The air in Subterranean Floor 1 tasted like hot copper pennies and burnt kerosene.
Tie Kuang stood three paces from the jammed drill cone, his chest heaving like a forge bellows. Crimson Asura qi billowed off his spiked dragon-scale armor in greasy waves, scorching the whitewashed lime coating off the ceiling arches. In his fists, the head of his dented Mountain-Crushing Warhammer sputtered with unstable crimson lightning. Two centuries of sectarian slaughter rolled off the old monster in waves thick enough to choke a horse.
"You," Tie Kuang snarled, spittle flying from his scorched beard. "You jammed the Imperial Colossus with a bar of pig iron. You insolent, dung-shoveling hillbilly. I will peel the hide off your ribs and grind your marrow into tallow for our forge fires!"
Austin stood with his thumbs hooked in the bib of his overalls, his yellow grease pencil tucked behind his left ear.
Before Tie Kuang could bring the warhammer into a strike pocket, the tunnel behind the shattered Colossus let out a jagged war cry.
*"CHARGE! THE GRAND ELDER HAS BREACHED THE VAULT! FLATTEN THE HERETICS!"*
A deep, rhythmic hammering shook the eastern basalt wall. Five hundred pairs of hobnailed iron boots came pounding down the shale bore, churning up a tidal wave of powdered grit. Behind them rumbled twelve basalt Subterranean Siege Golems, twelve feet tall and chiseled from volcanic stone. Their runic eye slits burned dull blood-red as heavy pneumatic bronze pistons kicked their stone hips forward.
An entire imperial heavy breach division. Armed to the teeth. Screaming bloody murder.
Austin looked past Tie Kuang's spiked pauldrons.
He stared down the dark borehole. His eyes tracked the boiling cloud of pulverized silica, powdered slate, and dry quarry muck rolling straight toward the workshop entrance.
A cold, visceral panic clamped around Austin's throat. Not fear of swords. Not fear of golems.
Pure cleanroom panic.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Austin barked, dropping his clipboard onto a steel cart and waving both arms. "Hold up! Stop right there! Back it up!"
Tie Kuang bared his yellowed teeth in a vicious grin. "Hah! Begging for mercy already, boy? My iron vanguard will trample your bones into road gravel!"
"Are you completely out of your mind?!" Austin shouted over the boots, his voice shrill with tradesman rage. "Look at your feet! You're marching five hundred trench diggers into an active mechanical rough-in with unwashed outdoor waffle stompers! Where are your disposable booties?! Where are your sticky mats?!"
Tie Kuang's grin slipped. His warhammer dipped two inches.
"Where are your what?" the Grand Elder rasped.
"The boot covers, you absolute butcher!" Austin jabbed a finger toward the dust cloud. "Look at that aggregate drift! High-silica powdered shale! Sharp as broken glass! I spent six hours wiping down the bronze lead-screws on the lathe with lint-free solvent. I've got open babbit bearings sitting on the bench waiting for an oil flush, and you're dragging an entire quarry floor through my clean doorway!"
A neon-red prompt strobed across the upper-right corner of Austin's field of vision.
"Forty-five thousand parts per million," Austin hissed, his voice dropping into the icy register of a superintendent whose drywall sub just dumped wet mud into the HVAC duct. "Unacceptable. Absolutely beyond the pale."
Austin turned his back on the Peak Golden Core sovereign.
He grabbed a pair of green-tinted polycarbonate safety glasses from his chest pocket, snapped them over his ears, and sprinted toward the main power board beside the Pelton waterwheel turbine.
"Senior Austin!" Li Xiaoyao shrieked from behind a stack of empty cedar wire spools. The junior disciple gripped his grease gun like a crossbow, his yellow hard hat trembling against his brow. "Twelve divine siege constructs! Ancient earth-magic war engines!"
"They're walking abrasive grit dispensers," Austin snapped back.
