Chapter 170 Fuck It’s a Dragon

The mechanical wail of the air raid klaxons tore through the salt air of Port Solis, high and piercing enough to vibrate inside Staff Sergeant Wyatt Callahan’s skull.

On the open concrete of Pier Three, the world had descended into controlled chaos. Forklifts hauling crates of 5.56mm ammo skidded to a halt, green-clad supply personnel scrambled for reinforced bunkers beneath the old stone warehouses, and the heavy diesel engines of armored fighting vehicles coughed to life across the harbor perimeter.

Callahan stood in the open commander’s hatch of his M1A2 SEPv3 Abrams, his Nomex gloves resting on the rim of the cupola. The ninety-ton turbine engine beneath his boots hummed with a low, deep vibration that shivered through the soles of his combat boots. To his front, the wide harbor basin stretched out toward the open sea, dotted with grey Navy transports and a pair of destroyers moored against the deep-water moorings.

"Gunner, traverse right! Elevation max! Get that main gun tube up right now!" Callahan yelled down into the turret through his integrated combat helmet.

Inside the cramped, green-lit belly of the tank, Corporal Tobias Karr frantically worked the Cadillac-gage control handles. The hydraulic traverse whined in protest as the massive depleted-uranium turret pivoted smoothly toward the eastern skyline.

"Tube is elevated to maximum stops, Sarge!" Karr shouted back over the intercom, his voice tight with raw tension. "What are we tracking? The radar van was screaming about an incoming heavy, but they didn’t give a profile!"

"Look through your thermal, Karr, and tell me if I’m losing my mind," Callahan grunted, lowering his binoculars.

Through the haze over the jagged Dragonspine Mountains, something massive was ripping through the lower cloud deck.

It wasn’t a winged transport, and it wasn’t an airship. It was a living mountain of crimson scales and muscle, boasting a wingspan that easily cleared three hundred feet. Every downstroke of its leathery wings generated a rolling, thunderous boom that echoed off the granite cliffs surrounding the bay. Long trails of black, greasy smoke billowed from its nostrils, and its hide glowed like coals hauled fresh from a blast furnace.

"Holy mother of God..." Karr’s voice cracked over the wire. "Is that... a dragon? Sarge, that’s a fucking dragon!"

"I don’t give a damn if it’s the Easter Bunny!" Callahan snapped, dropping down into the hatch and hauling the heavy steel hatch shut over his head with a solid clank. "It’s hostile, it’s inbound at three hundred knots, and it’s heading straight for the fleet! Load HEAT! Lase center of mass! Move!"

Before the Abrams could align its sights, the automated defense systems of the Navy reacted.

Five hundred yards out in the channel, the USS Gravely, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, was tied to the north pier. High up on its superstructure, the white dome of the Mk 15 Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) whirred, slewing its six-barrel Gatling cannon directly onto the approaching biological contact. The fire-control computer, reading the closing speed and extreme thermal signature, classified the target as an incoming low-altitude cruise missile.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRTTT!

The muzzle of the 20mm rotary cannon turned into a solid spear of orange flame. Tungsten armor-piercing rounds surged into the sky at seventy-five rounds a second, tearing through the air with a deafening buzz that sounded like tearing canvas.

The stream of solid-core penetrators caught the dragon square across the chest and the soft joints of its left wing.

Against aluminum fuselages or carbon-fiber drones, the 20mm rounds would have chewed the airframe into confetti in half a second. But Ignisrax was an apex predator born in the molten calderas of Mount Caelum, centuries before modern man discovered gunpowder. Its scales were overlapping plates of volcanic composite and ancient mana, dense as hardened chobham armor.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-SPAT!

A blinding blizzard of white sparks exploded across the beast’s chest. Dozens of heavy slugs simply flattened against the crimson plates, ricocheting off into the harbor water in smoking skips.

The impacts didn’t penetrate, but the kinetic energy—hundreds of thousands of foot-pounds delivered in a single second—battered the creature’s nerves like a hail of sledgehammers.

Ignisrax threw its horned head back, unleashing an ear-splitting shriek of pure fury that shattered the windowpanes along the entire harbor promenade.

The beast twisted mid-air, its long, jagged tail lashing out with enough force to snap a telephone pole in two. It locked its burning, slit-pupiled eyes onto the grey hull of the destroyer.

Down in the dark hollows of its chest, an ominous orange glow flared to life, rapidly rising through its throat like liquid magma.

"Warning! Inbound thermal spike from hostile maw!" radioed Captain Orson Teague, the battery commander for the Patriot missile site situated on the coastal bluff behind the docks. "All dockside crews, scatter! Get clear of the piers!"

Ignisrax exhaled.

It wasn’t a stream of common fire; it was a pressurized, continuous torrent of molten chemical liquid, burning at over two thousand degrees Celsius. The blazing river splashed directly across the north pier, engulfing two commercial cargo cranes and a reinforced concrete fuel bunker.

The steel beams of the cranes didn’t just bend—they glowed yellow and melted, sagging into the churning water like wax under a blowtorch. The concrete dock cracked, vaporizing the sea water in the basin and producing a blinding cloud of superheated steam that blistered the uniforms of Marines scrambling behind secondary blast walls fifty yards away.

"We need heavy ordnance on target right now!" Teague yelled into his tactical handset, coughing through the sudden heat that swept over his command van. "Patriot launcher two, fire! Engage direct profile! Don’t let it turn toward the troop transports!"

On the coastal bluff, the hydraulic erectors of Patriot Launcher Two slammed forward.

WHOOOOOSH!

A PAC-3 hit-to-kill missile erupted from its canister in an ear-shattering explosion of propellant, kicking up a blinding wall of sand and exhaust smoke. The missile climbed twenty feet, pitched over horizontally, and went supersonic within a quarter of a mile.

At this close range, the missile’s millimeter-wave radar seeker was blinded by the surface clutter of the water, but the dragon’s colossal body was impossible to miss.

The PAC-3 slammed directly into the meat of Ignisrax’s left hind leg.

BOOOOOOM!

A concussive shockwave rippled outward, flattening the canvas tents on the docks and sending a sheet of sea spray twenty feet into the air. The warhead’s lethality ring detonated, blowing a six-foot crater of shattered crimson scales and muscle clean out of the dragon’s flank.

Boiling, acidic blood sprayed across the stone pier, hissing and eating into the asphalt with dense, yellow smoke.

The dragon shrieked, its aerodynamic balance violently broken. Its massive wings flailed, but the left leg hung limp, trailing smoking tissue.

"Direct hit!" Callahan bellowed, his eye glued to the commander’s independent thermal viewer. "Karr! Take the wing root! Send it!"

Inside the turret, Karr squeezed the double triggers of the gunner’s control yoke.

CRACK-BOOM!

The 120mm smoothbore cannon recoiled violently on its hydraulic cylinders, the breechblock slamming back with a sharp mechanical clatter as it tossed an empty shell casing into the spent-brass basket.

The M830A1 High Explosive Anti-Tank round crossed the four-hundred-yard gap in a fraction of a second. The round struck the base of the dragon’s left wing where the joint met the massive spinal ridge.

The shaped-charge warhead triggered on contact. A focused jet of molten copper, moving at six times the speed of sound, burned through the thick cartilage and shattered the primary bone.

CRUNCH!

A sickening, wet crack echoed over the bay.

The left wing collapsed inward, its leathery membrane shredding into burning ribbons. Without lift on its port side, the three-hundred-foot beast stalled completely out of the air. It rolled inverted, clawing violently at the empty sky, before crashing down onto the granite breakwater that protected the outer harbor with the force of a falling meteor.