Central World. Baulos Sea.

  Flagship Battleship of the 1st Heavy Strike Group "Betegris".

  "Heavy cruiserDion— direct hit! Reactor detonated! Signature lost!" the chief communications officer's scream battered eardrums, drowning out even the screeching of the overloaded main caliber hydraulics.

  Kaon flinched. It sounded like a death sentence. Another masterpiece of Imperial shipbuilding, ten thousand tons of Krupp steel brimming with fuel and a thousand lives loyal to duty, instantly turned into a colossal funeral pyre.

  The massive shockwave born from the detonation of the cruiser's magazines reached the flagship, causing the enormous dreadnought to shudder from keel to masthead. The ocean boiled, devouring the molten metal.

  The enemy struck surgically. The celestial fortress knew the weak points: it ignored the side armor belts, hitting the thin deck plating with concentrated mana-plasma.

  Another salvo from Betegris's four-hundred-millimeter guns roared, spitting out a multi-ton mass of armor-piercing shells with tungsten cores. The range was point-blank; missing such a massive disk obscuring the sun was impossible. The sky was pockmarked with black bursts of proximity fuses. Oceans of steel, explosives, and shrapnel smashed against the lower plane of the Celestial Battleship.

  But the shimmering bluish barrier of the conversion field, pulsating like a living organism, absorbed the monstrous kinetic energy, merely lazily rippling. Physics was stubbornly, hopelessly losing to an unknown etheric equation.

  Kaon looked around lost, as if hoping to find a mistake in the smoke-filled gloom of the bridge. But there wasn't one.

  Through the narrow, thick panes of the viewing slits, pure hell was reflected in his contracted pupils: dancing reflections of flames, twisted, smoking skeletons of escort destroyers, slowly listing silhouettes of burning battleships. In these very seconds overboard, in boiling fuel oil, the best officers and sailors of the Eastern Fleet were burning alive, suffocating, and going to the bottom. His people. Those with whom he had gone through the blood and mud of the war for hegemony on their native Yggdra.

  The commander of the First Heavy Strike Group—a man whose steely temper the zealots of Cain could not break—could only stand at the sighting column, staring helplessly at the sky. A single relic of the Holy Mirishial Empire, piloted by degenerates, possessed such incomprehensible power that it ground down an entire armada with the sickening, mathematical efficiency of a death conveyor.

  An icy feeling of anguish, compressing his lungs, spread in Kaon's chest. Replaced by a bubbling hatred searing his esophagus, these feelings swaddled his mind in a dense, suffocating cocoon.

  His jaws clenched so hard that the enamel on his teeth crumbled when he saw the geometry change on the tactical screen.

  "Object has decelerated! Changing motion vector! It's laying a course on us, Admiral! Going straight to the zenith over the flagship!" screamed the navigator in panic, his face blending with his white tunic due to pallor.

  In Bat's eyes, standing at his left hand, Kaon saw no fear. Only the calm, dead understanding of an old veteran who knows the ammunition is exhausted and retreat routes are cut off.

  "This is the end... old friend," Kaon whispered with just his lips through the hum of sirens, looking at his chief of staff.

  Bat, adjusting the patch over his blind eye on his scar-disfigured face, caught his counterpart's gaze. He didn't salute, didn't shout foolish oaths to the Emperor. He simply gave a spare, heavy, but approving nod, agreeing to the final fight.

  Kaon's eyes flared with a wild, wolfish fatalism. He ripped the selector microphone from the console.

  "ALL SHIPS! OPEN FIRE WITH ALL CALIBERS! SAFETIES OFF! BURN THEIR BOTTOM!" his hoarse, cracking bass thundered in every compartment of the dreadnought.

  The sea answered with a deafening , like a wounded multi-ton shark, desperately bristled with death. Twin mounts of universal 127mm caliber hammered with a hysterical rhythm. They were echoed by the high, drilling crackle of quad 25mm anti-aircraft autocannons. Jets of tracer bullets and streams of solid fire rushed vertically into the underbelly of the monster hovering over them.

  A colossal ring of unknown black metal blocked out the sun, turning day into twilight. Crimson-blue explosions bloomed continuously like flowers under the leviathan's lower plane. This spectacle, full of fierce industrial tenacity, could take one's breath away.

  But as soon as the powder smoke, blue from the bursts, thinned out, blown away by the descending streams of anti-gravity, the truth appeared in all its ugly, mocking Chimeracontinued to rotate slowly and inevitably above them—monolithic, cold, and absolutely intact, without a single scratch or scorch mark on the conversion mage-armor.

  And then happened what no one could have foreseen. The central shutters in the belly of the ancient ship smoothly parted.

  No beam weapon shot followed. Instead, a sound struck the air.

  Initially, it was just a vile, infrasonic grind, as if someone dragged a giant piece of glass over rusty tin. But in the next instant, the sound transformed into a concentrated shock-sonic wave of impossible, destructive amplitude. The psycho-magical siren of the Ancients.

  It hit not only hearing aids—it pierced directly into the central nervous system.

  Glass instruments in the wheelhouse turned to microscopic dust with pops. Officers and sailors, as if mown down by an invisible scythe, began to collapse onto the metal deck. The strict formation collapsed in a single instant. People clutched their ears, but the sound lived inside their skulls, causing synovial fluid to boil. Strained, agonizing moaning, turning into the howl of dozens of leather-lunged throats, filled the flagship. Military discipline turned into convulsive threshing of biological material on the floor.

  "A-kha-a!... Bitch-a-a!.." Kaon wheezed bubbling with hatred, crashing onto his knees against the bulkhead with a dull thud.

  Blood flowed from his nose, and his ears burned as if red-hot needles were inserted into them. His hands cramped. Trying to physically scratch this corrosive sound out of his own brain, the celebrated Vice Admiral unconsciously scratched his face with clawed fingers, tearing skin to blood. at that moment, neither duty, nor the Gra-Valkas Empire, nor the fleet existed anymore. This unnatural resonance tore every nerve cell to pieces from the inside and ruthlessly drove mad, leaving only one animal, all-consuming instinct—to crawl into some secluded hole and die in silence.

  Aerial BattleshipPal Chimera-02(Tiamat).

  Central Command Sphere.

  The hall's polished walls vibrated imperceptibly as the suppression system's infrasound siren finally powered down.

  Leaning back casually in his anti-gravity chair, Meteos watched the volumetric tactical hologram projected directly into the center of the bridge. On it, the pulsing red markers of human biological signatures were rapidly fading out.

  The projection of the enemy dreadnought, which just a minute ago had been spewing a sea of fire, now looked like a ghost ship. The fiery tracers from their anti-aircraft guns had ceased. Unprotected by force barriers, the crew of the Betegris was entirely incapacitated, crippled by their own paralyzed nervous systems.

  The space in front of the Commander distorted with a faint rustle, and in a shower of blue sparks, the holographic avatar of Kolmed—the Chief Engineer—materialized. His face was hidden behind a featureless white mask, but his mechanical voice, amplified by the comms unit, carried a sense of professional satisfaction mixed with a touch of anxiety.

  "Status report, Commander," Kolmed reported dispassionately. "Sensors confirm: psycho-acoustic resonance has reached projected parameters. All bio-signatures on the enemy's exposed decks and in their unshielded bridges have been neutralized or placed into profound shock. Close-quarters combat is suspended. The energy channels of the runic mana-circuits inside the Chimera remain intact and are operating stably. There are no reactor fluctuations. However..."

  The engineer's hologram expanded the load charts for the force fields. The graph lines plummeted, breaking off dangerously close to the critical red zone.

  "However, the conversion fields absorbed a colossal amount of damage from a directed kinetic explosion," Kolmed continued. "The barrier's integrity was overloaded by seventy-nine percent before the system vented the pressure. Currently, the accumulation cycle is active. Shield density is regenerating: ten percent... twenty-five percent... forty-seven percent. The lower hemisphere's contour has stabilized."

  Propping his chin on his white-gloved hand, Meteos thoughtfully tapped his long fingers against the obsidian armrest. He did not take his eyes off the data on the monitor, analyzing the spectrum of the blasts that had just shaken his flying fortress.

  "Their chemists aren't wasting any time," Meteos muttered softly to himself, his tone laced with almost scientific respect. "They've refined the formula of their soulless mixture. There wasn't a single spark of mana in that gunpowder, just the concentrated combustion of chemical elements. Very crude. Very primitive. And monstrously effective in a confined space... If they had used that same explosive during their clash with Battista's Zero Fleet, those 'fiery suitcases' of theirs wouldn't have been able to drain even a third of our lower shields."

  He had to admit it: one or two more focused, zeroed-in volleys from the entire heavy squadron, and the defenses could have collapsed entirely. Ravernal engineering had never anticipated that magic-less barbarians could generate destructive energy of such density purely through chemical reactions and steel pipes. Gra-Valkas was an evolutionary mistake that needed to be eradicated immediately, before it perfected itself even further.

