UUUUUUUUU-WOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!
Outside the observation windows of Locomotive #01, Big Gray, Little Spot, and all sixty other hundred-mile-long Orange-Vested Void Whales were pressing their flat noses against the dark, rusted crust of Planet #20, trying desperately to scrape away the fifty-mile layer of toxic black-iron slag with their flippers.
Every time a whale’s flipper touched the surface of Planet #20, however, a vicious web of dark red Gravity-Crushing Runes flared up from the ground, shocking the whales’ flippers with ten-million-ton gravitational sparks!
“Stop scraping the crust with your bare flippers, Big Gray! Those runes will break your bones!” Pei Xuan called out through the station loudspeaker, his voice gentle but firm as he stepped out onto the bow of the locomotive.
Pei Xuan tapped his RTS Territory Screen, zooming the cross-section scanner fifty miles straight down through the rusted iron mountains of Planet #20 into the planetary core.
As Pei Xuan read the full scan on his screen and shared it across the fleet’s display monitors, a wave of furious outrage swept through every single person on the Star-Train.
“Those shameless, cold-blooded beasts!” Hong Ling slammed both of her heavy kitchen cleavers into the wooden railing so hard the blades buried three inches deep. “Not only did the Golden-Crow Sun Clan dump a trillion tons of poison trash on a hundred billion innocent mortals—when the kind Whale King tried to stop them eight hundred years ago, they nailed him under the ground, used his stomach as a trash magnet, and drained…
