she needed to fight and it wasn’t hard to imagine her life had been on the line.

That encounter was scary in a way that fighting Godzilla hadn’t been. Godzilla, while just as powerful mentally as physically, only used his power to make simple attacks and he didn’t pursue her back to her own mind when she retreated. Battra, while perhaps not as outright powerful, clearly knew how to use telepathy and was smart enough to not just ambush her but make best use of her unpreparedness and trap her.

She had only managed to survive because Battra chose to hear her out rather than just kill her. Because she had proved she was not a threat. She needed to be stronger than that if she wanted to protect Earth. She was stronger than she had been yesterday, but that was not enough.

Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that not only did she need to eat, but she needed to cycle all the way back to her hotel before she could do so. And make her way back through the ruins to get to her bike. It wasn’t quite sunset yet, but it most certainly would be by the time she had done all of that. She still wasn’t strong enough… But maybe she had done enough for today.

Chapter Text

When Miki finally made it back to the hotel, she did nothing more than eat dinner and fall into bed, exhausted. She woke up the next morning refreshed, but hungrier than usual thanks to her skipped meal yesterday. She actually did some forward planning, buying herself a backpack, a bento and a first aid kit. Her knees weren’t overly sore and she didn’t think they’d need a bandage but she’d be ready if she got herself hurt again.

Her preparations were fortunately unneeded that day (apart from the bento), as she had a better understanding of her telekinesis and was able to reach the crystals without incident. She had followed the same path as before and was before the same crystal as yesterday. It had slipped her mind in her exhaustion, but she hadn’t bothered to check how much of the energy she had actually used yesterday.

She reached out with her hand and closed her eyes as she focused on the crystal. She could tell that most of the pattern was intact, that the small part she had undone hadn’t undermined the rest, but she was surprised when she saw how much of the raw energy was left.

She hadn’t been paying too much attention to just how much there had been yesterday, more focused on her telepathy at the time, but she had barely put a dent in it. She had boosted her telepathy from covering Japan to covering the whole world, and it had used only a minute fraction of the energy.

She should have been shocked, but the very memory she had used as fuel explained it. Spacegodzilla had seen so much more and still had plenty of energy when he arrived on earth. In the grand scheme of the universe, one planet is a small place.

And telepathy is not exactly a hard skill for any competent psychic. Every single student at the psionics institute had developed telepathy. Even if other skills had eluded them. Glimpsing the future on the other hand was hard and trying to force it to happen did not end well. Even she was bad at that.

And while it was nice to know that she could elevate her telepathy to a planetary scale, Miki was under no impressions that the same could be done for her other abilities. And telepathy was not going to be the thing that saved the Earth.

But telekinesis… Well, it wasn’t hard to see the more obvious practical applications. Spacegodzilla had easily thrown M.O.G.U.E.R.A about with something that looked an awful lot like telekinesis. If she could reach that level…

Well, that was a big if, but it was a clear goal.

She briefly considered trying to use her telekinesis on herself again, making herself move faster rather than move something heavier, but dismissed the idea. Even if it worked, she did not want to fling herself around until she had a much better grip on her telekinesis. Not to mention, she would need to keep a grip on the crystal itself in the process, and moving at high speeds was not exactly conducive to that.

For now she would just focus on moving something heavy. And with all of the ruins and rubble around her, Miki had plenty of options. It didn’t take her long at all to find something suitable, a large chunk of concrete only slightly smaller than her that had broken off from one of the skyscrapers. It was definitely heavier than she was, and she could see it easily from the crystal.

She was pretty damn sure that she was not able to lift this with just her own telekinesis. But knowing just how hard it was would make it clear just how much she was relying on the crystal’s energy and give her a good idea of her normal limits, which she still wasn’t actually sure of. She still needed to get used to moving things other than herself too.

She stood before the rubble, closed her eyes and reached outwards, not with her telepathy but with her telekinesis, a faint pulse of force radiating out from her until it met resistance, akin to echolocation. The floor around her was the first thing she felt, the wall beside her being a close second. The piece of rubble was only a few seconds later, and she ignored the rest of her pulse to focus on where she felt it.

She reached out again, not a pulse this time but a grasp aimed directly at where she had felt the rubble. She felt resistance again and just as the force she used had grown, so had it. She didn’t feel movement, but she could tell that she could still push herself a bit more.

She focused more on the concrete, put more force into lifting. She found herself quickly tiring, but she felt something give, just the faintest bit of movement. She tentatively cracked open one eye, feeling her focus waver more but managing to see the piece of concrete wobbling just before her grasp slipped entirely and it went still.

That… was much better than she had expected. She had expected that it would just remain completely motionless while she exhausted herself. The fact that she had actually made it move, even just a tiny amount, was promising.

Well, perhaps promising wasn’t the right word. Promising would be if she could actually lift it using the crystal’s energy, but it was a good sign of her own prowess nonetheless.

She took a few moments to recover, walking to the crystal and re-establishing the connection while the tiredness faded. It was easier than it had been yesterday, now that she had a better idea of what she was doing. A part of her wondered what it would be like to watch the memory again now that she had melted (for severe lack of a better word) some of it into raw energy, but decided that it wasn’t important.

Once she was ready she closed her eyes and let out another probing pulse. She paid more attention to it this time, given that the concrete was further away, feeling more of the rubble strewn road and more of the skyscrapers near her before finding it again.

She gently started to push against the concrete, but not enough to move it. Just enough that she had something to funnel the energy into before she started using it. She still had no idea what would happen if the energy lingered in her and didn’t want to find out right now. Maybe another time.

She let the energy flow through her again, her arm and neck forming the conduit between the crystal and her brain. As soon as the first of the energy reached her mind, she felt the resistance fade away. She ignored the temptation to try and just throw the concrete up as far as she could, as much as she felt she could do it with ease. She wanted precision, not just raw strength.

Instead she continued to gently lift the concrete, mimicking the slow pace she had used before. She didn’t need to do anything fancy, she was just proving that she could do this. She was just lifting it like she had tried to, except this time it would work.

She slowly cracked an eye open, and saw the block of concrete hovering in the air. It wobbled slightly, her concentration slipping just a little as her surroundings took some of her focus, but after a few moments she was able to keep it stable and keep her eyes open.

After a minute of admiring her own work, she slowly set the concrete down, lowering it to the ground as gently as it had risen. She pulled her hand away from the crystal as it came to a rest, severing the connection. There was probably a way to do that without breaking physical contact, Spacegodzilla hadn’t had that option after all, but she could figure that out when she had some confidence in her new abilities and wasn’t improvising.

She then put her hand on the crystal again, examining the energy without using it. While there was still energy left, well over half of what she had started with, this had used a lot more than her telepathy had, given that it was actually noticeable.

It was somewhat odd, the disparity in the energy they each took. The scale of her telepathy had been far greater, undeniably, yet it took so much less energy. She had covered thousands of kilometers with her telepathy and lifted at most one tonne of concrete. Though perhaps she shouldn’t try and convert a distance into a weight. She imagined that any scientists would consider it a futile endeavour.

But despite that oddness, it made sense to Miki. Most ESP abilities didn’t really have a physical impact, with her recently discovered telekinesis as the outlier. If she was lucky, telekinesis would be the only thing that would be so energy hungry.

But for now, telekinesis was what she was practising. A clear and useful goal. Even if she learnt nothing else and could master telekinesis (and the energy to enhance it), she would be well prepared to fulfill her promise.

She set about looking for another piece of rubble that was a suitable weight to test. Unsurprisingly it didn’t take long. She didn’t bother testing this one without the energy’s assistance, there was no chance of it budging.

Again, she reached out to the crystal and let the connection form. Then she released the faint telekinetic pulse, waiting until she felt the piece of rubble with it. Once she felt it she aimed, letting all other details fade away as her mind locked onto that single chunk of debris.

She willed the rock upwards, and felt gravity pushing back against her. She let the crystal’s energy flow into her, and gravity seemed to fade away. It faded just as fast as it had the first time, and Miki noticed, but didn’t let it distract her. The odd sensation of distant motion followed, and she knew the debris was rising without even opening her eyes.

She waited a moment, before willing the rock to a stop. She felt the motion cease, but gravity was still absent. It should be floating. She waited another moment, then slowly opened her eyes. Again, the rock wobbled slightly with the extra sense taking some of her attention, but it didn’t falter.

She waited until the wobbling came to a stop. She wanted to see if she could move it while keeping her eyes open-

Suddenly gravity was back and Miki was holding the rock with just her mind. In less than a second it hurt and she let go in desperation, followed a moment later by a loud thud echoing from down the road.

Which did not help with the sudden headache she was experiencing. It was an odd headache, the pain sharper than usual but with none of the fuzzy-headedness one would expect. She could still think clearly, but she didn’t want to try anything that might exert her power even slightly.

Because of that clarity, she was able to figure out just what had happened without needing to actually check: she had depleted the energy she had freed up from the crystal. And in hindsight it was pretty obvious that that was going to happen (almost painfully so). This rock was probably three times the weight of the last one.

That was stupid of her. She should have seen that coming. She should have turned more of the memory into energy so that she could properly experiment with her telekinesis. This headache was entirely her fault and she deserved it. But she still needed to train.

Telekinesis was definitely not worth risking, but she could at least look through the memory in another crystal. She frowned. That wasn’t really training, but maybe she would see something that she could train later, once her headache ended.

She walked over from the crystal she was standing by to another, a bit further down the street and on the other side of the road. She reached a hand out and touched it, delicately crossing from her own mind to the interior of the crystal. It stung a little, but it was manageable.

She felt the immense power in this crystal, but she quickly noticed that it was different to the other one. Much of this power was already in a raw state, ready to be used. But she could tell that some of it was still layered into a memory. It looked like she was going to experience a damaged memory after all.

She pushed herself further into the crystal and the image of a lake began to appear in her mind. This one was much closer to an actual lake than the first crystal, far fewer unnatural features curving and coiling in defiance of gravity.

Perhaps a lake wasn’t the best word to describe it, but a half-thawed ice sculpture, the raw, liquid energy pooling at the bottom and several frozen fragments floating in that pool. At least that’s how her mind chose to process it.

She delved further, not so much stepping out onto the lake as wading through it. She could feel the energy around her, but she made sure not to take any of it in. If she did decide to see what happened when she didn’t have a way to use it, it would be with a far smaller amount than this.

While sensation was slowly creeping in as she waded closer and closer to one of the frozen fragments, it was weaker than it had been before. It also felt contradictory, an assortment of conflicting emotions even if she could not yet tell what they were. But it wouldn’t be long now. She braced herself, and pushed further until she-

He saw lights on the dark side of the planet. Not the lights in his mind, but actual lights, like the tiniest of suns across the surface. This was not the world he was seeking, but travelling through the void of space had dulled his curiosity with boredom and this was a chance to-

The long claws of the creature clattered against the crystal shield, unable to break it. He fired his corona beam, curving it around the shield but the creature was fast, dodging around the other side and raking its claws against his chest and drawing a few drops of dark blood. But they were too close to dodge again and-

Everywhere he had ripped them apart or blown them open was now covered in a shiny dark blue metal, the once gaping wound on his chest a great spinning blade. He smiled at the thought of killing them a second time-

His shield shattered, the central blade crackling with energy as it rained shards of debris on him. In fury he bit down on their tail before they could completely fly past him, forcing them to a halt. With just his jaw he threw them to the ground, firing his corona beam as he stomped down to pin them in-

They were dead for real this time, scorched flesh and smashed metal laying ruined before him-

He looked down on the dying planet. That had been an enjoyable diversion-

Miki recoiled from the crystal, ambushed by the fragmented yet visceral memories. This wasn’t the overload of last time but shock at the unexpected violence she had felt Spacegodzilla committing. She was suddenly very glad she was able to keep her sense of self this time. She wasn’t sure she could stomach the thought of doing those things herself.

