Austin marched straight into the center of the Obsidian Plaza, his steel-toed work boots striking the dark stone with heavy, unyielding cadence:
*Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.*
With every step, the air around his calves distorted. Five nested rings of two hundred and eighty celestial micro-particles—fragments of high-density obsidian, sintered titanium, Cold-Iron swarf, and compressed golden stellar plasma—whirled in frictionless, counter-rotating orbits at three percent the speed of light. Each revolution kicked off a localized gravitational shear of twenty-five times Earth normal (25.0G), driving his boot treads into the stone with the immovable mass of a bridge abutment.
Directly overhead hung the colossal, eight-hundred-foot Cold-Iron underbelly of the flagship *Sun-Slayer*. The black iron hull blocked out the sun like an iron continent of rivets and armor plates, weeping condensation from its rapid atmospheric descent.
Austin ignored the spiritual terror rolling off the dreadnought. He reached straight into the right-hand utility holster of his six-ounce saddle-leather toolbelt.
His calloused fingers drew a handheld digital sound-level decibel meter fitted with a dense black foam windscreen.
Austin thumbed the toggle switch. The monochrome liquid-crystal display lit up with a crisp green backlight, refreshing at thirty hertz as it sampled the acoustic violence rattling through the mountain air. He raised the meter at a clean forty-five-degree angle, aiming the precision condenser microphone directly at the glowing turquoise throat of the flagship's central anti-gravity intake duct.
His internal system HUD mirrored the reading with instantaneous diagnostic clarity:
Austin’s jaw hardened. He shook his head in bitter disgust.
"One hundred and fourteen point eight decibels," Austin muttered under his breath, scowling at the LCD readout. "That’s like running an unsilenced two-stroke concrete saw inside an echoey tiled bathroom. No intake silencers. No tuned expansion chambers. Zero consideration for municipal quiet hours."
He slid the meter back into its leather sleeve, hauled his wooden clipboard from under his arm, and flipped open a pad of three-part, carbon-copy pink violation notices. He pulled the yellow grease pencil from his ear, clicked his tongue, and hefted his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench in his right hand.
He leveled the forty-pound forged steel jaws directly at the gilded bridge of the *Sun-Slayer*.
"Hey!" Austin bellowed.
His contractor vocal cords went to work. Refined by twenty years of yelling over screaming diamond blades, idling diesel excavators, and pneumatic chipping hammers, his voice cut through the 114.8-decibel din like a tungsten hole-saw through wet drywall:
"Hey! You up there on the fancy porch! The clown in the crimson dragon bathrobe! Kill your secondary thrusters and shut down those un-muffled anti-gravity keels right this second!"
High above on the gilded observation bridge, Grand Admiral Meng froze in mid-stride.
He had just reached for his dragon-crested scabbard to give the formal execution command when the shout punched through his ears.
Meng’s crimson eyebrows knotted in pure disbelief. He caught up his gold-chased crystalline scrying telescope, snapped the brass barrels forward with a sharp *clack*, and leaned over the carved jade balustrade.
Through the multi-element crystal lenses, Meng peered down into the plaza.
Beside him, ninety imperial formation elders craned their necks over the railing, their white silk sleeves flapping in the prop wash:
"Admiral... is that mortal pointing a piece of plumbing iron at the sovereign flagship of the Great Yan Dynasty?"
"What kind of cursed relic is a five-foot steel bar with adjustable serrated jaws?! Was it dredged from the Abyssal Burial Grounds?!"
"Look at his left hand! He holds an iron-clipped wooden board stacked with pink talismans of binding doom!"
Admiral Meng’s face flushed a furious, insulted crimson. The Half-Step Divine Transformation cultivation in his dantian flared, sending jagged violet sparks dancing across the deck plates.
He expanded his chest, channeling three centuries of imperial slaughter into a roar that rattled the clouds:
*"INSOLENT INSECT OF DUST! DOST THOU COMPREHEND UPON WHOM THOU GAZETH?! I AM GRAND ADMIRAL MENG, CHIEFTAIN OF THE IMPERIAL VOID ARMADA, SHIELD OF THE HEAVENLY DRAGON EMPEROR! WE COMMAND THE CELESTIAL FLEET OF EXTINCTION! KNEEL AND WEEP IN THE DIRT, OR THY MOUNTAIN SHALL BE ERASED FROM THE MAPS OF ETERNITY!"*
The sonic boom of the proclamation rolled across Mount Clear Sky like a sequence of quarry blasts.
Down across the lower terraces, thousands of wandering cultivators pressed their faces into the dirt, wailing into their sleeves:
"Admiral Meng has given the decree! We’re finished! We’re getting ground into bone meal!"
"Master Austin, for the love of the ancestors, just take a knee! Bow your head once!"
Austin stood like a reinforced concrete pillar.
He squared his steel-toed boots shoulder-width apart, smoothed the pink carbon slip against the grain of his plywood clipboard, and began writing with the furious, mechanical precision of a veteran building inspector:
*Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch!*
"Section One!" Austin barked back, his voice bouncing off the black iron underbelly above with the cold clarity of a courtroom judge. "Operating twelve un-certificated commercial aircraft within five hundred feet of an active Class-B residential structure without an approved municipal flight plan or low-altitude variance!"
