STOMP! STOMP! SCREEEEECH—CLANK!
Inside the two-mile-wide main hangar of the buried Star-Fortress Canglan Ark, five thousand twenty-foot-tall Rank 6 Ancient Star-Bronze Security Golems marched out of their wall alcoves in fifty neat ranks!
Because they had been standing in dark, unheated storage alcoves thirty miles underground for ten thousand years without a single drop of machine oil, the sound of five thousand bronze giants moving at once was like ten million rusty door hinges being scraped with iron files.
Every time a golem lifted its leg, dry bronze rust flaked off its knee joints in clouds. Every time a golem turned its square metal head, its neck gears went CRACK-SQUEAK-POP, and a shower of loose bolts rattled onto the silver floor.
Yet despite their squeaky joints, the aura radiating from those five thousand bronze hulls was no joke—every single golem carried a solid Rank 6 Early Golden Core power furnace inside its chest!
WHIRRRRRR... SPUTTER... WHIRRRRR!
Five thousand round crystal cannon lenses embedded in the golems’ chests began to glow with unstable, flickering crimson spirit-light.
At the front of the formation stood a thirty-foot-tall Star-Bronze Commander Golem with three tarnished golden stars welded onto its shoulders and a bent bronze halberd in its right hand. Its jaw plate dropped open with a loud clank, and a phonograph-like crystal voice-box inside its throat spun up, screeching in an ancient, static-filled Canglan dialect:
