Morning mist drifted over the jagged rim of the Lower Smelter gorge, mingling with the dying sulfur smoke.
Across the shattered caldera, what had once been the feared Obsidian Furnace District was now a vast crater of black glass and cooling slag.
Princess Valeria’s silver-and-crimson royal banner fluttered from the parapet of the outer blast-wall, snapping proudly in the dawn breeze.
Below the wall, two thousand five hundred allied blades moved through the geothermal tunnels and outer smelter vaults.
Syndicate fighters from Deacon Vane’s underground network walked alongside freed laborers, their weapons drawn and alert.
They cleared the secondary service flues, disarmed forty lingering furnace guards, and secured the massive blast-proof storage bunkers that had survived the explosion.
Not a single shot was fired.
The remaining wardens threw down their weapons the moment they saw the crater where Krahl’s command tower had stood.
