Chapter 171 Dragon Ain’t Shit

The impact of three hundred feet of prehistoric muscle and armored bone tore the outer stone breakwater into millions of pulverized granite shards.

A forty-foot wall of green seawater and white foam blasted upward into the afternoon sky, crashing down over the docks and soaking Staff Sergeant Wyatt Callahan’s tank in salt spray, shattered shell fragments, and foul-smelling black blood that sizzled against the hot armor plating.

Inside the Abrams, the vibration felt like driving over a landmine.

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Callahan coughed, popping his hatch open three inches to clear the acrid smell of burnt hydraulic fluid and propellant. "Karr, load sabot! Loader, keep that ready rack unlatched!"

Through the settling mist of sea water and drifting grey smoke, Callahan raised his binoculars and peered out at the shattered seawall three hundred yards away.

The colossal red dragon lay half-submerged in the churned surf. Its left wing was mangled, pinned beneath massive granite slabs it had shattered during the fall. Thick, dark blood poured from its pulverized leg and shredded wing joint, turning the water in the cove into a bubbling, crimson soup.

"Is it done?" Karr asked over the intercom, his hands still trembling against the control yoke. "Did we crack it?"

"Hell no, it ain’t done," Callahan growled, his knuckles white against the rim of his hatch. "Look at the head!"

Rising out of the rubble, the monster’s colossal horned skull snapped upward.

Driven by the ancient imperial control spike buried between its eyes, Ignisrax had no concept of surrender. The violet crystal spike strobed with blinding, violent electricity, forcing the creature’s nervous system past the limits of mortal agony. Its jaws parted, exposing rows of serrated, dagger-like teeth coated in black slime.

It planted its massive front claws into the stone, gouging deep trenches into the solid rock as it dragged its immense bulk out of the water.

Its slit eyes, which had flickered with dimming life only seconds before, suddenly reignited into blinding white spheres of pure, unadulterated hatred.

"Tower, this is Reaper-Lead, visual on target," a panicked voice crackled through the battalion tactical net. "Warning to all ground units! The target is exhibiting an extreme localized thermal buildup! Radiated core temperature is spiking past two thousand degrees and climbing fast! Clear the waterfront immediately!"

"All units, fall back from Pier Three!" the radio net blared. "Fall back to secondary defensive line Bravo! It’s going critical!"

Ignisrax inhaled.

The air across the entire harbor basin suddenly distorted, shimmering under an invisible dome of terrifying heat. The oxygen was literally sucked out of the immediate vicinity, making it impossible for Callahan to draw a clean breath through his open hatch. On the front slope of his Abrams, the heavy green CARC paint began to blister, peel, and smoke from three hundred yards away.

"Driver, reverse! Get us behind that warehouse wall right now!" Callahan yelled, slamming his hatch shut and locking the dogs.

The tank’s tracks spun against the slick, wet cobblestones, the turbine engine screaming as it fought for traction to pull sixty-eight tons of steel backward.

Before the tank could clear the corner of the brick warehouse, the rhythmic, heavy thumping of twin turboshaft engines tore through the smoke from the west.

Two AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopters dropped over the coastal ridge, skimming barely thirty feet above the terracotta rooftops of Port Solis. Their Longbow radar domes, mounted high above the main rotor masts, tracked the thrashing leviathan on the rocks with cold, digital precision.

"Ugly Zero-One to ground forces, stay clear of the splash zone," the flight lead, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Garrett Cole, transmitted over the radio. His voice was completely steady, stripped of all emotion by years of combat flight. "Target is designated: cranial junction. We are going to sever the nervous system. Ripple fire Hellfires, follow up with thirty-mike-mike."

Inside the front seat of lead helicopter Ugly Zero-One, the co-pilot gunner flipped the master arm switch and squeezed the weapons release on his cyclic grip.

Under the stubby weapon pylons of the lead Apache, four AGM-114R Hellfire II missiles dropped from their rails and ignited their solid-rocket motors in rapid succession.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The four laser-guided missiles left thick plumes of white smoke, skimming ten feet above the surface of the harbor water before pitching upward in a steep top-attack profile. Their optical seekers were locked onto the tiny, flickering infrared dot Cole was painting squarely over the glowing purple spike in the center of the dragon’s forehead.

Ignisrax sensed the incoming projectiles. It snapped its jaws shut, thrashing its neck in a desperate bid to unleash its thermal purge into the air.

Too late.

The first Hellfire struck the beast’s upper snout at Mach 1.3.

BOOM!

The reinforced high-explosive warhead detonated on impact, tearing away three feet of armored snout, shattering both nostrils, and shearing off half of the creature’s upper jaw in a blinding eruption of red fire and pulverized bone.

The second Hellfire arrived less than half a heartbeat later, penetrating directly into the crater left by the first explosion.

It struck the imperial control spike dead center.

KABOOOOOOOM!

The shaped-charge warhead focused thousands of pounds of pressure inward, punching straight through the creature’s reinforced cranial plate and detonating inside its brain cavity.

The purple control crystal shattered into a cloud of harmless static sparks. The dragon’s entire head snapped violently backward, the massive shockwave blowing a ten-foot hole through the back of its skull and tearing away scales as large as riot shields.

The third and fourth Hellfires slammed back-to-back into the exposed base of the neck, completely severing the creature’s primary spinal column and blasting chunks of charred, smoking flesh sixty feet into the air.

Ignisrax’s colossal body went totally, unnaturally rigid.

Its tail, thick as an ancient oak trunk, whipped around in one final, violent death spasm. The jagged tail club smashed clean through a stack of three steel shipping containers on the edge of the pier, crumpling the reinforced steel like empty soda cans before splashing heavily into the bloody surf.

The second Apache slid into a stable hover fifty yards out, its nose pointing down at the twitching carcass.

The chin-mounted M230 30mm chain gun locked onto the ruined stump of the neck.

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!

The gunner walked a rhythmic burst of sixty high-explosive dual-purpose rounds through the remaining tissue, chewing through bone and muscle with mechanical, relentless precision. The heavy rounds exploded with dull thuds, ensuring the primordial core inside the beast’s chest could never reignite.

Slowly, the blinding white heat radiating from the creature’s body began to fade.

The glowing embers in its throat sputtered and went black. Its remaining slit eye clouded over, turning a milky, lifeless grey as the colossal horned head collapsed face-down into the pulverized granite of the breakwater.

A final, rattling hiss of boiling steam escaped from its ruined throat, drifting across the harbor before thinning out into the cool ocean wind.

The tyrant of Mount Caelum was dead.

Silence descended over Port Solis, broken only by the steady chop-chop-chop of the Apaches banking back toward the military airfield and the distant crackle of burning timbers along the docks.

Inside his Abrams, Callahan exhaled slowly, pushing his hatch open once more and stepping up into the cool air. The smell of copper, burnt rubber, and sulfur hung thick over the water.

Karr popped his head out of the gunner’s hatch, his face pale beneath streaks of dark soot, staring open-mouthed at the smoking mountain of crimson scales lying broken across the seawall.

"Holy shit..." Karr whispered, his voice trembling as he wiped sweat from his chin. "Tell me the locals don’t have a whole herd of those things."

Callahan pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his body armor, his gloved fingers shaking just enough to make the lighter click three times before catching. He took a long, slow drag, looking out at the dead leviathan, then eastward toward the dark, jagged passes of the Dragonspine Mountains.

"We just killed a dragon..."