*"MUNICIPAL FLIGHT PLAN?!"* Admiral Meng bellowed, his voice cracking on the syllables. *"WE ARE THE EMPEROR'S WRATH! THE EMPEROR DOES NOT SUBMIT FLIGHT PLANS!"*
"The Emperor doesn’t hold the deed to this airspace, pal!" Austin shouted back, digging the grease pencil into the carbon paper. "Section Two! Gross acoustic pollution exceeding municipal residential quiet-hours thresholds! Permissible daytime ambient sound level in this district tops out at sixty decibels! My meter clocked your fleet at one hundred and fourteen point eight! That’s an unauthorized excess of fifty-four point eight decibels!"
The ninety imperial formation elders leaned further over the balustrade, murmuring in terrified confusion:
"What is a 'decibel'? Is it a soul-devouring curse from the Netherworld?!"
"He claims our sacred leviathan keels breach the threshold of quiet! Does this peasant know these crystal slabs were mined from the First Epoch Trench of Sorrows?!"
"And Section Two, Subsection B!" Austin yelled, pacing three steps across the black basalt and pointing his grease pencil toward the lodge. "Structural property damage caused by low-frequency harmonic resonance! Your un-muffled thruster wash just rattled two Grade-A hand-split cedar shingles clean off my timber lodge roof! You created an active falling-debris hazard directly over an occupied primary egress walkway!"
Grand Admiral Meng stared down, his jaw hanging open in sheer, unadulterated shock.
"He... he is reciting building codes... over two shingles?!" Meng sputtered, his fingers twitching on his scabbard. "Our Void Armada burned down three sovereign kingdoms! We drowned seventeen major sects in their own blood! And this lunatic is issuing a violation for his front porch?!"
"And finally, Section Three!" Austin bellowed, slamming down a heavy black period on the form. "Illegal solar obstruction and commercial shading! By parking twelve iron hulls in a hexagonal ring directly between the sun and my summit, you have reduced direct insolation to my surface photovoltaic capacitor banks by twenty-four point eight percent! That translates to a generation loss of approximately four hundred and twenty kilowatt-hours of clean solar power every hour you sit idling up there!"
Austin finished scribbling the line items.
With a sharp, rhythmic flick of his wrist, he peeled the top pink sheet off the pad:
*RIIIIIIIIIP!*
The tear of carbon paper snapped across the quiet plaza like the release of a spring-loaded trap.
Austin held the pink slip up into the prop wash, letting the downdraft flutter the edges:
"Total citation penalty: Fifty thousand copper coins per vessel! That’s six hundred thousand copper for the fleet, plus forty copper for two replacement shingles and six ounces of exterior-grade roofing tar! You have exactly ten minutes to cut your thrusters, execute a controlled vertical descent, and park those twelve tin cans in the marked gravel staging lot on the eastern ridge!"
Austin lowered his five-foot pipe wrench, training the heavy forged steel nose squarely on Meng’s forehead:
"If all twelve boats ain’t inside marked white lines in ten minutes, I’m rolling out the heavy hydraulic floor jacks, putting commercial steel boot clamps on your landing skids, and impounding the entire fleet at your expense! Towing and storage fees run ten thousand copper a day!"
Dead silence fell across the summit.
Behind Austin, Tie Kuang and Old Patriarch Jiang Taixu stood frozen like salted fish.
"Master Austin..." Tie Kuang whispered, sweat rolling down his bushy beard into his leather apron. "You... you just wrote up the Imperial Void Navy for illegal parking."
"I served them a Class-A municipal airspace citation with structural restitution penalties," Austin replied without turning his head. "There's a legal difference. A ticket is for nudging a bumper over the line. A citation is for shaking shingles off my roof and stealing my solar juice. Clock’s ticking. They’ve got ten minutes."
"They're gonna turn us into ash, Master Austin!" Jiang Taixu whimpered, his knees knocking under his hemp robes. "Admiral Meng is a Half-Step Divine Transformation butcher! The imperial chronicles say he once executed forty thousand prisoners because their war drums were two beats off tempo!"
"Then he should understand the importance of proper timing and sound dampening," Austin said evenly.
Up on the gilded bridge deck of the *Sun-Slayer*, Grand Admiral Meng had completely lost his mind.
His complexion cycled through the entire spectrum of fury. It drained to chalk white, flared into mottled crimson, and settled into a bruised, apoplectic dark purple.
His hands shook so violently that the jade dragon rings on his fingers rattled against his gauntlets like loose gravel:
*Clack-clack-clack-clack.*
"A fine of fifty thousand copper...?!\" Meng choked out, the syllables scraping his throat like broken tile. "Wheel clamps... on the Emperor's war skids?! Impounding... the Supreme Armada of Great Yan?!"
Admiral Meng threw his head back toward the heavens and let loose a scream of vein-rupturing imperial fury:
*"LUNATIC! SUICIDAL RAG-CLOTH MECHANIC! HAST THOU LOST THY SENSES, OR DIDST THOU HUFF THE EXHAUST OF THINE OWN FOUL CHIMNEYS?!"*
Meng ripped his Imperial Executioner Blade from its scabbard. The five-foot blade of Dragon-Blood Iron shrieked with blood-red spiritual flames:
*"ARTILLERY BATTERY! UNCHAIN THE FORBIDDEN RELIC! TEAR OFF ALL RESTRAINT SEALS! PRIME THE ANCIENT DARK-ICE CORES! CHARGE THE ABSOLUTE ZERO CANNON TO MAXIMUM RATED OVERLOAD!"*
The Admiral thrust the flaming broadsword straight down at Austin’s hard hat:
*"FREEZE THIS INSOLENT BEGGAR INTO SUB-ATOMIC COSMIC DUST! TURN HIS MOUNTAIN INTO A GLACIAL SEPULCHER! WE SHALL SHATTER HIS CITATION INTO FROZEN PARTICLES!"*