Rides Leviathan

“Got you.”

I held out my hands, and with a metallic rattle, I summoned up my chains and commanded them forth.

This was my contingency for Plan B, for if Herakles and his raw strength wasn’t enough to force Leviathan into my trap: tackle the problem laterally, by taking advantage of conceptual abilities rather than physical.

Because if it was a beast, I could ride it.

That was one of the reasons why I had chosen Medusa. If it were a dragon, an honest-to-god dragon, then that would be beyond her, but anything and everything else that could be called a beast, whether it was a mere monster or something with a spark of the divine, it fell under her purview.

“Kuh!”

My chains moved with a life of their own, snaking, twining, wrapping around Leviathan’s torso. They slithered over the uneven planes of his chest and waist, still pockmarked with slowly healing wounds, and wound twice around the base of his tail for good measure. At the last, they came up and around his neck, leaving the two ends attached to a pair of nail-like daggers in my hands. I held them like a pair of reins.

The muscles in my arms strained as I grimaced and yanked on the chains as hard as I could.

“Rah!”

Leviathan was not a dragon. In shape, in form, he might resemble one only the slightest, but not enough to embody one, not enough to share its image and its concept. What he was in truth, what he counted as to Medusa’s power, I didn’t know, not for sure. But if Lung was hurt so much more by Balmung because he wore the concept of a dragon as his power, then Leviathan, who was shaped in the likeness of a divine beast from myth…

Well. Even those beasts blessed with the burden of divinity fell under Medusa’s purview.

And if even a divine beast could be tamed under my command…

Leviathan jerked and started to move.

…then Leviathan should be unable to resist.

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Slowly, haltingly, Leviathan began to march back towards the edge of the city — towards my trap, waiting at the edge of the Boat Graveyard, where I’d laid it in preparation for today — and he resisted every step of the way. He bucked and tossed about every few steps, trying to shake me. He stumbled and tripped over his own feet, as though he had suddenly, inexplicably become a clumsy, lumbering beast. He crashed into the corner of every building he even came close to.

He did everything he possibly could to try and resist, everything he could to try and throw off the yoke of my control. That he could even try likely had something to do with his nature, with the fact he was a creation of a passenger, rather than the real Leviathan.

He came close, at times. My grip over him was as close to absolute as it was going to get, but my footing, my position on his back, was not.

“It’s working!” someone shouted. I had no idea who.

“Don’t attack him!” I shouted back. “If you break the chains or throw me off, then I lose what little control I have over him, right now!”

Several people ignored me, and attacks peppered his legs and his tail, the two things in easiest reach. Even a projectile or two, a searing laser from Purity, struck him on the shoulder and the torso, just barely missing my chains enough not to sever them. Leviathan used them to make things harder on me, as an excuse to stumble and stagger under the force of them, even though I knew they meant nothing in terms of actual damage.

I gritted my teeth and worried, for a moment, that after all of this, after I’d finally started to get this plan back on track, it would be ruined just like that.

And then my armband — mine and everyone else’s — beeped to announce a priority message.

“This is Alexandria,” came her voice. “Do as she says. Until Leviathan breaks free, halt all attacks.”

Almost instantly, the attacks stopped. The blasters who had been firing at him hovered uncertainly in the air, watching warily, and the close-in fighters on the ground backed off, keeping hold of their weapons with white-knuckled grips. They would all start again the instant I lost control, undoubtedly, but for now, there was nothing else getting in my way.

I yanked on my chains again and compelled the beast beneath me to move. The links strained, but held, and with that plodding, reluctant gait, Leviathan marched under my command.

I wasn’t sure how long it took to make the trip. It might have been no more than five minutes, but the thick tension and Leviathan’s deliberate slowness made it feel like an eternity. It wasn’t helped by the fact he kept running into the side of every building he could whenever we had to make a turn, because I worried every time that he might shake me off and get free.

At last, however, we made it. The Boat Graveyard, and the conspicuous empty spot in its middle, was in sight. Well, so to speak.