She stood there for a few minutes, slowly trying to calm herself down. She knew that they weren’t likely to be the last violent memories she saw and tried not to shy away from them but instead reassured herself that she could handle them. That hadn’t been Earth.

But it could have been. She hadn’t seen just what Spacegodzilla had done to that world, but she knew he had left it ruined if his thoughts were anything to go by. He could have done the same to Earth if he hadn’t been stopped.

Mothra had known how destructive he was, surely, given how dire her warning had been. Getting even just a tiny glimpse of that made it seem more real. Earth could have been destroyed and MIki had done nothing.

She should have done something, no matter how reckless it may have been. It wouldn’t have mattered if she died if the whole world would have died anyway. And she was in a better position to do something than the average person with her forewarning and powers.

She slowly exhaled, trying to release some of the tension that had built in her chest. She would do something next time. And she was making sure that it would be something that mattered.

While the guilt didn’t disappear entirely, it did lessen and Miki got her breathing under control. Focus on the practical matters. That’s how she would fulfill her promise.

She forced herself to analyse those fragments of memory, trying to glean anything useful from them. Spacegodzilla stopped on life-bearing planets on his way to Earth. Spacegodzilla had fought other kaiju before reaching Earth. And Spacegodzilla thoroughly enjoyed the suffering he inflicted.

But Spacegodzilla was dead and none of those details were useful anymore. The only other thing of note was the crystalline shield, which she had already seen in his fight against Godzilla. If the memories were more intact, perhaps she would have felt him actually conjure it, but fragmented as they were, they were just a reminder it existed.

After a few more minutes of racking her brain, she was forced to admit that there wasn’t anything useful. It wasn’t all that surprising, now that she thought about it. If she were to choose random memories from her own life, few of them would be of use to someone trying to learn her psychic abilities. Honestly, she was lucky that the first memory she had seen had been useful.

But she couldn’t let herself be deterred. There were still plenty of crystals to examine, more memories to see. Just a few more, then she would have lunch. And after that, if her psychic pain was finally gone, she would test her telekinesis again.

None of the memories she saw that day were very useful. A few glimpses of alien worlds were interesting, but would be of little use even if they hadn’t been destroyed. But she did get a better grip on her telekinesis, properly lifting the larger chunk of concrete now that she had access to a larger pool of energy.

That day became a sort of template for how her days went over the course of the month. She would arrive, test her telekinesis with progressively larger and heavier objects, then take a break and examine the crystals for any useful memories before having lunch. After lunch, she would go back to practising her telekinesis.

Of course, it was hardly a fixed routine, especially when she found something new and useful. The first such thing wasn’t even a memory, though she had found it while searching for more of them. It was a small chunk of crystal that could fit comfortably in her palm.

It must have been one of the fragments that had broken off when Spacegodzilla telekinetically hurled some of the crystals at Godzilla. The break was surprisingly clean, no rough jagged edges to cut her hands on.

It didn’t have much energy in it at all, but it was intuitive enough to transfer energy from one crystal to another. She just needed to touch them together and pull on the energy.

Having a crystal she could hold in her hand opened up new possibilities. She started experimenting more with levitating herself, slowly getting accustomed to moving at faster speeds. Travelling from the outskirts of Fukuoka to the region filled with crystals was much easier once she could reliably fly. That gave her more time to train.

Within one week of starting her training, she could fly and lift small buildings with her telekinesis. But not at the same time.

So she made that her next goal. She started small and simple, splitting her focus to lift two rocks at the same time. It took a whole day just dedicated to that, but she was able to hold both at the same time.

Then she started lifting rubble while she was floating, but not moving herself. That only took half a day. The other half she spent moving both herself and the rubble. Slowly at first, not wanting to hurt herself badly if her concentration lapsed, and then with more confidence as she got that hang of it.

But she didn’t stop at moving just two things at once. Alongside her training with heavier and heavier objects, she started training herself to lift more and more things at a time. Pebbles made for good practice, simply because she didn’t have to worry about maneuvering large things around each other.

It seemed that the real barrier to it was moving herself and other objects, because she was able to go from 2 to 3 and then from 3 to 4 quite easily, taking less than a day.

It was around that point that it hit Miki just how fast she was progressing. It was less than two weeks and while she was still far from a kaiju level of power, she was considerably stronger than she used to be. If she were to be kidnapped again, she would have no problems escaping all on her own.

She wondered just when was the last time she had had so much time just to dedicate to her own psychic abilities, no distractions. She had been busy with various other duties in her time with the UNGCC and before that the JSDF. And while she had had an active role in the psionics institute, she had had to balance that against schoolwork.

And she had spent her last few years there teaching the younger students, where if she did learn a new technique she was more focused on getting it to a teachable form rather than experimenting with its limits.

She realised that she had never had this much freedom to focus solely on her own psychic endeavours. And while the trove of both memories and power were certainly playing a big part in her current growth, a part of her wondered if she had let herself be weak by not developing her powers properly.

Maybe she could have been able to help stop Spacegodzilla if she was stronger. Maybe Mothra and the cosmos had sensed her potential when they first met and assumed she would live up to it and that was why they asked her for help. They’d thought she was stronger.

Once that realisation hit her, the small amount of pride that had managed to grow despite her insecurities disappeared, along with most of the enjoyment from experimenting freely with her powers. This wasn’t her becoming stronger, this was just her getting to where she should already be. This wasn’t progress, this was merely catching up.

She started training harder after that, leaving the hotel earlier in the morning and returning later at night. The path there and back was more familiar to her now, so she was able to navigate it well enough in the dark. She got lost one night, but she was able to use her telepathy to reorient herself towards other people.

By the end of the second week, she could lift several small buildings alongside herself or a single one of the larger crystals. It was better, but she reminded herself not to get excited. She still had more to do.

Two days into the third week, she found another useful memory. She nearly missed it at first, dismissing it as just another unimportant glimpse of Spacegodzilla’s journey to Earth, a minor curiosity answered. Until the implications hit her.

He descended towards the surface of the planet. It was seemingly barren, yet he had sensed life there all the same. He had flown around it until he found something. Another foe to fight. Nearly as tall as he was, grey and rippling like they were not truly solid but liquid-like sludge. He did not see any wings or a way the creature could fly, so he lowered himself to the ground.

He concealed the bulk of crystals armouring his back, freeing his legs and tail as he touched down, growing lighter as the mass was hidden. He felt his connection to the power within fade, but it didn’t matter. He hadn’t found a foe that merited his full strength yet and this one would be no exception.

At first the memory had just reminded her of Spacegodzilla’s arrival on Earth, the block of crystals on his back seemingly disappearing as he landed. She had forgotten that minor event and even with the reminder it seemed unimportant.

But there was one little detail that struck her as odd. She felt his connection to the power fade, but the power itself seemed intact as best she could tell. And that was unusual.

Whatever mutation process Spacegodzilla had gone through had left him able to conjure crystals, something she very much could not replicate, in the same way she couldn’t replicate his corona beam: it was based on his physical biology. But when he did that, the crystals were empty of energy.

She could believe that he destroyed and created new crystals to switch between his flying and ground forms, but not that he would destroy crystals that still held energy. That would just be wasteful and she had seen enough of his memories to know that Spacegodzilla revelled in the power he held.

Which meant those crystals were still intact, as was the power within them. So just where had they gone?

She replayed the memory over and over, slowing down at the critical moment and focusing on just what happened until her brain eventually made some sense of it. It took a few hours and it was still hard for her to put it into words, but she had a rough understanding of what Spacegodzilla had done.

He had folded space.

He had used his mind not to push physical matter, but the fabric of space itself, reshaping it in a way that left a perfect hole to fill with the excess crystals on his back. There was no outside trace that they even still existed, no visible sign or even any of their weight.

It took her a while to process that, both from the shock that such a thing could be done and the sheer complexity of it. While words could at least summarize the process, they were simply not suited to explaining its underlying mechanisms. If she were ever to try and teach this, she would have to rely on sharing her memories rather than any crude explanation that words would provide.

And once she finished processing it, a thought hit her.

If Spacegodzilla can keep crystals that are too large and inconvenient stored like this… can I?

Suddenly she realised just how important this was. She wouldn’t have to limit herself to the small pieces of crystal that had been broken off in combat once she left Fukuoka. She could take the big ones with her too, the ones holding the real power in them.

And so she threw herself into this new endeavour, putting aside her practise with telekinesis to focus solely on this. And it needed the extra effort. From what she could sense in the memory, this took quite a lot of energy. And while estimating the difference in energy needed for the cluster of crystal and for a pebble smaller than the tip of her thumb was difficult, she could tell that even this would be a struggle, at least at first.

After a few hours of failed attempts, a mix of confusion and later exhaustion as she got closer to understanding, she decided to finally try using energy to help. She was fairly sure she understood now, but had tired herself out to the point where she couldn’t pull it off.

Of course, this was a risky move for a new technique. If she didn’t have the technique right, the energy wouldn’t be used and would build up in her. She still wasn’t sure what would happen if she did that, but decided it was finally time to find out. She was going to let just a little bit flow into her without trying to use it for anything. Just a tiny smidge to see if it was worth risking it or not.

She pulled oh-so gently on the energy within the crystal she was holding, letting only the most minute amount flow into her. A searing pain flared in her hand and she reflexively waved her hand around, trying frantically to cool it, dropping the crystal in the process.

While the pain didn’t fade, the heat behind it did, and she was able to still her arm even as tears welled up in her eyes. She turned her eyes to her right hand and saw an ugly burn. It didn’t cover the whole palm, thankfully, but the half it did cover was close to her fingers and after a quick test she found that it now hurt to move them.

She stood there just looking for a moment before some part of her remembered that she had brought a first aid kit with her. That brought her out of her stupor and within a few minutes she had applied some burn ointment and managed the incredibly awkward feat of applying a bandage with only one hand.

That eased the worst of the pain and with little else she could do to alleviate her wound, she found herself thinking. The first thought was that she wasn’t going to try and use energy with this technique until she was absolutely certain that she could do it.

Her second thought was that this was a reminder. A very stark, very painful reminder that this wasn’t something she was meant to enjoy. She wasn’t here because she wanted to be. She was here because she had a duty that she had sworn she would do. Saving the world was what mattered, not her. If she got hurt, so be it.

Her focus eventually turned back to the present. She was exhausted but her focus was still alright. Normally that meant she would search through memories for anything useful, but her mind kept circling back to this new ability. She was in no state to try again, but she wondered if there was something else she could do.

Would she be able to sense folded space? Was there any near her? If Spacegodzilla used it to store the crystals on his back, did that mean that the warped space was attached to him or otherwise following him? She decided to investigate, taking to the skies and flying around until she sensed something off.

Her flying had gotten considerably better in these few weeks. The fact that she considered it ‘flying’ rather than just ‘levitating’ was a pretty clear sign of that. Her initial efforts had been stiff and clunky, only able to move in one direction at a time, but she moved more fluidly now and much faster too. It helped that she was relying entirely on the energy of the crystal she always carried, letting her own strength recover until she was ready to experiment again.

