The volley of air-powered acid bolts tore through the yellow sulfur fog like screaming hornets, striking the armored undercarriage of the cage-cart in a wild, boiling cascade of sparks and dissolving metal.
Ren Vale hauled Mira down behind the solid iron axles. She pressed his body over hers as green drops of high-pressure burning acid sizzled into the floorplates an inch from his heel. The acid ate into the glass-fused baked-clay tiles with horrific speed, releasing plumes of choking white chlorine gas that stung their throats.
Ren-the-Cinder was already curled into a tight ball beneath the cart’s grease-pan, his arms wrapped around his head, whimpering in rhythmic staccato: “We’re trapped! We’re forty feet below ground, behind four cooking pots of boiling potash, with twelve sharpshooters above us! This is it! This is where the historian writes: And then the four idiots dissolved into soup!”
Peace, you trembling vermin! Lord Ren barked into young Ren’s mind. The cart’s sides are three-quarter-inch boiler plate. Small-arms acid bolts can’t penetrate the hub! Look at the height of their fire—they’re forty feet above us on a narrow gallery. They have high ground, but zero bending angle. If they lean over the railing to shoot down, they expose their sternums!
