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"We're close. That has to be Kong's destination."
Inside the HEAV, Maia Simmons studied the mountain peak beneath the thunderstorm in the distance, eyes flickering.
Their aircraft followed Kong up the hill, crossed the gravity inversion line, and flipped a full one hundred and eighty degrees — what had been the ground above them was now the ground below. The mountain peak was solid rock, lit up by the rolling storm, pulsing with a cold blue light.
"Baby Kong is finally going home." Jared looked at the carved marks etched into the rock face and smiled.
This Titan had always been friendlier to humans than any of the others. He was genuinely glad it had found its way back.
"I always feel like things can't go this smoothly." Old De glanced at the storm crackling over the mountain, then at the APEX personnel sharing the cabin with them, and frowned. "Something's off."
For one thing, sitting in the same aircraft as APEX operatives was already dangerous enough on its own.
They needed to figure out what these people were actually here for.
And the building carved into that rock mountain — no telling what was waiting inside.
"If we actually intended to be your enemies, we wouldn't have let you bring weapons into the HEAV." Maia Simmons looked at the two Monarch men, her voice flat and cold.
If she didn't need Kong to lead the way, she wouldn't have these two anywhere near her.
Two lunatics.
Her mission was to collect the energy. Starting a fight was a waste of everyone's time.
"Save it." Jared let out a short, dismissive laugh. "We're sitting together nice and easy right now, but that won't last. I know exactly what APEX Cybernetics is after. You can dress it up all you want — doesn't change what's underneath."
He still couldn't read this woman's specific angle, but he doubted she could do much damage regardless.
Even if things did come to a head with APEX later, he wasn't losing sleep over it. Their side had too big an advantage. Godzilla. Kong. Mothra. And above all else, Ultraman. If APEX wanted to start something, they'd better do the math first.
"Think what you want." Maia Simmons saw there was no getting through to him and stopped trying. She had no interest in wasting words on a man who looked like he slept in doorways.
Kong, buzzing with barely-contained excitement, had already reached the foot of the rock mountain. A massive stone door stood before it.
"Roar..."
On the right side of the door was a red handprint. Time had worn it down until it was impossible to say whether it was paint or dried blood. Something about it made Kong uneasy , a faint wrongness it couldn't name. But the desperate pull to find its kin was louder than that feeling.
It pressed both hands against the stone. The muscles in its arms swelled and strained as it pushed.
A deep, grinding boom rolled through the rock.
The door moved.
Beyond it, a vast hall opened up all at once.
The space had started as a natural cave, but hands had shaped it into something else entirely , a great hall, carved from the living rock. Wide steps descended to a broad floor below. Stone pillars held up the hollow above them, and beneath the central pillar, a stone throne had been cut directly from the rock. Archways on the far walls opened into other passages beyond.
Kong stood a hundred meters tall, and inside this place it looked almost human-sized.
Whoever built this hall had been built bigger.
"Roar! Roar roar!" Kong moved down the steps, voice filling every corner of the space.
The hall swallowed the sound. There was nothing here. No movement. No response. It kept calling anyway, pushing toward the bottom of the steps until its feet hit the stone floor of the main chamber.
Still nothing.
Kong went still.
"A place this size... and not a single one of its own kind?"
"Maybe they all went out hunting?" Jared stared at the empty hall, brow creased.
The architecture was right. Kong hadn't come to the wrong place. So where were they?
"They wouldn't all leave at once. Not even for a hunt."
Old De was quiet for a moment. He shifted to look through the side window at a cluster of pale shapes in the corner of the hall. Bones.
"They might have become history a long time ago," he said, something soft in his voice.
The bones weren't built like a great ape , wrong proportions, wrong skull. And there was an axe buried in that skull. They hadn't spotted a single living Titan great ape on the entire route in. That said enough. The same thing that wiped out Kong's family on Skull Island might have come here too, during some invasion no one alive remembered.
"It must be gutted." Jared watched Kong move toward the giant axe and said it quietly.
The HEAV descended. The hatch opened, and they stepped out onto the hall floor.
The two former Monarch members and the cluster of APEX operatives spread out, taking in the space with wide eyes.
"Roar!" Kong wrenched the axe free from the skull it had been buried in.
The weapon was built from a creature's scale fused to a section of bone. The scale still gave off a dim light. The grip was natural in Kong's hand , right weight, right balance. This had belonged to whoever ruled this hall once. Kong knew it immediately.
"That scale." Jared squinted at it, tilting his head. "That's not... Godzilla's scale, is it?"
The more he looked, the more familiar it seemed.
And given the ancient grudge between Kong and Godzilla... it was hard not to look at that scale and think about Godzilla's dorsal fin.
God. Kong's ancestors were something else.
"It's not here...?"
"How?" Maia Simmons swept her instrument across the hall, watching the readings, and felt her jaw tighten. No trace of the energy signal she was looking for. Nothing.
If even Kong leading them directly here couldn't turn up pure geothermal energy, they might actually have to search the entire Hollow Earth.
"Heads up." Old De had been scanning upward with his binoculars since they landed. He kept his voice low. "There are other creatures in here."
The cave ceiling above them was alive with roosting bodies , winged things, somewhere between bats and birds, packed together in a dense mass. Kong's roaring had started to wake them. The ones already awake were looking down.
Looking directly at them.
"I think we leave. Now." Old De turned to Jared.
If Kong stayed, it risked getting swarmed. There were no kin here to find. There was no reason to stay.
"Roar...?"
Kong wasn't moving yet. Gripping the scale axe, it was walking toward the throne, and then it stopped.
There were patterns on the ground around the throne , shapes and lines it didn't recognize. And set into the floor around the throne were other axes, also made from fin bones, their blades embedded into carved recesses. The fin bones on those were dark. Burned out, or spent.
Then Kong noticed the groove in the floor directly in front of the throne. A perfect match for the axe in its hand.
It lowered the axe into the groove.
HUM!
Energy surged up from beneath the stone, flooding through the axe. The glowing fin bone blazed brighter. One by one, the dormant axes around the throne lit up in sequence, the light spreading outward across the floor in a complex interlocking pattern , a massive figure rendered in cold blue light, encircling the throne on all sides.
Godzilla.
At the same moment, outside the hall, the Scar King crested a ridge atop its great white beast. It saw the mountain peak beneath the thunderstorm.
The hideous smile that split its face said it had been looking for exactly this.
➤ Next: The Handsome One: The Family Has Arrived!
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