  "No more taking risks. The survivability experiment is over," the Commander stated in an icy tone, and with one light, dismissive flick of his hand, he erased the mana-monitor displaying the physical analysis of the enemy's volley. The image crumbled into pixelated dust. "Kolmed. Remove the lockdown on the core's launch silo. Drop aJibilon the flagship of these mechanical parasites. Scorch them so thoroughly that they won't even be able to tow their wreckage away."

  The engineer's hologram paused. A launch of this caliber induced a chthonic terror even among the personnel of the Department.

  "The casing will destabilize immediately after exiting the power contour. The terminal detonation point above the enemy deck has been calibrated, Commander," the technician replied with a slight bow. "Understood. Launch sequence activated."

  The engineer's avatar folded in on itself and vanished in a shimmer of blue aether.

  On the belly of thePal Chimera, dead center between the anti-gravity levitators, the armored doors of the bomb bay began to slowly part with a heavy metallic screech. From the yawning darkness breathed an icy, sepulchral cold that sucked the moisture straight out of the surrounding clouds.

  The weapon currently lowering onto the guide rails was classified by Mirishial science as the Super-large Magical Bomb Jibil. However, in earthly terms—used by the Russian military analysts in the quiet offices of OPIR-9—a far more precise and blood-chilling designation had already been assigned to this device: a mago-thermobaric volumetric implosion munition, or the "vacuum bomb of the Ancients."

  This device was not born from the genius of Runepolis's engineers. The current Empire, despite being at the peak of its power, was only capable of assembling the casings and filling them with a synthesized substance according to ready-made recipes extracted from cursed ruins. The sheer dimensions and colossal weight of the munition were such that not a single Beta-series bomber, nor even their finest battleships, could transport it to a combat zone. Only the gravitational force fields of an aerial fortress like the Pal Chimera could restrain the mass of anti-matter from a premature chain reaction and carry such a burden inside its armored belly.

  For the Ravernal Empire, which had vanished millennia ago, the Jibil bomb was not the crown jewel of destruction, nor was it a prototype for a "doomsday weapon." It was merely an ordinary, mass-standardized tool for cleansing rebellious continents, issued to "police" ships of the Chimera class—something as utterly mundane to them as an arrow in an ordinary guardsman's quiver.

  A weapon capable of reducing the physical structure of a target into absolute nothingness.

  Combat Bridge of the 1st Heavy Strike Group Flagship Betelgeuse(Betegris).

  "What..."Admiral Caon wheezed painfully, his voice rasping through torn vocal cords.

  His fingers slipped across the cold steel, leaving bloody smears on the bulkhead. The old veteran, who had survived the h.e.l.l of Yggdra, struggled to peel his heavy, lead-like body off the deck. In the wake of the magical infrasound strike, a ringing emptiness echoed inside his skull, where a single, fragmented thought was adrift:get up.

  Next to him, spitting up thick crimson phlegm, the other surviving staff officers struggled to rise from their knees. Due to severe barotrauma, most of them were bleeding steadily from their noses and ears. Stripped of all coordination, deafened, and completely broken, they looked more like the patients of a typhus ward than the strategic brains behind a mighty military fleet.

  Leaning against the mangled console of a rangefinder, Rear Admiral Bate shook his head like a shell-shocked dog and stared straight up through the shattered glass of the armored conning tower. Blotting out the heavens, the flying fortress Pal Chimera hung motionless directly above their masts.

  And from its absolutely perfectly flat, black metallic underbelly, at that exact moment, something detached.

  It had absolutely nothing in common with the elongated high-explosive aerial bombs that the Gra-Valkas military was accustomed to. It was a colossal, teardrop-shaped gray monolith the size of a freight locomotive. Fastened to its rear were powerful, cross-shaped aerodynamic fins designed to ensure a flawless vertical descent. But the most terrifying detail lay at the nose of the bomb: three massive, glowing blood-red stabilizers. It wasn't gunpowder burning inside them—they pulsed with super-concentrated mana, guiding the Jibil warhead toward its target with the absolute mathematical certainty of gravitational pull.

  Bate's eye—the seasoned eye of a master artillerist—instantly calculated the trajectory, the payload's mass, and the point of no return. Time dilated, compressing down to the last few frantic beats of a battered heart. He realized everything.

  "INCOMING!.. FROM ABOVE!"Bate roared in a hoa.r.s.e, lung-tearing howl, pouring whatever was left of his life into that scream as he threw himself forward, trying to shove his friend and commander under the heavy concrete overhang of the communications niche.

  But sound proved to be much slower than gravity and magic.

  AN INSTANT.

  In that very fraction of a second, the overwhelmingly heavy bomb of the Ancients did not explode. Physics took the stage first. The tip of the gray capsule slammed into the battleship's main armored deck between the second and third turrets. Dropping from an alt. of over three thousand feet, the multi-ton mass simply punched through the Krupp cemented steel as effortlessly as a sledgehammer driving through rotting floorboards. With a horrifying, gut-wrenching screech of tearing hull metal, the projectile drove deep into the ship's bowels—smashing down through the battery deck, through the boiler room, right down into the double bottom holding the main battery's ammunition magazines.

  Only then did the red runic stabilizers finally close the conversion circuit inside the bomb.

  "…A flash,"— this final, ephemeral thought never even fully formed in the concussed brain of Admiral Caon.

  His nervous system had no time to register pain. He didn't even have time to blink. The old sea wolf, a veteran of dozens of grand campaigns, simply ceased to exist—instantly erased from the fabric of reality.

  His fiercely loyal Chief of Staff, Bate, never got to finish his warning cry; he dissolved into elementary subatomic particles right alongside the bridge armor he had been touching.

  The detonation sequence of theJibilproceeded along an algorithm totally alien to the industrial era. First came a colossal expulsion of aetherial gas. For a split second, the warship was shrouded in a sickly turquoise haze. Aether flooded every single compartment of the 40,000-ton battleship, seeping through cracks and ventilation shafts, forcefully displacing the oxygen and actively trans.m. the ship's iron molecular structure into an energetic conduit.

  In the very next heartbeat, the volumetric mago-thermobaric implosion collapsed in on itself. The plasma reaction had been initiated.

  Everything contained aboard theBetelgeuse—a.r. sh.e. , crude oil tanks, multi-ton machinery, and thousands of human lives—immediately became fuel for a single, compact sun that ignited directly inside the ship's steel sh.e.l.l.

  None of the crews manning the flanking Gra-Valkas escort destroyers had ever seen anything like this in their entire lives, not even amidst the global blood baths of their home planet.

  The battle ship Betelgeuse, a crown jewel of naval engineering and the symbol of the Empire's indomitable war machine, was instantly illuminated from the inside out by a blinding, retina-searing, impossibly intense white-blue light. Rays of absolute light poured out from the portholes and the gun turrets, splitting open the steel seams of the heavy armor belt and ripping right upward through the wooden teak deck.

  Then, with an unnatural, totally silent speed, the warship swelled outwards. The steel hull, superheated to hundreds of thousands of degrees, took on the malleable consistency of modeling clay—and then, with a cataclysmic roar, it burst at every seam.

  The ocean completely vaporized within a radius of four hundred yards, totally exposing the craggy, dry bedrock of the sea floor. Accompanied by a deafening, ear-shattering boom that physically popped eardrums over ten miles away, an absolute vacuum formed precisely at the epicenter of the blast. The violently displaced wall of seawater instantly rushed back in to fill the void, generating a horrific localized tsunami that casually swept the escorting destroyers away like splintered matchsticks.

  And directly out from the center of this oceanic chaos, a hyper-dense, roiling pillar of fire, dust, and vaporized steel violently erupted all the way up into the stratosphere. Stretching endlessly toward the heavens, it bloomed into a colossal ash-gray mushroom cloud that crackled internally with raging arcs of turquoise mana-lightning.

  The mighty armada of the Gra-Valkas Empire, its flagship eradicated and its command entirely decapitated in a single merciless strike, ground to a paralyzed halt. The sailors could only stare in mesmerizing, primal, mystical terror at this towering, artificial monument to the apocalypse. It was the absolute first meeting of the mechanical Hammer and the magical Anvil, and the Anvil had struck back with catastrophic vengeance.

  Central Command Post of the Aerial Battle ship Pal Chimera-02.

  The shimmering sphere of the tactical mana-projection in the center of the hall rippled, going blind for a few moments due to the monstrous electromagnetic and aetherial surge outside. The protective force fields of the levitating citadel vibrated, compensating for the shockwave tearing across the space below.

  When the interference cleared and the crystal screens regained their sharpness, an icy, deafening silence hung in the bridge.

