Drakon's mid-air tumble succeeded. The violent, spinning centrifugal force ripped Lucius from the beast's back, sending him free-falling toward the coastal edge of New Kong.
Lucius hit the pavement hard, rolling to absorb the momentum just as Drakon crashed into the heavy steel railings bordering the ocean, mere blocks from the towering, illuminated Ferris wheel.
The beast didn't stay down. Drakon rose, his impossibly elongated neck snapping forward to plunge into the churning seawater. He began to frantically gobble the water, his throat muscles working in massive, gulping spasms.
Lucius pushed himself up from the cracked asphalt. He watched the massive, sac-like appendage at Drakon's throat begin to dangerously expand. A sickly, yellow-green gas began to hiss and escape from between the creature's serrated teeth.
Drakon reared his head back to unleash a catastrophic acidic shower over the street, but Sol arrived.
Flying in low and fast over the water, Sol drove a full-force uppercut directly under Drakon's jaw. The kinetic impact snapped the beast's head up and tripped him backward, his massive tail flailing for balance.
Sol looped back for a second strike, but Drakon was already retaliating. Facing the sky, the beast released a geyser of pressurized, superheated acid. The caustic spray forced Sol to sharply pull away to avoid being melted.
With Sol out of the way, Drakon's head snapped back down, locking his reptilian eyes onto Lucius. The beast opened his jaws.
Lucius sprinted. He lunged behind an abandoned truck just as the torrent of acid hit. The car didn't hold; the metal frame began to instantly slag and melt, the chassis dissolving into a puddle of bubbling chemical fire. But those two seconds of cover were all Lucius needed.
He smoothly broke the cylinder, dumped his spent casings, and reloaded the Lord with three fresh rounds. He dashed out from the melting ruins of the car, dropped into a slide, and fired two rapid shots directly into Drakon's expanded neck sac.
The heavy bullets didn't pierce the thick hide, but the concussive vibrations rippled through the beast's throat, choking off the acid attack. Drakon shrieked—a silent, vibrating tremor—spread his massive wings, and took back to the sky.
He didn't make it far. Sol had already circled back. Coming in with blistering velocity, Sol delivered a devastating double-punch squarely to the side of Drakon's face. The beast's skull cracked, and his massive body careened sideways.
But as Drakon fell, his tail whipped upward like a felled redwood. The bone-protruding appendage slammed into Sol, knocking the hero out of the sky and sending him rocketing backward, deep into the dense, skyscraper-filled center of the city.
Furious and running purely on the feral instincts of the morph, Drakon abandoned Lucius. He flapped his wings, chasing after Sol into the concrete jungle.
---
Sol managed to right himself mid-air, but Drakon was suddenly right above him, releasing another indiscriminate torrent of acid. Sol got partially doused—his uniform smoking as the edges of it began to singe and melt—forcing him to dive erratically toward an intersection.
Drakon, completely out of control, crashed blindly into a towering office building.
The impact gave Sol a brief moment of distance, but Drakon no longer cared about pain. The beast tore himself free from the wreckage, snapping his jaws and spraying his caustic breath in every direction.
The acid washed over the support columns of a neighboring high-rise. The steel dissolved like sugar in hot tea. The building groaned, tilting ominously toward the street where Miguel, the NCC, and the remaining heroes were fighting.
Sol rushed in. He caught the collapsing building, his boots shattering the asphalt as he took the weight of thousands of tons of concrete and steel onto his shoulders, desperately trying to keep it from falling onto the people below.
He was entirely exposed.
Drakon twisted in the air and whipped his tail again. The blow caught Sol squarely in the chest, driving him backward through the building he was holding up. Sol shattered through the lobby, bursting out the back wall, and was carried by the sheer momentum through three more adjacent buildings, leaving a line of devastating, structural craters in his wake.
Lucius was already tracking them on foot, sprinting tirelessly through the debris-littered streets, trying to catch up to the sheer vertical speed of the fight.
Sol lay trapped in the rubble of the fourth building, his vision swimming, struggling to push a massive concrete slab off his legs.
Drakon landed heavily against the side of the structure, his claws sinking deep into the masonry. His massive reptilian eye peered through the jagged hole Sol had created. Drakon's throat expanded, pulling back to flood the enclosed space with a concentrated blast of acid.
From the sky, Lucius came down.
