Immediately on firing, Wong had firewalled his throttles, cut in reheat and taken his F/A-18 up into a steep climb. The last thing he had wanted to do was get too close to those things. As he rolled over at the top of the climb, he could see the havoc his attack had wrought on the demon formation below. His target had gone, its death marked by a black streak towards the sea far below. Another one of the formation had taken hits from four AIM-120s, for some reason two F/A-18s had fired on the same aircraft, well, that sort of thing happened. It had meant that the demon had been quite literally torn apart by the storm of fragments and blast of the explosions. More than 200 pounds of best explosive American dollars could buy had vented its wrath on the hideous creature and all that was left of it was a shower of burning fragments. A third demon was staggering away, it had been the last to get hit and had escaped the eviscerating body hits. Instead, one of its wings had been torn to tiny fragments and it was going down in a helpless spin. Even as Wong watched, two of his F-18s were closing on it.

Prigrathrath was desperately trying to control his descent. One of his wings had gone, it was just a mass of torn flesh and spurting blood. The only thing that was saving him was that his flight path was keeping the blood-and-acid away from his body, the fate of Shingroleth and Caranaskatos had shown him what would happen when demon blood and body parts mixed. Two of the gray-painted human machines were coming after him, he could see them, but with his crippled wings there was little he could do about it. It was odd, there was a strange twinkling light coming from the front of the two flying machines. Then Prigrathrath’s lights went out.

Squires had fired a much longer burst than was normal for the M61 cannon in the nose of his F/A-18.