Chapter 165: Countermeasure

Leon coughed, spitting a thick clot of crimson into the churning muck beside his knee. Every breath felt like jagged glass grinding against his cracked ribs. His legendary greatsword lay snapped in the mud a few paces away, its dark steel smoking.

"Stop yelling at the sky," Leon wheezed, his rough voice scraping in his dry throat. "They aren’t going to show their faces, Viona. They don’t have to."

Viona dropped to her knees in the mud beside him. Her immaculate white gown was completely destroyed, blackened by soot and soaked with cold river water. The golden halo of divine illusion around her had collapsed, showing her pale, dirt-streaked face.

"They dropped four tons of iron without even breaking the cloud deck!" she gasped, her hands trembling as she pressed a weak healing palm against his dented breastplate. "How are they finding us? The canopy here is dense ironwood. The leaves are thick enough to block high-tier scouting birds. How do they see through it?!"

"Think," Leon grunted through gritted teeth, pushing her hand away to save her mana. "You said that kid... Ayanokoji... told you about how their weapons work. What did he say about their flying machines? How do their eyes actually work?"

Viona swallowed hard, forcing her panicked thoughts to slow down. She recalled the late-night interrogations in the royal dungeons before she had sent the vanguard to the coast.

"He said... they don’t look with true eyes," Viona muttered, her eyes darting across the smoldering crater. "They use two kinds of vision. One is just like a bird’s eye, using lenses made of glass to see light and color. But the other... it sees heat. Warmth."

Leon’s single amber eye locked onto hers. "Warmth?"

"Yes," Viona said, the pieces clicking together in her mind. "He said their machines see the warmth of living blood. When a man breathes, when a camp builds a cooking fire, or when a horse sweats, they shine like torches on their glass boards. The colder the world is around them, the brighter the warmth glows."

Leon let out a dry, rattling chuckle that turned into a painful wince.

"Then we’ve been handing them torches in the pitch black," Leon rasped. "This whole valley is freezing rock and wet mud. The moment you flare your golden core, or a fire is lit under a tent, we light up like a beacon on their glass boards."

He grabbed a handful of cold river mud and smeared it over his neck and face.

"So we take their eyes away," Leon said, pointing a muddy finger toward the river and the shattered rock walls. "Can you boil the water? Can you choke this whole gorge with steam and fire?"

"I am an archmage, Leon," Viona breathed, a spark of desperate arrogance returning to her eyes. "I can crack the earth’s veins."

"Then do it," Leon commanded, hauling himself up against the stone wall until he was on his feet. "Boil the river. Crack the volcanic fissures below the riverbed and flood this entire canyon floor with boiling mist. Saturate the air with hot steam. Make the ground, the rocks, the trees, and the sky all the exact same boiling temperature. If everything is burning hot, their glass eyes will only see a wall of bright light."

"And the glass lenses that see color?" Viona asked, raising both hands.

"Burn the forest," Leon said coldly. "Choke the air with black ash. Mix soot with the boiling mist. Blanket the gorge in a cloud so thick a hawk couldn’t see its own talons. If they want to drop iron on our heads, make them guess where the ground is."

Viona didn’t waste another second.

She planted her bare feet into the mud, biting back the agonizing flare of pain in her depleted core. She didn’t call upon the sky or cast a radiant golden beam. Instead, she pushed her mana deep down into the bedrock, tapping straight into the volcanic veins running beneath the Dragonspine Mountains.

FZZZZZZ!

The river began to churn violently.

Bubbles broke the surface, and in seconds, the dark water was violently boiling. Massive geysers of scalding steam hissed up from the cracks in the stone floor. At the same time, Viona flicked her left wrist, sending waves of raw flame tearing through the dense ironwood roots.

The damp, resin-rich wood didn’t flare into bright fire; it began to smolder furiously, spewing torrents of thick, oily black ash.

The boiling steam collided with the dense soot and the freezing mountain air.

