The whirlpool gradually faded. Suddenly, the ship began to rock. Then, with a clang, both anchor chains were severed at once. Selma saw the vanished whirlpool turn into a sharp line across the water, racing straight after them.
"We're under attack by an unidentified object!" someone shouted.
"Selma, get on the sonar and find out what that thing is!" Mans said.
Selma hurried to the sonar station and stared at the bright echo that had abruptly appeared on the screen. "Bearing zero-four-five, depth thirty meters! Closing at extreme speed!"
First Officer Grayson snatched up the microphone. "Confirm target characteristics! Submarine or torpedo?"
"No propeller cavitation noise! No mechanical heat signature!" Selma's voice edged toward tears. "Approximately fifteen meters long, speed fifty knots! Still accelerating!"
Holy crap, we've already survived all eighty-one trials. Why isn't this over yet? No, wait-in Journey to the West, the monk and his three disciples had only gone through eighty trials. This must be the last one they tacked on to make up the numbers!
"A flesh-and-blood body charging underwater at fifty knots..." Professor Mans strode onto the bow. "The guardian of the Bronze City has awakened. All hands to battle stations! Brace for impact!"
Bang! The expected collision never came. The hull merely shuddered slightly.
"It missed!"
"It didn't miss. The sonar's damaged!"
Beep-beep-beep!
The battle alarm instantly rang through every compartment aboard the ship.
"Angel..." Lu Mingfei opened his eyes, sat bolt upright, and reached to pull the IV needle out of the back of his hand.
"Lie down."
Zero caught Lu Mingfei's wrist, laid her other hand on his chest, and gently pressed him back down.
"Outside..."
"Leave it alone. That's the Executive Department's job." Zero placed a hand against Lu Mingfei's forehead. "You're still at risk of shock. Things haven't deteriorated enough for you to go out there yet. Keep resting."
An overwhelming surge of irritation and exhaustion rose in Lu Mingfei's chest. In the end, he did not wrench himself free of Zero's hand. He stiffly sank back onto the pillow.
Just beyond the door, a desperate struggle for survival was unfolding on deck.
Ye Sheng, who had only just stripped off his diving suit, shoved aside the medic beside him and threw himself onto the steel nonslip decking, scoured by torrential rain.
His eyes were tightly shut, veins bulging across his forehead as he unleashed Word Spirit: Serpent at full power. Violent bioelectric currents poured through his body into the surging river. Tens of thousands of invisible serpents raced outward from the Morania in every direction, weaving a vast active sonar net.
"Starboard! Bearing zero-four-five!" Ye Sheng jerked his head up, veins throbbing in his neck. "Depth thirty! Target speed fifty knots!"
Selma gripped the communications microphone and shouted over the shipwide broadcast, "Target bearing zero-four-five, range eight hundred, depth thirty, speed fifty knots!"
Grayson shoved the panel in front of him aside. "Hard to port! Both engines full ahead!"
"Hard to port! Both engines full ahead!" Muscles bulged in the helmsman's arms as he frantically hauled the heavy wheel all the way to the left.
At full speed, the Morania's massive hull forced its way into a port turn, carving a violent white S-shaped wake across the river. The enormous centrifugal force sent the warship into a savage roll to starboard. Her starboard rail nearly touched the surface, and river water poured backward through the scuppers onto the deck.
A huge black shadow churned up thick white foam beneath the water and thundered past the Morania's starboard waterline. The immense vortex it dragged behind it tossed the ship like a leaf in a gale.
"It's coming around!" Ye Sheng opened his bloodshot eyes. "Bearing two-seven-zero! Range four hundred!"
"Hard to starboard! Hard over!" First Officer Grayson roared.
"Too late! We're going too fast. The ship's still carrying momentum from the port turn!" the helmsman shouted.
"Hold the rudder angle! Brace for impact!" Grayson bellowed.
Professor Mans strode to the portside edge of the deck amidships. Planting his feet apart and gripping the railing with both hands, he began chanting in dragon script.
Word Spirit: Realm of Dust.
The spherical repulsion field had barely formed beyond the port rail when the Dragon Servitor's terrifying charge slammed into the invisible barrier.
A muffled boom drowned out even the thunder overhead. The field forcibly deflected the kinetic force of hundreds upon thousands of tons, and the Morania's bow pitched violently upward. Rivets beneath the waterline burst loose in sheets. Mans's chest jolted. He spat out a mist of blood and slammed down onto one knee.
When the first strike failed, the shadow underwater instantly changed tactics.
The river surface exploded.
The Dragon Servitor's enormous body burst straight out of the water, proudly spreading membranous wings more than ten meters across against the storm-lashed night sky. Like a heavy seaplane bomber, the creature skimmed low over the river's wave crests. Two foreclaws bristling with bone spurs tore through the curtain of rain, reaching straight for the Morania's bridge.
"Engage aerial target!" Second Officer Gunayal roared over the communications channel, yanking the waterproof cover off the foredeck weapons station.
The gunner on deck lunged for the twin-mounted 12.7 mm heavy machine guns.
Ammunition belts raced through the guns. The 12.7 mm armor-piercing tracer rounds streaked through the night in two dazzling whips of fire, instantly engulfing the low-gliding Dragon Servitor in intersecting streams of bullets. High-energy armor-piercing rounds struck dragon scales and shattered into showers of blazing fragments. Their tungsten-steel cores could not penetrate that ancient biological armor, but the physical force of hundreds of heavy machine-gun rounds poured into one membranous wing, hammering the creature out of its glide.
The Dragon Servitor veered off course. As the creature narrowly passed the Morania's mainmast, Shide Aki reached the top of it. She lifted her face toward the enormous slit pupil mere inches away, her lips moving rapidly.
"Close your eyes, now!" Seeing what Aki was doing, Ye Sheng shouted to the crew.
Word Spirit: Blazing Sun.
Four thousand lumens of searing light instantly radiated across a ten-meter radius around Shide Aki. As though plunged inside an incandescent bulb, the Dragon Servitor instinctively snapped the nictitating membranes over those eyes. But the creature was too close-close enough for Aki to smell that rank body, and close enough for Blazing Sun's fierce light to pierce those membranes and temporarily blind the Dragon Servitor.
Acting purely on instinct, the Dragon Servitor snapped both wings inward. That enormous body plunged headfirst into the river like an out-of-control block of iron.
"Flood the torpedo tubes! Fire three and four! Hurry, while it's still there!"
"Three and four away!"
Two Alchemy Torpedoes modified by the Equipment Department were lobbed like depth charges straight into the center of the whirlpool where the Dragon Servitor had fallen.
Bang! Bang!
Successive explosions erupted underwater. Two enormous bulges instantly rose on the river's surface, and violent underwater shock waves slammed into the Morania's underside.
Large quantities of dark red blood welled up to the surface along with shattered scales. The wounded Dragon Servitor gave a low cry of pain and fled toward the depths of the riverbed.
"Target diving!" Ye Sheng pressed his temples. "Depth seventy meters! It's retreated into deep water!"