He had scaled a neighboring rooftop and leaped. In his hands, he held a long, sheared steel pole with a massive chunk of solid concrete still fused to the bottom. Falling like a meteor, Lucius swung the makeshift hammer with every ounce of his momentum, smashing it directly into Drakon's ugly mug.
The concrete shattered. The beast was ripped from the side of the building, crashing down into the street below.
Lucius was in freefall, dropping toward the adjacent roof. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a figure creeping out of the shadows toward Sol's exposed position in the rubble. Lucius couldn't alter his trajectory. He hit the rooftop and rolled.
Inside the building, Sol finally pushed the slab off his legs and prepared to fly out.
Then, the world shattered inside his own head.
It wasn't external sound. It was targeted, concussive sonic waves, vibrating directly against his eardrums and skull. Sol was driven violently to his knees. He clawed at his ears as blood began to freely stream from his ear canals, his eyes, and his nose. The agonizing frequency scrambled his equilibrium, making it impossible for him to turn, impossible to see where the puppet master was hiding.
---
Down on the street, the silence was still absolute, but the chaos was deafening to the eyes.
Drakon had crashed right into the perimeter the NCC was trying to secure. The tactical officers immediately opened fire, their muzzle flashes lighting up the smoke, though the gunshots made no sound.
Nearby, Miguel had Kane pinned. The massive spider-morph was battered, swarmed by Legion's relentless clones, and Miguel wasn't playing anymore. He grabbed Kane by the throat, his hands glowing with blinding, white-hot thermal energy. He poured the heat directly into the thick bio-chitin armor, melting the villain's neck joint as he desperately tried to rip his head clean off.
Aegis, nursing a splitting headache from Sol's earlier knockout blow, had just pulled himself off a nearby rooftop. The ceremonial hero in white hovered down from the smoke, his public-relations drones buzzing uselessly around him as he tried to get a clear visual of the downed wyvern.
Drakon recovered first. The beast snapped his jaws upward and unleashed a hyper-pressurized geyser of acid directly at the floating hero.
Aegis tried to command his drones into a defensive shield, but it was useless. The caustic liquid blasted the drones out of the air, washing over the hero's pristine white armor. The ceramic plating instantly slagged. Aegis thrashed in the silent air, his mouth open in a soundless, agonizing scream as the pressurized liquid melted his high-tech armor directly into his flesh, dissolving him from the sky.
Drakon turned his massive head toward the NCC officers, throat expanding to vaporize the entire perimeter.
Lucius arrived, sprinting into the open street. He fired his third and final round from the cylinder, a perfectly placed shot from the Lord digging directly into Drakon's neck sac.
The beast snapped his jaws shut, turning his furious gaze away from the NCC and locking entirely onto the man who had shot him. Drakon lunged, his jaws snapping inches from Lucius's back.
Lucius vaulted over the hood of an armored NCC vehicle, weaving through the silent, flashing lights. He sprinted directly toward Miguel. As Miguel finally blew Kane's armored neck apart in a shower of boiling blood and molten chitin, Lucius smoothly shoved him out of the way.
Miguel turned, fists raised to fight, but seeing it was Lucius, he let him pass.
Lucius didn't break stride. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he broke the Lord open. Three smoking brass casings hit the asphalt. He thumbed three fresh rounds into the cylinder, snapping it shut in a single, fluid motion just as Drakon barreled through the space they had occupied.
Drakon crushed the NCC vehicles into flat sheets of metal before catching his balance and launching himself back into the air to pursue Lucius.
As Drakon swept low over the street, Lucius timed it perfectly. He leaped, grabbing onto the beast's massive, scaly leg, letting Drakon carry him upward.
Drakon thrashed, twisting violently in the air to shake the human off. As they flew past the massive, jagged hole in the building where Sol was currently bleeding from his eyes, Lucius leveled the Lord and fired a single shot squarely into Drakon's eye.
The beast shrieked and flinched hard, jerking his massive body in a sharp, evasive turn toward the building.
Lucius let go.
Using the beast's sudden momentum, Lucius launched himself off the dragon's leg, sailing directly through the hole in the wall and landing perfectly in a forward sprint across the ruined office floor.
He didn't slow down. He didn't even turn his head. As he sprinted past the shadowy figure of the man—who was standing over the agonizingly paralyzed Sol—Lucius simply raised his gun arm to the side and pulled the trigger.
