Arthur Vance emerged onto the high watching overhead frame of Gate Seven. Then, the world before him looked like the threshold of a world-ending nightmare.
The sulfuric smog that usually choked the badlands had been swept aside by the sheer, bone-shaking pressure waves of sixty thousand advancing war-beasts. The entire three-half-mile expanse of frozen mud, barbed-wire entanglements, and anti-tank ditches had been leveled into a churning morass of black slush.
Marching at the center of this sea of horrors was the Chimeric Cathedral.
It wasn’t merely a vehicle. It was a mobile mountain of hardened giant beast bone, rusted battleship plating, and weeping body-leverage sinew. Spanning over one hundred and fifty meters in length and standing eight stories tall, the castle crept forward on twelve massive multi-jointed high-pressure crawler tracks, each track link wider than an armored personnel carrier. Deep within its gothic ribbed iron arches, massive living boilers burned raw aetheric sludge, venting towering plumes of oily purple smoke into the sky.
Hauling this clockwork blasphemy forward were the three leftover Class-I Siege Giant statues. Towering, thirty-meter-tall behemoths built from the grafted skeletons of mountain gorillas, woolly mammoths, and deep-sea crustacean plate. Thick chains of forged heavy dark metal, each link as thick as an oak trunk, connected the Giant statues to the Cathedral’s frontal prow.