  "The thermal signature at the epicenter is unstable... Peak values exceed six thousand degrees,"Kolmed's voice, sounding from the holographic display, had lost its usual flawless dryness. A tremor broke through it—the tremor of a man who had just looked into the maw of the gods."Enemy bio-signatures in the blast radius... have vanished. Vanished completely. There are no survivors in the center of the formation."

  Meteos, having never touched the glass sitting on his armrest, slowly ran his white-gloved hand over the smooth obsidian of his chair.

  "Evidently, the decompression damage and aetherial decay that Jibil triggers upon direct contact with physical matter does not leave so much as a smear of flesh,"the Commander stated dispassionately, as if commenting on a laboratory experiment, watching the dissipating pillar of smoke.

  The smoke slowly parted, driven away by the stormy sea wind. What was revealed to the optical scanners caused the experienced officers of the Department to freeze in stunned disbelief.

  Of the once-proud 40,000-ton dreadnought, which had seemed to be the embodiment of Gra-Valkas's steel immortality, absolutely nothing remained that could be called a ship. In the center of a boiling, smoking maelstrom, a charred, melted husk slowly bobbed on the waves. The hull had turned into a cherry-red puddle of slag, glowing from the ultra-high temperatures, congealed over a bare, warped keel. The armor, the guns, the multistory superstructures with their optics—all of it had fused into a single shapeless mass. The water around this floating chunk of dead metal hissed continuously, generating thick clouds of acidic, seemingly radioactive steam.

  "Incredible..."wheezed one of the operators of the secondary mana-pulse cannon in a whisper, involuntarily taking a step back from the monitor.

  "This is... simply inconceivable. No shield could survive that,"another mage-technician replied, his fingers frantically gripping his console.

  "We are playing with the fire of the Creators... It can't be..."

  Shocked whispers began to swell in the sterile silence of the hall, spreading like a virus of panic. Unlike the exalted sailors of the fleet down below, the people working here in the control center were intellectuals. They understood the true price of what had just happened. This weapon was not defending them. It proved the Russian diplomats and the most terrifying legends completely right: the ancient Ravernal Empire possessed tools of mass genocide that the current generation was still hundreds of years away from matching.

  The sharp sound of a palm slamming against a crystal table, hitting like the crack of a whip, made everyone flinch.

  "The show is over!"Meteos's cold, joyless, barking roar struck the crew's ears, driving their mystical awe back beneath the thick skin of military discipline. The Commander stood up, towering over the viewing sphere."It is simply a tool, and you are its operators! Pull yourselves together! Everyone, return to the algorithm! Only the command unit was destroyed; the formation still exists, and this battle is not over yet!"

  He pointed to the tactical sphere, where the surviving but leaderless markers of Gra-Valkas destroyers and heavy cruisers were darting about chaotically, utterly stunned by the catastrophe of their flagship.

  "Finish off the remnants of the first wave. Show no mercy. Switch to 'Raid' mode. Commence sectoral sweep using the auxiliary 150-millimeter caliber and the emitters. Do not let a single scrap of their filthy iron slip out of the kill zone unattended. Execute!"

  "Yes, Commander! Locking onto markers four through twelve!"the operators replied in a disjointed chorus, quickly shifting from pure emotion back into a professional assembly line of death as their fingers fluttered over the mana-panels once more.

  Letting out a deep, bass-heavy hum from its anti-gravity coils, the Pal Chimera slightly altered the tilt of its massive disk, bringing its lower batteries to bear on the enemy scrambling across the water below. It returned to the process of annihilation: smoothly, with icy calculation, completely without rush. The heavy cruisers and agile destroyers, attempting to escape into smokescreens or wildly firing blindly into the sky, had absolutely no chance against the magical thermal lock-ons and the energy pulses striking them from above like falling stars.

  No shouts, no megaphone commands, no artillery duels disturbed the scene. Instead, a silent, sterile process unfolded—the disinfection of a tainted space, executed with meticulous precision.

  In forty-four minutes, the combat engagement was concluded with the absolute victory of the Aerial Fortress and the demonstrative, surgical annihilation of the First Heavy Strike Group. Thirty-six first-class warships of the Gra-Valkas Empire, once considered the undisputed lords of the seas who struck primal terror into the entire region, had been transformed into a sprawling patch of mangled, burning metal drifting on the currents of the Baltica Sea, within which not a single human being had survived.

  Waters of the Baulos Sea.

  Strategic Bridge of the Super dreadnought Atlastar.

  The air inside the radio room, buried deep beneath the main armor belt of the bridge, reeked of the ozone of blown fuses and human sweat.

  "…The First Heavy… totally destroyed… I repeat, fleet signatures have vanished from the scopes… The unidentified enemy object has executed a turn and is moving to intercept our disposition, Your Excellency,"the radar operator reported, his voice hollow and strained. The young enlisted man fought to keep his composure, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the microphone. Listening to the shrieks of static and the death rattles over his headset, he had just witnessed a live broadcast of thirty-six warships being annihilated. Admiral Caon, a grizzled veteran of Yggdra, no longer existed.

  Hearing the report echo over the PA system, Captain Luxstal froze by the panoramic window. The armored glass reflected his face—and it wasn't contorted in panic, nor had it gone gray with terror. On the contrary, his dark eyes gleamed with a sickly, almost manic spark of dark, predatory antic.i. .

  His thin lips pulled back into a hard sneer, baring his teeth. If a wily old wolf like Caon couldn't find a way to leash this flying city and ultimately laid his head on the block, then it meant—without a doubt—that this was it. A genuine challenge. Something truly worthy of the Atlastar's caliber.

  After all, when the Empire had first fallen through s.p. and landed in this d.a. New World, n. could have imagined they'd actually need to flex their steel muscle.

  Luxstal mentally chuckled as he reminisced about the early days of their expansion. Shortly after the spatial displacement, their homeland had the sheer audacity to be challenged by some two-bit, muck-sc.r. monarch of the completely backwater Kingdom of Paganda. A native savage whose nation hadn't even discovered the steam engine thought far too highly of himself! Intoxicated by fairy tales of his own magical exceptionalism, the idiot actually tried to arrest the head of the diplomatic mission—Prince Gra-Kabal, the very son of Emperor Gra-Lux himself—and throw him into a dungeon! Furthermore, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d threatened the Crown Prince with a humiliating execution by hanging, as if he were some common vagrant. It was an unprecedented, spectacular display of arrogance born of absolute, total ignorance.

  And yet, keeping with the best diplomatic traditions of the GVE, those aboriginals had originally been offered a completely fair partnership: solid, ringing imperial gold coins, freshly minted in the factories of Ragna, traded for the badly needed grain and food required to stabilize the disoriented Empire.

  But the petty king demanded entirely too much—tributes, groveling on their knees, and the total enslavement of the "newcomers"—something His Imperial Majesty, obviously, would never tolerate. It was a direct insult to Gra-Valkas's very right to exist.

  Glory to the Emperor and to his "Blades"—the elite detachment of the Imperial Guard that escorted the prince. Superior training and raw steel decided the issue entirely. The Guardsmen, equipped with the absolute pinnacle of 1940s infantry technology, broke through the heavy enemy encirclement in the throne room as easily as if they were tearing through wet cardboard sets, fighting their way out to the transport ships docked in the roadstead.

  In that meat grinder, which more closely resembled a slaughterhouse floor than a battle, not a single Guardsman fell. No one suffered an injury worse than a scratch. The tight, cohesive crossfire from their submachine guns simply churned the advancing palace guards—who charged them in tightly packed phalanxes wielding spears and broadswords—into piles of ragged meat across the expensive rugs. Countless Pagandans, blinded by idiotic faith in their magical amulets, foolishly charged the meat grinder and were mowed down indiscriminately.

  When the heavy burden of rescuing the heir fell upon their shoulders, the Blad emphatically proved their phenomenal combat effectiveness in practice. They spared neither bullets nor the lives of savages. They fired short, point-blank bursts, jammed their blades into the visors and joints of knightly armor, and lobbed heavy, ribbed fragmentation grenades straight down the castle corridors.

  Following that incredibly demonstrative incident, a brand-new protocol was inst. : absolutely all movements of the Children of the Emperor must be escorted by a full army convoy—at bare minimum, a motorized infantry platoon, a covering screen of trucks, and three half-tracks armed with heavy anti-aircraft machine guns. Purely to avoid any future "diplomatic misunderstandings," naturally.

  The payback for raising a hand against the bloodline of the Throne was unavoidable and mechanically cruel.

  The moment His Imperial Highness Gra-Kabal stepped onto the deck of a destroyer and was safely outside the target zone, the commander of the expeditionary strike group checked his watch and quietly, with zero rush, ordered the start of full-scale artillery prep.

