Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(82)
Chapter 12
The fight against the Leviathan had been raging for just over an hour, but it already felt like a hundred.
The sky was full of fire. Everywhere Julius looked, dragons and jets and helicopters were shooting down the black tentacles that fell from the sky like streamers. There were actually more human aircraft than dragons now. They’d been arriving in a steady stream since the magic had dropped enough to let them fly, and not all of them were military. Between General Jackson and David, everything capable of flight for three hundred miles had been scrambled. The ones that couldn’t shoot served as spotters, helping Julius direct the rest to places where the tentacles were getting through.
“South of the river! Canadian shore of Lake Erie!” a voice shouted in Julius’s ear. “No one’s here, and that thing’s drinking the lake like a damn hose!”
“Copy,” Julius replied, looking up at Amelia. “We need someone on the Erie north shore by the river.”
“Working on it,” his sister growled, hovering on her flaming wings as tentacles shot through her. She wasn’t even bothering to burn them anymore. She was too busy coordinating the dragon half of the world’s biggest, deadliest game of Whac-A-Mole, abusing her ability to turn into pure flame to avoid having to dodge the tentacles that were constantly sailing through the air.
Julius didn’t have that luxury. He was still flesh and blood, which meant he spent most of his time dodging, blasting whatever he could while he frantically tried to keep track of everything that was going on and which locations needed help the most.
“Most” was key, because everywhere was in trouble. When they’d started this, he’d assumed that the Leviathan couldn’t be everywhere at once. After an hour of fighting, though, Julius had decided there was no practical limit to the number of tentacles that thing could produce. They literally filled the sky at times, forcing the dragons to scramble out of the way as the black appendages crashed into the lake beds to suck up whatever water was left. The less-agile human vehicles weren’t so lucky. They went down flaming when the tentacles got thick, the pilots’ voices screaming in Julius’s ears before their radios cut out.
It would have been horrific if he’d had time to process it, but there was no time for anything except the fight. They’d long since given up trying to stop every tentacle. At this point, it was simply a race to slow the Leviathan down enough for Marci to finish. He just hoped they could make it.
“Julius.”
He snatched his eyes off his AR radar display as General Jackson’s face appeared in the air to his left, looking more harried than he’d ever seen her. “We’re losing too many units,” she said. “We can’t keep up like this, so I’m pulling two squads off Lake Michigan and authorizing a bombing run on the Leviathan’s main body. I need you and the Planeswalker to pull someone in to cover their areas during the gap.”
“I don’t know if we have anyone else,” Julius said, flitting to the side just in time to avoid being hit by the flaming end of a tentacle Justin had just chomped in half. “Why are you wasting time on a bombing run anyway? Amelia already blasted that thing with enough dragon fire to melt a battleship, and it did nothing.”
“I know,” the general snapped. “But we can’t keep up with the tentacles and I’m running out of planes. If we don’t start doing some damage back, this fight is going to be over in the next ten minutes.”
Julius swallowed. He’d known things were dire, but he hadn’t realized they were that bad. “I’ll find someone to cover the gap,” he promised. “Good luck.”
But the general had already cut out. A few moments later, Julius saw the jets on his radar tracker peel off their pattern above Lake Michigan and start heading for the Leviathan.
“Fools,” Amelia snorted when he told her. “If I couldn’t burn it, no combination of metal and explosives has a chance.”
“I said the same thing,” Julius replied. “But while I agree it won’t work, the general has a point. Every tentacle we burn pops right back up, but while the Leviathan doesn’t seem to care, we’re taking real damage.” He glanced up at Justin, who was still bathing the sky in green fire despite the blood dripping through his feathers. “We can’t keep on like this. If we’re going to survive until Marci gets here, we have to find a way to start hurting it back.”
“If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m all ears,” Amelia said, the flames that made up her head flickering wildly as she watched the jets fly in. “Here we go.”
That was the only warning Julius got before the bombardment began. He barely managed to cover his ears in time before a halo of white light filled the sky as multiple magical warheads struck the Leviathan’s carapace. The force wave hit him a second later, sending him tumbling through the air. He caught himself with his wings just before he crashed into a toppled building, clutching the wreckage with his claws for balance as he watched, breathless, to see if the attack had had any effect.
When the smoke cleared, his heart sank. It was hard to see in the dark, but it didn’t look as though the fighters’ bombs had been any more effective than Amelia’s fire. The bottom of the Leviathan was still a solid wall of shiny black, smooth and impenetrable.
For the first time since he’d taken off, Julius began to feel truly hopeless. They couldn’t hurt it. They must have burned thousands of tentacles by now, and it didn’t seem to have changed a thing. The lakes were almost gone. People were dead. Only a few dragons were down, but that number was bound to rise as more of the UN forces were destroyed or forced to drop out. It didn’t matter how hard they fought—they were failing, and there was nothing he could do about it. If Marci didn’t come through soon, they would all die up here. He would die, and he wouldn’t even get to apologize to her for failing. He couldn’t even tell her goodb—