Colossus By Choice: B1V16 Side Story - The Monster Armies of the Skull King

[Book 1 Verse 16 – B1V16]
[Side Story]

“The Monster Armies of the Skull King” – Narrated by Taum Thunder-clan Pyrestar

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As I’m carried back to Silver Sun City by Captain Gairi, I can’t help but wonder about the predicament we’ve now found ourselves in.

I’m narrating my thoughts internally once again, this time focusing on the old stories that gave us our name for that Iwi-ki soldier’s transformed state.

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Oozaru….. the Great Ape of the Moon. The Final War of All Wars.

Not so final anymore, it seems. While the identity of the Skull King himself is unknown to us living in the present, it’s been known for generations that he led the heretics that opposed Godzilla, the True Titans, and Humanity in particular. We don’t know why the Skull King and his followers hated Godzilla and the Humans so much, only that this unnatural hatred led them to an unfathomably long war of extermination.

They reached such great heights of evil and depravity that they were wiped out wholesale with barely any records left beyond the stories that were passed down by our ancestors and written down for their descendants to pass onto their own children.

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Out of all manner of creatures and beasts that followed the Dreaded One, there was one that stood above the rest: the Oozaru. They were giant apes who had comparable intelligence to even the most tactically gifted Human, but they possessed size and strength that far surpassed the might of the client gods to the True Titans. Their immeasurable power and stature were equal to that of the largest ground-level war machine that ancient Humanity could muster: the Heavy Frame Battle-Mech.

These skyscraper-sized Battle-Mechs were veritable gods in its own right despite their nature as mechanical suits that were directed and controlled by singular Human pilots. From academic research on ruins, records, and remnants left behind from these conflicts, we now know that every single weapon, armour plate, and internal component was composed of the legendary Nanometal that the Oxbul people revere as sacred forging material. A single one of these impulse-controlled engines of destruction had enough firepower in its mounted guns to raze a large portions of a small continent and more than enough armour to withstand the resultant aftermath effects.

Before the Skull King surfaced for his conquest of all of existence, the Heavy Frames served as the ground-level champions of Mechagodzilla, one of the few True Titans to not possess a singular true physical form and the source and intelligence behind all Nanometal in existence. These Heavy Frame Battle-Mechs were the backbone and strongest elements of ancient Humanity’s standing armies, fielded in untold numbers for peacekeeping and war.

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Despite this power and ability to be quickly manufactured by Humanity’s source of technological prowess, they proved to be inferior to the might of the Great Apes.

The Oozaru were faster, more mobile, and could wield powerful magics in addition to a wide assortment of medieval and advanced weaponry that utilized the mythical Wraith Argent. They had comparable if cruder barbarian-like armour that cloaked the entirety of their bodies, and their ferocity was unmatched by any other beyond the Skull King himself. Although the Heavy Frames were superior in number, this combination of strength, agility, intelligence, and superior weaponry meant that the Great Apes of the Moon were easily able to gain the advantage on the ground.

The Oozaru were like the hunters of the current day, dancing around the battlefield with the grace of Mothra, wearing the defences of Gamera, and wielding the ferocious might and power of Godzilla. Any Heavy Frame Battle-Mechs that were struck down and left gutted by embedded blades of the Wraith Argent could never rise again, even with the full resurrective might of Mechagodzilla behind them. It’s just like the far older tales of how Godzilla would seal Old Gods with her Slayer Crucible to prevent them from rising or even producing creatures of Grimm from their blackened souls.

But even when these weapons were knocked out of their hands, the Great Apes were still superior. They combined their tactical acumen with the raw instinctual drive of their simian origins to great effect, tearing apart the battlefield and the Heavy Frames they fought with fists and great gouts of lightning magics.

These battles were by no means one-sided given the mass destruction these Nanometal machines could bring to bear and their sheer numbers, but things decidedly went in the favour of the Oozaru when the armies of Godzilla and the Skull King came to blows on planetary surfaces.

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I find their usage of Wraith Argent equal parts intriguing and terrifying. Only Godzilla herself ever freely used this powerful elemental energy and didn’t allow even her closest allies to use it. But apparently, the Oozaru and even the Skull King himself somehow gained consistent access to the most potent source of power in all of existence. There’s such little information on Wraith Argent that many academic circles don’t even believe it actually exists outside of Godzilla’s own personal stores.

Personally, while it can be hard to believe, I do think there’s merit to the idea that the Skull King and his followers somehow gained a source of the Wraith Argent. It’d explain why the Skull King could inflict such terror upon Humanity that, even after having most of his known history erased, his influence over them persists even to this day after they mysteriously vanished shortly before the Post-Godzilla Era began.

It’d also explain why the ruler of the universe would want their background to be wiped clean. It may be heretical of me to say this, but I think our overarching god may have feared the knowledge of Wraith Argent production becoming known to the rest of creation. I doubt it’d be for nefarious reasons, though. I think she was scared about what the burgeoning new sapient life that her, Mothra, and Gamera had begun cooking might end up doing if given such power without having the foreknowledge or ability to wield it properly.

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Could what we call Oozaru actually be those very same horrifying monstrosities that dominated the ancient battlefields during the Final War of All Wars?

It’s hard to believe that any mortal being could wield such power, but aside from the lack of weapons and armour, the creature we fought against definitely fits the mould. I never heard of the ancient Oozaru having a weakness via their tails, however. One would think that such a blatant weakpoint that’s potentially vulnerable to even our modern conventional means would be kept in the archives by our gods.

Unless….. unless this is something new.

Huh.

I think I might have some new ideas on what these modern Great Apes might really be.