  The heavy cruisers rotated, bringing their broadsides to bear against the coast. They relentlessly flattened the coastal fortresses, the port infrastructure, and the administrative center of the Pagandan capital for three consecutive days without pause, methodically working grid square by grid square to turn stone to dust and timber to ash. n. kept count of the high-explosive sh.e. used—the military industry back on the mainland was humming along perfectly.

  And on the next day—the fourth day of a choking blanket of smog hovering over the ruins—the heavy iron ramps of flat-bottomed amphibious landing crafts (equivalent to Higgins Boats/LCVPs) clanged down onto the white, debris-littered sands of the Paganda Kingdom.

  Covered by intense anti-aircraft fire from the ships, the first waves of angry, seasick, but extremely motivated Marines surged ash.o.r.e. Through unofficial word from their political officers, a nasty rumor had already filtered down through the ranks: the unwashed local "papooses" had tried to lynch the Emperor's own son. They took no prisoners. Captivity was completely canceled via a deeply understood, unwritten order that ran right from the bottom to the top.

  In one single, blood-soaked week, the "Pagandan question" was decisively and irreversibly closed, the country outright annexed and fully transformed into an imperial resource-extraction colony.

  All of those fancy "Armies of the Second Civilization Area," all of those fearsome aboriginal formations turned out to be absolutely nothing more than expensively dressed, undisciplined mobs.

  Engagement engagements elicited nothing but bitter, cynical sneers from the career officers of the GVE.

  Archaic, feudal "glorious knights" marching around in brightly polished engraved plate armor, cavalry trying to fight with edge weapons, and a clumsy, untrained peasant militia shivering in moth-eaten gambesons and chainmail desperately attempting to lock a pike wall... All marching shoulder-to-shoulder directly into the teeth of MG machine-gun fire, head-to-head against the hyper-mobile, industrialized units of the Imperial National Army, who had cut their teeth in the relentless modern meat grinders of Yggdra.

  Armed with ultra-reliable bolt-action rifles and fixed, faceted bayonet-cleavers, the Marines worked precisely. The close-quarters weapon—the bayonet—was used efficiently during the occasional savage trench scuffles that broke out, tactics which the Gra-Valkans were highly accustomed to relying on, readily transforming enemy fighting pits into a bloody mash, unlike the squeamish and easily panicked local mages.

  Above all else, Gra-Valkan humans always benefited from completely uninterrupted, centralized command lines, binoculars for artillery spotters, and the paramount tactical advantage of 1940s combat doctrine: the man-portable backpack radio. While a native commander was still busy shouting orders at a bugler boy, the Gra-Valkan infantry was already casually dialing in heavy artillery coordinates for the precise grid square.

  It wasn't even a war. It was a severe beating. Like clubbing toddlers over the head with an iron pipe.

  It wasn't even funny anymore…

  Over the course of fleeting, surgically brutal, and utterly devastating battles, the Kingdom of Paganda simply ceased to exist as a sovereign entity. What the proud natives initially attempted to dub a "heroic resistance" ultimately amounted to nothing more than a routine, mildly exhausting urban clearing exercise for the Gra-Valkas motorized divisions.

  The highly coordinated infantry assaults, backed by relentless fire support and the ceaseless artillery terror of heavy naval guns, ground the once-picturesque stone cities into smoking rubble. Those few desperate pockets of militia and palace guard who frantically attempted to hold the line in the narrow cobblestone streets were mercilessly gunned down at point-blank range with submachine guns and torched out with grenades—without a single word of negotiation.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  By the verdict of a drumhead court-martial, the former government—that incredibly shortsighted petty king and his entire high council, totaling some three dozen men—were marched out to the central square, whose pavement had been severely chewed up by tank treads. There, methodically and with zero fanfare, they were strung up on hastily slapped-together gallows. Their bodies were left swinging under the slate-gray sky as a grim object lesson to the rest, leaving the buzzards to finish the gruesome job the tribunal had started.

  The state was officially annexed, permanently downgraded to a mere governor-generalship. A viceroy was installed at its helm—a hard-nosed functionary, one of the sharpest political protégés produced by Dallas's Foreign Affairs Bureau. The system operated like absolute clockwork: resources, raw minerals, and the populace were instantly cataloged, turning the region into a sprawling resource-extraction base.

  Was it actually worth it? Did it make any rational sense to haughtily spit in a safely extended hand that initially offered clinking, freshly minted gold in a peaceful exchange for cheap grain? Lord only knows. The savages paid the ultimate price for their profound stupidity.

  Shortly thereafter, the subjugated nation's protector—the Leiforian Empire—attempted to challenge them. The narcissistic mages, having arrogantly bestowed superpower status upon themselves, raised their banners and launched their wyverns into the skies, banking on overwhelming the "newcomers" through sheer numbers and ancient vows. And what was the endgame?

  That so-called "superpower" was violently cracked open, swallowed whole, and completely annexed exactly like the minuscule Paganda.

  The aboriginal system of moral values shattered completely under the brutal weight of industrialized shell shock. The famed Leiforian imperial dynasty—the very people deemed the anointed chosen of the gods—reached the end of the line on a scaffold erected right in the heart of their own smoldering capital. Furthermore, it wasn't even the occupying forces who tightened the nooses around their necks. Fully realizing that any notion of protection had ceased to exist and that the Gra-Valkan iron machines completely blotted out the skies, their own panic-stricken subjects violently dragged their rulers out of their palaces and lynched them in the public squares, in a desperate bid to beg the new masters for mercy.

  The new administration extended a highly specific brand of mercy strictly toward the royal infants: those young children whose minds hadn't yet petrified in the local dogma were ripped straight from the arms of their wet nurses and shipped back to Ragna, the Gra-Valkan capital. There, securely confined within specialized orphanages, they would be methodically molded into perfectly obedient administrators destined to oversee future conquered territories.

  "An absolute land of unabashed, phenomenal idiots,"Luxstal scoffed dismissively, firmly pulling down the lapels of his immaculate white tunic. The bridge reeked of cordite from the previous broadside and the expensive pipe tobacco he highly preferred during moments of immense nervous tension.

  Standing on the very bleeding edge of the Imperial sword, he was the man who had personally delivered those leaden ultimatums directly to the local overlords. He had witnessed it firsthand: this magical world, hopelessly bogged down in its childish fairy tales and antiquated rituals, only truly respected one thing. Absolute, undiluted, physical Force. Until you literally smash their teeth in, forcefully drag their fanciful illusions through the bloody mud, and ruthlessly rub their noses deep into their own utter impotence, trying to negotiate is absolutely pointless. But the exact moment they truly tasted modern steel—there was zero going back for them. They broke. Forever.

  It was specifically under Luxstal's command that the supposedly "invincible" Pagandan and Leiforian squadrons fiercely burned and sank to the abyss; it was the Main Battery of his personal superdreadnought that had methodically ground the architectural masterpieces of their capital cities into pulverized concrete and crushed glass.

  But now the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. The Gra-Valkas Empire was now being aggressively challenged by this entire globe, which had ultimately decided to actively unite!

  Luxstal sharply narrowed his eyes, squinting hard through the slate-gray Baltica haze. Proper military conflict analytics absolutely loathed blind hubris. Under zero circumstances could they ever afford to dangerously "play along" with or heavily underestimate the crippled remnants of the Mirishial fleet, and that went doubly true for the industrialized state of Mu. You simply could not dismiss them entirely merely due to their initial weakness straight out of the starting gate. Give them even the slightest illusion of a breather, permit them to safely lick their wounds and actively course-correct on their early tactical blunders—and they'd effortlessly mobilize the raw resources of all three massive Continents. They would quickly learn to actively camouflage their most vulnerable nodes, aggressively shift their battlefield doctrines, and violently attempt to reverse-engineer mechanical armaments... And at that precise moment, this incredibly easy colonial walk in the park severely ran the very real risk of morphing into a brutal, grinding, total war of violent attrition entirely capable of sucking dry the absolute last drops of the Empire's economic lifeblood.

  A drawn-out scenario featuring a prolonged, trench-style positional war simply did not have the right to exist. They desperately needed to strike hard right now—stomping down heavily on the skulls of the enemy commanders while they were still visibly reeling in shock from the initial blow.

  "…Yet regardless, no matter how relentlessly fast we aggressively burn right through this pathetic trash, sooner or later, we are still inevitably going to have to physically confront Russia,"Luxstal reasoned aloud in a quietly low, practically philosophical tone. Simply vocalizing that precise name instantly triggered a sickening, cold pang somewhere deep within his solar plexus—an undeniable bodily reaction spawned directly from the freezing, long-forgotten primal terror heavily featured within that archived video tape playing in the Emperor's private study.

  But right now, he actively needed to forcibly pull himself completely out from his hypothetical theories and brutally lock himself firmly into the reality of the present. Undeniable reality stood actively waiting for him right here and right now, tangibly materializing dead ahead of the tremendously thick armored glass covering his command bridge.

