Game Over (An NES Godzilla AU)

-Fragile Protector-

"So, Mothra should be on this planet?"

"Yes." Acacius assured, "I can sense her soul on this planet."

"These... monsters have souls...? Like living things?"

He heard Acacius chuckle, "Of course they do. How else would I know of their whereabouts aside from word of mouth?"

"The monsters can talk...?" He mumbled to himself, he was about to speak, when the next world finally loaded in, which was strangely named: "Maeculpa".

"Huh..? Why is it called that...?"

"I'm not very sure... A lot of things in this universe are very strange, from what I've heard. Just, try to be careful."

The board wasn't as big as the board of the previous world, which put Billy at ease a bit since getting through the bigger worlds was exhausting if he tried to do it all in one sitting. This, he felt he could easily get through in one afternoon, with small breaks every now and again, of course.

The only boss monster on the board was a moth-like monster named Battra, who was currently right at the other side of the board, which actually wasn't too far away from where his monsters were.

Then, he just remembered- Godzilla was now one of his playable monsters! He was actually kind of excited to play as Godzilla, as it would be a nice change of pace from playing as two flying monsters in the game so far.

The board looked a lot like the board of Planet X from the original Monster Of Monsters game, with a circle of levels in the middle of it. He decided to take a look at the level icons across the board; some kind of fancy temple at the end, what looked to be some kind of ruins, a small dirt house, and a statue of some monster with three horns that was surrounded by icons of a bronze temple.

Somehow, the entire board gave off a feeling of being very... mythical, in a sense. It somehow made him feel like he wasn't even playing a Godzilla game for a moment. Although, quite a few Godzilla movies did have a bit of a mythical feel to them -mainly the Mothra trilogy, so it didn't feel too out of the ordinary.

Out of curiosity, he selected the three-horned monster of the board, to which a message popped up onscreen- "Something will awake soon." This confused him. He selected it again, the "there is no monster here" message then popped up. Strange.

His monsters were surrounded by dirt house and ruin icons, so after a second of tying to decide who to send first, he selected Godzilla and went onwards into a dirt home level.

The level was pretty much what he expected it to be; a small village of dirt homes on a mostly grassy plain, most of them were either half the size of Godzilla, or smaller. Judging by this, it seemed like all kinds of monsters lived in this one part of the planet.

As he moved onwards, he eventually found small homes made of some kind of wood or bamboo in a few of the trees he stumbled across, even finding a couple of dirt homes the size of Godzilla.

It just felt peaceful to walk through this village for the time being, he was glad that he didn't encounter any enemies in the level thus far. But then he came across some partially destroyed homes with giant holes in the walls, and homes either burnt or torn to almost nothing, with smaller insect monsters -that looked like a mix of a caterpillar and some kind of wasp- crying inside of their ruined homes.

He approached one of them, and after pressing up on the d-pad, it spoke. "Oh divine goddesses... why have you failed us..?!"

He talked to another one, "This was worse than the other disasters..."

He tried talking to one more, but they just told him to go away.

The level ended right after another screen of nothing much but walking past more ruined homes, he found himself wondering what exactly happened here just as he was sent back to the board screen. He then selected Gigamoth to enter one of the dirt house levels near the ruins, wondering if anything would be different about it- and there was.