The Grand Borer did not advance alone into the Grand Round hall.
Behind its twelve-ton iron chassis marched twenty armored hired blades from the Azure Firmament Sect’s elite shock brigade, with four mobile acid-cannon platforms pushed by teams of four men. The cannons were squat, heavy bronze pieces mounted on four-wheeled carriages, each carrying a high-pressure pool of aqua regia and a hand-pumped draft-metal tube capable of projecting a nonstop stream of boiling, fuming burning acid across eighty paces of open floor.
“Deploy the battery!” Zhu Heling’s voice shrieked from the raised bridge of the borer. “Anchor the carriages at the four cardinal compass points! Cover every exit! If anything moves along the outer edge walkway, burn it to lime!”
The hired blades moved with practiced, military care.
The four acid cannons were wheeled into position along the southern outer edge, their bronze legs spiked into the hard speckled rock floor flags with heavy iron sledgehammers. Two gunners began pumping the pressure handles on each carriage, their respirators hissing as thirty pounds of air-pressure built up behind the skin-burning acid tanks. The brass nozzles were swung outward, sweeping across the vast expanse of the hall in overlapping arcs of fire.
