Chapter 49
Captain Matt Williams rushed forward, elf prisoner at his side, while Lieutenant Soto piloted her exo mecha behind them. Lyndis likely chafed at the slow pace, but Matt silently applauded her restraint. They hadn’t heard back from First Sergeant Cabral’s detachment during the expected contact window, and it had everyone on edge.
The three of them had been with the vehicles in the back, but a report from the infantry leading the column had come in reporting that some soldiers were engaging some kind of monster, and Matt had decided he needed to see what was going on for himself.
As Matt was in the process of climbing out of the tank, keeping the elf prisoner in front of him when a brilliant stream of fire burst into the sky. Matt hadn’t been close enough to see exactly what happened, but the reports coming in over the radio said something about the monster breathing fire.
Matt preferred to trust his men, but animals didn’t just spontaneously breathe fire. As Matt and the other commanders reached the front of the column, elf in tow, he had a better idea of what was happening. A squad of soldiers was busy engaging some kind of flying evolved creature. Something with a snake head and neck, bird wings, and a bear’s body flew through the air, shrieking and roaring in response to the incoming gunfire.
A few hundred meters down the road, a church building was in the process of burning down, a swath of grass had been turned to cinders and ash. Two corpses lay in the fire’s path, one of them wearing the scorched and melted remnants of an American military uniform.
Matt directed his attention to the engagement between his infantrymen and the flying creature. After observing for a moment, he decided to join the fray. “I’m going to use a taunt ability and make it attack me. Be sure not to shoot me, but go ahead and unload on it when it comes down to land,” he called. Then he triggered two abilities, [Heroic Taunt] and [Inspiration].
The effect was almost instantaneous. The creature had been flapping its wings, gaining altitude, and flying away from Matt. As he triggered the abilities, the beast emitted a deep roar, shaking the ground and the nearby trees. It turned, tucking its wings and diving toward him, long serpentine neck extended towards him.
At the same time, the sporadic gunfire from the men who’d engaged the creature seemed to grow more accurate and focused, as though the men had considerable experience taking down flying threats together and were thinking in concert.
The beast got closer and closer, seemingly acknowledging that this would be a pyrrhic victory as it suffered continued damage from the soldiers. As the monster drew closer, Matt noticed it was bleeding from a terrible wound on its ass. Matt never would have guessed the first spurting ass wound he encountered would be on a flying bear.
The blood that splattered across the ground sizzled and smoked, charring the individual blades of grass it came in contact with. Only Matt’s enhanced senses allowed him to notice that many details while maintaining enough focus on the creature to notice when its neck contracted, rearing back. Some sixth sense had him dropping to the ground, getting out of the way.
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The Chimera hadn’t expected the move and unleashed a breath of fire directly at the spot he’d been standing. It would seem the monster didn’t have snake parts, but dragon ones instead. A dragon bear with a damn spurting ass wound. If the situation wasn’t so dangerous, Matt would have likely been rolling on the ground laughing. Instead, he realized how serious the situation was as the fire breath turned the outer armor layer of Soto’s exo-mecha cherry red.
It was a good thing the armor had been designed to withstand modern plasma anti-tank rounds and included a mesh cooling layer to keep Lyndis from cooking alive inside the suit. Knowing that allowed Matt to turn his full attention on the dragon Chimera. The squad of infantry was still engaging the monster, and Matt triggered [Breach the Defenses], which he knew from experience lowered the defensive abilities of his target. He doubted that was the full intended purpose of that ability since it came from his [Seigebreaker] advanced class, and it cost huge amounts of his relatively large stamina pool.
As soon as he triggered the ability, one of the monster’s wing bones snapped under a lucky round that finally found its intended target and the monster fell from the air, shrieking in pain on the way. Matt rushed forward, triggering a final ability, [Touch of the Icy (Redacted)], which he still didn’t fully understand, but he knew it would take from his mostly full mana pool instead of his dangerously low stamina pool, and it would kill the creature if anything he had access to would kill the fucking thing.
As soon as he touched the Chimera, it started smoking, turning to ash almost instantaneously. Now that the fight was over, Matt turned his concentration back to other things. Lyndis would be okay, as the system-enhanced exo-mecha could likely take even more punishment than the pre-system version engineers ever dreamed of.
The squad of soldiers that’d engaged the Chimera originally were checking each other for wounds and counting ammo, so Matt turned his focus to the charred corpse in the yard before the church. Knowing that the flying monster had likely killed it recently, rather than the corpse belonging to a civilian veteran who’d died trying to hunt the beast made him reconsider his earlier conclusions.
Sure enough, the soldier’s dog tags identified him as one of the members of the first armored company who’d been assigned to head out with First Sergeant Cabral. Now Matt was doubly interested. Something must have happened to Cabral’s detachment, and some of the soldiers had managed to make it this far before being killed by the Chimera’s fire breath.
Matt stood and glanced around. He would have liked to be able to put the fire out and investigate the church, but that just wasn’t happening now. The building was already burning quite brightly, and no professional fire trucks were coming to back them up. Instead, he ordered the element to camp here for the night, intending to investigate the charred ruins in the morning. Besides, if any more of Cabral’s detachment made it here, Matt wanted the main force to be able to respond quickly to any intel they could get.
For a moment, Matt’s stomach dropped, realizing he’d completely forgotten about the elf prisoner during the fight, but he was reassured when he spotted her gazing at the burning building. Until someone from the First Sergeant’s detachment returned, he couldn’t be certain about the intel she’d provided, but the fact that she hadn’t tried to escape while he’d had his back turned bought no small amount of trust.
It seemed nothing had really gone as planned that day, and Matt would have quite the mystery waiting to be solved in the morning, but for tonight, there wasn’t much else he could do that couldn’t be done better by someone else, so he decided to finish the night with dinner and another planning meeting. With such a powerful monster in the area, they would need to plan out options for the attack that included dealing with powerful mutated monsters and flying threats.