After about fifteen minutes, something stood out to her, beyond the general otherworldlyness of the crystalline ruins that she had grown accustomed to. She tentatively probed outwards with her mind, trying to find its exact source.

She landed on a building, one of the few still standing this far out into the crystals, turning her focus solely to finding this abnormality. There were plenty of crystals here, the ones the size of skyscrapers, but none of them looked out of the ordinary as best she could tell. They didn’t feel off either, at least no more than any other crystal.

But there was one thing that stood out. It was a large mass, a shade of dark blue so dark it almost verged on black. It was a little over one story high, but quite a bit longer. She could sense an abnormality lying right on top of it and after a moment realised that there was a second, smaller one only a short distance from it.

She looked at the mass for a few moments, trying to figure out what it was and just why it had folded space around it. It was only when she saw a few jagged crystals running along it in a line that it hit her: this was Spacegodzilla’s body, or what little was left of it.

That realisation left her stunned for a few moments, unsure what to make of it. Eventually her mind chose to shift back to the reason she had been drawn to it, the pair of anomalies. She wouldn’t get her answers as to why there were two of them until she could unravel the spatial contortions, but she could at least grow her understanding of their nature.

She was still too tired to actually experiment, but being able to probe the folded space with her own senses was far more informative than overanalyzing a single fragment of the memory she had been using as a guide. Having not just one but two different sections of warped space was helpful too.

The fact that she had already understood enough to sense them at all was another good sign. She sat there for about half an hour, tentatively probing at the warped spaces as her strength returned to her, growing her understanding until she was confident she would be able to do it.

And that confidence was deserved, as she managed to make a small dent in space that was just enough to hold the pebble she was practising with. But whatever excitement would have come was rather diminished by the fact that she was already exhausted again. Even that effort, too small for anything practical, took nearly all of her strength.

But she could do it. She could do it and she could train it and most importantly she could use energy to enhance it. It was one more thing to add to her daily training.

And so her daily training got longer, more time spent on refining and strengthening the techniques she knew and less time searching the memories for new ones. This technique was a bit like telekinesis, in that it took much more energy than telepathy as it had an actual physical effect on the world. But, much like telekinesis, it got easier with practice, even when she wasn’t boosting herself with the crystals’ energy. And by this point she was quite experienced with how to best use the energy.

At the end of her third week, she could fold (and unfold) a hole in space the size of her fist without using any energy, though it was still tiring. She could fly, albeit much slower, on her own. And she could lift that rock she had initially only been able to make wobble with her telekinesis. Her focus had improved to the point that closing her eyes was not just unnecessary but felt silly.

And when she used energy?

She was already able to condense the building sized crystals down to nothing. Her telekinesis was at the point where she could hold a few of those crystals at the same time while flying.

She had also figured out that she could, for lack of a better word, attach the folded space to things, or even herself. It was probably why Spacegodzilla’s remains still had those spatial contortions: they travelled with him. Which meant that her own anomalies travelled with her.

Once she was more confident in her abilities, she returned to the corpse and undid the spatial anomalies, curious to find out just why there were two of them. She began with the one directly on the body, as she already suspected that it was the mass of crystals he bore while travelling through space.

While she could just about fold a skyscraper sized crystal using just the energy in the crystal she could hold, and unfolding was easier than folding, this abnormality forced her to use the power in one of the nearby crystals to do so. It was larger, holding more crystals and bending that space back into a normal configuration was even more energy intensive than usual.

When she managed to unfold the space, her suspicions were confirmed. It looked almost like a shell the way the crystals were clumped together, a shell that laid on top of Spacegodzilla’s remains for just a moment before sliding off, hitting the ground with a deafening thud.

She waited a few moments and once she was sure that none of the crystals around it were going to collapse, she floated down to the shell. She reached out to the crystal with both hand and mind and immediately realised just how much power was within. It eclipsed what she had felt in any other crystal and felt not only greater but different in a way she wasn’t sure she could really describe. But something about it reminded her firmly that whatever it was, was alien.

She hesitantly refolded the space around it, linked not to Spacegodzilla but to her, and focused on the other. She knew the shell was power and she didn’t want to delve any deeper into it than that, so she turned her attention to a mystery she was more interested in solving.

The second anomaly was easier to unravel, and faster too. The speed was what made it click for her just what it was she was looking at, but it was not its only unique feature. It was both paler and almost entirely translucent, and shaped very differently from the simple points of the other crystals.

It was the shield. It was the shield that Spacegodzilla had used to deflect Godzilla’s heat ray, both from himself and Fukuoka tower. It was the shield that had turned Godzilla’s heat ray back against him.

And with that new potential skill to learn, Miki paid little attention to whatever mystery lurked within the shell.

She didn’t have any way to truly test it on that day, but she did forfeit her training to spend the entire rest of her time searching for any memory that could help. She had had glimpses before, but now that she was learning she needed detail.

By the end of the day she had found a few things, some already obvious but many that were not. It relied on her new ability to fold and unfold space. Obvious. It relied on her using telekinesis to hold it in place. Obvious. She could move it as a spatial anomaly to cover something else. Not so obvious.

It could block some physical attacks but if there was enough power behind it, it would shatter. She had glimpsed a memory where it had been broken and Spacegodzilla knew he would have to make another, but she could not find anything about how. She had to make do with just this one.

But most importantly of all, it relied on her doing something with the energy inside it to actually be reflective.

Before returning to Fukuoka the next day, she bought a laser pointer, hoping that it would be a good way to test the shield’s reflective capabilities. Aiming the laser at the shield simply made the red dot appear on its surface. Not reflective. She propped it up against a rock at an angle, making sure that she wouldn’t reflect the laser right in her eyes if she succeeded, and left it on.

Then she began her experiments with the energy in the crystalline shield. She had quickly come to realise that this crystal was different from the others, in that she could actually manipulate its energy from a distance, but for her early experiments she still made contact.

She mimicked the pattern she had seen in various memories, or tried to at least. She made the energy pull inwards, like a wave retreating from the shore before striking anew. She practised that for a few minutes to get a feeling for it and build a rhythm before she looked at the dot of the laser pointer.

It was still there, but then it disappeared for just a moment. She was disappointed, but didn’t stop as she had at least done something right. She kept her rhythm and a moment later the dot vanished again, just to return a second later.

She kept watching, kept the slow pulsing pattern of energy going and realised what she was seeing. The light disappeared at the moment she pushed the energy outwards, as if bouncing it off the crystal’s surface. But it did nothing to reflect the dot while she was pulling the energy in. She was only reflecting it half the time.

She wondered what to do, trying to think of some other pattern that would keep reflecting the laser, but none of her attempts proved fruitful. She went back to the crystal she had first seen the pattern in and relived the memory, drinking in every last detail and trying to see just what she had missed.

At first she could see nothing new, but when she slowed down the memory and truly honed her focus in on the shield, she saw it. She had the rhythm right, but had failed to notice that it was playing in duplicate. While one pulled inwards, the other pushed out, ensuring that there was not a single moment where the crystalline shield was not reflective.

If Miki hadn’t already learnt to divide her focus between multiple tasks, she would have found the prospect of it daunting. As it was, it still proved a challenge, but a manageable one. She was rewarded with the dot of the laser pointer no longer flickering but remaining firmly on the patch of ground where it was reflected.

She kept practising with the crystalline shield, now working in the telekinesis needed to lift it at the same time, where before it was simply lying on the ground. There wasn’t much point in a reflective shield if it just fell over, after all. It wasn’t too hard, she was very familiar with telekinesis by now, but adding in a new ability made multitasking just a bit more complex.

Once she got the hang of that, she incorporated the space folding, making the shield materialise and immediately holding it in place and manipulating its energy. That was another step up, both for the extra task and the swiftness she needed to effectively utilise her abilities. But it was necessary if she wanted the shield to be actually useful.

She let that take up most of her remaining practise time, already very confident in her other abilities. She stopped browsing memories as the last few days approached, as she was fairly sure that she had seen everything useful. Even if she hadn’t, there wouldn’t be much time to learn anything new anyway.

On the final day, she didn’t train. Instead she flew around Fukuoka, a massive crystal alongside her, and began collecting all of the crystals she could. She had already gathered several hand sized crystals, but now she was taking the building sized ones. Space condensed down to imperceptible points around her, accessible to her and her alone.

Quite a few buildings collapsed, already damaged and no longer supported by the only thing keeping them upright. She wasn’t sure if Fukuoka looked more or less sorry than it had been before. Regardless, it was still a far cry from the thriving city it had been.

But she was ready. She was confident enough that if it came down to it, she would be able to go toe to toe with a kaiju. When the world was next in danger, she would make good on her promise.

Chapter Text

But being ready didn’t mean that whatever threat was to come was just going to appear immediately. Perhaps some part of her had thought that some new kaiju would appear to menace the world as soon as she was ready, but she soon found herself laughing at how silly she was for having that idea.

So she went back to work. Being the head of G-force’s psychic department was a job that had many responsibilities, but not quite as many as one would expect. She was a department head, but it was a small department that was a subset of the research department. And after the fiasco with the T-project, their duties were primarily tracking and monitoring, something she was quite comfortable with.

She didn’t tell anyone what she had been doing during her time off. If she told anyone what she had done, they would ask why and if they asked that she would have to admit to failing the world. She just couldn’t do that, not until she had made things right.

If someone asked about her break, she would fob them off with a generic answer about taking some time for herself or taking an impromptu holiday. Not many people asked, given the sensitive nature of the events that had led to her having that much time off.

Of course, being back at work didn’t stop her from continuing to practise her new talents, but it did place certain limits. She wasn’t able to tap into the energy of the crystals, bar the few tiny ones she could hold, so instead of lifting heavier objects she lifted more objects.

Her ability to fly was very limited, and she didn’t want to risk being seen, but floating around inside her own home with the curtains closed at least kept her familiar with it. She briefly thought about travelling to Fukuoka on weekends to practise where she wouldn’t be seen, but with the crystals removed rebuilding had begun, so that wasn’t an option.

She eventually managed to figure out how to move her spatial contortions. It was almost like looping a piece of otherwise straight rope around a finger, then moving your finger up and down the string, with the loop naturally following. Except that the string was the fabric of space itself.

She also managed to develop her finesse by using her telekinesis to put on her clothes. It was surprisingly difficult, as all of her practice had been with rigid objects that didn’t bend at all. It was a small thing, but being able to train her skills and not just maintain them helped to keep her anxiety at bay.

But she was anxious. And every uneventful day that passed made her just a little bit more anxious. It had been slow at first, but as weeks turned into months, it slowly grew stronger. She knew she should be glad. An uneventful day meant Earth was safe. But it also meant that her promise was no closer to being fulfilled.

She had felt awful when the full weight of her inaction had first hit her and training in Fukuoka had been a way to do something about that. But now she was doing nothing but waiting and that ate away at her.

But if she let that affect her, she wouldn’t be ready when she needed to be. And her job meant she was in a position to know about any threats that emerged, so she couldn’t let her anxieties affect that either.

So she kept working. Managing the people under her, as well as her semi-regular visits to Baas island to make sure Godzilla and Junior were still there, sensing their emotions for any violent intent (though she was very careful to only lightly probe Godzilla), kept her busy.

