The battle began not with a bang, but with a whisper.
Miles from the Alliance fortress, Diego stood at the nexus of a great circle formed by the LAAU's shamans and nature-wielders. He knelt, his palms pressed flat against the cool desert sand. He closed his eyes, and the world of sight and sound fell away, replaced by the deep, rhythmic pulse of the earth. He was not commanding the desert; he was asking for its help, offering his own energy as a catalyst for its ancient, slumbering rage.
Around him, the chanting began. It was a low, guttural hum that resonated with the vibration Diego felt from the earth. A thousand whispers from a dozen different tribes, blending into a single, rising roar. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of ozone and the static crackle of building power. The sky, once a pale, indifferent blue, began to darken, turning the color of bruised plums.
Inside the Alliance command center, a junior officer at a weather monitoring station frowned. "Sir," he said, turning to Commander Valerius. "We're detecting an anomalous drop in barometric pressure. The wind speed is... well, it's increasing exponentially. It looks like a freak sandstorm."
Valerius glanced at the screen, then dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "It's a desert. It has storms. Recalibrate the optical sensors to compensate for dust particulates. Business as usual."
But this was not business as usual.
On the horizon, a dark line appeared. It grew with terrifying speed, not a wall of sand, but the desert itself rising in fury. It was a churning, roiling monster of wind and grit a thousand feet high, its approach marked by a monstrous, grinding roar that was the sound of mountains being turned to dust.
The storm hit the fortress like a physical blow. The world outside the reinforced viewports vanished into an impenetrable, screaming vortex of brown. The automated turrets, blinded, swiveled uselessly. The sophisticated radar and LIDAR systems screamed with ghost data, their displays dissolving into a meaningless blizzard of white noise. The fortress, a testament to technological supremacy, was now a steel giant with its eyes gouged out.
"Sir! All external sensors are offline!" the officer yelled over the roar. "We're completely blind!"
It was into this blindness that the dragon descended.
The joint task force did not charge into the storm; they became part of it. The LAAU warriors, their bodies wrapped in cloth to protect them from the stinging sand, moved like phantoms in the gale. They were in their element, the storm's chaos a cloak for their advance.
Among them, moving with a different kind of precision, were Lin Feng's EAC shock troops. Their helmet visors glowed a faint, spectral green as their thermal imaging cut through the worst of the dust. They were not flowing with the storm; they were using it, a scalpel of disciplined violence hidden within a hurricane of raw nature.
At the very tip of the spear was Lin Feng himself. He gave a single, sharp hand signal, and his team melted into the swirling chaos, their objective clear: not the walls, not the guns, but the heart.
The first explosions rocked the fortress's outer perimeter. The LAAU warriors, guided by their shamans, were disabling the automated turrets not with brute force, but by summoning the sand to choke their mechanisms and erode their power conduits.
Inside, Valerius's face was a mask of cold fury. "They're using the storm as cover! Activate seismic sensors! I want every Jackal on the wall to fire on anything that moves! I want this insurgency crushed!"
But it was too late. The dragon was already inside the gates. While the Jackals fired blindly into the storm, wasting thousands of rounds on shadows, Lin Feng and his team had already slipped past the ravaged perimeter. They were deep inside the beast's belly, and they were heading for its brain. The thunder was about to strike.