Connors had now completely mutated into a terrifying creature in Godzilla form—the attack on Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant had caused shockwaves far greater than the damage it inflicted on the reactor shells.
Almost the instant its giant claws, covered in dark, heavy keratinous scales, tore through the first Containment Shell, US spy satellites high above the stratosphere transmitted the captured abnormal thermal signatures and ground-vibration data through encrypted channels to Fort Meade National Reconnaissance Office Headquarters in Maryland.
Within minutes, the preliminarily analyzed intelligence summary pierced Washington D.C.'s midnight calm like an icy steel needle, reaching the Pentagon's war room, the White House's underground emergency Command Center, and US Forces Japan Headquarters at Yokota Air Force Base in Tokyo.
Tony Stark, the technological titan who protected New York as Iron Man, learned of the news almost simultaneously.
J.A.R.V.I.S.'s highly efficient global information-monitoring network detected the sudden spike in encrypted traffic across US Forces Japan communications channels, as well as the abrupt flood of blurry images and written accounts filled with extreme panic appearing across civilian networks around Fukushima.
When a real-time image transmitted by a high-altitude drone—an RQ-4 Global Hawk—with enough resolution to reveal the texture of every massive scale on the monster's body was projected onto the screen in Tony's private lab, he sucked in a sharp breath.
On the screen, the nearly hundred-meter-tall behemoth was tearing apart the outer shell of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 with bone-chilling brute force, like peeling open a soda can.
Its enormous body moved through the ruins, kicking up smoke and dust that blotted out the sky. Every step it took triggered a dull rumble from the earth, as though the ground itself were groaning in agony.
Most unsettling of all, it seemed to have no intention of concealing