A golden-red fireball erupted from Nakarkos's back, blasting away large chunks of the thick bone armor covering it.
Struck by the sudden, heavy blow, Nakarkos roared in pain and toppled to the ground.
"Nice shot!" Dylan roared as he swung his giant axe with all his strength, hacking repeatedly at Nakarkos's horrifying mouthparts.
Altaïr was about to rush forward and attack the vital organs exposed by the fall, whose flesh was charred black and badly damaged.
Just then, however, he sensed something and looked up at the dark night sky, where neither stars nor moon were visible.
The clouds churned. The next instant, the massive hull of the Knowledge Seeker descended through them and appeared above the nest.
"They're here, meow!" Sajji cheered.
Such a massive target appearing in the sky naturally caught Nakarkos's attention.
It raised its head, the giant Airship reflected in its irregularly shaped pupils.
Until now, it had never truly taken the Hunters invading its nest seriously. In its mind, creatures so insignificant could pose no threat.
It was like rats entering a house and biting a resident a few times. The pests might cause anger and irritation, but no one would fear being bitten to death by them.
By comparison, the Knowledge Seeker above the atoll was like an armed bandit smashing through the door. This was a presence Nakarkos truly feared.
It had even mistaken the Supernova that erupted inside its wound for the "handiwork" of the Knowledge Seeker as the ship entered the battlefield.
Nakarkos almost instantly entered an intensely aggressive stress response. Its body, once dotted with faint fluorescence, began radiating bands of crimson light.
The crimson clusters pulsed one after another, as though streams of energy were flowing from its body into the two tentacle arms.
Without taking time to adjust its posture, Nakarkos raised both tentacle arms. Scarlet light flared within the skeletal eye sockets at their tips.
"It's a breath attack! Interrupt it!" Altaïr had no time to debate whether a high-energy beam fired from a tentacle could truly be called a breath attack. He shouted a warning to his companions.
Isis and Olivia understood the severity of the situation.
Without hesitation, Isis raised her muzzle and unleashed AA Flare at the upraised bone-dragon tentacle.
Her Gunlance shelling flowed straight into Wyvern's Fire. The erupting blast successfully interrupted the charge within the bone-dragon tentacle before her.
Olivia pivoted rapidly, spinning the Hammer around herself. She then twisted at the waist, stepped forward, and leaped with all her strength, converting the Hammer's rotational momentum into upward force.
"Bang!"
The Hammer swept upward like an uppercut and slammed into the bone dragon's lower jaw, snapping its head back. The gathering Dragon Element energy burst apart, and Olivia stopped the attack as well.
A shout rang out from the Knowledge Seeker.
"Pull back! Pull back quickly!"
Although the Blademasters did not understand the purpose of the retreat order, everyone surrounding Nakarkos immediately stopped attacking and pulled back to open some distance.
To keep Nakarkos from seizing the chance to escape, the Hunters maintained the encirclement as they withdrew, ensuring that a Hunter could intercept it no matter which direction it chose.
Nakarkos had no intention of fleeing for now and no interest in stopping the Hunters. Its attention was completely fixed on the Airship overhead.
Dragon Element energy gathered once more at the tips of its bone-dragon tentacles.
Before, it had kept missing because the Knowledge Seeker had flown too high for it to see clearly. Now the ship had all but settled onto its forehead. At this range, a target that large would be difficult to miss even on purpose.
It intended to shoot the ship down with a single breath attack!
Of course, the Knowledge Seeker had not risked descending to such a low altitude without reason.
At the stern, a hatch connected to the cargo hold swung open.
Francesca poked her head out, glanced down, and waved vigorously. "Right here! The position's perfect! It's down and can't move, so hurry, hurry! Drop the bombs! Drop the bombs!"
One gigantic Barrel Bomb after another, perhaps shorter than Isis but certainly taller than Francesca, was pushed from the cargo hold and sent plummeting toward Nakarkos roaring furiously at the sky.
