"Who's pulling your strings?"
Zod figured it was worth getting the enemy's name out of them.
"Thanos."
The Herald dared not withhold the truth, even if this remote planet probably had no idea who Thanos was or just how terrifying he could be.
Thanos?
Zod never expected this invasion to be Thanos's doing. The guy was running a lot more operations than the movies ever showed.
"Did Thanos give the invasion order himself? And where is Thanos right now?"
Zod figured he ought to return the favor.
"I don't know. Lord Thanos's whereabouts have always been a secret."
The Herald rushed to explain.
Thanos had far too many enemies. Some were vengeance-driven souls carrying planet-shattering bombs, ready to die if it meant taking Thanos with them. Plenty of hyper-civilizations wouldn't hesitate to drop a planet-cracker round or a gravitational collapse bomb on Thanos's coordinates either.
Without the Infinity Stones, Thanos was only a Sub-Skyfather level being. Powerful, certainly, but still far too fragile when faced with planet-crackers, gravitational collapse bombs, dimensional collapse weapons, and the like.
Even if he could survive such things, his forces would be wiped out to the last soldier.
So Thanos had no homeworld, no stronghold. The Black Order carried a fearsome reputation, but in truth they were nothing more than wandering destroyers and ruiners, drifting from place to place.
They couldn't even resupply openly. They had to offer prices far above market rates to attract the kind of profit-hungry scavengers willing to trade with them at any risk.
"Then you have no further value."
Zod was somewhat disappointed. The superheroes, meanwhile, launched into their all-too-familiar demolition routine.
And so the Herald civilization was annihilated. After all, when it came to unleashing destruction without restraint, no one was more practiced than superheroes.
Back on Earth, the superheroes returned to their respective daily lives.
Though the toxic miasma from the Kaiju corpses still seeped through the city, rivers of blood flowing into sewer systems vast enough to race cars through and emptying into the deep ocean, the mountainous carcasses piled like hills.
The Kaiju that had made landfall in Los Angeles—walking cataclysms all—had been completely eliminated. But sheer numbers had made it impossible to exercise restraint during the fighting. In other words, the city had indeed suffered catastrophic damage.
Still... this time, Los Angeles genuinely needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The silver lining, though, was that civilian casualties in LA were not particularly severe. Under circumstances like these, the numbers they'd managed to tally could already be considered something to be grateful for.
The real irony? Stark Tower had just been relocated from Los Angeles to New York, only to get blown up by the Chitauri and the Monster Association. Then New York became Sword Force headquarters, so the tower was moved back to Los Angeles—and now it had collapsed all over again.
Not that Stark lacked the money for one building. If he wanted to, he could throw up eighty or a hundred of them without breaking a sweat. But Stark was still extremely annoyed.
Beyond Los Angeles, every major coastal city in America and across the globe had sustained varying degrees of damage. The third wave of nine Kaiju had appeared less than a day after the second wave of six had barely been put down.
Larger bodies. Greater speed. Stronger striking power. More terrifying defenses. And now electromagnetic pulse attacks that crippled most of humanity's weapons systems.
Going by Pacific Rim classifications, these were all Category VI and above.
New York City, shrouded in pollution and still smoldering, was in an utterly dire state—completely quarantined from surrounding cities. The adjacent waters had been cordoned off. With Kaiju Blue contamination saturating the city, the entire population needed to be relocated. The situation was guaranteed to plunge everything into chaos once again. If the city needed rebuilding... the mental and physical toll required would be enormous.
That feeling of helplessness among humanity was growing heavier by the day.
And who could blame them? The past stretch of time had been relentlessly brutal. Alien invasions. Giant monsters. Monsters of the human variety. And then there were the Saiyans, who had openly declared that more Saiyans were on the way...
Even though Sword Force had repelled every enemy time and again, the psychological blows to humanity were unavoidable.
Invasion after invasion. Evacuation after evacuation. Even when the body count stayed low, the economic devastation was staggering in its own right.
There was no helping it, really. If Zod had once felt some sense of responsibility for such things, the Kaiju invasion had flipped the equation entirely. This time, humanity owed him.
Without all those drills he'd forced on them—teaching people to flee the moment an alert sounded—the Chitauri and the Kaiju would have left behind a slaughter beyond counting. The death toll would have been tens of thousands of times worse than what they were facing now.
"We humans need our own monsters!"
Zod Heath stepped forward, addressing humanity's shattered morale head-on.
"Our own... monsters?"
Everyone else looked utterly bewildered. And then they watched as Zod Heath's Umbrella Corporation unveiled a new product.
The Multi-Purpose Mobile Suit — Zaku Unit!
Standing twenty meters tall. Primary armament: a 200mm-caliber machine gun. Full-body secondary Kryptonian alloy armor. Engine thrust output reaching fifty tons. Core power source: a second-generation novel-element nuclear fusion reactor, capable of sustaining continuous combat operations for an entire month.
The 200mm machine gun was practically an autocannon, but because it utilized electromagnetic kinetic weaponry, it wouldn't suffer from the limited range and slow projectile speeds of howitzer-style weapons.
With no need for propellant charges, the projectiles were single-stage formed. Effective range: three thousand meters. Muzzle velocity: eighteen hundred meters per second.
More than sufficient to handle Kaiju of that scale.
The debut of the Zaku Unit officially signaled the retirement of the aircraft carrier.
Zod Heath stated that the Zaku possessed tri-environment combat capability—surface, submerged, and aerial operations.
Defensive power, firepower, and mobility all surpassed every weapon system humanity possessed. The price tag was admittedly steep: 300 billion dollars per unit.
But thanks to the Kaiju, the orders came flooding in the moment the product launched.
Even the Rabbit went on a procurement spree this time. They had discovered that the Spear Bureau's top operatives simply couldn't handle monsters of such colossal size. Given that reality, deploying humanity's own monsters to fight monsters had become a necessity.
Zod Heath could have made a fortune off this war. All he'd have to do was keep that space-time portal open and let the money roll in. It was only his conscience—and the superheroes standing right beside him—that made him shut it down.
In London, on the other side of the globe, Thor's girlfriend Jane Foster was not having a good time.
By nature, as an astrophysicist, she loved observing astronomical phenomena, hoping to explore the mysteries of the universe through them.
That was exactly how she had met Thor in the first place, back when Odin had banished him to Earth.
Time deepened their bond, and beneath a sky full of beautiful stars, Jane became Thor's girlfriend on Earth.
It should have been the most romantic thing imaginable.
But ever since Thor destroyed the Bifrost, seeing Jane again had become nearly impossible. Even after the Battle of New York ended, Thor had rushed back to Asgard with Loki in tow, and in all the time since, he had never once found the time to visit his girlfriend.
/-\
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