Chapter 70: The Unbreakable Leviathan and the Blue Flame

My Heads-Up Display was having a complete nervous breakdown.

“Warning.

Magical energy signatures exceeding Class-Omega thresholds,” FRIDAY’s voice echoed in my helmet, trying and failing to sound calm.

“Structural integrity of Central Park bedrock is failing.

Sir, I highly recommend we be anywhere else.”

“Noted, FRIDAY.

Add it to the suggestion box,” I muttered, banking hard to the left as a massive torrent of red hellfire vaporized the air exactly where I had been a millisecond prior.

I leveled out, hovering high above the tree line, and took a quick tactical scan of the warzone below.

It was pure, unadulterated chaos.

On the ground, Rogers was doing what he did best, coordinating a desperate defensive line against the four-armed Abyssal Titans.

“Keep them boxed in!” Cap’s voice crackled over the comms.

“Colossus, break their center!

Logan, take the flanks!”

I watched a massive, eight-foot-tall green behemoth who looked horrifyingly like a gamma-irradiated Wolverine physically tear a Titan in half.

Beside her, a girl wearing a terrifying symbiote suit was tying demons up for the space pirates to surgically dismember.

“Hey, Capsicle,” I called out, firing a barrage of micro-munitions into a cluster of demons.

“Who are the new recruits?

The giant green rage-monster and the venom-knockoff?”

“Survivors, Tony!” Cap grunted, the sound of his shield ringing loudly against demonic bone.

“They’re holding the line!

Focus on the giant three-headed problem in the sky!”

“Right.

The Ghidorah rip-off.

Working on it.”

I angled my thrusters upward, joining the heavy-hitter squadron.

The three-headed demonic dragon was an absolute nightmare.

Its scales were glowing with internal magma, and it was entirely ignoring our combined firepower.

“Have at thee, beast of the abyss!” Thor roared.

He swung Mjolnir, calling down a blinding pillar of divine lightning that struck the dragon’s right head perfectly.

At the exact same time, Carol went full binary, blasting like a blazing comet through the beast’s left wing.

I diverted all auxiliary power to my chest piece and unleashed a continuous unibeam directly into its chest, right alongside a massive optic blast from Cyclops and a localized hurricane from Storm.

It should have turned the leviathan to ash.

Instead, the dragon merely shook its heads.

The massive hole Carol had punched through its wing bubbled with dark magic and instantly healed.

“Is anyone else feeling entirely inadequate right now?” I grumbled, recalibrating my repulsors.

“Because that did absolutely nothing.”

“It absorbs our strikes!” Thor yelled, hovering beside me, his cape singed.

“I feel no hollow sorcery within its heart, Stark!

This is a beast of the ancient realms.

A living, immortal entity bound to the sorcerer’s will by force!”

“Great.

An immortal pet,” I sighed.

“Does anyone have a giant rolled-up newspaper?”

Before anyone could answer, the air around the dragon plummeted in temperature.

One of the pirate captain’s glowing constructs a massive jade unicorn, galloped through the sky as if running on solid ground.

The beast stomped a crystalline hoof.

The air on the dragon’s left side flash-froze to absolute zero, encasing its wing in a massive block of brittle ice.

Instantly, the unicorn pivoted, its right side flaring with the heat of a miniature sun, blasting the frozen wing in an attempt to thermally shock and shatter the scales.

The dragon roared, the thermal shock cracking its armor, but the dark magic flared again, seamlessly knitting the obsidian scales back together in a second.

Furious at the unicorn, the center head reared back, its maw crackling with dense, jagged black lightning.

It didn’t aim at the jade beast; it snapped its head toward Cyclops and Storm, who were hovering dangerously close and completely exposed.

“Look out!” I yelled, pushing my thrusters to maximum to intercept.

I wasn’t going to make it.

The dragon unleashed a massive, concentrated beam of dark lightning.

Suddenly, a blur of motion shattered the sound barrier.

Jasmine, the pirate with the hammer, bounded through the empty air using those impossible, concussive kicks.

She placed herself directly between the X-Men and the dragon, raising the expanded head of her weapon like a lightning rod.

The dark lightning slammed into her.

I expected her to be vaporized.

Instead, she laughed.

The electricity spiraled wildly down the handle of her hammer, wrapping around her arms and absorbing directly into her skin.

