HUMMMMMMM—ZZZZZZT!
At the outer edge of Solar System No. 10, the fifty colossal Golden-Crow War-Galleons spread out into a crescent-moon battle formation a hundred thousand miles wide.
Each thousand-yard warship was forged from dark-red sun-iron shaped like a crouching three-legged crow. Inside the open beak at the bow of every ship sat a terrifying Rank 8 Sun-Core Main Cannon, already glowing with blinding crimson light as fifty thousand elite Golden-Crow sailors shoveled crates of high-grade Fire Spirit Stones into the breech-furnaces.
Standing on the golden dragon-prow of the central flagship, the Flame-Beard Marquis (Rank 8 Early Peak) glared across the starry void at the newly wrapped sun of System No. 10.
He was ten feet tall, with shoulders as wide as a barn door and a three-foot-long beard made of roaring, white-hot solar flames that crackled like dry pine wood.
“Who is the lunatic hiding on that iron train?!” the Flame-Beard Marquis roared, his voice shaking the asteroid belt like a magnitude-ten earthquake. “In seven days, you smashed twenty-seven of my Seventh Branch’s Sacred Drain-Anchors across ten solar systems! You wrapped my ten tax-stars in hideous brass plumbing! And you kidnapped my sworn nephew, Emissary Jin Huo! Come out and accept your death before I blast your brass boiler knob and all ten planets behind you into cosmic ash!”
