The sudden arrival of fifty Vanguard butchers upon the high battery was not an assault; it was an execution.
The gun-crews of the Eclipse Dynasty—clad in stiff, boiled-leather tunics and iron skull-masks—had no time to draw their curved cutlasses. Malakor was already among them, an engine of terrifying momentum. His great sword roared in a sweeping figure-eight, cleaving through an artillery lieutenant and his spotter, the dark steel hissing as shadow-flame cauterized the spray before it even splattered the flagstones.
"Form the ring!" Malakor bellowed, his backhand sweep decapitating a third gunner. "Keep the stairheads clear! Crossbows on the courtyard below!"
The fifty mountain veterans moved with brutal, instinctive synchronicity.
Twenty men leveled heavy dwarven repeating crossbows over the inner parapet, raining armor-piercing iron bolts into the garrison courtyard below, where hundreds of alarmed infantrymen were spilling from the barracks in half-buckled breastplates. The remaining thirty marines locked their boarding shields across the two spiral staircases leading up to the battery, turning the narrow granite ascents into impassable chokepoints of hacking axes and thrusting pikes.
Aurelia stood at the center of the battery, beside the colossal bronze turntable of the central siege-mortar.
Her ancestral blade trailed arcs of white-hot starlight as two Eclipse officers lunged at her flank with serrated thrusting spears. She did not bother to parry. With a flick of her left wrist, she channeled the Fifth Shard—the crushing gravity of the continental mantle.
The air above the two officers grew tenfold heavier in the space of a heartbeat.
Their knees slammed into the stone with enough force to shatter their kneecaps, their breastplates groaning under an invisible, downward anvil. Aurelia stepped past them with effortless, regal grace, her blade slicing through the lacquered collars of their armor in two clean, fluid strokes.
She stepped up to the massive mortar.
The weapon was a beast of cast bronze and blackened iron, forty feet long, resting on greased iron tracks with thick gear-chains linked to a hand-cranked traversal wheel. Its muzzle was still hot, smoking with the foul stench of sulfur and alchemical grease.
"Malakor!" Aurelia called out over the din of screaming men and clashing steel. "The traversal gear! Swing this beast around!"
Malakor slammed his shoulder into an oncoming sergeant, sending the armored man sailing over the exterior battlements to dash against the volcanic rocks two hundred feet below. He crossed the battery in three lunging strides, sheathing his sword and grabbing the heavy iron traversal wheel with both gauntleted hands.
Veins bulged along his thick, scarred neck, his teeth bared in a feral snarl as he threw his full, monstrous weight into the gear.
The bronze teeth shrieked in protest.
With a grinding groan that vibrated through the stones beneath their boots, the colossal thirty-ton mortar began to pivot, its wide, gaping maw turning away from the sea and locking directly onto the sheltered cove below, where the three Eclipse ironclads were desperately attempting to slip their anchor cables.
"Loaded with a thirty-pound shell of solid iron!" an engineer corporal shouted, kicking open the powder box beside the breech. "Fuse is primed, Your Grace!"
"Depress the muzzle twenty degrees!" Aurelia commanded, her silver-violet eyes locking onto the lead ironclad, the Gorgon's Eye, whose paddle-wheels were churning the cove into black froth.
Malakor wrenched the elevation lever downward, locking the massive barrel into a steep, plunging trajectory. He reached out with his bare left hand, snatching a burning brand from an iron sconce on the wall, and thrust it toward the powder train.
"Give them our compliments, empress," Malakor snarled, his amber eyes burning with savage delight.
He touched the fire to the powder.
The concussive roar of the siege-mortar detonating at point-blank range threw three men to the stone and blew the remaining glass from the battery's watchtower. The battery floor groaned, hairline fractures spider-webbing across the granite as the three-ton iron projectile screamed downward at a sickening angle.
The shell did not strike the water.
It plunged directly through the unarmored wooden deck-grating of the Gorgon's Eye, piercing straight into the vessel’s lower steam-boilers.
For half a second, there was only the dull, muffled crunch of splintering timber and iron.
Then, the cove erupted into a blinding pillar of superheated steam, black smoke, and roaring orange flame. The ironclad’s boilers detonated in a cataclysmic chain reaction, tearing the armored hull in two from the keel upward. Colossal slabs of iron plate and shattered paddle-wheel gears were hurled hundreds of feet into the air, raining down upon the second ironclad like falling meteors.
On the battery above, Malakor threw his head back and let out a roaring, victorious laugh that echoed over the burning cove.
He turned to Aurelia, catching her by the nape of her neck, pulling her roughly against his soot-covered chest as the shockwave washed over them in a wave of hot, sulfurous wind.
"One down, two to go," he growled against her lips, his breath hot, ragged, and thick with the scent of burning powder. "Now let's turn the other five guns and scour this harbor to the bone."