She soaked up an attack that would have leveled a city block, her eyes glowing with pure electrical energy.

“FRIDAY,” I blinked inside my helmet.

“Add ‘eats lightning for breakfast’ to the pirate’s threat-assessment file.”

“Already logged, boss,” FRIDAY replied.

The dragon, enraged that its attack was absorbed, reared all three heads back.

Its chests expanded, the red hellfire glowing deep within its throats.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Carol ordered, her binary aura flaring.

“It’s gearing up for a wide-spread breath attack!”

Then, a localized earthquake rattled my HUD sensors.

Down in the crater, the pirate captain was still fighting the corrupted Strange.

Suddenly, a blur of purple and gold launched out of the smoking pit like a surface-to-air missile.

It wasn’t a projectile; it was Evil Dr.

Strange, screaming as he sailed through the air at supersonic speeds.

He crashed face-first into the dragon’s center snout with a deafening CRACK.

The impact forced the dragon’s jaw shut right as it was about to breathe fire.

The hellfire detonated inside the beast’s own throat, sending the leviathan reeling backward in agonizing pain.

“Did…

did the pirate just use the wizard as a throwing star?” I asked, completely bewildered.

“Do not question the gift, Man of Iron!

Strike!” Thor bellowed.

Carol and Thor capitalized on the Warlord’s brutal assist, launching a synchronized barrage of divine lightning and cosmic energy into the dragon’s exposed chest, dropping it toward the tree line.

Evil Strange fell back toward the earth, immediately intercepted by the pirate captain.

The breather didn’t last long.

The dragon recovered quickly, catching itself before hitting the ground.

It was completely unhinged now.

The red hellfire in its throats didn’t just glow; it turned blindingly white with heat.

“Sir, energy readings from the leviathan are off the charts,” FRIDAY warned rapidly.

“If it releases that blast, Manhattan is gone.”

“Everybody fall back!

Put everything you have into shields!” I ordered over the open comms, diverting all suit power to my frontal deflectors.

We braced for the end of the world.

Instead, the world stopped.

A terrifying, invisible pressure erupted from the crater below.

My suit’s WIlpower sensors screamed, immediately flatlining.

A massive, deafening shockwave of red and black lightning rippled outward, washing over Central Park in a microsecond.

The sheer, suffocating weight of it made my repulsors stutter, almost dropping me from the sky.

The effect on the invasion was instantaneous.

Down on the ground, the Abyssal Titans that Cap and the others were fighting abruptly froze like statues, before violently disintegrating into lifeless black ash.

Trapped in the five-kilometer telekinetic web, the colossal World-Borer worm dissolved into dust, leaving the black chains holding nothing but empty air.

The dark magic sustaining the invasion was utterly erased.

We looked at the massive dragon, waiting for it to turn to ash like the rest of the demons.

It didn’t.

Instead, the massive beast let out a deafening, agonizing scream.

It thrashed wildly in the air, its wings beating erratically as if a parasite were being brutally ripped from its mind.

The corrupted, dark red hellfire and the jagged black lightning spewing from its maws violently purged.

Like a poisoned wound finally being cleaned, the dark colors burned away, rapidly shifting and igniting into a blinding, pure, and brilliant blue energy.

The thrashing abruptly stopped.

The massive beast fell gracefully from the sky, landing heavily in the center of the Great Lawn.

A wave of pure blue flame washed over its body.

The jagged, obsidian spikes melted away.

The demonic corruption cooled, revealing majestic, ancient, shimmering azure scales.

The dragon lowered its three massive heads.

Its six eyes slowly opened, the feral, bloodthirsty red madness completely gone, replaced by a profound, deep sapphire clarity.

It just sat there, breathing soft plumes of blue flame.

I hovered down slowly, my repulsors whining, landing next to Cap, Thor, and the others as they stared at the majestic leviathan in absolute silence.

A web line zipped past my helmet, and Spider-Man swung down, landing lightly on the scorched grass beside me.

He tilted his masked head, staring up at the three-headed blue dragon.

“So…” Peter broke the silence, his voice echoing loudly across the quiet park.

“Do we pet it, or does somebody need to go find a really, really giant bowl of milk?”

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Jordan D’souza, Curtis Branscum, Vince, Eric

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