Another night.

  The temperature in the Blackrock Gorge plummeted unnaturally fast. Exhaled breath instantly crystallized into ice, as if the ambient heat was being actively siphoned away by something.

  Standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the command center, I watched frost rapidly spiderweb across the edges of the glass.

  Suddenly, a terrifying, low-frequency hum radiated from the direction of Bunker 04. It was incredibly deep—not a sound traveling through the air, but an air-raid siren reverberating directly inside my skull, vibrating against my bone marrow.

  Immediately after, the cloud layer above Skyreach began to boil violently.

  Accompanied by a roar that felt like it should shatter eardrums but was completely, horrifyingly silent, the phantom image of an indescribably massive ancient dragon violently tore through the sky.

  But this dragon wasn't physical. It didn't breathe fire. It didn't even displace a single current of air.

  It was a holographic projection formed from an ultra-high-density energy cluster. Glitching blue corrupted data streams and high-voltage lightning cascaded frantically across its phantom scales.

  Across the entire city, every single Cat-kin, Bear-kin, and Wolf-kin worker froze in their tracks. Staring up at the leviathan blotting out the sky, they stopped breathing. It was absolute, paralyzing terror hardwired into the bedrock of their genetics.

  A second later, the extreme magnetic interference overloaded every steam-powered lightbulb in the city. Glass shattered in sequence. Skyreach plunged into total darkness.

  Those massive, pupil-less eyes of light slowly swept across the Blackrock Mountains, eventually locking dead onto Skyreach—the largest source of noise and energy output in the region.

  On my retinas, the UI panel that had been silent for days suddenly went completely insane, flashing a glaring yellow Debug Mode:

  Ten seconds later, constrained by some unknown parameter preventing it from fully manifesting its higher-dimensional energy state, the phantom slowly retracted back into the tear in space.

  The clouds stitched themselves back together. Starlight spilled down again, as if the whole thing had just been a mass hallucination.

  I stood in front of the cracked window, my hands slick with cold sweat.

  I had exactly 90 days to either figure out how to evacuate an entire city.

  Conventional weapons couldn't touch that thing. This wasn't a problem I could solve by casting a few more artillery pieces or bolting on extra armor plating. That wasn't even a standard biological organism; it operated like a foundational bug-clearing protocol for the entire continent.

  ...

  Just as the dragon’s shadow dissipated, the harsh, physical wail of the anti-air sirens suddenly kicked in.

  A bizarrely shaped, heavily damaged magic airship, trailing thick black smoke and firing frantic red distress flares, staggered through the gorge. It nosedived straight into the buffer zone of the municipal plaza.

  Massive kinetic momentum plowed a deep, ugly trench through the dirt.

  After it ground to a halt, the hatch blew open, and a familiar figure rolled out—Jasta.

  Spotting him, I immediately bolted downstairs.

  Looking much as he had during our escape from the floating island, Jasta tumbled out of the smoke, looking like absolute hell, collapsing on the dirt in a coughing fit.

  The old fox, who usually obsessed over his appearance, had over half of his signature silk robes scorched off. His bushy tail was nearly singed bald, and his face was caked in black soot.

  But before I could even drop a sarcastic comment, a second person stumbled out of the hatch.

  It was a young human wearing a severely torn, yet obviously astronomically expensive, magic cloak. He was pale. Staring at the heavily armed, vicious-looking beast-kin guards surrounding the crash site, his eyes carried instinctual fear, but he kept his spine rigid, refusing to step back, desperately maintaining his aristocratic dignity.

  “Boss...” Jasta hacked up a lungful of black smoke, gasping for air as he delivered his sit-rep. His voice carried the heavy adrenaline of a near-death experience, mixed with the manic high of a gambler who just hit the jackpot:

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  “I just finished signing the tax-free port treaty with the Fourth Prince of the Kingdom of Golden Sands—the Viper Prince.’ But out of nowhere, that ancient, half-dead Emperor listened to some rival faction’s slander and officially branded the Prince a ‘traitor colluding with northern heretics’!”

  Jasta pointed a shaky finger at the young man, swallowing hard. “The Emperor deployed the Royal Guard to execute him... We had to hotwire the Prince’s personal airship and punch straight through the southern anti-air grid to get out.”

  Zayla, who had just arrived on the scene, heard Jasta’s report. Her amber eyes locked onto him with an absolute zero gaze. “Fox, are your circuits fried? You brought an Imperial traitor back to Skyreach? You just handed the Golden Emperor the absolute legal justification to mobilize his army and declare war on us! We barely have the bandwidth to survive the dragon waking up under our boots!”

  “I ran the risk assessment, my Queen.”

  Jasta wiped a streak of blood from his mouth, a ruthless, purely mercantile gleam flashing in his eyes.

  “I had to extract the Prince. Keeping him breathing is worth ten thousand times more than letting him die in the South.”

  He turned to me, his tone dead certain. “The politics in the Golden Sands Kingdom are a quagmire. Boss, let me get a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow, I will hand you a comprehensive schematic that will flip this entire continent upside down.”

  ...

  The next day.

  Whatever Jasta’s grand scheme was, I needed to run a hard inventory check on my assets first. I rallied the core team for an inspection of the underground arsenal.

  Ever since we dropped the Eagle-kin’s floating island and salvaged massive quantities of storm crystals and ruin scrap, Skyreach’s industrial mother-machines had been running 24/7. I needed exact metrics on our current tech tree to know if we had the firepower to fight a nation-ending war.

  To my surprise, Selena tagged along right beside Jasta.

  Wearing her Mana-Inhibitor collar, the former Empress no longer glared at the machinery with toxic hostility. Instead, she watched with a highly calculating, evaluative stare. Jasta, the veteran diplomat, had clearly run some private psychological maintenance on her—or brokered a backroom deal.