At first, Nakarkos paid little attention to the "falling objects," assuming the "giant beast" overhead was relieving itself.
It continued gathering energy, intent only on dealing a vicious blow to the creature above its head.
Then those Barrel Bombs, so insignificant in its eyes, landed on its body...
"BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!!"
The impacts shattered bone. Thunder swept across the nest, and flames lit the night sky.
In an instant, explosive fire completely engulfed Nakarkos's enormous body. The expanding blast wave rocked the Knowledge Seeker, a hundred meters above the ground, so violently that the ship shuddered.
The Hunters who had withdrawn in advance stared in shock.
They had expected the Knowledge Seeker to bombard Nakarkos from the safety of two or three hundred meters with concentrated cannon fire.
It could bombard the target with Barrel Bombs too?!
The Hunters could not yet judge Nakarkos's condition, but under a barrage like that, a boulder of the same size would have had at least two layers blasted away.
"Those... aren't ordinary Large Barrel Bombs, are they?" Altaïr murmured dazedly as he stared at the giant silhouette writhing in agony beneath the explosive flames.
"Of course they aren't ordinary Large Barrel Bombs, meow." Sajji's whiskers twitched. "They've all got Dense Marcoal mixed into them, meow. According to Francesca, they're called Anti-dragon Bombs, meow..."
Already slow on land and knocked prone by the Supernova's internal blast, Nakarkos had nowhere to hide from the bombs raining down like a storm.
All it could do was curl up as tightly as possible and use the hard bone armor across its back to withstand the assault.
But how could ordinary bone armor endure the continuous bombardment of Anti-dragon Bombs? Apart from the dragon skull perched atop its head, which was suspected to come from a Lao-Shan Lung, almost all the bone plating across Nakarkos's body was blasted to pieces.
Its indigo flesh was now riddled with blackened blast craters.
"That hurt, didn't it?!" Leaning out of the cargo hold, Francesca extended both hands and made a rude gesture at the battered Nakarkos below.
Under the Professor's command, the Knowledge Seeker began climbing again.
The ship had descended only to facilitate the bombing. Francesca and the Alchemists had now emptied the warehouse, throwing out every Anti-dragon Bomb they had made in one massive barrage, so there was no reason to remain in the dangerous low-altitude airspace.
As it climbed, the Knowledge Seeker's Rapid-fire Cannons and Machine Cannons opened fire again. Streams of pointed Machine Cannon rounds and heavy cannonballs broad enough for a man to wrap both arms around hammered the struggling Nakarkos without pause.
For the moment, the Blademasters dared not approach for fear of being struck by shrapnel from the exploding shells.
"Keep firing! Don't stop until it's down for good!" the Professor roared.
Nakarkos had devoured an entire human village, repeatedly attacked Airships, and seriously disrupted the coastal ecosystem through indiscriminate predation on Sea Beasts.
There was no reason to spare its life.
Under the relentless bombardment, thick gunsmoke concealed Nakarkos's body. Combined with the darkness of night, the smoke made the target increasingly difficult to see from either the ground or the air.
Aboard the Knowledge Seeker, Nymera suddenly released the Machine Cannon's trigger, which she had been holding down. She had noticed something strange.
Something's wrong! The Machine Cannon's shots don't sound right when they hit!
"Cease fire!" she shouted, halting Morgan and the crew as they cycled endlessly between firing and reloading.
Without stopping to explain, Nymera launched a Wirebug and raced to the stern in a series of airborne bounds, then took control of the Heavy Ballista stationed there.
The thick gunsmoke made precise aim impossible. She could only choose a rough area before immediately pulling the trigger.
A specially modified One-shot Binder, its tail linked to a long rope and buoy, shot out and plunged into the smoke-shrouded area.
The instant the cannonade from above ceased, the Blademasters on the ground closed in.
They scattered the gunsmoke and pushed through the heat to the spot where Nakarkos had fallen, but no corpse awaited them.
They found a massive hole instead.
* * *
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