The air upon the ironclad’s foredeck was a suffocating soup of venting steam, burning oil, and the copper tang of opened arteries.
Arch-Reaver Vorenus kicked open the armored door of the pilothouse, his boots leaving heavy, bloody tracks in the slick grating. The giant was seven feet of sinew, muscle, and pneumatically driven iron plate, his left arm encased in an articulated steam-gauntlet linked to a roaring pressure-boiler bolted between his shoulder blades.
In his right hand, the pneumatic war-hammer hummed with violent blue lightning.
"You brought forty galleys of driftwood to fight the forge-lords of the Eclipse?" Vorenus roared, his deep voice carrying over the crackle of burning timbers and the screaming of his drowning sailors. "I will shatter your ribs, take those eight stars from your cold throat, and mount your skull upon the Emperor’s prow!"
"You talk too much for a dead man," a gravelly, lethal voice cut through the steam.
Vorenus didn't even have time to swing his hammer.
Malakor lunged from the smoke at his blind flank. The warlord did not test his opponent with probing cuts; he brought his five-foot great sword down in a two-handed overhead chop backed by the full, brutal weight of his body and a snarling torrent of black shadow-fire.
The Arch-Reaver raised his pneumatic hammer in a frantic, two-handed parry.
The collision of star metal and charged dwarven steel rang like a cathedral bell detonating.
The shockwave blew the burning soot clean off the deck, cracking the iron deck-plates beneath their boots. The hydraulic pistons along Vorenus’s gauntlet shrieked in agony, venting clouds of scalding vapor as the raw kinetic momentum of Malakor’s blow forced the seven-foot titan to one knee.
"You like hammers, giant?" Malakor growled, his face inches from Vorenus's iron visor, teeth bared in a feral snarl as their locked blades showered sparks between their faces. "Let's see how much pressure your little pipes can take."
Vorenus activated his chest-boiler.
A valve snapped open, releasing a pressurized blast of superheated steam directly into Malakor’s face.
Malakor flinched, his head turning aside as the scalding vapor blistered his cheek, but he did not release the pressure on his blade. He dropped his left hand from the hilt, drove his bare iron-plated elbow straight into the side of Vorenus’s neck with bone-shattering force, and wrenched his great sword free with a shower of sparks.
Vorenus stumbled backward, his pneumatic hammer swinging in a desperate, whistling horizontal arc that would have sheared a bull in half.
Aurelia moved.
She did not allow the duel to prolong itself for honor or spectacle. She crossed the fifteen paces of blood-slick grating in the span of an intake of breath, her boots weightless as she channeled the Sixth Shard—the Sovereign Void.
She slid beneath the whistling hammer, her ancestral blade rising in a clean, vertical stroke of silver-violet starlight.
The celestial edge sliced through the reinforced copper steam-lines running from Vorenus’s back-boiler to his hammer.
Hiss.
The lightning died on the war-hammer in an instant. The heavy weapon became dead, unwieldy iron, dragging the giant's right arm down under sixty pounds of unpowered weight.
Vorenus gasped, his mechanical eye spinning erratically as he tried to backpedal, his hand reaching for the combat cleaver at his belt.
Malakor met him on the turn.
Dropping his great sword, Malakor tackled the towering reaver around the waist, slamming the armored behemoth down onto the iron deck with a concussive crash.
Before Vorenus could bring his steam-gauntlet up to throttle him, Malakor was straddling his chest. With one heavy hand, he ripped the iron skull-visor clean off Vorenus’s face, exposing the scarred, terrified features of an old warrior who had finally met something far worse than himself.
Malakor drew his heavy combat dagger from his boot.
"Look at her," Malakor snarled, his left hand pinning Vorenus’s throat to the deck, his dagger hovering an inch above the giant’s remaining flesh eye. "Look at the Empress of the Veil, you piece of offal."
Vorenus spat blood onto his own breastplate, his single eye darting to Aurelia, who stood over him with her sword resting lightly against his carotid artery, the Eight Spheres around her neck blazing with blinding, sovereign majesty.
"Your... your little kingdom... will still burn," Vorenus wheezed, his defiance ragged and failing. "The Eclipse Fleet... is an ocean... of iron... you cannot stop... the Emperor..."
"We aren't going to stop him," Aurelia said softly, her voice cold as an arctic winter. "We are going to take his ships. We are going to burn his forges. And then we are going to bury him beneath the ash of his own caldera."
She nodded once to Malakor.
"End him, warlord."
Malakor drove the dagger home with a clean, brutal thrust beneath the reaver's jawline, pinning the giant’s head to the iron deck.
The Arch-Reaver’s body shuddered once, went limp, and the steam died in his broken pipes.
Across the waters of Val-Khor, the surrender horns were already beginning to sound.
The sight of their supreme commander’s head being severed and impaled upon the bowsprit of the Black Leviathan broke the will of the remaining Eclipse crews. One by one, thirty-two surviving ironclads lowered their black skull-standards, reversing their paddle-wheels and drifting dead in the water beneath the smoking guns of the Vanguard.
Malakor stood up from the corpse, his armor drenched in black oil and red blood, his chest heaving as he wiped his dagger on Vorenus's silk mantle.
He turned to Aurelia, his amber eyes burning with that wild, intoxicating heat that made her heart hammer against her ribs.
He stepped over the dead giant, catching her by the back of the neck with his bloody, calloused hand, pulling her in until their foreheads rested together amidst the swirling smoke.
"Val-Khor is safe, my empress," he whispered, his rough lips brushing hers in a breathless, possessive touch that set her veins on fire. "And we just took ourselves thirty-two ironclads."
Aurelia smiled against his mouth, her arms coming up around his broad shoulders, holding the butcher close as their city cheered their name from the white battlements across the bay.