Chapter 172: Inspection

John Smith stepped down from the steps of the Grand Palace, flanked by Colonel Richter and a four-man security detail of Marines carrying suppressed M4A1 carbines. An open-topped JLTV was idling near the courtyard fountain, its turbo-diesel engine rumbling steadily over the cobblestones.

“Take the vehicle,” Richter suggested, adjusting the brim of his patrol cap against the late afternoon sun. “Walking the waterfront will take two hours, sir.”

“No,” John said, buttoning the cuffs of his gray tactical shirt. “I want to walk it. The men need to see command on the ground. Besides, I want to see the structural damage with my own eyes.”

Richter nodded once, falling into step beside him as they exited the palace gates and headed down the broad marble avenue leading toward the harbor district.

Everywhere they looked, the aftermath of the dragon’s raid was carved into the ancient city.

Engineers from the 133rd Mobile Construction Battalion were already hard at work. Heavy yellow bulldozers were shoving crushed stone and shattered roof tiles out of the primary supply corridors. Medical corpsmen were loading a few injured personnel onto field ambulances—mostly concussions and second-degree flash burns from the beast’s initial breath weapon.

“Give me the sitrep, Richter,” John said as they stepped over a blackened crater in the cobblestones. “What did that lizard actually cost us?”

Richter flipped open a green military binder, scanning the handwritten casualty sheets and equipment logs.

“Could’ve been a total catastrophe, sir,” Richter replied, his gravelly voice calm. “Eagle One-One is our only hull loss. Captain Sterling punched out safely five miles south of the dunes. Search and rescue already recovered him via a Jolly Green. Minor flash burns on his neck, but he’s standing and walking.”

“And on the ground?”

“Pier Two took the brunt of the fire breath,” Richter continued, pointing toward the water. “Two commercial cranes are melted into scrap. A fuel depot was breached, but damage control foam teams suppressed the fire before it touched the main JP-8 storage tanks. We lost six light utility trucks and three shipping containers filled with dry rations. Casualties: fourteen injured, zero KIA.”

John stopped at the edge of the promenade, looking down at an M1A2 Abrams tank from the 1st Armored Division.

The tank’s crew was busy scrubbing thick, black residue off the front glacis. The heavy chemical-resistant paint had blistered and peeled off like sunburned skin, leaving patches of raw steel exposed.

Staff Sergeant Ramirez, sitting on the edge of the turret, spotted John’s rank insignia and immediately hopped down, snapping a sharp salute.

“At ease, Sergeant,” John said, returning the salute with a relaxed nod. “Armor hold up?”

“She held, sir,” Ramirez said, wiping black soot from his forehead with the back of a dirty glove. “Thermal wash scorched the optics and melted the rubber track pads, but the composite armor barely noticed the heat. That 120mm HEAT round put a real dent in the bastard’s wing, though.”

“Good work on the line, Sergeant,” John said, patting the tank’s warm side skirt. “Get your vehicle refueled and rearmed. Maintenance will cycle replacement optics before midnight.”

“Hooah, Commander.”

John and Richter continued walking along the stone quay, moving past rows of armed checkpoints until they reached the outer breakwater.

The area was heavily cordoned off.

Rolls of concertina wire were stretched across the cracked granite, marked with red biohazard flags. Two dozen soldiers stood guard with rifles at the low ready, keeping back crowds of curious locals and imperial dockworkers who were staring in terrified silence from the safety of the warehouse rooftops.

John flashed his badge to the checkpoint guard, who immediately pulled aside the wire barricade.

“Watch your step, Commander,” the guard cautioned. “The rocks are slick with dragon blood. Stuff burns like battery acid.”

John climbed over a heap of shattered granite boulders, stepping onto the jagged breakwater where Ignisrax’s massive corpse lay sprawled.

Up close, the sheer scale of the creature was staggering.

The beast stretched nearly three hundred feet along the shoreline, its massive bulk resting half in the ocean surf and half on the crushed rock. The water around the carcass had turned a dark, oily crimson, bubbling gently as the dragon’s internal body heat slowly leaked into the bay.

A team of military intelligence specialists and field scientists in gray hazmat suits were swarming over the body, taking radiation readings, scraping tissue samples, and measuring the thickness of the scales with digital calipers.

John stopped near the creature’s severed head.

Even in death, Ignisrax looked monstrous. The skull was larger than a city bus, crowned with four swept-back horns that looked like petrified black wood. The upper snout was blown away, exposing rows of shattered teeth the size of shortswords. At the base of the neck, thirty-millimeter cannon rounds had chewed through the dense flesh, leaving a ragged, smoking crater of blackened bone and shattered vertebrae.

John knelt down, picking up a shard of crimson scale that had been blown off by the Hellfire strike.

It was surprisingly light, but when he pressed his combat knife against the surface and scraped with all his strength, the hardened tool steel didn’t leave a single scratch.

John walked around the snout, looking eastward toward the dark, jagged silhouette of the Dragonspine Mountains in the distance.

The sky over the interior was still clouded with the thick, artificial smoke that Viona and Leon were using to hide their remaining forces.

“How are our drone passes over the mountains?” John asked, his voice turning cold and focused.

“Still degraded by that boiling sulfur steam Viona is pumping out,” Richter replied, closing his binder. “The Ironwood Basin is completely obscured by thermal washout. But drone recon on the perimeter confirmed the imperial garrison hasn’t moved. They’re still bottled up beneath the fog.”

“Could it be that she’s involved in this attack?” he looked at Richter.

“It’s a possibility that we can take into consideration, Commander. A dragon such as this would never attack this randomly…but of course, this is just us working in an assumption. We don’t know what prompted it to attack.”

“Well, whatever the reason may be, we defeated it. Let’s take the body to research, maybe its body can be of good use to us in material sciences.”