Within minutes, an impenetrable, churning wall of black smoke and scalding fog rose from the valley floor. It swallowed the trees, the river, the rock cliffs, and the crater, expanding outward like a massive, opaque dome.

Five miles above the clouds, the three F-35C Lightning IIs were banking into a wide orbit over the Dragonspine foothills.

Inside the cockpit of Viper Zero-One, Lieutenant Commander Nathan "Ghost" Cross glanced at his panoramic touchscreen. The high-resolution targeting pod slaved to his helmet visor was still focused on the coordinates of the first JDAM strike.

"Strike Control, Viper One," Cross transmitted, his voice level through his mask. "BDA on initial drop: good blast radius, direct hit on designated coordinates. Rolling in for secondary scan to confirm hostile KIA."

"Copy that, Viper One," the carrier’s controller answered over the satcom channel. "Maintain standoff. Threat receiver is showing no further surface-to-air emissions, but keep your speed up."

"Viper Two, swing the thermal pod back across the grid," Cross ordered over the internal tactical link. "Let’s see if those two warm bodies are still twitching."

"Rolling the ball," Lieutenant Marcus "Riptide" Briggs responded from Viper Zero-Two. "Switching FLIR to white-hot."

A second later, Briggs’s voice carried a sharp frown.

"Lead, I’m losing the target area."

Cross tapped his left multi-function display, pulling up Briggs’s shared sensor feed.

What had been a clear, crisp thermal map of a dark forest and a cold river was rapidly turning into an unrecognizable blob of pure blinding white.

"What the hell is that?" Cross muttered, adjusting his sensor gain. "Camera blooming?"

"Negative, Lead," Briggs reported, his tone puzzled. "Sensor gain is calibrated. The whole damn valley just flared up. I’m getting extreme thermal saturation across a three-mile radius. It looks like... steam? The entire river just shot up twenty degrees Celsius in thirty seconds."

"I see it on my pod too," Lieutenant Elena "Valkyrie" Cole cut in from Viper Three. "Optical is zeroed out. Massive smoke generation down there. It looks like heavy industrial particulate mixed with dense fog. Day-TV can’t punch through, and the thermal pod is completely whited out. It’s a total thermal washout."

Cross stared at the display. The sharp crosshairs on his helmet display had nothing to lock onto. The GPS grid was still there, but without optical confirmation or laser return, there was no way to tell if the targets were dead, running, or buried.

"Strike Control, this is Viper One," Cross called in, frustration tightening his jaw. "Target area is experiencing sudden, extreme meteorological interference. Ground level is socked in by heavy thermal bloom and zero-visibility smoke. Our pods are blind. We cannot confirm secondary targets or verify kill status on Hostile Alpha."

Static crackled over the radio from the carrier’s combat center.

"Viper One, this is Strike. Can you lase through the soup?"

"Negative, Strike," Cross replied, checking his pod telemetry. "Dense water vapor and soot particles are scattering the beam. Laser designation is diffusing at eight thousand feet. If we drop another JDAM, it’s a blind throw into the fog."

"Understood, Viper Flight. Do not loiter. Command is ordering you to break off and return to base."

"Viper Flight copies. RTB," Cross answered. He nudged his side-stick controller to the left, leveling off his wings. "Flight, set power to cruise. Let’s go home."

The three stealth fighters tucked their noses into the cloud layer, their jet engines howling softly as they headed back toward the blue horizon of the western sea.

Down in the suffocating heat of the mist, the distant, hollow roar of the flying machines slowly faded away.

Leon stood with his back against the wet rock, breathing in the damp, smoky air. The thick fog swirled around his mud-covered shoulders, hiding his form from more than five feet away.

He looked down at his calloused, empty hands, then over at Viona, who was leaning against a boulder, coughing softly from the soot.

"They’re leaving," Viona whispered. "I guess, it’s been like one hour and they haven’t attacked yet. It worked!"

Leon looked up into the swirling gray cloud that now blanketed the entire mountain gorge.

A grim, dangerous smirk crept onto his scarred face.

"Looks like they have weaknesses after all."