The northern dusk settled over Iron Bastion with the cold finality of a headsman’s blade. Along the twenty-mile outer edge walls, the great bronze fire bowl towers stood dark, cold, and dead. The guard post’s emergency spirit-stone vault—normally stacked with ten thousand glowing jade metal bars—lay empty, scraped clean by months of unmaintained leylines and fraudulent office claims.
Beyond the outer trenches, in the deep ravines of the northern tundra, the first night-hunting howls began to rise. Shadow-wolves the size of warhorses and six-legged tundra fiends slithered through the snow. Their glowing crimson eyes watched the darkened castle walls.
In the command courtyard, General Zhao was pacing so furiously that the iron plates of his armor ground together like millstones. “Three hours!” Zhao shouted, his voice cracking with desperation. “The sun will dip below the ridge in three hours! The Regional Pavilion refuses to release emergency spirit stones without a royal commission audit! If the outer edge lights don’t ignite before the dark moon rises, thirty thousand beasts will breach the walls!”
Zhao rushed to the flatbed cart where Frank was calmly checking the pushback on a spool of padded wire with his multimeter. “Master Lu!” Zhao begged, grabbing Frank’s canvas sleeve with trembling gauntlets. “Can your students erect twenty miles of defensive light arrays before sundown?! I’ll give you every piece of scrap iron in the armory! I’ll sign any supply order scroll!”