But eventually that routine broke down.

Baas island was gone. All that remained was a small strip of smoking land. Miki looked down from the helicopter in a mixture of shock and horror. Even the pilot was shocked, though they were more concerned about the fact that something had just wiped an island off the map than what might have happened to Godzilla and Junior.

But Miki very much was. Once she pulled herself together she immediately reached out with her mind, trying to sense if the pair were still nearby. Hopefully they were. Hopefully, they weren’t on the island when whatever crisis this was happened.

But she knew the chances of that were slim.

She felt for miles around, but sensed nothing other than the ocean life below. She reached out further, hoping that they were just beyond her senses, but was again met with no sign of them. They weren’t close.

But they were still somewhere, surely.

She reached further, tens of miles, then hundreds, just trying to make sure that they were still out there somewhere, that they weren’t-
She cut that thought short, not wanting to consider what it would mean if she couldn’t find them.

She kept reaching further, well into the hundreds of miles territory, just trying to find where they were. She pushed further and further, a distant part of her mind lighting up as Japan entered her vision.

And then there was a light, bright and familiar.

Junior.

She felt relief knowing that the young kaiju had avoided, or at least survived, whatever had happened. But that relief was cut short as she realised that she could not sense Godzilla with him. Whatever had happened here had separated the two.

Assuming Godzilla was still alive. But surely if Junior was alive then Godzilla was too? If Junior could handle it then surely Godzilla could. Unless Junior hadn’t been on the island when it happened and Godzilla was. It wasn’t hard to picture it, Junior swimming in the sea while Godzilla rested on the island and then-

No. Godzilla was fine. He had to be. But she needed to know for sure. She briefly glanced at the pilot to make sure they weren’t looking at her, before unfolding one of the smaller pockets of space around her, a small chunk of crystal materialising in her open palm. It was still a tiring process, but not quite as bad as it used to be.

She turned her focus back to her telepathy and reached further, crossing hundreds upon hundreds of miles, probably pushing past the thousand threshold. So many clusters of light filled the edges of her mind but she ignored them, just trying to find the single mind she was looking for.

And then she found it. Godzilla’s mind was as bright as ever, perhaps even more so than usual. She tried not to make her sigh of relief too obvious, even if the pilot was mostly ignoring her. He was ok. That was all she needed to know. If she had to worry, it would only be about how they had gotten separated, not their wellbeing.

She put the crystal back into a spatial fold, using its own energy to avoid exhausting herself, no longer needing it. She had put her worst doubts to rest and turned her attention back to her work.

She could sense Junior, and her superiors would absolutely want to know where he was now that Baas island was gone. They would want to know where Godzilla was too, but she wasn’t going to let on about the sheer extent of her telepathy. Besides, she needed to actually fly there to get a precise geographic location and she highly doubted this helicopter had enough fuel to get to Godzilla.

A quick word with the pilot and she was headed in Junior’s direction. It took a couple of hours or so, but they arrived at a patch of ocean that would be entirely unnoteworthy except for the kaiju swimming below the surface.

She let the pilot know that they were in the right place, but turned her attention to Junior while they took note of their co-ordinates. She gently reached out with her mind and soon met his own.

Hello Junior. she gently thought, announcing her presence. The young kaiju mostly communicated by emotion, with only the beginnings of language, but he seemed to understand her well enough and today was no exception.

He responded with a mixture of happiness to see her and a curiosity of how she was here, so far from land. He rose to the surface, water cascading off his body and-

Oh.

This was not the Junior she had seen only a week ago. The Junior before her now must have been double his old size, though it was hard to be certain with nothing for scale. His scales were a darker green than before, his dorsal plates had grown longer and spikier and his face now resembled his father’s more closely.

He looked less like a child and more like an adolescent.

He looked around and his eyes quickly landed on the helicopter. Miki gave a little wave through the window and, if the recognition she felt from him was anything to go by, he had seen her.

Miki hesitantly asked him what had happened.
What happened to your home?
The answer was more emotion than words, but there were a few.
Hot, bright. Strong. Miki felt just an echo of a sudden searing sensation and being sent flying. Some kind of explosion? But that wouldn’t explain Junior’s sudden growth spurt unless… it was nuclear.

While a part of her was horrified that Junior had been exposed to such a thing, it was allayed by the fact that both Godzilla and Junior had survived. And she knew that Godzilla could take in nuclear energy, so he would be fine just like Junior. But Junior may not know that.

I felt your father while looking for you. He’s far away, but he’s ok.
She felt immense relief coming from Junior. Clearly he had been worried that his father may have been lost in more than just the literal sense.
Old home. Find father. Miki had to rely on the impressions she felt from Junior to understand what he meant by ‘old home’, an impression of something older than him, something instinctual and atavistic, but realised he meant the place where his egg had resided.

Adonoa island. Junior was headed to Adonoa island and was hoping his father would find him there.

If I find him, I’ll tell him where to find you. Miki promised. Junior felt happy at that, eager to be reunited with his father. Miki reluctantly bid Junior farewell as the helicopter began to fly back to G-force headquarters. He was a little sad that her ‘visit’ was so short but he seemed to understand that the middle of the ocean wasn’t an ideal place for her to converse.

When Miki arrived back at headquarters, it seemed to be in a state of chaos, people hurrying to and fro, the few conversations she caught seemed tense, and she doubted that it was all due to her late return. Something had happened.

Normally she would simply return to her office and write up her report after returning from Baas island, but between the sudden change of circumstances and the overall sense of urgency suffusing headquarters, she decided to go straight to the commander’s office and explain the situation. It would also let her be briefed on whatever had happened here by the person who had all the facts.

The commander opened the door of his office just as she was about to knock. Surprise briefly flashed on his face, but it was quickly followed by a look of relief that was only mildly strained.

“Ah, Ms Saegusa, you’ve returned. We’d started to think something had happened to you.”
“I’m perfectly fine, commander, but the situation with Godzilla has changed considerably and I felt it prudent to investigate.”
“We’re well aware that things with Godzilla have changed. He was spotted not long after you left just off the coast of Hong Kong and had clearly undergone some kind of change. I’m just on my way to an emergency meeting about it with all department heads. Tell me what happened with you while we walk.”

Miki fell into step alongside the commander as they made their way to the meeting room. She knew that Godzilla being sighted near a major city was not good, but to warrant an emergency meeting with all department heads, and all of this upheaval, there was clearly more to it. But she would be briefed on that in the meeting.

“Baas island was gone. There was only a tiny strip of smoking land left at its coordinates. Neither Godzilla nor Junior were there, but I was able to sense Junior. I was able to guide the pilot to him and get the coordinates of his position. He’s still quite far from mainland Japan.”

“Ah, at least that’s some good news. Saves us the effort of finding him.”
“He has also undergone a change of sorts, though I do not yet know if it is like Godzilla’s.”
The way the commander’s face paled at the mention of a change did not put Miki’s mind at ease.

“He has grown, both in size and maturity. I couldn’t say for certain, but he’s approximately doubled in size, and his overall appearance is much more like Godzilla’s.”
While the colour returned to the commander’s face, his worried expression stayed.

“And he’s roaming the ocean, presumably with no idea where to go or what to do. We’ll need to be prepared in case he lands near a populated area.”
“Actually, commander, I was able to get an idea of his intentions. He’s following an instinct to go back to where his egg was, Adonoa island. I’d need someone to check, but I don’t think his path will cross Japanese land.” The commander’s expression relaxed just a bit at that.

“If you’re right, that should make things far simpler for us. That just leaves the matter of Godzilla himself.” Although Miki was glad her input on Junior was well received, the implications about what had happened to Godzilla were taking priority in her mind. The way he was speaking about Godzilla was reminiscent of how people spoke about him before he adopted Junior. As a threat, a problem to solve.

But they had arrived at the meeting room and Miki knew that she was about to get her answers whether she liked them or not.

The footage of the incident was played for the benefit of those who had not been briefed. And what a terrifying sight it was. Godzilla was only a small figure on the horizon, but despite this and despite it being night he was perfectly visible.

Because his dark scales were now a glowing orange, only a few patches of the original colour remained. Even his eyes seemed to have a glow to them. It was almost as if his body was burning up.

But that still wasn’t the worst thing, because even this change wouldn’t merit this much alarm if it was only a sighting. He was firing off heat rays, not their usual blue but the same burning orange as his body, the energy chaotically writhing as if struggling to follow a straight path.

He didn’t even seem to be aiming at anything. Just random stretches of ocean, or occasionally the sky. It was hard to tell at this distance, but he looked pained, as if he could barely control his heat rays. She had never seen him act like this before. Perhaps it was her imagination, but he looked like he was spasming in pain with every heat ray he loosed.

The footage continued, and one of his heat rays arced near to the camera. It was quickly followed by the sounds of rubble crashing to the ground, and the camera shook as it happened, though the building it was in remained standing.

The footage ended there, leaving Miki in stunned silence. A few moments passed, everyone taking in what they had just seen. After what must have been only a matter of seconds but what felt like minutes, the commander spoke up.

“What’s happened to Godzilla? The colour of the ray, the glowing skin, we’ve never seen this before.”

A female voice replied, one that Miki realised was coming from the speakers rather than a person in the room. She turned her eyes back to the screen and was met by the image of a woman in G-force uniform and a beret.

“Baas island was destroyed by nuclear fission. Dr Marvin, beside me, has an interesting report on Godzilla that should answer your questions.”
The camera panned to the right to show the doctor, a bespectacled man holding up a cassette tape with an English title on the side. The man spoke in English, with the woman translating for him.

“As we all know, the current theory is that Godzilla’s body contains a living nuclear reactor, taking much the same role as the heart of a man. It appears that the explosion at Baas island has affected the normal running of that reactor, causing a problem in Godzilla’s heart. Look at this.” He said, gesturing to the cassette.

“I have here a thesis which accurately analyses it from every point of view. It came through the internet from a Japanese college boy. It’s an interesting and certainly unusual opinion about Godzilla. I’ve already made several copies and sent them over to you.”

The meeting continued for maybe another ten minutes, but only a few things said were important. The main one was that Godzilla’s power was growing uncontrollably and it was putting more and more stress on his body. Dr Marvin was uncertain of exactly what would happen if this continued, the thesis only discussing this ‘burning form’ as a hypothetical, but it didn’t need to be stated that it would be very bad.

Miki was still reeling when the meeting ended. So much for her promise that Godzilla was fine.

She just stood there for a few moments as the other department heads left, before slowly making her way back to her own office. Her thoughts were a whirlwind, but she had gotten better at pushing down her negative emotions in the last few months and by the time she was sat at her desk she had managed to force herself into a calm state.

First she would write her report on Baas island and Junior. Then she’d get someone to figure out whether Junior would cross land or not. And after that she was going to get herself a copy of that thesis and figure out what the hell to do.

Her report was impersonal and detached, which was the only way she could bring herself to write it. A simple list of the facts, elaborating where necessary. Baas island was gone. Junior had been found. Junior was headed to Adonoa island. It was a stark difference from her normal style, which managed to have some warmth to it even as a formal report.

But she had finished it, which was what mattered. She’d gotten someone to crunch the numbers on Junior’s path too. It was mostly clear, but it came very close to Hamamatsu and that was assuming he moved in a perfectly straight line. She added that as an addendum to the report, knowing that even if Junior would never hurt anyone her bosses would insist on being prepared.

