The hurricane of dead thick parchment didn’t merely hidden vision. It stripped the senses down to raw nerve endings.
Thousands of stone-hard parchment flakes whipped through the underground air of the Shattered Crucible, slicing against skin like razor blades made of dry slate. In the eye of that swirling grey storm, the Man Who Returned moved with terrifying, measured economy. His salt-bleached homespun coat snapped in the gale. But his boots never lost purchase on the slick, ash-coated flags. He didn’t rush. He didn’t charge. He advanced with the deliberate stride of a land-mapper pacing out the boundaries of an abandoned cemetery.
“Formation! Lock the outer edge!” Lord Ren’s roar cut through the screeching wind like an iron drop-gate dropping into stone.
The Ash Emperor threw his weight forward, his blackened plate shin guards crunching into the debris. His two-handed broadsword swept low across the flags, the hardened steel edge shrieking against the granite as he sought to sever the older man’s shins. At the same instant, Unit Ren surged in from the blind spot behind an overturned baptismal font.
The machine-grafted summon of the iron foundries had bypassed all internal safety governors. The clockwork valves in his steam-grafted right arm shrieked with blistering heat. High-pressure stone oil hissed from burst lead rubber rings, spraying hot, greasy mist across his bronze-plated chest. The summon had driven two steel wedges directly into the exhaust petcocks. That forced the high-pressure piston into a nonstop, runaway cycle of moving overdrive.
