Drydock Bay One at Station Deep-Anchor had been converted into an emergency aquatic trauma theater of titanic proportions.
Suspended from four huge overhead frame cranes in the center of the flooded bay was an ancient mythological terror. Oceanspear, the bonded friend beast of Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Douglas Kincaid.
The beast was an Deep-sea Giant beast-Drake—a forty-meter apex hunting beast of Diamond S-Rank. Its snake-like body was covered in thick, overlapping plates of dark sapphire scales, each plate as large as a tall body-shield, with four massive, webbed claws and a broad, spade-like tail that could generate blast waves capable of capsizing destroyers.
Now, the titan hung limp in the heavy steel slings, its massive sapphire head resting in a cradle of heavy beams, its golden reptilian eyes clouded with death.
Protruding from the beast’s left chest flank was the weapon that had brought it down. An eight-foot-long, barbed Rotting Cavitation Harpoon launched from the main batteries of Nautilus-Prime. The harpoon had pierced four feet into the drake’s ribs. Its blackened heavy was dark metal barbs anchored deep within the myocardial muscle tissue of the main heart. Around the wound track, the drake’s flesh had turned a sickening shade of rotting gray. It dissolved into foul-smelling slime under the influence of an artificial cellular-decay pathogen.