The auxiliary power board was still in rough-in status, but the heavy iron was ready. Mounted on a two-inch slab of black slate, three raw copper busbars connected the hydro turbine's induction dynamo to the mountain's primary DC battery trunk. To the left hung a pair of three-phase knife switches with soapstone arc chutes and spring-loaded copper contacts.
Beside the panel sat a glass beaker filled with amber transformer oil. Austin had spent his morning break checking the dielectric breakdown voltage with a brass spark gap to ensure the coils wouldn't flash over under surge load.
"Let's see how your quarry boys like proper dust collection," Austin muttered.
He grabbed the heavy vulcanized-rubber handle of the main transfer disconnect.
With a sharp grunt, he pulled the blades clear of the generation circuit. *CLACK.* The waterwheel disconnected from the grid, its bronze runner spinning freely against the penstock jet.
Then Austin threw the lever straight up into the auxiliary DC shunt bus.
*BANG.*
The knife contacts seated home. A brilliant violet arc snapped across the soapstone chutes, sizzling the smell of burnt hair and sweet transformer fluid into the air.
Two point five gigawatt-hours of direct-current lightning—stored in the surface cabin's deep-cycle capacitor array—dumped backward into the turbine generator's copper field windings.
The heavy copper armature screamed like a radial arm saw hitting an iron railway tie. The magnetic field inverted instantaneously. Falling water inside the enclosed penstock was violently rejected backward up the mountain shaft in a foaming back-hammer!
The three-meter Pelton wheel ceased to be an electric generator.
It became a 65-kilowatt spinning vacuum blower.
*WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-SHKRK!*
Cavern atmospheric pressure tanked instantly. Austin's ears snapped with a sharp *pop*. Air roared toward the turbine intake flue at eighty miles an hour, dragging loose shavings, dropped screws, and workshop rags across the obsidian floor like dry leaves across concrete.
Inside the eastern breach tunnel, the vanguard captain of the Iron Pavilion was mid-roar.
"TAKE THEIR HEADS AND FLINT THEIR——*GLURK!*"
The captain's battle cry turned into a wet gasp as sixty thousand cubic feet of air per minute vanished down his throat.
An irresistible aerodynamic vacuum grabbed five hundred charging miners by their breastplates.
Their hobnailed boots lost all purchase on the shale. Iron pikes clattered to the floor. Men clawed at the walls, ripping out fingernails and scraping grooves into the rock, but eighty miles per hour of negative draft inside a twelve-foot stone pipe does not negotiate with human quadriceps.
"THE ABYSS!" someone wailed. "THE EARTH DRAGON IS SWALLOWING US!"
Nobody anchored anything.
Five hundred heavy-infantry miners were plucked off their feet like loose packing peanuts sucked into a leaf mulcher. They tumbled through the breach in a screaming tangle of flying boots, dented kettle helmets, and flailing limbs.
Austin was already in position at the mouth of the breach.
He had dragged a five-foot curved deflection baffle over from the scrap bin—a piece of quarter-inch bronze plate rolled for a sawdust cyclone separator. He planted his steel-toed boots shoulder-width apart, braced the bronze sheet against his hip, and stood waiting.
*SWOOSH-WHUMP-SLIDE!*
The howling vortex flung the first cluster of twenty miners straight out of the tunnel mouth.
Austin caught them on the curved bronze plate with a smooth sweep of his forearms. He angled the guide forty-five degrees down. The bronze surface, slick with machine tallow, sent the armored men skimming across the floor in a tidy arc, straight down the greased basalt chute leading into the ten-foot-deep Basalt Slag Holding Basin.
*THUMP. CLATTER. OOF.*
"Next batch," Austin grunted.
*SWOOSH-SLIDE-CRUNCH!*
Another thirty miners sailed out, banked off the bronze deflection curve, and dropped into the pit like gravel sliding out of a dump truck bed.
