Match 162: Black Moth vs. King Caesar

Match 162: Black Moth vs. King Caesar is the 162nd Match of the KWC and is written by Andrew Sudomerski.

## Story

Along the sacred Okinawan shores, Black Moth is a literal claw away from slicing the Azumi Princess open. She had little intent on killing her, only using it as a threat to get the royal daughter of the Azumi line to do as she commands. For now, Nami is her hostage; but it wasn’t the princess she wanted, but the king. A creature as old as the ancestral line of the Azumi family itself, if not older. Long ago, a brown monster appeared and warded off foreign invaders from the Okinawan region and was praised as a god to its people. A golem that inspired the mythical shisa. King Caesar.

A deep growl of irritation is getting to her. She double checks once more, recalling the old folk legend of the Okinawan guardian. When the moon is red, and the sun rises in the west, two monsters will rise to save the world. Of course that legend came to pass decades before, thusly no need to heed its words. All that was needed was for the statue, in mold of a shisa with rubies embedded in its eyes, to awaken the mighty golem once more.

Black Moth scours her memory banks about last night; as it would seem, timing is everything. A scarlet moon that is seen in the skies above during the previous night. For people of older generations, this was interpreted as a wary sign of the apocalypse or a bad omen. It wasn’t until selenologists came across a rational explanation for the red-colored moon; a lunar eclipse, where a full moon is cast under the Earth’s shadow. She glances to her left and right, seeing the odd alluring sight of two suns to the east and west. This too had a rational explanation to back it up, or at least one that makes the most sense. In most circumstances similar, the likely appearance of a secondary sun can only be explained by optical refraction, often creating mirages as atmospheric particles bend light in strange ways. To see a lunar eclipse and double-sun phenomena occur in a short span of time is truly a spectacle to behold. But for the winged lion hybrid, the scientific side of life was not her investment. As a human, she was a military captain by the name of Kroiga, who went rogue and joined the sinister Doctor Malik on his crusade to conquer the world. Yet after she met her demise by assassination, she was turned into a literal monster. With the doctor’s failure coming back to bite him, she destroyed the vessel Black Shark and fled the exploding island base that they once resided at. Since then, she has been looking the world over for a challenge to prove herself worthy.

As the suns rise from the horizon, the embedded rubies reflect the beautiful blaze of the sunlight and its mirage. The jewel eyes absorb the solar energy, then fires a concentrated beam of red light aimed at the stack. An eruption of rock and sparks explode and fall to the shallow waters below, revealing the mighty form of the legendary monster of the olden days.

The Azumi Princess falls to her knees, hands folded in a prayerful state. She couldn’t move, or otherwise she would meet her demise at the feline claws before her.

“King Caesar,” Nami whispers quietly, “Rise and awaken, for Your People seek your help at our time of need!” Still on her knees, the princess sings an ancient hymn, passed down from generation to generation of the royal bloodline. A song to summon King Caesar from his slumber. Black Moth, impatient and irritated, emanates a deep rumble, displaying her thinning patience with her song. As she comes to a close, a disturbance catches the mammalian’s attention. Another explosion, vaster than the previous one, showers sparks and boulders into the coastal waters of Okinawa. An epic roar booms from a distance. King Caesar has awakened. For Black Moth, this pleases her greatly. Now she may settle the matter and needs no use for her hostage anymore.

With a casual swipe, the mix-mash hybrid flings Princess Nami across the shore, crashing hard against the soft sands. While far from having lethal injuries, she suffers from several minor fractures and joint pains. As the Okinawans, including that of the High Priest, take her away from the inevitable battlefield and flee further inland. The sight of this angers the mighty golem shisa. These people he vowed to protect, as he is their king. His ears perk up and his ruby eyes shine brightly in the mist of the clouds of dust. In a single bound, he crashes into the body of water with his feet, then charges towards the winged abomination as his legs part the salt water before him with crashing waves.

She stands on her hind legs as a form of animalistic intimidation, showing off her impressive height. The roar of a lion echoes from her maw, ready to take on the challenger she yearns to face. Without a moment’s notice, the Azumi deity collides with the byproduct of freakish science. Black Moth claws into the shisa’s rocky flesh, only for his strength to continuously increase. With a series of heaves, King Caesar shoves against the winged mammal across the white sands to the inland terrain. Beating her wings, Black Moth kicks up the loose dirt and sand into the air as she tries to sustain aerial mobility. Scraping talons across rock and flesh, the lion-beast frees herself by manically slashing and whipping her tail, which surprisingly flinches the stone giant and grants her access to the air.

Taken aback by the golem’s reaction, Black Moth devises a strategy. From the ground, King Caesar, his ears now floppy, focuses his attention on her, not letting her out of his sight. Circling around him like a vulture waiting for the death of its prey, the aerial feline scans for a weak point to exploit. Despite his material being comprised of stone, gems and various minerals and metals, his outer body show no signs of exposed joints to sever the tendons, leaving only one option open to her.