Having finished her first two tasks, she would move onto the third, but she had noticed something was off. She could never remember his formal job title (something to do with personnel and communication), but Tatsuya Tanaka was the man responsible for actually circulating information between the various departments of G-force, amongst other things. He would be in charge of sending copies of her report to any relevant people and also giving any relevant reports from them to her. He’d probably know where she could get a copy of the thesis too.

And her desk was conspicuously missing the sheaf of papers he usually delivered. Maybe he’d heard that she hadn’t returned at her usual time and decided to focus on other work? Possible, but if he of all people was out of the loop about her return that was just a bit concerning. Regardless of why, she did not want to be missing information in a crisis.

Fortunately she knew his work number and could swiftly get to the bottom of this. She called him with the phone on her desk and he answered quickly.

“Tatsuya Tanaka?”
“Ah, Miki Saegusa, you’ve returned.” he answered.
“Indeed I have. I have a few documents for the other heads that need to be sent, and likely a few to receive, including a certain thesis.” She said, keeping her voice neutral. She was hardly a confrontational person and he was probably busy given the crisis.

“Of course. I’ll- Hm?” Miki heard someone else talking with him, though the only word she could make out was ‘excellent’.
“My apologies. I’ll be back at the base in half an hour with the man who wrote the thesis.”
“Thank you.” she replied before hanging up.

That was better than expected. It felt odd for something to actually go well for her. A chance to actually speak with the man who wrote the thesis would be good. But she still had half an hour before that and she wanted to make sure she knew what questions to ask.

She was able to find a copy of the thesis easily enough on her own in the end, Dr Marvin had sent plenty, and she did her best to go over it. The fact that she was neither a physicist nor a biologist did not make it easy for her, given that the thesis was a highly technical combination of both. He skimmed over various equations and diagrams she didn’t understand, but she was able to get the overall gist of it.

Godzilla had taken in too much energy, which was mostly being held in his heart, where his body usually stored energy. This was damaging his heart, and so his body was trying to release the excess, but both his elevated body heat and heat rays were barely helping. She may not recognise the units he was using, but she was able to recognise a big number when she saw one.

As she looked the thesis over, an idea crept into her mind. If the root of the problem was energy… Could she do something? Spacegodzilla’s crystals were able to hold plenty of energy, and if the raw sense of power she had felt from the shell was anything to go by then most of them weren’t even close to full. If the crystals were able to store all of that power, would she be able to siphon it into them?

It was a dangerous idea, especially with the way Godzilla was lashing out, but she had thought the same of using those crystals in the first place. And much like that idea, it wasn’t one she could just dismiss.

But Miki was assuming that she was interpreting the thesis correctly and that was not a certainty. Hopefully she would be able to ask in a way that didn’t arouse too much suspicion. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise, to G-force at least, that she was trying to find a non-violent solution. And who would suspect her of possessing Spacegodzilla’s crystals?

“Miki, here’s the new guy.” Tatsuya said, snapping her attention away from the thesis. Beside him was a young man who looked equal parts excited and nervous.
“Kenichi Yamane, at your service!” He said enthusiastically “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”
“Likewise.” She replied, keeping her tone more even, despite having feelings not too dissimilar to his just under the surface.

“You’re the one who wrote this thesis on Godzilla, yes?” She asked rhetorically, holding it up.
“T-that’s me, yes. My grandfather studied the original Godzilla and the data from his notes was very helpful.”

Miki’s eyes briefly widened. She did not think about the fact that there had been another Godzilla much, but it would explain how an outsider was able to develop such a detailed theory given G-force’s tendency to classify most information around Godzilla.

“I think I can speak for a lot of G-force when I say that it’s been very helpful given Godzilla’s… situation.” Miki said, her confidence momentarily disappearing as she acknowledged Godzilla’s current state. She decided to not dwell on it and focus on asking her questions.

“I’ll admit a lot of it went over my head, but the core problem is that Godzilla has absorbed far too much energy, yes?”
“In short, yes, but there’s a bit more to it than that. The overload of energy is damaging his heart, which means more fission than normal is occurring. This produces even more energy, which then damages his heart even more, causing more fission. It’s a positive feedback loop.”

“And if there were some way to remove that excess energy? Would Godzilla just go back to normal?” She asked, typing to keep the hope in her voice from being too obvious.
“If the energy were to just vanish, there would still be the damage done to his heart. I’m not exactly certain of this Godzilla’s capacity to heal, but if it isn’t enough then the loop would continue, just much slower.”

“He can heal from it.” Miki asserted with a confidence that grabbed both Kenichi and Tatsuya’s attention “He was able to regenerate his lower brain after it was destroyed by the G-crusher,” don’t think about the fact I aimed the G-crusher, don’t think about the fact I- “he can regenerate this damage to his heart.”

Kenichi’s eyes lit up at that, his curiosity taking over “That… would explain a few things. It would also mean we have a lot longer than I initially thought.”
“A lot longer until what?” Tatsuya asked, “Your thesis was rather ambiguous about the endpoint of the feedback loop.”
“It would be the same endpoint as any runaway nuclear reaction. Godzilla would explode.”

Miki was speechless. Godzilla was going to die? It almost didn’t compute in her mind. Godzilla had survived everything humanity had thrown at him, and that said a lot. After all he’d been through, some part of Miki’s mind had started to think of him as immortal, hell, his cells had made Biollante immortal, and now death was coming for him.

“How big of an explosion would we be looking at?” Tatsuya asked.
“I’d need to run some calculations with your data to get an exact number, but it would be catastrophic. Greater than all nuclear weapons detonating at once.”

Miki was still in silence, but Tatsuya said exactly what she was thinking.
“That would be world ending!”
“...Yes.”

After they had left, Miki sat alone in her office, thinking on what she had just learnt. The world was ending. Godzilla was the cause. And she held the solution. SHe would get her chance to fulfill her promise, even if it wasn’t exactly anything glamorous.

…Glamourous?

What the fuck was wrong with her? Why did a thought like that even enter her head? Her breathing quickly grew erratic as guilt overcame her.

This wasn’t meant to be about glamour. Or playing the hero. This was about protecting Earth. So why had her mind gone there?

Perhaps she had let fantasy and fiction affect her perception too much. Whenever someone saved the world in a book or in a film, they were a hero. They were celebrated. There was a happy ending and everything was fine.

She wasn’t a hero. She was just someone who had already failed. She was just someone making up for her own mistakes now.

She made another promise to herself. If she somehow managed to get through this without anyone realising what she had done, if she somehow saved the world and remained anonymous, she would stay that way. She didn’t deserve any credit.

It didn’t bring as much comfort as she had hoped, knowing that it was an unlikely scenario, but she let it ease just a bit of her guilt. At least it was better than feeling happy that the world was finally in danger.

It was only a couple of days before Godzilla was sighted again. This time it was off the coast of Taiwan. When Miki had first heard that, she had been glad that he was still in the sea and hadn’t come onto land. That had been quickly crushed when she saw the rest of the briefing.

He had let off a pulse of power, well beyond anything he had done before. From what she was told, it was stronger than any nuclear bomb mankind had ever made. Even with Godzilla dozens of kilometers away from the coast, the blast had scorched the edges of Taitung and the nearby Green island was simply gone. People that had been looking in his direction had gone blind. The entire area was left radioactive. There wasn’t an official death toll yet, but it was surely in the tens of thousands.

All of that from a single, uncontrollable pulse.

If there had been any doubt about the sheer destructive potential of Godzilla’s burning form, it was gone. Everyone knew what the stakes were. Everyone wanted to take decisive action. Which was why Kenichi’s latest discovery wasn’t going down well.

“No more attacks on Godzilla?” The commander asked, incredulous.
“Indeed, sir, we do not have a choice.” A woman calmly replied, her face revealing that she was not happy with the news either. Miki recognised her as the woman who had translated for Dr Marvin, who was apparently now working alongside Kenichi.

“But we can’t simply sit here doing nothing, we must act!”
“It would be like throwing a match into a powder keg. We’d risk another pulse like this one or potentially cause Godzilla’s detonation early!” Kenichi replied. A conflicted look appeared on the commander’s face.

“But… we can’t just… sit and do nothing.”
The woman spoke up again.
“If we launch an offensive, it cannot involve any form of explosives. Other methods may still be feasible.”
“What kinds of other methods?” Tatsuya asked.

“Anything that could reduce his energy or even just lower his temperature would buy us some time. Maybe we could develop something more permanent. But the other alternative is… chemical methods.” Kenichi replied. Miki couldn’t help but wonder why he seemed to grimace at those last words.

“Chemical methods?” The general asked, also intrigued “What would that entail?”
There was a moment of hesitation, with Kenichi glancing at Miki with a pained expression before he spoke “We kill him the same way we killed the first Godzilla.”

Miki’s heart dropped as she realised what he was getting at.
“You can’t mean!”
“Yes.” he quietly replied “The Oxygen Destroyer.”

There was a moment of silence in the room. Everyone in G-force knew about the first Godzilla, and how the only thing that had been able to end him was the mysterious weapon of mass destruction called the Oxygen Destroyer. If it could kill Godzilla, it could surely kill just about everything else in the vicinity. Details were hazy, chiefly because no one had heard of such a weapon before or since.

As if trying to prove her wrong, a memory rose to the front of her mind, unbidden. A recent news report about something called micro-oxygen. A reporter having concerns about its similarities to the Oxygen Destroyer.

Perhaps this remnant of the past was still lurking in the present day.

“You can’t.” Miki said again, quieter. There was a look of discomfort on Kenichi’s face, like he didn’t really want to argue with her, but he argued all the same.
“We need some kind of contingency! Maybe we could develop something to drain Godzilla’s energy without killing him. But we’d be trying to create something entirely new with no guarantee we would succeed! The Oxygen Destroyer has been made before and we know it works.”

“And what about the collateral? It’s a weapon of mass destruction for God’s sake!” Miki replied. The thought of the Oxygen Destroyer being recreated was stirring up a passion in Miki, a need to do things her way. She just couldn’t say that.

“However bad it is, it’ll be worse if Godzilla explodes.”
“And what if we do find another way? If we find a way to prevent Godzilla from exploding and just have an Oxygen Destroyer left over? Or what if someone figures out how we made it and decides to make their own?”

Kenichi considered her words for a few moments. He didn’t exactly look thrilled at the possibilities she had raised.
“It would be bad.” He admitted “But there would at least be a world left to be bad.”

Miki got the impression that she wasn’t going to change his mind. And if she was being honest with herself it was hard to blame him. He didn’t know that she held the solution. With the world at stake, who wouldn’t be desperate?

“Regardless, we do not currently possess the Oxygen Destroyer or an alternative.” The commander interjected, suddenly reminding Miki that she had not been having a private conversation but an argument in front of her superiors.

“I can’t say I’m fond of an unproven idea, nor the risks the Oxygen Destroyer would carry. But our short term priority is to buy time for whatever solution we decide on. Kenichi, you said lowering Godzilla’s temperature could achieve that?” He continued.
“That’s right, sir.”
“Then we may have something that will delay Godzilla’s explosion.” Miki perked up at that, but kept quiet given her earlier outburst.

“It’s a ministry of defense project: the Super X3. It is fitted with heavy cryolasers as well as cadmium missiles. It was designed as a countermeasure for nuclear crises, and I think Godzilla’s current state qualifies.”

