The staging for the final assault was conducted with the grim, careful care of a siege vanguard.
In the damp stone courtyard of the abandoned customs house, thirty veteran mortal tunnel diggers and scouts from the Southern Sovereign Basin assembled in the copper twilight. These were men and women who had spent years working the high granite faces of the Taiyi quarries and navigating the flooded service trenches of the underworld—artisans who understood the physical language of iron, stone, and explosive black powder.
Tie Shan stood before them, his massive star-iron totem planted three feet deep into the gravel.
He had spent the last two hours reinforcing his gear. His leather wrist wraps were doubled and treated with boiled linseed oil to resist acid spray. His bronze shoulder pauldrons were strapped tight over a padded canvas gambeson. And in his wide leather belt, he had tucked four heavy cold-iron drift punches and a two-foot steel pry-bar.
“Every man checks his boots,” Tie Shan commanded, his voice cutting through the heavy air like an iron bell.
The thirty tunnel diggers right away knelt, inspecting their boot soles and checking the bindings of their equipment to ensure zero rattling iron.
Lin Tao walked down the ranks, carrying a wooden chest filled with prepared sneaking gear.
