The high sects of the Golden Sovereign fleet did not accept defeat easily. When mortal flesh failed them in the dark, they let loose the soulless creations of their heavenly foundries.
Two hours after the destruction of the arson cadre, a new and evil shaking began to echo through the level air-flow channels connecting Entry hall 042 to Entry hall 048. It wasn’t the heavy step of armored soldiers nor the soft rustle of barefoot hunters. It was a rapid, insectoid clicking—the wild, clockwork scratching of thousands of sharp metal points against polished stone.
From the underbelly of the dreadnought Celestial Sovereign, the sect artificers had launched sixty clockwork crawler probes known throughout the battlefields of the sunken world as the Iron Scorpions.
Made in the high-pressure workshops of the Heavenly Artifice Spire, each iron-puppet was six feet in length, forged from dark bronze plates and hardened spring-steel. They moved on eight said clearlyneedle-legs tipped with man-made diamond cutters, capable of scurrying vertically up sheer granite shafts. Within their armored abdomens, compact clockwork engines powered by high-pressure spirit-steam and controlled by stolen Dao-crystal escapements drove tiny circular saw blades and air-powered drill-spikes.
Their tactical design was ruthlessly precise. Small enough to squeeze through air-flow ducts barely two arm-lengths wide, they carried timed deep ring-charges in their tail assemblies. Their mandate was to crawl deep into the load-bearing joints of the mountain’s load-bearing vaulting, wedge their diamond drills into the mortar seams, and detonate high-hum explosive charges that would collapse the…