  Luxstal, the supreme commanding officer steering this victorious steel colossus, tightly clenched his jaw, heavily resting his weight over the iron railing with the stone-cold calculated precision of a seasoned predator entirely frozen in rapt anticipation of a forthcoming lethal rendezvous. He silently waited. Intently waiting to eagerly face down the gigantic unidentified object, the very same ancient chthonic superweapon that possessed the staggering, playful audacity to seamlessly scrub Caon's 1st Heavy Strike Group completely off the map.

  Colossal super-heavy armor-piercing shells had already been expertly hoisted and chambered solidly into the primary breeches. The mightyAtlastarstood locked and thoroughly primed to violently yank those fake gods screaming right down out from their precious skies.

  Waters of the Baulos Sea

  North of the Mu Continent coast.

  Main command bridge of the 1st Mu Naval Fleet Flagship — the Super dreadnought La Erdo.

  The bridge of the La Erdo smelled neither of ozone nor the exotic incense typical of Mirishial vessels. Here, the reigning scents were heavy machine grease, burnt coal, heated copper, and bitter tobacco smoke. The massive, nearly thirty-thousand-ton, all-metal leviathan vibrated constantly: deep underfoot, in the colossal bellies of the boiler rooms, stokers shoveled tons of black gold into the ravenous fireboxes of the Yarrow boilers, driving the steam turbines to their absolute maximum RPM.

  The air on the bridge was thick with nervous tension. Rider, the commander of the Mu Navy's operational strike group, tightly gripped his unlit pipe. He stared out into the leaden, forbidding sky through the narrow slits of the armored glass, listening to the dry, clattering rhythm of the radiotelegraph drifting in from the adjacent acoustic booth.

  Suddenly, the clatter abruptly ceased. The door to the radio room clanged open, and a junior communications lieutenant—his face pale to the point of being blue—dashed onto the bridge, nearly tripping over his headphone wires. The decoded message slip in his hand was shaking violently.

  "Commander! Radiogram from the forward aviation patrol, 'Stormpetrel-Four'! Visual contact confirmed!"he blurted out, throwing military bearing completely out the window. A graveyard silence immediately fell over the confined space of the bridge."They are tracking the approach of the main body of the enemy fleet. Sector West-Northwest of the Allied World Fleet core! Bearing two-seven-zero. Range... six hundred and forty-eight cables (about seventy-five miles)! Approaching in columns, maintaining a broad front. Their course is dead set on us!"

  The lieutenant loudly swallowed a lump of dry spit.

  "The radiogram cut off, sir. The patrol craft is no longer responding to hails."

  Two hours prior, those very same Gra-Valkan fighter planes had diced up Mu's absolute best, elite aviation squadrons like cabbage. The recon scouts only lived up until the exact second those "gray monoplanes" physically laid eyes on them.

  "All battle stations! General Quarters! Prepare for immediate combat!"The Executive Officer's hoa.r.s.e baritone violently punched through the hum of the turbines, immediately followed by the jarring clatter of the battle alarms blaring across every compartment of the battleship.

  The rotating gears of armored hatches shrieked as they locked down, and the heavy munitions elevators violently clanked, hoisting fifteen-inch armor-piercing sh.e. up into the barbettes of the main battery turrets.

  Rider stood in silence, his gaze fixed on the second hand of the ship's heavy chronometer. It inexorably turned, ticking away the final moments of peace.

  "Six hundred forty-eight cables. An hour and a half, maybe two hours, before we reach visual contact and ranging shots,"his thoroughly pragmatic mind calculated completely automatically.

  And then, a heavy knot of nausea aggressively violently coiled in the pit of his stomach. A sharp, p.r.i. spike of pain lanced out from his chronic ulcer—one that only ever acted up during periods of mortal stress. Swept entirely clean of cheap imperial propaganda and political chest-thumping, a terrifyingly clear thought brightly flashed through his head:

  "This is the truly decisive battle. The Battle of Trafalgar of our century. Except today... we are the ones playing the unfortunate role of the technically backwards savages."

  He actively knew exactly what the specifications of his ship's armor were. He knew the uncla. data explicitly detailing the devastating penetration power of the enemy's highly vaunted eighteen-inch guns—intelligence bravely smuggled straight out of Paganda. Rider perfectly, acutely understood that theLa Erdo'sdeeply outdated, conventionally riveted armor belts absolutely would not endure a solid, direct hit from a "suitcase" packing that caliber. To the Gra-Valkans, the highly esteemed pride of the Mu Fleet was nothing more than an aluminum tin can lazily floating toward a firing squad.

  But he was a Fleet Commander of Mu. An ardent rationalist who had solemnly sworn an oath. And there was literally nowhere to retreat when facing a mechanical leviathan. Lying directly behind them, completely unprotected, were their valuable s.h., their irreplaceable industrial factories, and absolutely millions of innocent civilians back in Otaheite.

  "Hoist the masthead colors and the battle ensigns! Signal all divisions!"Rider hissed through heavily gritted teeth, aggressively biting down on the wooden stem of his smoking pipe hard enough to crack it. His eyes intensely narrowed, tightening down into twin, frosty slits.

  "Form up the battleline! Throw the Mirishials and their fancy 'Bastions of Light' right smack into the very center of the formation—we are securely covering their flanks! I want absolutely every last drop of steam ruthlessly wrung out of those boilers! We need to forcefully close this distance and lock into our point-blank engagement envelope before their battleships easily erase us right out of existence from far beyond the horizon."

  Signal searchlights up on the halyards vigorously began blinking, rapidly punching staccato orders out across the thick, hazy sea air directly to the neighboring ships.

  The absolutely gigantic, lumbering clunker that was the Allied World Fleet—a massive, totally chaotic hodgepodge incredibly consisting of heavily soot-stained dreadnoughts from Mu, blindingly brilliantly white Mirishial magi-cruisers visibly crackling with raw aetherial energy, and dangerously obsolete sail-steam hybrid frigates originating from the far lesser nations—laboriously, heavily groaning against the grinding friction of the sea, finally committed itself onto a deadly intercept course. The combined bulk of multiple hundreds of distinct pennants, visibly blotting out the skies above them beneath a smothering blanket of choking oil and dirty coal smog, uniformly surged heavily against the crashing oncoming waves. They threw themselves violently forward in one totally singular, genuinely desperate plunge, singularly aiming to force the inexorable, creeping Gra-Valkan steel armada into absolutely one ultimate, highly decisive engagement entirely within the increasingly intense, completely unyielding, consuming flames of this rapidly escalating global, absolute total war.Я

  At the same time. Airspace over the Sea of Baulos.

  North of the Mu continent.

  The sky here was bitingly cold and the color of blued steel.

  The Wing Commander of the Nigrat Union, Knight-InstructorAlban, cast a glance over the spiked head of his beast. The wind whistled as it battered the visor of his fully enclosed magitech helmet.

  To his right and left, stretching in a wide arc across the expanse of the sky, sailed his men. Three hundred riders on mighty Wyvern Lords. Three hundred perfect symbioses of man and reptile, raised together from day one in the Union's hatcheries. Composed, fanatically devoted to duty, ready to die on command.

  They were the elite. The pride and the primary shield of the Nigrat Union, throwing everything they had into this total war of all against one.

  One single, yet absolutely ruthless Terror from the West.

  Beneath their leathery wings, a kilometer below, slicing through the leaden waves, steamed the Gra Valkas breakthrough flotilla: forty-two ships. But Alban wasn't looking at them. The danger wasn't coming from the water.

  "Enemy..." the Commander exhaled tensely.

  His gauntleted fingers dug deathly tight into the stiff leather reins. The helmet's oculars, cut from faceted rock crystal and infused with the mana of Clairvoyance, allowed him to pick out a black, sinister rash in the damp haze. Five dozen rapidly growing dots on an intercept course, flying an echelon higher at two thousand -class carrier-based fighters.

  They were approaching with a frightening speed, unnatural for any living creature. Alban knew the reports. He understood: in a head-on clash, these aluminum locusts would simply tear their formation to shreds before they could even get close.

  "Wing! Hard bearing! Break into single flights! Open formation, split altitudes! Force a dogfight! Do not dare fly in a straight line!" Alban's hoarse bark of an order slammed into the tactical manacoms sewn into the collars of every knight.

  The wyverns reacted instantly, breaking the perfect wall and scattering in all directions.

  For a few long seconds, while the distance melted away, Alban allowed himself to close his eyes, sheltering from the roar of the rushing air.

  "Homeland..." he whispered into the silence of his sealed mask.

  His thoughts treacherously tore away, flying thousands of kilometers from this cursed place covered in gray overcast. To the warm, emerald valleys of Nigrat. To his little daughter, who that morning before his departure had wrapped her small arms around his heavy sabaton and begged him to return before the rainy season. To his wife, whose eyes were dry because she was a soldier's wife, but whose hands trembled as she fastened his cloak.