The heavy bullet caught him perfectly in the temple. The puppet master's head was obliterated in a shower of crimson.
Instantly, the vacuum of the silence zone shattered.
Sound flooded back into the world with the physical force of a tidal wave. The wail of police sirens, the roar of burning buildings, the screams of civilians, and the grinding crunch of settling concrete all crashed into Lucius's ears at once.
Lucius hit the opposite side of the building and leaped out the window.
He dropped three stories, landing hard on the flat roof of a smaller adjacent structure. With the fluidity of pure muscle memory, he dropped into a sliding rotation, spinning on his knees, aiming the Lord upward, and firing his final round as Drakon flew furiously overhead.
The chase resumed, louder now, every explosion of acid and shattering window echoing across the skyline. Lucius bounded across the rooftops, desperately trying to keep the beast away from the populated streets below.
He vaulted into the shattered window of a sleek, towering corporate high-rise, realizing too late there was no clear path to the roof.
Drakon latched onto the exterior glass of the building like a massive, demonic gecko. The beast's jaws parted, and a continuous stream of acid began washing through the interior offices, melting cubicles, computers, and load-bearing pillars as he tracked Lucius's sprint across the floor.
Lucius ran for the opposite windows. As the acid chewed through the floorboards at his heels, he prepped the Lord for its true purpose.
He broke the gun open via the top-break latch, his last three smoking casings flying out into the void. He slammed his palm against the front head of the cylinder, pushing it violently inward.
With a heavy, mechanical *CLACK-CLACK-CLACK*, the internal steel dividers of the three empty chambers retracted and collapsed, merging the three holes into one centralized, massive mega-chamber.
He loaded a single, custom-machined artillery shell into the combined chamber, snapping the gun shut to deliver the bunker-busting payload.
Lucius hit the glass and launched himself out of the skyscraper, free-falling into the open night air.
Drakon rounded the corner of the building, jaws gaping wide to swallow him whole.
Suspended in mid-air, Lucius raised the Lord. He gripped it with two hands, braced his core for the impact, and pulled the trigger.
The sound was apocalyptic. After an hour of eerie silence, the explosive roar of the mega-chamber didn't just pierce the night; it murdered it. The recoil was a catastrophic force, a localized thunderstrike that rocketed Lucius violently backward through the air until he crashed spine-first into a massive, illuminated billboard.
The artillery shell struck Drakon directly in his remaining eye. It punched deep into the skull casing and detonated.
The internal explosion blew a geyser of black blood and bone fragments out the side of the beast's head. Half-blind, brain-damaged, and bleeding out, Drakon lost his altitude, drifting low over the skyline.
He was flying blindly, directly toward the glowing neon rings of the Ferris wheel and the crowds of evacuated civilians gathered near the water.
Lucius peeled his battered body out of the shattered metal of the billboard. He timed his drop, landing squarely on the crown of Drakon's massive, bleeding head.
There was no time to reload again. Lucius holstered his weapon. He grabbed the thick, bony ridges of the dragon's skull with his left hand, anchored himself, and began to pummel the beast with his bare right fist.
He hit him with everything he had left. A relentless, savage barrage of knuckles against scales, driving the beast's head lower and lower. Left, right, hammering the skull until his knuckles split and bled.
Under the sheer, blunt-force trauma, Drakon finally lost consciousness.
The massive beast plummeted, hitting the coastal street like a derailed freight train. The impact tore up hundreds of feet of asphalt, throwing cars aside as the enormous body slid, grinding against the concrete in a shower of sparks, before finally coming to a halt less than fifty yards from the base of the Ferris wheel.
---
When the NCC perimeter units and the local news crews finally pushed through the smoke to secure the waterfront, the camera lenses captured it perfectly.
The flashing red and blue strobes of the emergency vehicles cut through the settling dust, illuminating the massive, scaled head of the defeated wyvern.
Resting casually against the beast's snout was Lucius.
He sat on the cracked pavement, one knee drawn up, his other leg stretched out lazily before him. His clothes were singed, his knuckles bloody, and his chest heaved with exhaustion, his battered hand draped effortlessly across his knee. Surrounded by the wreckage of a broken city, bathed in the sharp, chaotic lights of the sirens, he didn't look like a man who had just survived a war.
He looked like the man who had won it.
---
To Be Continued