The Lower Plaza of the Artisan District had never been designed to withstand an army of hard-shelled apex hunting beasts. Built around a central public water tank and ringed by three-story timber-frame warehouses, cooperages, and brass-casting foundries, it was an artery of commerce, thick with the smell of sawdust, wet clay, and cheap coal smoke. By noon, that commercial artery had been converted into a heavy-duty slaughterhouse.
Valerie Koslov stood atop an overturned beer heavy cart, her six-foot air-powered shock-lance resting across her shoulder. Her heavy trench coat was caked in dried viscera. The high-pressure actuators of her left carbon-fiber prosthetic arm hissed softly with every gesture. Beside her, Brutus, her three-legged war mastiff, kept watch over the barricade mouth. A spiked steel collar shone around his scarred neck as he chewed contentedly on the cut claw of a Vanguard Razor-Beetle.
“Listen up, you soot-stained grease monkeys!” Valerie bellowed across the square, her voice cutting through the clatter of hammers and the hiss of escaping steam. “The high-born pricks in the Citadel locked their doors and pulled up their silk sheets! That means nobody is coming down that hill to wipe your noses or bury your dead! If we lose this plaza, the tide pours straight into the family apartments in the lower basin! You hold this line. Or you watch your children get turned into incubator fodder for the burrowing drones! Understood?”
