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.
Not angry. Not hungry. Lost.
He looked confused.
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. the visitor godzilla
He did not hate them. He pitied them. They were mayflies, building castles on the skin of a sleeper. Not this ocean—the one he remembered
He wasn’t an invader. He was a visitor who had woken up in the wrong millennium, looking for a home that no longer existed. He had slept in the mantle for three
Then he turned. He waded back into the harbor, each step sending a tidal wave toward the shore, toward the city he had not meant to harm. He sank beneath the waves without a sound.