The artillery shells didn’t make a sound until they hit the upper air.
They were void-core rounds, cast from dense star-fallen black-bronze and filled with high-pressure spatial-collapse powder. Fifty long-range batteries fired at the same time from the Holy Alliance lines. Then, the sky above Mount Azure Cloud whistled with a jagged, tearing scream like a thousand iron saws ripping through dry pine.
*
Lin Ke stood in the center of the switchboard bunker. His boots shook to the rhythmic, chattering recoil of the distant royal cannons.
Around the central ridge, fifty Foundation Peak students were sitting cross-legged on the stone terraces, each holding a red Breakthrough Pill in their trembling hands.
They didn’t look at the incoming artillery shells.
They looked at Lin Ke.
“The batteries can’t take both,” Shen Yue said, her hands flying across the backup control levers as sweat poured down her temples. “If we dump the artillery impact into the defense grid, the shields will draw eighty thousand units of power. If we keep the magnetic holding coils charged for fifty breakthroughs, the charge bank banks will hit heat saturation in forty seconds!”
