Driven mad by the destruction of his clockwork heart and the total failure of his siege tactics, Zhu Heling clawed his way onto the narrow high walkway of the third drilling rig in Entry hall 887.
The scholar was dying. The heavy dark metal gear catch in his chest had shattered into fine metal dust. Black machine oil and boiling water were pouring from the broken seals of his bronze ribs, staining his torn silk robes with greasy sludge. His quartz fire-box was cracked, its red spirit-coke fire sputtering out in oily black smoke. Yet his fanatical hatred and wounded pride sustained his failing mind. With his single working brass pincer, he shoved aside two scared alchemists and gripped the clockwork firing levers of the platform’s twin emergency acid cannons.
These were the Conclave’s heaviest chemical weapons. Two eight-inch smoothbore bronze cannons mounted upon high-pressure steam accumulators, designed to scour underground monster dens with high-pressure streams of boiling burning acid. The barrels were four arm-lengths long, cast from heavy bell-bronze and wrapped in heat-softened iron wire to withstand huge internal bursting charges. Behind each breech sat a four-hundred-gallon copper metal tube filled with packed sulfuric acid fortified with crushed phosphorus and distilled dragon-gall.