  This war was nothing like the border skirmishes for territory with neighbors, where knightly honor and ultimatums ruled. In this battle, only one thing was being decided: was their race worthy of existing under this sky at all? Were their children worthy of breathing air, or would Gra Valkas grind their nation into coal dust? If not him, and not these three hundred knights standing in the path of the steel juggernaut—then who?

  The trance lasted exactly a moment.

  His senses returned with an explosion: space was torn apart by the rising, soul-rending scream of piston engines transitioning into a dive. The enemy fighters crashed down from the zenith.

  "TO BATTLE! FOR THE UNION!" Alban's roar, amplified by the mental fury of his wyvern, Derk, cut through the ether.

  But the bravado was too late. A mechanical slaughter had begun.

  The Gra Valkas interceptors pierced their sparse formation without engaging in maneuvering. They simply fell from above at speeds over 600 km/h, spewing fire. Stabbing, dotted threads of tracers ripped open the overcast sky. The deafening, staccato rattle of heavy machine guns and the bassy, dull thud of 20mm aircraft cannons filled the air.

  Before the Commander's eyes, a dozen Wyvern Lords were blown into pieces of bloody mince in a second. Explosive 20mm shells turned reptile wings into sieves, tore through the riders' body armor, and detonated inside the animals' bellies, pouring crimson rain into the atmosphere.

  "Don't bunch up! Claw for altitude! Wait until they lose speed!" Alban screamed, digging his spurs into Derk's sides, forcing his mighty, 800-kilogram partner to snap into a wild barrel roll to escape the fan of death.

  In the heat of battle, one of the young, reckless Gra-Valkan pilots made a fatal error. After gunning down the wyvern flying ahead of him, he got greedy. Instead of pulling up into a vertical climb—a classic "Boom and Zoom"—he cut the throttle and banked into a horizontal turn, trying to get on the tail of Alban's wingman.

  The aircraft's speed dropped to critical levels. In a horizontal turning fight against a living reptile, he was a dead man.

  "Hit him!" the lieutenant sent a mental flash.

  The Nigrat knight's Wyvern Lord didn't attempt to land on the slippery duralumin—at those speeds, that would have been suicide. Instead, the beast tucked its webbed wings, transformed into a living battering ram, and dropped like a stone from above onto the Antares cutting across its path.

  CRA-ACK!

  The sound was like a sledgehammer striking an empty barrel, only a hundred times louder.

  The wyvern's massive hind legs, armed with talons the length of daggers, slammed at full speed not into the cockpit, but into the root of the fighter's left wing.

  The impact of monstrous kinetic force simply sheared off the wing surface. The spars snapped with a screech, and the aluminum skin sprayed out in all directions like tin foil.

  Instantly deprived of its left wing, the plane jerked so violently that the pilot's head whipped around inside the cockpit and slammed with a sickening crunch against the armored glass of the canopy. The machine turned into a piece of uncontrollably spinning wreckage, spewing fuel.

  Kicking off the falling enemy, the wyvern spread its wings to kill its momentum, while the mangled Antares, tumbling end-over-end, plummeted downwards and a second later smashed into the water, sending up a geyser of spray.

  But this tiny tactical triumph was drowning in a sea of their blood...

  The battle had been going on for only five minutes, and of the three hundred elite Dragon Knights of Nigrat, only two hundred and some remained. The exchange rate was terrifying: fifteen scaled giants for one smoking enemy machine. Of the forty Gra Valkas fighters that started, barely five machines had been destroyed.

  The enemies were faster. They were swifter and deadlier in every attack.

  The sound of tearing fabric. Impact!

  Alban was thrown forward onto the pommel of his saddle. Derk squealed pitifully, swerving aside: a 7.7mm burst had grazed them.

  The Mangal steel of the Union knight's cuirass, reinforced with protective runes, did its job—the armor did not let the lead penetrate into the Commander's flesh. The shells merely struck sparks from the rounded plates of the breastplate, denting it inward.

  But against physics, magic was powerless.

  The kinetic energy of a machine-gun burst of a caliber designed to pierce concrete fortifications was monstrous. The impact was transferred to his body through layers of sturdy padding and a leather gambeson. A dull, wet crack resonated.

  Three ribs on his right side crunched and caved in, threatening to puncture a lung. The air left Alban's chest with a whistle; his vision went dark for a second from a blinding surge of adrenaline and pain. Viscous blood pooled in his mouth—capillaries had burst from the micro-concussion of his internal organs.

  The left arm of Derk the wyvern, which had also taken a couple of bullets, hung like a whip, generously spraying the wind streams with blood, but the faithful beast did not lose its equilibrium, balancing instinctively.

  His whole body, compressed by the mangled cuirass, roared in blind, primal agony. His fingers seemed to want to unclench on their own from the pain shooting through his spine with every breath, and his grip on the bloody reins weakened.

  But Alban had no right to close his eyes. The Nigrat knights, seeing their commander thrashing under fire, still did not abandon the aerial line, forming up anew and weaving a deadly "carousel."

  They weren't holding on thanks to magic. And not even thanks to training. Alban, swallowing blood, bared his red-stained teeth through the glass of his visor and steered the wounded, rage-maddened Derk to intercept a new flight of enemy monoplanes entering a dive.

  It was the pure, naked moral will and resistance of the doomed, for whom physical pain had long ceased to matter, turning into nothingness. Behind them was Home. Ahead of them was Hell. And they were not about to let it pass.

  Alban's mind balanced on a razor's edge, threatening to collapse into a blackout of shock. His imagination, sharpened by pain, vividly painted the picture: if these iron, implacable locusts broke their formation, if these magicless, compassionless monsters in gray greatcoats made landfall on the shores of the Union... Nigrat would be scorched to ash. His wife and little daughter would simply be churned into the mud by tank treads. There would be no honorable knightly captivity. Only the industrial-scale extermination of "subhumans."

  "I will kill you..." the Commander wheezed with a whistle, expectorating bloody foam onto the fogged-up interior of his visor glass. To keep from losing his fading consciousness to the hypoxia caused by a punctured lung, he sank his teeth into his own lip. He bit down until he tasted raw meat. The sharp flash of pain served as a crude stimulant, dragging his blurred vision back to reality. "...Until you bastards knock the soul out of this piece of meat..."

  Their suicidal "dogfight" tactics, built on a total disregard for their own lives, had begun to bear fruit. The Gra Valkas pilots in their high-speedAntaresfighters were simply psychologically unprepared for mutilated reptiles—missing legs or chunks of wings—deliberately ramming them to shield their comrades. Having expended most of their 20mm ammunition, the Gra Valkas flights wavered. Unwilling to risk their machines in a chaos where dead carcasses plummeted alongside the living, the monoplane commanders changed vectors, pulling their fighters up to a safe altitude to regroup.

  They had cleared the lower echelon. It was a window of opportunity, lasting only a few dozen seconds.

  "Visual on target! I see the 'Demons of the West'! Dead ahead!" one of the miraculously surviving lookouts roared into the manacom, his voice cracking with strain and hatred.

  The cloud cover below tore open, exposing the dark ocean. And there, on the leaden surface, spreading like an iron web to the very horizon, steamed the enemy fleet. Dozens of ships. Their gray, angular hulls, bristling with smokestacks and a forest of gun barrels, belched black soot. They carried death to their civilization.

  The will to fight within the wounded, bleeding Dragon Knights soared to new heights. This wasn't the inspiration of victory. This was the absolute, icy fatalism of the walking dead who had finally spotted the enemy's throat and were ready to clamp their jaws shut.

  "HOLD FORMATION! DIVE! ATTACK!" Alban snarled, putting the last remnants of air in his punctured lungs into the scream. The commands flowed not so much through the microphone as through the shared empathic lattice binding the riders and their wounded animals into a single organism pulsing with rage. "Form a dome! Protect the 'Flame' with your bodies!"

  All the light and medium Dragon Knights abandoned their evasive maneuvers and closed ranks, transforming into a dense, scaled shield. They surged into a vertical dive.

  And in the center of this plunging spearhead, in the rearguard, sheltered by the bodies of the doomed, flew the heavyweights. The largest and most powerful Wyvern Lords, each straining their tendons to clutch massive, forged kegs in their armored talons.

  Inside these capsules sloshed "Alchemical Flame"—a viscous slurry reinforced with fire mana. A single detonation was enough for the substance to melt through iron, stripping a steel ship of its crew and control.

  Alban threw his wyvern to the bottom edge of this pyramid, understanding the cost: when they entered the range of the rapid-fire autocannons, the lead elements would take a solid wall of lead. Their only task was to die a fraction of a second later than the others, shielding the heavy carriers with the kegs until they reached the guaranteed drop distance. They had no choice.