His eyes.

With this revelation in mind, Black Moth tucks her wings in and dive-bombs her way directly towards King Caesar. She sees him preparing to strike, but she keeps soaring in his general direction. Before she came into his range of attack, Black Moth unfolds her feathery wings. The wind force against her wings slows her aerial momentum drastically, giving her enough time to see the leaping dog-beast plummet to the earth below, failing to grasp her legs to pull her down with him. As King Caesar crashes on his two feet, Black Moth made her descent and tried to gouge out his ruby eyes with her wailing talons. The mighty shisa repels the flurry of claws with his stone hands, shielding his face from harm. Chipping away at his rocky flesh, Black Moth eagerness to tear the jewel-like eyes from their sockets overcomes her. However, in a swift motion, King Caesar frees his other arm and jabs the lion-beast in the gut, resulting in a roaring pain that echoes across the land.

Before Black Moth could recover from the agony, a sudden roundhouse kick slams against her face and mane, nearly cricking her neck out of place. Her body skids across dirt while she moans with pain, uprooting the trees and shrubbery and kicking up a cloud of dust as her body drags on the ground. Picking up her aching body, spitting out the unnecessary dirt and flapping her wings to reorient herself, she cracks her neck back into place. She knew there was no time to readjust herself, as the titanic golem is charging straight for her. Acting on instinct, she kicks up soil, fauna and dust with her hind legs and beating wings to create a shroud that will hide her.

King Caesar stops dead in his tracks as the haze of leftover dirt particles consume him. His eyes are virtually immune and have no irritation from the dirt itself, yet his vision is hindered with the thick brown cloud. To compromise for the lack of sight, his floppy ears perk up once more. With enhanced hearing, he would be sure to know if she was on the move. As the dirty fog died cleared, his ears heard nothing; neither did his eyes. The threat vanished. The golem shisa scans the horizon in a swift three-hundred and sixty degree turnaround, only to notice a shadowy blotch on the ground. Realizing the tactic too late, King Caesar darts his attention to the skies above to see exactly what he thought. The winged feline, now booming a lion’s bellow upon eye contact, lunges at him from the sky.

The first part of Black Moth to firmly imprint on King Caesar’s face were her talons, doing precisely as she planned. Planting her paw on his face, her claws dig into the eye sockets, extracting the ruby orb in all its glimmering glory. A painful roar emits from the Okinawan deity’s mouth, revealing a glimpse of the inner-workings of his cranium; a gleaming sky bluish light from an even greater gem laid within his skull. In records past, this gem was used to bounce the plasma and energy of a large variety of projectile attacks, even from the likes of Godzilla’s radioactive laser, after being absorbed through one of his eyes then out the other. Tossing the eyeball aside, Black Moth was almost fixated on its beauty, but soon realized the errors of her ways as King Caesar’s broken hands strike her sides. The ensuing sound of the impacts resonated like shotguns firing, mercilessly pounding at her serum-enhanced body. Unable to tolerate the pain, she backs off and creates distance between them. As the one-eyed King Caesar rises to his feet, Black Moth readies herself for another lethal strike.

Her observations take note on King Caesar’s condition post-eye removal; unlike organic animals, which suffer from a sense of imbalance and sensory deprivation, the golem seems to be perfectly capable of using one eye in the place of two. King Caesar is unlike any creature or mecha on the planet, so its ability to feel pain and yet adapt to missing jewels and limbs with relative ease confused her. But now is not the time to ponder for her. Both of the mammalian kaiju charges for each other; King Caesar treks through the landscape, and Black Moth hovering above the ground. The guardian hero would vanquish the threat by way of penetrating through her body with his whatever if left of his fist, tearing her apart from within. Black Moth fully intended to remove King Caesar’s scalp and the gem that lies within through the eye socket.

There is no turning back for either of them now. The two close the gap between them, awaiting to see whose demise will befall them.

In the split second they meet, Black Moth shoves her forearm into King Caesar’s socket. As she firmly grasps the shining crystal, her air speed tears the inorganic organ and the rest of King Caesar’s cranium along with it, revealing the workings of a metal endoskeleton and various other jewels not seen on the surface.

King Caesar simultaneously gutted the lion’s chest, essentially allowing the stone arm to rip her wide open, pouring gallons of red blood and gray organs.

As the two monsters passed, they both immediately collapsed from their mortal injuries. A nearly headless King Caesar and a disemboweled Black Moth would be all that remain for the people of Okinawa to see upon their return. They would mourn and praise King Caesar for the rest of eternity, as he valiantly gave his life to protect his people from all threats, no matter who it was.