The jets came. Missiles streaked in, broke against his shoulder like glass rain. He did not flinch. He raised one clawed hand—slowly, deliberately—and placed it on the tallest building he could reach. Not crushing it. Just touching. A geologist reading a rock.
Not this ocean—the one he remembered. The one before the continents drifted, before the sky turned this pale, thin blue. The one where his kind had swum between the stars, when Earth was young and molten and theirs. He had slept in the mantle for three hundred million years, dreaming of that sea. And now he had risen to find it gone, replaced by steel and glass and tiny screaming things that threw fireflies at his hide. the visitor godzilla
He did not hate them. He pitied them. They were mayflies, building castles on the skin of a sleeper. The jets came
The admiral would call it a retreat. The news would call it a miracle. But Eri, still on the rooftop, still in her red raincoat, knew better. A geologist reading a rock
The sky didn’t roar. It simply opened.
And somewhere deep in the trench, where the pressure would turn a submarine to foil, he curled into the dark and closed his ancient eye. Dreaming of salt. Dreaming of stars. Dreaming of the ocean he had lost.