  The mixture carried in the heavy forged kegs by the rearguard wyverns was officially designated in the registries of the Nigrat Union as "Alchemical Flame." But in reality, it was a sheer nightmare synthesized by war mages from thickened vegetable oil, deep-distilled "burning water," and "earth blood"—raw, unrefined petroleum—additionally enriched with an unstable powder of Fire-element mana crystals. It was the perfect medieval napalm. Sticky, toxic, and absolutely inextinguishable.

  To deliver it, they had to break through hell. And hell opened up before them.

  Leaden downpours from twin- and triple-barreled 25mm anti-aircraft autocannons, heavy tracer bursts from mounted machine guns—this entire unimaginable mass of superheated metal crashed down upon the heads of the Dragon Knights. Within a kilometer radius of the Gra Valkas squadron, the air became solid with lead.

  The bursts sliced through the formation like invisible laser whips. Wyvern after wyvern, rider after rider flared up, snapped in half, and fell from the roaring heavens. Their wings were torn to shreds; knightly steel was punched clean through, offering no salvation from the shrapnel.

  Whether ruined by a stray bullet, torn apart by a fragment of a Type-3 flak shell, or burned alive by a direct hit to the kegs of "Flame" while still in the air—in these minutes, the difference was erased. The icy, leaden waters of the Baltic accepted both men and mangled reptiles into their black embrace with equal indifference and tenderness, extinguishing their agony forever.

  But the first waves of suicide troops had done their job—they clogged the targeting sights of the enemy gunners with meat and chaos, allowing the heavy strike group to get right up close to the destroyers and light escort cruisers. To hover even for a second in this steel storm meant certain death; they had to strike on the fly.

  —Drop! DROP! Cut the locks, goddamnit!— Alban roared into the manacom, spitting blood as he pressed himself into the armored neck of his beast. In that same instant, a heavy-caliber bullet screamed past, grazing the top of his helmet, shearing off part of the crest and deafening his left ear so badly the Commander nearly vomited from the pressure drop.

  The sharp talons of the Wyvern Lords unclenched. Gravity and inertia took over. Dozens of massive forged kegs rained down like hail onto the decks and superstructures of the steel Gra Valkas ships.

  Detonating this infernal weapon required no external fuse or wyvern fireball. The Nigrat mage-alchemists had created their "cocktail" specifically for a blind drop, accounting for the extreme density of anti-aircraft fire in modern warfare. As soon as the sturdy oak staves burst from the crushing impact against the enemy ships' armor steel, the vessel's internal isolation was breached.

  The aggressive components of the liquid "Flame" broke free. With a microscopic delay, barely perceptible to the eye—just enough time for the thick, black, oily slime to splatter in a fan across the superstructures, flooding open gun pits, ventilation shafts, and the armored glass of the bridges—a violent chain reaction began. The unstable Fire Mana crystals, crushed on impact, instantly ignited the enriched resin and wood alcohol upon contact with ordinary air.

  the decks of the warships simultaneously turned into roaring crematoriums.

  The sticky, viscous, and heavy mass didn't just burn—it instantly expanded into self-igniting bubbles of white, blinding flame that generated thousands of degrees of heat. This mage-napalm was impossible to douse with water; on the contrary, moisture only caused the alchemical compound to bubble more actively, gnawing into surfaces. The vaunted steel, rivets, and proud arrogance of the industrial age melted rapidly in these seconds, fusing together with human skin, bones, and the mouse-gray uniforms of the air defense crews. The hellish, hissing brew ruthlessly claimed the lives of the Gra Valkas sailors in fractions of a second, curling their bodies in wild, indescribable agony.

  —Take that... you son of a b-b-bitch!— the primal, raspy roar of a burning gunner turned into a shrill, inhuman scream. His hands were clamped so tightly by the cramps of his charring muscles onto the control handles of the twin autocannon that he couldn't unclench them. Transformed into a torch of blinding fire, he continued to convulsively fire into the empty skies until the steel of the ready-service lockers, boiling from the monstrous temperature, decided the matter for him.

  The deafening explosion of the ammunition detonating right on the superstructure obliterated the entire gun emplacement, grinding the gunner's body and the weapon itself into red-hot bloody dust, scattering pieces of the twisted gun across the ocean.

  And this all-consuming nightmare repeated synchronously along the entire line of the armada's close protection. Kegs, self-igniting upon impact with steel, flared up again and again, flooding entire compartments. The target ships were instantly shrouded in greasy, impenetrable black smoke. Within minutes, the decks of light cruisers and destroyers turned into melting traps, baking alive the very sailors who, just fifteen minutes ago, had contemptuously considered these winged creatures nothing more than backward, sluggish animals to be shot down.

  The tactical plan had been executed at the very limit of human and animal endurance. The air pocket for escape was vanishing: Gra Valkas, overcoming the initial shock of the breakthrough, was shifting the focus of its anti-aircraft artillery from the depth of the formation to the machines that had broken through. Whatever followed would be nothing but a crossfire execution of those who lingered.

  —Pull out! Increase distance! Into the clouds!— Alban shouted, sharply yanking the reins. They were slippery with his blood and the wyvern's blood, but he clung to them with an iron grip.

  Adrenaline hit his exposed nerve endings like a heavy sledgehammer, burning away the remnants of rational fear and temporarily pushing the ribs shattered by the bullet somewhere to the background of his narrowed, tunnel vision. The mighty Derk lunged upward, miraculously avoiding the pillar of rising thermal heat from a destroyer burning below. Having won this tactical moment at a costly, unthinkable price, Alban had to immediately save the few remaining fighters of his air wing who had miraculously survived this fiery assault.

  —Retreat! Get up immediately! Into the "blind" zones!— the Commander barked into the radio again, choking on a heavy cough as he guided his beast toward the edge of the clouds.

  Now he had to get the boys out... Save the Order's gene pool...

  —Boys...— Alban repeated hollowly into his empty visor. A hot, metallic taste suddenly became nauseatingly distinct in his mouth. The synchronization suffered a brutal failure. A wave of dull, lifeless coldness shot through his mind. —Derk?..

  Instead of a powerful flap of wings and a transition into a steep climb, the enormous reptile suddenly went limp. His Wyvern Lord let out a guttural, terrible wheeze, coughing up black blood. Through the mental channel, this sound felt like an apology that there was no strength left. The beast's chest had been punched clean through by a 127mm shrapnel shard from a dual-purpose flak gun, and the magic of Life was rapidly leaving the pierced heart.

  —Brother... no, pull up...— Alban wheezed, tearing off his glove and stroking the mangled, soot-covered, and blood-sticky scales on his partner's scruff in desperation. The beast he had eaten with from the same bowl, whom he had known and understood since they were in diapers. Derk's death resonated in the knight's mind like the loss of his own half.

  —U-u-urgh...— Derk rasped barely audibly, gurgling with torn lungs, permanently folding his left wing, which had been shattered at the base.

  Control was completely lost. The multi-ton carcass, just a hundred meters above the squadron, rolled onto its wing. Gravity asserted its rights, dragging them down.

  The last thing Alban realized before impact was the giant steel superstructure and mainmast of one of the burning Gra Valkas Imperial cruisers rushing to meet him with supernatural speed.

  Darkness descended instantly, swallowing all existence.

  Consciousness did not return gradually. It slammed into his brain with a blinding flash of skull-splitting pain and nauseating stinging. It smelled of fuel oil, burnt blood, acid, and cordite. Fire alarms were wailing all around.

  —K-kkh... grrhh,— Alban groaned, spitting a clot of blood mixed with dust right beneath himself. His entire body was one continuous zone of shattered nerves, but... he was breathing. He hadn't been flattened against the armored deck.

  Falling and stumbling, tangling in twisted sheets of steel, the Commander clumsily collapsed onto his knees right in the middle of the mangled ship deck. Before him, blocking his view of the blazing cruiser, lay the massive, smoking body of his friend.

  The wyvern had managed, in the very last moment before the collision—a moment unattainable for simple instinct—to twist in the air. He had shielded his master's back from the kinetic impact against the armored deck with his own belly and wide, powerful wings, crushing the steel deck railings with his mass, taking the broken neck upon himself. The agile beast, the faithful partner... had saved him even after his own death, becoming a shock-absorbing shield of flesh andmithrilfor him.

  Roaring from a soulful anguish that burned out his reason and eclipsed any physical pain, Alban tore his mangled helmet with its shattered visor from his head with trembling hands, skinned to the bone, and threw it aside. Staggering, he crawled over and, in blind panic, pressed his ear to the pierced, still searingly hot scaled chest. To the heart of the dearest comrade in his life.