Down in the holding basin, Director Tie Feng sat against the basalt curb, holding a half-eaten dry biscuit in one hand and a limp piece of pickled turnip in the other. He blinked through the gloom as fifty heavily armored imperial elites dropped out of the sky and landed across his shins.
"Watch the boots, boys," Tie Feng croaked, chewing slowly. "Mind the aggregate bin. The floor boss gets cranky about scuff marks."
Behind the miners came the heavy artillery.
The twelve twelve-foot-tall basalt Subterranean Siege Golems tumbled through the breach like loose masonry falling off an aqueduct. Each construct weighed six tons, powered by crimson runic formations carved into their chest cores, glowing with raw volcanic earth-mana.
Austin reached down to the auxiliary ground bus beside the chute—a three-inch braided copper strap bonded directly to eight solid copper ground rods driven twenty feet into the wet mountain bedrock.
He snatched up the grounding wand: a heavy steel pry bar clamped to the copper strap with a two-bolt mechanical lug.
As the first six-ton stone golem skittered past his boots on the bronze sheet, Austin jabbed the pry bar directly against the construct's glowing crimson heart stone.
*BZZZZZZZZ-CLACK.*
A sharp spark of blue static jumped between stone and steel.
The earth-mana powering the construct took the path of least resistance. It bypassed the golem's internal stone circuitry and dumped straight down the heavy copper braid into the earth grid, grounding out the runic potential with a sound like a popped paper bag.
The golem's crimson eye slits flickered twice and died.
Its hydraulic stone limbs went dead slack. Six tons of inert, unpowered basalt skidded down the chute and thudded into the bottom of the pit, stacking neatly against the far wall like surplus landscaping blocks.
*BZZZZT-CLACK.* Golem two went dark.
*BZZZZT-CLACK.* Golem three turned into a garden ornament.
One by one, all twelve imperial war engines were discharged, neutralized, and filed into the aggregate bin.
Austin let go of the grounding wand, stepped back to the slate distribution board, and hauled the heavy disconnect handle back down to center.
*THUNK.*
The contacts parted. The screaming vacuum died with a deep whine as the waterwheel slowed back to its normal operating cadence, water sloshing peacefully into the tailrace.
Silence settled over Subterranean Floor 1.
The air was pristine. The cyclonic draft had stripped every particle of airborne dust, floating lint, and hair out of the room, venting it straight out the mountain's lower drainage culvert.
Austin checked the prompt on his safety glasses.
Austin pulled a clean blue shop rag from his pocket, wiped a speck of grease from the glass cover of the oil-level sight gauge, and tucked the rag away.
Then he turned around.
Standing alone in the center of the vast basalt cavern was Supreme Grand Elder Tie Kuang.
The old man was frozen in mid-swing. His Mountain-Crushing Warhammer was held aloft over his right shoulder, both arms locked in a rigid spasm. His mouth hung open so wide his lower jaw was nearly resting on his breastplate. The terrifying crimson Asura aura had withered away to a single wisp of pale gray steam leaking from his left nostril.
His bloodshot eyes darted from the spotless breach tunnel to the pit thirty yards away, where five hundred of his imperial stormtroopers and twelve ancient war golems were stacked like cordwood under a layer of stale turnip peels.
Fifty-two seconds.
From the first war cry to total cavern silence: fifty-two seconds.
Two centuries of military doctrine and imperial pride had been swept, categorized, and shoveled into a scrap bin like wood shavings off a jointer table.
Austin reached over to his tool cart, picked up his five-foot Cosmic Star-Steel pipe wrench, and rested the heavy blue I-beam handle across his collarbone.
He pulled the yellow grease pencil from behind his ear and tapped the wooden margin of his clipboard with three dull, rhythmic clicks.
"Alright, chief," Austin said, his voice flat as a carpenter's rule. "The air is back within code tolerances. Now let's talk about that twelve-foot unauthorized penetration in my eastern load-bearing wall, and which one of you clowns has the company card to pay for the structural hydraulic grout."