“The cryolasers might do the job, I would need to look over the weapon specifications to be certain. But the cadmium missiles shouldn't be used! Even putting aside the explosive component, Godzilla’s fission is running haywire right now. Cadmium may not affect him the same way it normally would.” Kenichi replied, speaking with a sense of urgency in his voice.

The commander nodded.
“Very well. I’ll contact the minister of defense and request both the project specifications and for it to be placed on standby.”

While bureaucracy was known for being slow, the end of the world was enough to change that, and within the hour they had received in depth specifications from the ministry of defence. Kenichi had quickly gotten to work examining them, with some assistance from the G-force woman from earlier (who’s name Miki had learnt was Meru), who was more familiar with weapons than he was.

It hadn’t taken them long to confirm Kenichi’s initial hunch: the cryolasers would delay (but not stop) Godzilla’s detonation, and the cadmium missiles would be a liability that could make things worse. He’d also determined that the armour could take one, maybe two, hits from Godzilla’s burning heat ray. But it didn’t need to be said that another pulse would destroy it. This was a hit and retreat mission.

As soon as they were certain of this, the commander called the minister of defence again and requested the deployment of the Super X3 against Godzilla, making sure that they did not carry any cadmium missiles in case the pilot decided to be reckless.

It took a while for the Super X3 to reach Godzilla’s location, but everyone at headquarters was watching when it did. Godzilla was still in the ocean but he was not far from the coast. The swathes of burning orange scales seemed to have only grown brighter despite now being in daylight.

He didn’t even seem to notice the approaching aircraft. Not until the first cryolaser hit him in the chest. That got his attention, but only just. His head turned towards it, eyes unfocused. Miki couldn’t sense Godzilla’s mental state through the screen, but she was starting to suspect that it was hard for him to feel much through the pain.

For a brief moment there was a layer of frost covering his chest, but in mere seconds it was steam. However, the orange glow did dim, just a bit.

The Super X3 swerved through the air, Godzilla disappearing from view for a few moments as then reappearing, now with his back to the aircraft. The Super X3 fired again, a barrage of cryolasers hitting his dorsal plates. That earned a roar from Godzilla and this time when he turned to face the craft his eyes were focused. And you didn’t need to be a psychic to tell that he was angry.

The Super X3 dodged as a burning heat ray burst from Godzilla’s maw. There was no sudden jolt of the camera, so Miki assumed that the pilot had successfully dodged. It fired more cryolasers, aiming at his chest again now that he was facing it again.

The ice that formed where it struck stayed longer this time, and the orange glow lost some more of its brightness even as it melted the ice away. It was working. It may only be buying them more time, but it was working.

Godzilla growled and Miki could see the orange energy building up in his throat. The Super X3 tried to dodge, but it was much closer now and the camera glitched for a moment as the craft shook from the impact of the blast.

But the Super X3 was still flying and got behind Godzilla again. It had already turned and fired its cryolaser before Godzilla had a chance to react, and this time it fully coated his dorsal plates in ice. The first few hits must have lowered his body temperature a lot, as this time the ice remained, even if there was still some steam rising from it.

Godzilla was slow to turn and Miki wondered just how powerful the cryolaser must have been to already be affecting him like this. The Super X3 was able to get another blast in, aiming at his waist this time, before he could retaliate. A large chunk of ice formed around Godzilla, the surrounding seawater frozen.

The Super X3 flew behind him again, and this time Godzilla didn’t seem to turn at all. It wasn’t much of a battle after that. The Super X3 was able to stay out of sight of an increasingly sluggish Godzilla and by the time the cryolaser had run out of power Godzilla was completely covered in ice, along with a sizable amount of the ocean around him.

The mission was a success.

But Godzilla would break free well before the cryolaser could be fully recharged. And even if that weren’t the case, this was only stalling the inevitable. Miki needed a chance to reach Godzilla.

A few days passed with infuriatingly little happening. The Super X3 had been rearmed and some of the damage to the armour had been repaired, but Godzilla had broken out of the ice by then and hadn’t been spotted since.

Miki had wanted to go find Godzilla herself, but had been told that his heat could be reliably tracked by satellite. He hadn’t been found yet because his body was still heating up after the ice but he would be found soon. And while a small part of Miki was glad that conventional tracking methods were reliable for once, it meant that G-force wasn’t just going to let her fly out in a helicopter to find Godzilla.

Just as she was starting to wonder if they weren’t going to find him after all, two pieces of news arrived at once. Godzilla and Junior. Okinawa and Hamamatsu. Both were still in the ocean, only passing the land.

While Hamamatsu had been preemptively evacuated thanks to her prediction, Junior seemed content to remain in the ocean. Miki felt vindicated in her confidence that Junior wouldn’t cause any harm.

But as much as she wanted to see the young kaiju, there wasn’t really anything to justify it, at least not anything she could justify to the commander.

So, like before, she watched the footage being broadcast by the Super X3 as it was sent after Godzilla again. Whoever was piloting it had learnt from the last skirmish and was keeping their distance so that they could dodge better, firing the cryolaser from further than they had the last time.

But apparently they were not the only one to have learnt. Godzilla’s head snapped towards it after the first hit, and he did not seem as distracted as before. When he retaliated, his heat rays were broad and sweeping, harder to dodge than before.

It was hard to say who was better prepared this time. The Super X3 was still getting hits in, but Godzilla was taking longer to freeze this time, having only grown hotter since breaking out of the ice.

And then the camera feed cut out.

A hush came over the command room, everyone unsure of what had just happened. Had the Super X3 been destroyed? Or had the blow only damaged the camera?

It was a tense few minutes, until a call came through from the minister of defence. Naturally the commander answered. After a few stoic “I see”s and the end of the call he gave everyone the answers they wanted.

“The Super X3 managed to last long enough to freeze Godzilla again, but it sustained heavy damage. It was barely able to make it back to base and needs extensive repairs. And it won’t be usable again until after we expect Godzilla to detonate.”

People muttered, a few of them cursing and Miki couldn’t blame them. Finding out that the one thing stalling doomsday was now broken would scare anyone. Even knowing that she could stop it, she still felt uncomfortable about it.

“Then what is our plan?” Tatsuya asked, breaking the uneasy murmurings. The commander was silent for a moment, clearly uncomfortable with how badly the situation was going.
“...We don’t have one. If we could at least figure out where Godzilla is going then maybe we could come up with a new one.”

“Actually, sir, I think I might have figured that out.” Meru spoke up, standing up from the desk she shared with Kenichi. The commander gave her a nod, telling her to continue.
“When Junior passed Hamamatsu, I cross-referenced his path with Godzilla’s trajectory for the last week. It seems that Godzilla has consistently been moving in Junior’s direction.”

“Is that even possible?” The commander asked.
“It is possible.” Miki interjected “Both Godzilla and Junior have shown latent psychic potential before. It’s very likely that Godzilla can sense Junior’s location.”

“Well then, we can at least figure out Godzilla’s path.” He turned back to Meru and Kenichi before continuing “See if there’s anywhere on his path that is far away enough that we could safely deploy an Oxygen Destroyer.”

Miki wanted to object again, to raise her voice and tell him no. But they’d had this argument before and she hadn’t been able to persuade him then. And they hadn’t developed anything to lower Godzilla’s energy levels since then. Unless she was willing to reveal her secret, it wasn’t worth it.

“...I’m afraid Dr Ijuin is reluctant to make one. He’s become increasingly concerned about the possible risks, regardless of where it is used.” Kenichi replied hesitantly, not wanting to give the commander bad news.

“Then… What do we do?”

Things had gotten tense in the control room, with a solution looking less and less likely. The best plan the commander could come up with was to station cryolaser tanks along stretches of coast that Godzilla was expected to pass to buy a bit more time. No one was particularly happy about it, and Miki (and several others) had returned to their own offices or workstations to try and find anything useful or do something productive.

Miki was surprised when there was a knock at her door, and Meru stepped in.
“I just wanted to thank you for backing me up on my theory. I was nervous about speaking to the commander.”

Miki blinked in surprise. She had not thought that the woman before her had been anything other than confident.
“Really? It didn’t show. It’s Meru, right? Are you new here?” Meru nodded.

“I’m new to this base, but not to G-force. I went to an ESP school in the USA and joined up at a nearby base. I’m a researcher, specialising in paleontology but I’m mostly working with the computers here.”
“Oh, you’re a researcher not a psychic? That would explain why I haven’t seen much of you.”
“No, ESP is more of a hobby to me.”

Miki raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Most people don’t go to special schools for something that just a hobby to them. Meru caught on to her skepticism and elaborated.

“I have a condition where I’m psychically sensitive to certain things. Large crowds with very strong emotions, that sort of thing. I mostly learned ESP as a way to get a better handle on it, and happened to pick a few things up on the way.”

Miki felt bad for prying. She vaguely remembered a few students back at the psionics institute that were a bit oversensitive, but she hadn’t realised it could be a permanent condition. She understood why the woman wouldn’t pursue a career as a psychic, even if the idea was almost alien to her.

“Sorry, I didn’t realise!” She apologised.
“It’s… Alright. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was when I was a child.” Miki did not miss the pause before ‘alright’, giving Meru a look but not outright asking. She had already pried after all.

Meru gave a sigh before speaking, a little reluctance in her voice.
“It’s not anything major but… Well, I guess sufficiently powerful psychics might be one of the things that triggers it. I promise, it’s only some mild discomfort, I can handle it!”

Miki blinked in shock for a few moments, processing what she had just said.
“I’m sorry!” She blurted out.
“You don’t have to be, it’s not your fault!” Meru reassured her. But Miki didn’t believe it.

Because she remembered how she had felt in Spacegodzilla’s presence, the pressure bearing down on her mind that wasn’t quite pain, but was so very close to it. And who had taken all of that power?

She had. Even if it was concealed, hidden away in the folds of space she had made, it was there.

“Besides, I’m probably just a few years away from losing my powers, and then I can live a normal life. I’ve managed so far, I can take a bit more.”

Miki just nodded, not trusting herself with words at that moment.

Chapter Text

Destoroyah.

On top of the problem they were already facing with burning Godzilla, they now had to contend with a new kaiju, one that was born from the Oxygen Destroyer. And they hadn’t even handled burning Godzilla well.

Miki had seen her fair share of kaiju over the years but in terms of sheer destructive presence, the only one rivalling Destoroyah was Godzilla in his burning form. Its very existence ate away at the oxygen in the air. People that narrowly escaped being crushed underfoot suffocated. People that might have lived to see another day had it been any other kaiju.

It had taken to the skies but did not go far, terrorising various parts of Tokyo. Most of the city had been evacuated, with G-force base being one of the few places that hadn’t.

Things were manic around the base, the chaos that she had returned to when she first learnt of Godzilla’s approaching demise now doubled. People were desperate. And the ideas people were coming up with in desperation were not ideas Miki liked.

“Destoroyah and Godzilla, now we have two incredible monsters.” The commander pronounced.
“…It’s an Oxygen Destroyer, but not one made by mankind. Dr Ijuin refused to make one, but this… It may be just what we need to stop Godzilla.” Kenichi said, initially nervous but becoming confident the more he spoke.

Miki did not like where this was going.

“What are you saying?” Tatsuya asked.
“It was the only thing to work on the first Godzilla. It should work again.”
“You want Destoroyah to fight Godzilla?”

Miki did not like this one bit.