  But there were no beats. The mighty chest was as empty as Alban's soul was right now. No wheeze, no breath could be heard. Only Derk's dimmed eyes, filled with ashen dust—eyes that had always shimmered with intelligent, living molten gold—now stared pointlessly into nowhere, right through his commander. In them remained only the void of oblivion.

  Derk had done his duty and died...

  At the same time. Deck of a heavy cruiser of the Gra Valkas Empire.

  "The bastard with the wyvern went down over there! On the second superstructure!" a hoarse, strained voice shouted through the thick plumes of acrid black smoke rising from burning rubber and cables.

  "Squad, spread out! Form a semi-circle!" commanded another, more authoritative baritone, evidently belonging to a non-commissioned officer. The clatter of bolt-action rifles being cycled and the dry click of a submachine gun followed. "Keep your distance! Find the body, confirm the kill with a headshot!"

  They were moving in to finish the job. A standard mop-up operation for the Gra Valkas Imperial infantry.

  Lying amidst the twisted steel, Alban swallowed blood. His ribs were reduced to pulp, but the adrenaline of his death throes blocked the pain receptors.

  "Thank you... brother... wait for me," the Commander whispered almost inaudibly. Through the thick steel of his gauntlet, he stroked the dead, soot-covered snout of his faithful Derk one last time. The scales were cooling rapidly.

  Unclipping a crumpled metal canteen from the harness on his chest, he yanked the cork out with his teeth. Liquid poured down his throat. He greedily gulped down warm water mixed half-and-half with his own blood—not to quench his thirst, but to clear his airways and ensure he wouldn't choke on foam during the charge.

  Throwing the canteen onto the iron floor, Alban groped for his scabbard. The fastening straps had been sheared off upon impact. He gripped the hilt and drew his ancestral weapon. The heavy broadsword, forged from Orichalcum steel, absorbed the remnants of its master's life force with a low hum. Turquoise flashes of concentrated mana ran along the blade, turning the weapon's edge into a plasma-temperature cutter.

  He picked up his mangled, dented helmet—missing its visor—from the deck and placed it on his head, snapping the chin strap. The rider's eyes ceased to belong to a human—they burned with the beastly, predatory detachment of the doomed. Alban pulled as much toxic, gunpowder-scented air into his lungs as he could manage.

  He didn't rush into the swirling fuel-oil smoke with a knightly battle cry. A wild, guttural, rolling roar erupted from his ruined chest—a terrifying imitation of the call of an enraged Wyvern Lord.

  "OO-RA-A-A-AH!"

  Like a silver cannonball, Alban smashed through the wall of smoke.

  Two Gra Valkas stormtroopers, advancing slowly across the deck with rifles at the ready, were taken aback for only a fraction of a second. But in close-quarters combat, distances are closed not by steps, but by heartbeats.

  The first Gra Valkas soldier instinctively raised his weapon but didn't have time to pull the trigger. A deadly, blinding turquoise crescent slashed through the air. With a sickening, wet crunch, the Orichalcum blade sheared through the steel barrel of the rifle along with the fingers holding it, without losing any speed, and bit diagonally into the infantryman's neck, severing his clavicle all the way to the spine. Blood sprayed in a fountain against the gray wall of the superstructure. A thick, hot jet stained the tarnished, soot-covered silver armor of the Nigrat knight crimson.

  In that same second, something heavy and invisible slammed into Alban's back, just under the right shoulder blade, with a deafening crack. Pain lashed his spine like a burning whip. The kinetic energy of the 7.7mm bullet made him stumble, but the ancient armor, while absorbing the direct penetration, deformed, denting into his body.

  Spinning sharply on the rubberized sole of his sabaton, Alban saw the second shooter.

  The soldier in the gray uniform jumped back. On his soot-smeared face lay the animal panic of a man watching a steel-clad leviathan charging at him at full speed. With trembling, sweating hands, he worked the bolt of his Arisaka rifle. A spent brass casing flew out of the hot chamber with a ring, trailing a thin wisp of smoke.

  In terror, the trooper tried to chamber the next round, but the jitters made him jam the clip. The bolt locked up tight. The marine's eyes went wide as the armored shadow looming over him blocked out the light.

  Lunging forward to take the panicked enemy's head, Alban suddenly took a brutal, blind blow to his left side from an officer rushing him from the flank.

  "Doesn't matter..." the knight hissed through bloody saliva. Keeping his balance on the sloped deck, he didn't even bother raising his sword. He simply put his weight into a straight jab with his left gauntlet.

  The steel fist crashed exactly into the center of the Gra Valkas officer's face with such crushing force that the sound of the facial arch fracturing echoed through the air with a wet snap. The fighter's nose was driven inside his skull. The demon of the industrial world was instantly knocked out, collapsing like a sack of meat onto the ribbed metal of the ship's decking.

  The smoke parted again, and a whole line rose before Alban—an assault squad of eight men formed up behind a torpedo launcher. They looked at this butcher from the fairy tales in horror, but their submachine guns were already raised to their shoulders.

  "Squad, open fire!" the arriving platoon commander screamed, his voice cracking as he shook off his stupor.

  A squall of dozens of lead bullets slammed into the knight's breastplate and pauldrons with a roar. Sparks from ricochets sprayed in a sheaf. The armor's magical protective sigils flickered and burst one after another with loud, crackling chimes. Alban was thrown about by the impacts as if being beaten by invisible sledgehammers. One bullet found a gap in the joint of his greaves, tearing through thigh muscle; another blew off a fragment of his helmet.

  There was a catastrophic lack of air in his shattered chest. Breathing became impossible; his lungs were filling with warm fluid.

  "Grra-a-a-a-a-akh!" a monstrous, no longer remotely human roar gurgled from Alban's ruined mouth.

  He gripped the ribbed hilt of the glowing blade with both hands, bracing his legs against the oil-slicked deck. There were no more tactics. There was no pain. His eyes, filled with burst vessels, were veiled by a murky, absolute red mist of rage. He was a ghost, a living instrument of vengeance whose expiration date was running out right now.

  He charged forward.

  The submachine gunners fired while backing away in terror, tripping over cables and diving to the sides. But the distance had already closed to arm's length.

  In his hatred, merged with the feral instincts of his fallen beast, the Commander plowed into the Gra Valkas infantry formation. A wide swing of the heavy blade tore through two shooters at once, cleaving them diagonally through their harnesses and collarbones. A pivot—a short thrust to the throat. A kick with an armored boot to the back of a knee, snapping the leg, followed by an elbow strike to the back of the head.

  Blood sprayed in all directions. The sounds of gunfire drowned in the piercing, desperate screams of tearing human flesh. Sending yet another Gra Valkas soldier to the beyond with a strike of his pommel to the temple, Alban stopped, leaning heavily on his dulled, smoking sword.

  "In close quarters... you are just empty... tin cans... bastards," Alban wheezed gloatingly, bubbles foaming on his lips as he spat a clot of black blood. He slowly swept his gaze over the bridge a level above, bristling with the glass of portholes and the steel of rifles.

  A wall of marine infantry had risen on the ship's superstructure. No less than two platoons. A heavy mounted machine gun swiveled its thick, water-cooled muzzle toward him.

  And below, he stood alone—the last Dragon Rider amidst a grisly carpet of corpses that flooded the steel deck in dark crimson, surrounded by the convulsing, mangled bodies of soldiers of the modern era. His entire suit of silver armor was dented and blackened, drenched in so much blood that not a single bright spot remained.

  From above came the trembling but decisive order of their commander, accompanied by a sharp wave of his hand:

  "Total suppression. On the beast—Fire!"

  The silence was torn apart by a ragged but incredibly dense and deafening volley from dozens of barrels. No fewer than a hundred bullets struck the warrior's body in a continuous stream, punching right through the remains of his protective scales and plate, gouging out chunks of armor and flesh.

  The knight didn't even stagger, taking the entire swarm like rain. He realized that the limit of physiology had been reached. His muscles failed.

  "Worthless..." Alban rasped quietly, almost dismissively. With immense effort, straining the remnants of his broken neck, he took one last deep breath of the damp sea air, inhaling until his alveoli ruptured, drawing in the scents of his beloved sky... and closed his eyes.

  And suddenly, the hellish cannonade fell silent for him. The red mist cleared, replaced by the bright, pure light of a summer day in the valleys of Nigrat. Before his mind's eye, the most precious episodes of his life began to circle smoothly, as if plucked from an old play...

  His mother's happy tears, the firm handshake of his stern father on the day of his induction into the Order, his wife's hands—soft as petals—on his shoulders... And the ringing laughter of his little daughter running to meet him on the lawn.

  He regretted nothing. His duty was done, and behind him lay silence. Soon, the Great Judgment of the Ancestors awaited him...

  The Commander of the Order of Dragon Knights of the Second Civilization, Commander Alban Mart, died standing on his feet, taking a dozen Gra Valkas soldiers with him...