  Sarak led the tour deep into the subterranean armory that had hollowed out half the mountain.

  First up was the heavy infantry armor division.

  Several massive Bear-kin and Wolf-kin shock troops were running field tests on the latest prototype: [Steam-Driven Powered Exoskeletons (Mk.II)].

  Accompanied by the heavy, rhythmic thud of hydraulics and plumes of white exhaust, a heavy water-cooled Gatling gun—a weapon that previously required three heavily muscled beast-kin just to mount—was now casually hefted one-handed by a single wolf. A massive ammo belt fed directly from a mechanized backpack, the cold brass casings gleaming with pure, violent aesthetics.

  Grinning proudly, Sarak yanked the tarp off the anti-air and anti-armor emplacements.

  Revealed were twelve absurdly thick [120mm Steam/Chemical Composite Rifled Cannons]. Stacked next to them were pallets of depleted uranium/tungsten-steel composite armor-piercing shells, radiating a cold, lethal aura.

  “As long as we get the trajectory right,” the goblin slapped the freezing barrel, baring her sharp teeth, “this hardware will peel a dragon’s scales open like a tin can!”

  And parked at the absolute far end of the armory was our true apex predator of the sky.

  Our new flagship: The Skyreach Fury.

  It was no longer a sluggish, balloon-like airship. The hull was heavily plated in two hundred millimeters of homogenous alloy steel. The power core utilized [High-Voltage Capacitors] stabilized by Mykra’s shadow magic, directly driving four massive ducted fan arrays.

  It was a high-speed aerial fortress that completely ignored magic, bowing only to the laws of aerodynamics.

  The Viper Prince stared at these massive steel beasts—machines devoid of a single drop of mana, yet radiating absolute, freezing lethality. He was too shocked to speak.

  This was a product of an entirely different dimension compared to the Golden Kingdom’s tech, which obsessed over ornate aesthetics and relied entirely on high-tier mages.

  Selena kept her mouth tightly shut, her eyes incredibly complex.

  ...

  After the inspection.

  I kept Jasta behind for a private debrief. It was time to pull the real intel on the Golden Kingdom.

  Jasta drew a few circles on the holographic map on my desk, launching into his strategic analysis.

  “Boss, the Golden Emperor is ancient, senile, and completely obsessed with ancient magic that promises immortality. The five princes under him have all militarized their own factions. The Fourth Prince I extracted is the only one who actually gives a damn about the civilian infrastructure and wants to push reforms. The rest only know how to strip-mine resources and backstab each other.”

  Jasta let out a cold, deeply calculating laugh.

  “I pulled him out to get him out of the blast radius and preserve his assets. As for the Emperor deploying troops to hit us? Zero percent probability. The internal friction in the Golden Kingdom is critical. Anyone who deploys their main force for a cross-border war of attrition will immediately get a knife in the back from the other princes. They are praying the Fourth Prince dies out here.”

  I nodded. That confirmed my initial read; Jasta didn't operate on blind luck.

  Next, I briefed him on the [Golden Conduction Core] and the [Main Processing Chip] missing items from Bunker 04.

  Jasta’s eyes lit up. He slammed his hands together. “That perfectly aligns the data! Inside the Supreme Temple of the Golden Kingdom, they worship an ancient artifact they call the 'Eye of the Creator'. That has to be the chip you’re looking for!”

  Staring at the map, I ground my teeth, running rapid wargame simulations in my head. “But with our current military output, what are the actual odds of successfully breaching the Golden Empire and extracting the chip?”

  Jasta dropped the slick merchant persona. He looked at me with absolute, lethal seriousness.

  “Mayor, speaking frankly. Our artillery packs a massive punch, but the Golden Empire’s 'Wall of Sighs' and their Guardian Mechs run incredibly deep. Factor in the active threat of the Dragon King... we are currently fighting a two-front war.”

  “The second we engage, there is a ninety percent probability Skyreach gets flattened by either the dragon or imperial magic. Even if we win the tactical engagement and secure the chip, we’ll be left ruling over a pile of rubble and tens of thousands of corpses.”

  “So what’s your play?” I stared him down, my voice turning to ice. “We just sit here and wait to die?”

  Jasta shook his head.

  His finger slowly traced up the map, moving past the Blackrock Mountains, past the familiar wasteland, until it stopped on a massive, uncharted zone to the west, heavily obscured by fog markers.

  “Boss, speaking purely as a businessman... if the foundation of your storefront is about to collapse, and the local gangs are staging a shootout right next door, the most logical move isn't to liquidate your assets to buy guns and fight to the death. The optimal move is... relocation.”

  I froze.

  Jasta locked eyes with me, dropping a completely insane, continent-shifting strategic blueprint right on the table:

  “According to the oldest legends, that sector holds the ruins of the continent’s Old Empire—the ancient capital of the 'Sun City.' The tectonic plates there are supposedly absolutely stable. Zero sleeping dragons.”

  “But more importantly, Boss... as the original cradle of pre-civilization, there is a highly probable chance that an even more massive ancient armory is buried there—one with enough hardware to let us fight the Golden Empire head-on!”

  The old fox took a deep breath, fully exposing his ambition:

  “Instead of sitting on top of a live volcano and burning our resources in a war of attrition against the Golden Empire, you should personally lead an expedition to the Old Capital ruins. If the structural integrity holds up... we might need to initiate an unprecedented 'Great Exodus'.”

  ?? UPDATE SCHEDULE:

  March 8th, new chapters will be released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  Project Update: I am currently developing a Video Series for this novel to expand the world-building and visual experience.