Across the outer edge walls of Ironfang Mega-City, the watchtower guards had spent their dawn shift preparing for an outside red alert. The ground-shaking sirens had barely wound down. Just then, the asphalt beneath their boots began to warm.
First came the light.
It didn’t burst forth with explosive violence. Instead, a blazing bright golden radiance seeped through the cracks in the heavy ferro-concrete roadway. It bubbled up through the drainage grates like liquid amber. Where the light touched the soles of the soldiers’ boots, a gentle, static warmth tingled through their calves, carrying none of the harsh sting associated with high-voltage heavy-duty discharge.
“outer edge Team Four, report!” Commander Valerie Koslov’s voice crackled through the wall speakers, tight and ready for an engagement. “What’s that ground soft glow? Is it a subsurface energy rupture?”
A young vanguard sentry, standing thirty meters above the outer moat, leaned over the silver-steel low roof wall. He lowered his binoculars, staring in utter disbelief at the wasteland beyond the castle walls.
“Commander...” the sentry stammered, his knuckles turning white against the railing. “It’s... It’s not a rupture. Look at the grass.”
For one hundred and forty-two years, the buffer zone outside Ironfang had been known as the Ash Barrens. A lonely expanse of hardened gray soil poisoned by toxic aether runoff, where only jagged thorn-bushes and mutated bone-lichen could take root. Every cadet who patrolled the outer edge knew that stepping onto that gray dust without heavy bio-sealed gaiters meant chemical rusting of…