“We don’t have any other solutions. We don’t have enough time left to think of something else. This is the only solution.”
“I think we should try it.” Meru added, standing next to Kenichi.

“But how do we get Destoroyah to fight Godzilla?” Tatsuya asked. Finally someone was saying something she actually wanted to hear.

“Godzilla Junior.” Meru said. Miki’s heart plummeted. Making Godzilla and Destoroyah fight was one thing, but bringing Junior into this? Even if his body had grown, he was still a child!
“We bring him to Tokyo and Godzilla will follow. His path is about as close to here as it’s going to get.” She continued, unaware of Miki’s internal anguish. She decided to change that.

“You can’t be serious… Junior is just a child, we would be sending him to his death!” She half shouted, emotions boiling over.

Meru turned to face her, and while she didn’t exactly look comfortable with the idea (or maybe that was just Miki’s presence, part of her whispered to herself), she was resolute in her reply.

“Miki, sentimentalism does not have its place where the future is concerned! Our priority is to prevent Godzilla from destroying the world!” There was a pause between them, where neither was sure what to say and no one seemed to want to interrupt them.

“I’m doing this with or without you.”

Miki opened her mouth, ready to protest. But then it hit her. Godzilla, Destoroyah and her, all at the same place. Tokyo was practically empty. This was as good a chance to do things her way as she was going to get. She could stop Destoroyah herself and once Godzilla arrived she could drain all of his overloaded energy.

This was her chance to finally fulfil her promise.

“I’ll do it.” Miki said confidently. Meru looked more than a little surprised at her suddenly changing her mind (as did a few others) but decided not to ask why.

It was only as they walked to the helipad that Miki realised that this wasn’t quite the perfect opportunity she had hoped for. Meru was with her.

For a brief moment she was worried about the fact she would be seen and would have to explain herself. But a part of her knew that she couldn’t keep this secret forever. There was no perfect chance and if she waited any longer then there wouldn’t be a world left to save.
But another thought hit her a moment later and it made her feel vain for merely entertaining her ideal of secrecy. Meru was there. The woman who was overly sensitive to powerful psychics was going to be there as she unleashed the full extent of her power.

Miki couldn’t let herself hesitate, didn’t stop walking towards the helipad. She would have to hope that she could get her away from the fight as soon as it started. That was all she could do.

Meru had not thought she would need to use her psychic abilities today. She didn’t need them most days and she hadn’t thought today would be an exception. But with the threat of Destoroyah suddenly looming over them, that had changed.

Fortunately, she wouldn’t need to do anything too hard. Godzilla Junior was already quite close to Tokyo, and she could reach out to his mind without tiring herself too much. And with Miki’s help it would be even easier, despite the discomfort her presence brought. If she was powerful enough to disturb her thoughts by simply being there, she was more than powerful enough to call out to Godzilla Junior.

She was honestly surprised by how quickly she had changed her mind about it though. She had been defensive of the young kaiju and while Meru might find it admirable under less tense circumstances, the end of the world wasn’t a place that could afford that sort of kindness. Perhaps it had just taken a moment for the grim reality of the situation to set in for her.

Regardless, the pair were now in a helicopter, a good distance from both G-force headquarters and Destoroyah. The pilot was being fed information by someone back at the base to make sure that they stayed at a reasonable distance from the kaiju.

They were ready.

Meru started reaching outwards with her mind, almost immediately feeling the professional psychic next to her. Miki clearly felt her, reaching out to her and a moment later she heard a voice in her head.

Let’s do this.
Meru found herself surprised by the sheer certainty practically radiating off of her but put that to one side as she started reaching further out with her mind. Just a few miles at a time, covering more and more ground, and most importantly pacing herself. She was lucky that Tokyo was all but empty, she doubted that feeling millions of people, even at the most surface level, would be safe for her.

Godzilla Junior was less than 100 miles from Tokyo, she would just have to keep at this for a few minutes-

Suddenly Meru felt her mind surge forward, covering dozens of miles in an instant. There were a few small clusters of people she could sense, but more important than them was a single, large mind that was far more visible.

Meru found herself shocked. Had Miki just…
She had known that the other psychic was significantly stronger than her, they don’t make just anyone the head of the psychic department, but she didn’t feel even the slightest exertion from her. She had covered more than enough space to find Godzilla Junior in one single moment like it was nothing. She hadn’t just spread her awareness in one direction either, but in all at once.

Meru wondered if she was strictly necessary for this plan. She gently tugged at the mind of the young kaiju, trying to spark his curiosity and bring him to them. She felt some success, he was wondering what just happened, but he didn’t feel any need to investigate.

Ok, she needed a new approach, maybe-

Junior.
Before Meru could finish her thought, she felt recognition from the young kaiju. And maybe some enthusiasm if she was understanding correctly.
Junior, we need you.
Now Meru felt curiosity from the young kaiju. Curiosity and… a desire to help? She had not expected that. She was starting to see why Miki was fond of this one-
How?

Meru’s eyes snapped open in shock at that, and if she wasn’t relying on Miki’s efforts then she would probably have lost the connection there and then.

Godzilla Junior couldn’t just understand them. He could use words. She glanced at Miki and not only did she not look surprised, but her eyes were also open and looking back at her. Oh, she could also keep her focus without needing to close her eyes. Ok.

Meru quickly closed her own eyes and tried to focus on the connection, even as she realised that she wasn’t really needed. But surely she could at least do something?

Find us. Meru thought across the bond.
Your father has been following you, Junior. If you come to us, he will reach you sooner. Miki added. That certainly got the young kaiju’s attention.
Find you. Find father.

Meru felt like she was intruding on a private conversation, given how comfortable Miki and Godzilla Junior were with each other, but she could at least help a bit.
I’ll keep this link so you can find us. Meru said. She let her mind drift away from any words that were being spoken and slipped into a meditative state. It was easier to maintain the psychic bond like this, and it also helped with her oversensitivity.

It also meant that she could ignore any awkwardness between her and Miki while they were waiting for Godzilla Junior to arrive. After a few moments, she felt Miki pull back, letting Meru maintain the connection by herself.

Meru wasn’t sure exactly how long passed in her trance-like state, maybe less than an hour, maybe more, but she could tell when Godzilla Junior was nearing them. She was starting to tire, though nowhere near as much as she would have if she had had to create the psychic bond itself, so she let it go.

Tuning back into the world around her, the first thing she heard was the pilot speaking in a rather panicked tone into his earpiece. After a moment, she could make out the words.

“-Can’t return to base? It’s headed our way?! What the hell do you expect me to do?!”

Oh. Oh, that was not a good sign. It didn’t take a genius to realise that ‘it’ was Destoroyah. And Destoroyah, who had apparently been content to fly around, ruining city blocks aimlessly, just happened to be flying in their direction.

Fear clutched at her heart. She found herself desperately hoping that Godzilla Junior would reach them first, because she could not see anything good coming if Destoroyah-

Suddenly a spike of pain lanced through her head. It was sharp, like someone had run a needle through her brain, but fortunately brief, fading after only a moment. She didn’t quite cry out, but she did let out a groan of pain. She instinctively put a hand to her head, as if that would do anything for the psychic pain.

What the hell had just caused that? Her pain didn’t just flare up like that. She turned to the window, hoping she would somehow find her answer. Was it Destoroyah? Did it somehow mess with her head? No, surely not, it wouldn’t just go away if that were the case, it would be a constant flow of pain.

So what had-

“Return to base, that’s an order.” Miki spoke with an unusual sternness. Meru turned her gaze back and saw that Miki had leant forward and gotten the pilot’s attention.
“What? But HQ is saying-“
“You won’t be followed. Now go.”

Meru was shocked at the sudden change of attitude from the other woman, too stunned to say anything. She was also surprised at the small white… crystal(?) in her hand that definitely hadn’t been there before. And wait, why did she say ‘you’?

Before she could ask any of the myriad questions that her brain was generating, Miki turned to the door and opened it. The sound of wind rushing by was too loud for her to hear anything Miki might be saying. And then she leapt out, using the hand she had on the door and her momentum to slam it shut behind her.

Meru scrambled over and pressed her face up against the window, trying to spot her. She didn’t know why. She didn’t think about how she had surely fallen to her death. She didn’t think about how the window wouldn’t give her an angle to look straight down anyway. She just reacted on instinct.

And yet, despite the impossibility of it all, she saw Miki. She wasn’t falling. She was floating. In fact, she was rising, almost back to the height she had jumped from.

Before the relief could even hit her, the air around Miki seemed to shimmer and her psychic pain was back with a vengeance. This time it wasn’t a needle going through her head but a mace. She was just able to catch a glimpse of white before the pain grew too much and she blacked out…

Miki hoped that Meru would be ok one last time before putting it out of her mind. She would need all of her focus for this.

She had unfolded the many special contortions that she had left around herself and the crystals were now out in the open, hovering just above Tokyo. She was under no impression that Tokyo would end the day unscathed, but she wasn’t just going to immediately flatten the half that was still standing with her crystals.

So she was holding them above the city, most of them above her too. For now she only had a single crystal (beyond the one in her hand) beside her, and she had her hand to it, using its power to hold all the others in place. Depending on just how long it lasts, she might deplete its energy and need to switch to another crystal.

It took a not insignificant chunk of her focus just to keep them in place, but it was less than she would have expected just a few months ago. She would be able to fight like this. Her continued training had paid off.

She didn’t even need to reach out with her mind to find Destoroyah, hearing its ungodly screech, but she did anyway. What she felt was aberrant and screamed unnatural at her. There was no single consciousness, no singular bright light in her mind, but masses of them, small and dull, amalgamated together. And every last one of them felt hatred.

Of course, she could see them too and what she saw wasn’t good either. There was a difference between seeing that dark red, carapaced creature on a screen and seeing it in person. It was far more menacing, its almost demonic presence not truly conveyed through such a limited medium.

But it hadn’t noticed her yet, and looking in the direction it was flying told her why. Junior had arrived. He gave a roar upon seeing Destoroyah, not the cute little sounds he had made before but a proper roar like his father’s. the heat ray he fired was also like his father’s, no longer the small bubbles it had once been but a proper beam.

Well, not entirely like his father’s. It wasn’t the deep orange of his burning form but the old blue, yet it struck Destoroyah with enough force to knock it out of the sky regardless. It crashed into a skyscraper, breaking it apart, and gave a shriek of either pain or fury, probably both.

But it did not stay down for more than a moment, sending rubble flying just by standing back up. Its form had changed, having forgone its wings for legs. Miki attacked before the kaiju had a chance to notice her. She sent a wave of telekinetic force at Destoroyah, knocking it down again and sending it into another skyscraper.

Destoroyah gave another hateful screech as the building collapsed in on it, but Junior’s roar was more wary. She couldn’t afford to give him her full attention, but she could still sense the confusion coming from him. He looked around and quickly saw the array of crystals hovering in the sky, his wariness growing. There was something else too, f-

A sound that wasn’t Junior grabbed her attention, snapping her back to the situation at hand. It was a horrible, crackly sound that could only be coming from Destoroyah. As she turned her head, she saw a beam of white energy erupting from its maw, and it was aimed upwards.

She didn’t have time to react, and it hit one of the many floating crystals, which cracked over before shattering. Her telekinetic grip on it vanished and the shards of crystal rained down, punching holes in buildings with the speed they had built up by the time they hit. But at least it wasn’t aimed at her. Miki breathed a sigh of relief.

But when she breathed in again, it felt wrong. Air may have flowed into her lungs, but her body was telling her that she still needed breath. She was becoming lightheaded. She breathed out and in again, but there was no reprieve. Why could she not-

The beam. It must have been pure micro-oxygen, annihilating any oxygen that was even close to it, leaving only dead air around it. Her head was growing fuzzier. She needed to get to actually breathable air.

She flew with a burst of speed, telekinesis moving herself and the crystal she was still touching, along with any in her path. She forced herself to take slow, methodical breaths in and out as she flew, even as her body panicked.

It only took a few moments before she hit real air and she could breathe properly. As oxygen flooded her lungs, Miki felt a rush of adrenaline too. That had been close. The fight felt much more real now that Destoroyah had actually attacked her, and she needed to give it her full focus. Telepathy was just a distraction right now. She would just have to prove herself an ally to Junior by helping.

She turned her gaze back to the two kaiju, locked in claw-to-claw combat. Destoroyah was snarling and stabbing at Junior with the two appendages protruding from its back, but Junior was batting them away with one hand and preparing a claw swipe with the other.

Miki saw her chance and waited for the moment Junior made his move. As Junior’s claws swung at Destoroyah’s chest, Miki pushed it into the blow, sending it toppling over and letting Junior’s claws cut much deeper. She saw a spurt of some green fluid come from Destoroyah, and she realised that they had drawn blood. The fiend’s blood looked as unnatural as the rest of it.

She floated down to Junior, but without taking her eyes off of Destoroyah. It was slower to get up this time, and that gave her enough time to give Junior some help. She hovered only a dozen or so meters above him, a few of the large crystals alongside her.

She pressed those crystals to Junior, and then gently pushed on the energy within, letting it flow into and revitalise him. His body was receptive, his own natural nuclear energy augmented by her gift. She was careful not to give him too much, not wanting to push him to the same state as his father.

She pulled the crystals away, all but empty now. But Junior did not look better. He was hunched in on himself, as if trying to look smaller. He was shuddering slightly but did not otherwise move. She should be stronger now, why was he-

Oh. Oh she was an idiot. She was a complete and utter idiot who had just made everything worse. She realised what emotion she had just barely begun to sense from Junior was now. It was fear.

Because the last person to wield these crystals hadn’t exactly been friendly to Junior. Because the last person to wrap those crystals around Junior had imprisoned him with them when he was young and helpless.

And she had just reminded him of that. She was a complete and utter idiot who couldn’t do anything right-

A screech drew her out of her thoughts, and she turned to see Destoroyah standing again. She had made everything worse and now she had to face Destoroyah alone. It reared its head back, readying another micro-oxygen beam and Miki readied her crystalline shield, forcing herself to focus only on the fight.

She just barely caught the angle of its head turning as it fired, and she desperately flung the shield over to Junior before conjuring it. Unfold space, immediate telekinesis, layered pattern of energy.

The beam struck the shield and bounced right back at Destoroyah. The kaiju screeched and stumbled back, but it didn’t fall over. It was clearly able to withstand its own beam a lot better than she had withstood just being near it. Probably because this thing lived off of micro-oxygen.

Regardless, it was enough to draw its attention away from Junior. Destoroyah’s gaze turned to the crystals in the sky, though it still didn’t look directly at her. She was probably beneath its notice. But she needed to keep it away from Junior and that meant keeping its focus on either the crystals or herself.

She flung the near empty crystals she had used on Junior at Destoroyah, sharp tips first. It fired its micro-oxygen beam again, shattering one, but it couldn’t turn in time to hit the other one and it struck Destoroyah on the chest, or the closest thing it had to a chest.

It was pushed back, and she could see just a little bit of that green blood leaking around the point of the crystal. But Destoroyah bit down on the crystal and barely a second later it burst too, a few chunks bouncing harmlessly off the kaiju. It must have used its micro-oxygen at point blank.

Destoroyah turned its head up to the sky, now glaring up at the crystals with even more malice than before, and screeched. Miki shoved it with a wave of telekinetic force, sending it into a building before it could try and destroy more of her crystals. She didn’t let up in her assault, piling another two skyscrapers onto Destoroyah while it was still down.

But Destoroyah rose again, looking no more injured but a lot more angry. It fired its micro-oxygen beam in wide, sweeping arcs upwards. Miki conjured the crystalline shield to cover herself, but the beam barely hit it for more than a moment. But it did hit glancing blows on several crystals, cracking them but none of them fully breaking.

Miki felt that the crystal she was touching was starting to run low on energy. The shield took more out of her than she had realised, and she had used it twice now. And she was still holding all of the crystals above her. She flew over to another crystal, an uncracked one, and put her other hand to it. She let the connection form and released the first crystal.

When she turned back to Destoroyah, it was beside the traumatised Junior, and she was just in time to see it bite down into his shoulder. Immediately she grabbed it with her telekinesis and flung them away, sending the kaiju flying until it crashed into a skyscraper, one of the few still intact in the area. Miki found herself wishing she had some kind of beam attack like Godzilla’s heat ray so that she could both draw Destoroyah’s attention better and personally punish it for attacking Junior like that.

As she looked at Destoroyah rising from the rubble, she was met with its own hateful gaze. It fired a micro-oxygen beam, and this time it was aimed directly at her. She conjured the shield again, denying the attack, but Destoroyah gave an almost gleeful screech as the beam bounced back and hit it, rather than one of pain.

Destoroyah began walking towards her, its spindly legs crushing smaller building in its approach. Miki was certain it had seen her and had decided to focus on the active threat rather than the motionless Junior.

She needed to do something that actually hurt Destoroyah. Throwing it around and reflecting its micro-oxygen beam back was only buying time, not getting her closer to ending the fight. And she did not want to be on the defensive when she had Destoroyah’s full attention.

A radical idea hit her. She had no clue if it would work, but it was something new and that was what she needed right now.

As Destoroyah lumbered towards her, she reached out with her mind and crumpled the space Destoroyah was in, folding it like she did to store the crystals. There was no tearing sound, yet the kaiju was all but ripped in half, back legs simply gone along with part of its body, the rest carried forward by its momentum. Destoroyah fell to the ground, writhing and screeching, its green blood spilling across the streets.

Miki undid the spatial anomaly, chunks of limbs that looked like they had been crushed falling a short distance behind Destoroyah. It had worked. It had actually worked-

Suddenly Destoroyah vanished, its body and limbs dispersing into a thick white mist. The mist did not stay on the ground, rising upwards before suddenly condensing back into Destoroyah, now in its flying form again. There was no sign of the blood she had just spilled. Nor of the slashes Junior had left on it.

It had undone all the damage they had done to it in an instant. Against any other foe she would have just ended the fight, but she had to be fighting the one kaiju that could shrug that off. It was uninjured again, and it was flying straight at her.

Miki rose further up into the sky, knowing that letting Destoroyah close to her meant suffocation, putting distance between them horizontally too. She was well above the city now, entering the midair field of crystals. She didn’t lift them up further, she was already using enough energy just to keep them in place.

She tried to force Destoroyah back down to the ground, getting a firm telekinetic grip on it, but before she could actually shove it down, it split into the white mist again. She could do nothing to stop it rising again and reforming, now even closer to her. But she could still breathe. At least for the moment.

Destoroyah was gaining on her and she decided to try and confuse the kaiju instead. It may have learnt to evade her telekinesis, but it had not done it quickly. She should be able to outsmart it. Miki weaved around the crystals as she flew, moving erratically and unpredictably. She also made several of the crystals around them move in a similar manner, trying to lose Destoroyah among them.

It worked, at least for a few moments. Destoroyah’s head darted around, screeching in confusion at where its enemy had gone. And then it started lashing out. It fired its micro-oxygen beam as it flew, turning around to hit more crystals. A few that had been cracked earlier shattered immediately but the others weren’t breaking just yet.

Miki conjured the crystalline shield again, stopping the beam before it got to close to her. Again, the beam bounced back and again it did little to Destoroyah. She didn’t expect it to. But she did expect to be low on energy again and switched to another crystal before it became a problem.

But between the shield and her movement to reach a new crystal, Destoroyah had seen her and was flying towards her again. It didn’t bother using its micro-oxygen beam, having apparently figured out that it wouldn’t hit her, but it was more than threatening enough without it.

Miki flew further away and higher up, Destoroyah slowly catching up to her. She needed to do something to stop it or at least hold it back for a bit. Could she draw the crystals closer together, giving it less space to fly? No, it would just smash more of her limited crystals-

The crystals.

As Destoroyah got closer and closer, and Miki felt increasingly lucky that she could still breathe, she tightened her telekinetic grip on one of the crystals beneath her. She passed over it and rammed it upwards with as much force as she could muster when Destoroyah did the same.

By some stroke of good fortune, she not only hit, but hit it in the flower-like pattern on its body. The crystal stabbed deep into Destoroyah, green blood spraying. Destoroyah screeched in pain, but continued forwards, ripping itself off of the crystal with its own momentum, widening the wound further.

With the wound no longer sealed by the crystal, green blood flowed freely, raining down to the ground below. Destoroyah’s flight was slowed and wobbly for a moment, but it regained its balance after just a few seconds and did not stop pursuing her.

In all, it had delayed it for perhaps ten seconds. Even that great gaping wound had barely slowed it down. How could she ever hope to-

A bright blue pillar of energy, wreathed with an orange spiral, hit Destoroyah from below. It struck the hole in its chest and burst out the other side, chunks of dark red flesh sent flying. The screech Destoroyah gave was one that didn’t hold malice for once, just pure pain. If Miki didn’t know any better, she might have even felt bad for the creature.

Miki risked a glance down and saw that it was Junior, standing firm now, head aiming directly up with the spiral heat ray pouring forth from his jaws. He must have faced, and overcome, whatever dark thoughts she had accidentally roused. She felt proud of him for it, but guilty for having forced him to do so.

She turned her gaze back to Destoroyah just as the beam cut off, leaving smoke rising from the wound. It wasn’t quite falling, but it certainly wasn’t flying. Even calling it gliding was a generous comparison. Something about that beam must have hurt it in a way that she hadn’t been able to, because Destoroyah was fall-gliding away as fast as it could. It was retreating.

She knew she should go after it. She needed to put an end to it once and for all. But she also knew that she couldn’t. Despite all of her training, all her practise and all the power she was wielding, she wasn’t strong enough.

She had been able to hurt it, but she hadn’t been able to truly injure it. That was Junior. And she had left Junior unable to help for most of the fight. Had she even helped at all? Or had she just bought enough time for her mistake to fix itself?

Those were the thoughts occupying her head as she watched Destoroyah fade into the distance. Inadequacy and the looming threat of its return. How long did they have? Minutes? Hours? Either way, the options weren’t good, merely bad and worse. But they would at least have some reprieve.

She peeled her gaze from the spot she last saw Destoroyah and turned back to look at Junior. She felt guilty as she floated down towards him, folding space to disappear all but the smallest crystal. She didn’t want to frighten him, not again.

She reached out with her mind and felt that even though most of the fear had passed, Junior was still nervous and on edge. Of course he was. She didn’t greet him, she just babbled a string of apologies to the young kaiju, saying I’m sorry over and over. It felt hollow knowing what she must have put him through. She wasn’t sure how long she was there like that, or when she started crying, but it felt like an entire age of desperately begging for forgiveness.

She couldn’t do this.