A crimson flare streaked across the northern horizon four days after the fall of Mist-Bell Reef.
It was not a single scout rocket. It was a dense, smoking curtain of fire that turned the midnight sky into the belly of an iron furnace.
Thirty colossal iron barges, each two hundred paces long and encrusted with explosive blood-star glyphs, were hurtling southward across the Star-Fall Sea. The vessels had no rudders, no oars, and no crews. Ancestor Pyre and Ancestor Draven had stripped their auxiliary shipyards to construct these unmanned engines of slaughter.
Each barge was packed to the gunwales with three hundred kegs of volatile celestial fire-oil and thousands of cracked Spirit Domain cores.
Twin earth-fire rocket boosters, forged from thick cast iron, roared at their sterns like chained dragons. The sheer heat radiating from their keels turned the ocean water into boiling foam, leaving thirty wide trails of hissing white steam across the dark sea.
Inside the command tower of Void Lotus Isle, the warning talismans flared scarlet.
Elder Sterling leaned over the battlements, his white hair whipping in the hot draft blowing from the north. Beside him, Barnaby Holt peered through a brass spyglass, his face draining of color.
