The Spirit-Furnace Star-Train shot through the wormhole tunnel from World 25 and pulled onto the central lakeside plaza of World 26 (Glacier-Lake World)—the fourth and final planet of the Dark-Ice Sector.
Just six hours earlier, the central basin of World 26 had been a lifeless crater of solid black ice ten miles wide. Now, thanks to Ao Ming’s underground radiator grid and thirty giant brass heating vents at the bottom of the crater, the entire ten-mile basin had melted into a crystal-clear, steaming Planetary Hot-Spring Lake!
Along the warm stone boardwalk surrounding the lake, four billion local ice-miners and their families were soaking their tired feet in the warm mineral water and eating bubbling mutton hot-pot under glowing red lanterns.
Yet the moment the dark clouds in the upper sky split open, the cheerful chatter around the lake froze.
CRACK—BOOOOOOM!
A terrifying wave of Rank 7 Peak frost pressure rolled down from the heavens like a collapsing mountain range.
Out of the black void descended 200 Heavy Ice-Cruisers—three-hundred-foot-long warships carved out of ten-thousand-year blue glacier ice, bristling with spiked frost-ballistas and dark iron rams.
At the very center of the armada flew a beast so massive that its wings blotted out the stars: a thousand-foot-long Ancient Glacier Wyrm covered in jagged white ice-scales!
