The pain came like a dying star—white-hot, collapsing, devouring everything in its wake. It split my bones like kindling, molten fire coursing through veins that no longer felt human. My scream began as something mortal, raw and guttural, but by the end, it was a sound no throat should make: a tectonic shriek, grinding and primal, that shook the ashen air of Umbara.

The planet itself seemed to recoil. Around me, the ruins of the radiation spiral still glowed faintly, jagged fissures in the earth crackling with residual energy. The sky hung heavy, a bruised tapestry of violet and sulfur, streaked with the ghostly afterburn of the cataclysm that had scorched this world to a husk. And there, at the epicenter of it all—me. Or what was left of me.

My skin blistered, split, sloughed away in ribbons. Beneath it, something moved. Scales erupted like armor forged in the heart of a supernova, iridescent and obsidian, drinking in the dim light. My spine twisted, vertebrae snapping and reknitting with a sound like boulders cracking under pressure. Dorsal plates surged upward, serrated and trembling with pent-up fury, each one humming as if charged by the dead star's final breath.

Nyx.

Her name flickered in the ruins of my mind—a shard of the man I'd been. I saw her face: sharp-edged defiance, eyes like twin galaxies, her hand gripping mine as the spiral's light consumed everything. "Don't let it change you," she'd hissed. Too late. The radiation had hollowed me out, scraped me clean, and filled the void with something older. Hungrier.

The crater around me steamed, a gaping maw where cities once clawed at the sky. I clawed my way free of the rubble, talons gouging furrows into stone melted smooth by atomic fire. My tail—a tail—lashed, crushing the skeletal remains of Umbara's spires. The air reeked of ionized decay, of ozone and scorched metal, but beneath it all, I caught the scent of fear. Distant, panicked. Survivors.

Prey.

I reared up, my shadow swallowing the horizon. The plates along my spine flared, bathing the wasteland in an eerie cobalt pulse—a beacon, a warning. My snout tilted skyward, nostrils flaring as I drank in the rot and the rage and the raw, untamed power crackling in my chest. When I roared this time, the ground shattered. Ripples of force tore through the crater, toppling what little remained upright. Ash rained down like funeral confetti.

Nyx was gone. Consumed by the spiral, by the hubris of those who'd weaponized it. But her absence wasn't a void—it was fuel. The man might have mourned. The creature only burned.

Godzilla did not mourn.

Godzilla raged.

SCENEBREAK

The galaxy hung in ruins, its once-cohesive tapestry of light now a jagged mosaic of dead stars and fractured nebulae. Shards of celestial debris glittered like broken stained glass, drifting in the silent aftermath of apocalypse. Beneath me, Umbara's corpse smoldered—a blistered, bleeding wound in the cosmos. The radiation beam had carved through its mantle like a god's scalpel, leaving a crater so deep it seemed to gnaw at the planet's molten core. Rivers of magma serpentined across the surface, their glow a sickly chartreuse from the poison still simmering in the air.

I stepped away from the crater's edge, each footfall triggering seismic shudders. The ground whispered as I moved, a chorus of half-formed voices—Umbara's final, desperate attempt to knit itself back together. Mountains crumbled like sandcastles, only to rise again in jagged, malformed spires. Forests of crystalline fungi sprouted from irradiated soil, then withered to ash in seconds. The planet was a dying animal, twitching in its death throes, caught between creation and oblivion.

But I felt no pity.

The radiation had seared away such frailties. My scales, now laced with star-forged alloys, drank in the ambient chaos—the crackle of dying energy fields, the hiss of collapsing atmospheres. My claws, sharpened by celestial friction, left trenches brimming with liquid starlight. When I tilted my head, the cosmos reflected in my eyes: supernovae blooming in the pupils, black holes swirling in the irises.

Nyx's voice flickered again. A ghost in the machine of my new mind. "You could've saved them," she whispered, though her bones were dust, her defiance erased. I crushed the memory like a comet beneath my heel.

The stars ahead pulsed, their light warped by gravitational scars. I smirked, a rumbling growl building in my chest—a sound that shook asteroids from their orbits. The smirk was not human. Not anymore. It was the curl of a predator who'd tasted entropy and found it sweet.

I crouched, dorsal plates flaring with stolen starlight. The void between worlds seemed to inhale, holding its breath. Then—

Leap.

The planet fractured beneath the force of my launch, tectonic plates screaming as they peeled apart. For a heartbeat, I hung suspended in the silence, Umbara's ruin shrinking below, a festering jewel in the dark. Then spacetime rippled, buckling under my mass, and I surged forward. Nebulae unraveled as I passed, their colors bleeding into my wake. Solar winds howled, but their fury cooled against my hide, a lover's breath on iron.

I did not look back.

Umbara's light died behind me, its final gasp lost in the cacophony of the void. Ahead, the starfield stretched infinite, its mysteries ripe for razing. Let the galaxies shiver. Let the cosmic architects tremble.

Godzilla did not rebuild.

Godzilla devoured.