Desperate to break the stalemate before his overheated boiler burst, Zhu Heling launched his final, direct assault against the left ankle of the Obsidian Throne in Entry hall 883.
The scholar had realized that the dampening field could not be pierced by high-flight path mortar shells or chemical burning acid pumped through the drainage weirs. He turned to brute clockwork force. From the prow of the central drilling rig, a huge steam-powered harpoon gun—originally designed to hunt deep-sea krakens in the outer hadal trenches—swung on its gimbal mount, its massive bronze barrel four arm-lengths long and rifled with six deep spiral grooves. The weapon was powered by twin high-pressure steam accumulators charged to six hundred pounds of pressure, capable of launching an iron projectile through twenty feet of solid oak.
The harpoon loaded into the breach was not a fishing spear. It was a twenty-foot rod of solid forge-hardened iron, weighing twelve hundred pounds, its warhead packed with tightly packed spirit-gunpowder and tipped with a core of dense star-fallen iron. The bronze trunnions groaned as four clockwork winches cranked the elevating screw, depressing the muzzle by three degrees until the iron sights bore directly upon the Heart-Vein Sluice at the Sovereign’s left heel.
