GTAG Chapter 51: The Thing
The Pacific Ocean.
Deep beneath the waves, the outline of a vast undersea city had taken shape.
Because Godzilla's colossal body was still growing, the buildings within this city had to be equally massive. Even walking through its broad avenues, he never felt cramped.
He nodded in approval at the tireless "workers" carrying boulders and cutting stone.
At the heart of the city lay a massive pit, like the eye of an abyss.
This was where the Monster Factory resided.
Now expanded to a staggering diameter of ten kilometers, the Monster Factory was capable of producing entire legions every day. Most were workers, but Godzilla had also ordered it to create a new type of combat unit: the Sentinels.
The Sentinels resembled Xenomorphs, though much larger—towering five meters tall. They patrolled the city and the Monster Factory, guarding against intruders.
The factory had even begun developing larger monsters, though their immense energy demands meant progress was slow.
As Godzilla inspected the half-built city, his body suddenly froze.
He had locked onto the coordinates of another world—an especially unique one.
The Thing.
He remembered watching the film long ago, disturbed for days by its grotesque imagery. The alien species' ability was terrifying, but what had unsettled him most as a child were the twisted, fused limbs devouring one another.
The movie told the story of a Norwegian camp in Antarctica discovering a buried spaceship and retrieving an ice block that held an alien creature.
Unaware of the danger, they attempted to extract it—only to unleash a nightmare.
A tiny crack in the ice was enough to awaken it. The entity spread through the camp like a plague.
But it wasn't a virus.
The Thing was a parasite that invaded a host, imitated its cells, and replaced it entirely. It was nearly indestructible, able to survive extreme cold and even sacrifice most of its body to ensure survival.
The only true countermeasure was fire.
The crashed alien ship itself had fallen victim to these creatures, its crew freezing themselves to contain the outbreak. But even Antarctica's brutal cold couldn't stop the Thing's hunger.
For Godzilla, the species was fascinating.
His own G-cells were invasive in their own way. Even a single drop of his blood, given enough energy, could grow into another Godzilla.
Normally, he suppressed this ability. His shed blood or torn flesh might replicate, but it never grew into a full duplicate.
Still, a parasite capable of infecting any organism was a horrifying threat. One misstep, and he could be assimilated before realizing it.
That was why Godzilla didn't immediately travel to the Thing's world.
He wasn't fully confident he could resist infection. The thought of a monster his size being consumed in such a small world was humiliating.
Yet he had a solution.
The Thing was weak against fire. If he could raise his body temperature high enough, he could shield himself.
His current body heat was only a few hundred degrees. Too low. He needed to push it past a thousand.
The best method was to channel the energy of his fusion reactor throughout his body, overloading his systems. Dangerous, yes—but worth training for.
Steam erupted around him as he practiced. When he infused his body with power, he felt faster, stronger, like a machine flooding itself with energy to enter overdrive.
It was an unexpected boon. He now had another trump card.
After half a month of grueling training, Godzilla mastered this Overload Mode. With a thought, he could ignite it, maintaining it for long stretches without even using his radiation beam. If he did fire the beam, the duration would shorten depending on energy consumption.
Now, with Overload Mode, he finally had the courage to face the Thing's world.
Let's see, he thought, how they plan to infect me when I'm burning at over a thousand degrees. Did they think my body heat was a joke?
Since there was nothing else in that world worth worrying about besides the parasite, Godzilla didn't bother fine-tuning his entry.
He arrived at the exact moment between the prequel's end and the beginning of the original film.
In the prequel, every infected person had been burned away—except one dog that escaped. Its strange behavior in the next movie, from its uncanny movements to its unsettling affection, marked it as infected.
But Godzilla had no interest in the humans or their camps. He wanted something else.
The spaceship.
Truth be told, he had only ever seen one alien ship before, a massive donut-shaped craft. He was curious to find this one buried beneath the Antarctic ice.
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