Up in the northern flight corridor over Mount Clear Sky, the Great Yan Dynasty’s air fleet was falling apart at the seams.
Eleven vice-admirals and over eight hundred formation elders scrambled across their brass observation galleries, staring through polished quartz scrying monitors in slack-jawed, sweat-drenched horror. The air smelled of burnt sandalwood incense and singed talisman paper as communication crystals overheated across every bridge.
Down on the eastern gravel terrace, the eight-hundred-foot flagship *Sun-Slayer* lay beached like an iron whale. It sat square between two crisp white chalk lines, its primary levitation line chewed clean in two, its ten-foot dragon-blood steering helm gnawed into kindling, and its supreme commander, Grand Admiral Meng, slumped over the rail covered head-to-toe in three pints of warm, affectionate nether-dog drool.
The fleet’s shared telepathic channel shrieked like a boiler room with every relief valve jammed open:
*"THE FLAGSHIP IS GROUNDED! REPEAT! A THREE-HEADED DEMON BEAST JUST MAULED ADMIRAL MENG!"*
*"THE CONTRACTOR LIVES! HE SWALLOWED THE EMPEROR'S SACRED COMET-CORE TO BLEED OFF HIS CONDENSER LOADS!"*
*"THE IMPERIAL DRAGON SHIELD IS GONE! HE GAVE THE SUPREME COMMANDER A TWENTY PERCENT PARKING REBATE!"*
*"Vice-Admiral Zhao, take tactical command! Should we roll out the broadside fire-jars?! Should we drop spiritual depth charges on the timber shed?!"*
*"Are you out of your mind, Qian?! Look at his left hand! He’s holding a yellow talisman-pencil of absolute bureaucratic doom! If we drop fire-jars, he’ll cite our entire family registry for unpermitted open-air incinerator emissions!"*
*"ALL SHIPS, DISENGAGE! REVERSE PRIMARY THRUSTERS! ENGAGE EMERGENCY WARP COILS! GET US BACK TO THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL!"*
Panic broke the fleet's discipline like dry pine. Eleven five-hundred-foot iron leviathans wheeled hard to the north, their shark-shaped hulls groaning as engine crews redlined the ancient crystal keels past every safety tolerance in the manual. Blinding torrents of turquoise exhaust blasted across the cloud layer as the ships clawed frantically for altitude, trying to break through the overcast into the upper jet stream and bolt for the capital.
Down on the Obsidian Plaza, Austin slowly lowered his clipboard.
He reached up with a gloved thumb, squared his midnight-blue Sovereign Hard Hat, and tracked the fleeing hulls through his dark green Shade-14 welding goggles.
His yellow grease pencil ticked against the clipboard’s brass spring clip:
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
"Leaving the scene of an active municipal traffic violation," Austin muttered, his voice flat with the weary disgust of a veteran highway patrolman working an interstate pileup in the rain. "Failing to display proof of registration and commercial insurance upon request. Exceeding thirty knots in a designated residential and school approach corridor. That’s an automatic class-three moving violation, points on the title, and mandatory appearance before the magistrate."
He drew in a long, steady breath through his nose. The air tasted of pine shavings and crisp, newly vented ozone.
Down in Austin’s gut, the minus 273.15°C void frost from the Absolute Zero Cannon had finished circulating through the capillary coils of the First Epoch Containment Mesh.
Dumping cryogenic slush against five million Kelvin of thermonuclear plasma hadn't just cooled the golden core; it had triggered a violent thermodynamic compression cycle. Just like injecting chilled fuel into a supercharged diesel cylinder right at top dead center, the steep thermal gradient forced the core's magnetic confinement fields inward, packing the stellar plasma down to bone-crushing density.
*KAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The core took the compression and fired back with interest.
Cascades of amber warning text and solar readouts flooded Austin’s vision, accompanied by the brassy, full-throated blare of a three-part fanfare:
*BA-BA-BA-BAAAAAAAA—CHIME!*
"Level fifty-two," Austin murmured, feeling a heavy, iron-hard warmth settle deep behind his ribs. "Six million Kelvin baseline. Seven hundred and fifty petawatts steady-state."
Around the frayed hems of his dungarees, forty new microscopic specks precipitated straight out of empty air, snapping into the orbital rings around his lower legs with sharp, metallic clicks:
*Click-click-click-snap!*
Exactly **three hundred and twenty** celestial micro-particles—chips of black obsidian, sintered titanium carbide, cold-iron turnings, copper shavings, and glowing golden plasma droplets—whirled in five interlocking, counter-rotating tiers around his work boots.
The localized gravitational gradient around his soles leaped from twenty-five to **twenty-eight times Earth gravity (28.0G)**.
The obsidian tiles underneath his heels groaned. The granite sub-base compressed half a millimeter under the immense localized mass. Across the patio, loose 8d nails, flat brass washers, and stray lag bolts skittered along the stone, sucked straight toward his steel toes:
*Skitter-skitter-clink!*
Behind him on the cedar porch, Old Patriarch Jiang Taixu dropped flat on his face, the invisible gravitational wave pressing his long silver beard flush against the floorboards:
"Ancestors preserve us... the mass resonance! My spiritual sea is bowing toward his shins! Grand Senior has opened the Second Stage of the Celestial Sun!"
Austin rested his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench across his shoulder.
He tilted his welding goggles up toward the eleven fleeing ships. They had punched through three thousand feet, spewing dirty turquoise smoke as they gunned their crystal engines for the northern pass.
"Controlled Coronal Mass Ejection," Austin read off the HUD subroutine. "Directional magnetohydrodynamic plasma pulse. Let's check your electrical grounding specs, boys."
Austin set his boots shoulder-width apart in the center of the flagstones.
No hand seals. No flowery incantations.
He tightened his core, throwing the primary bypass valves wide open on the First Epoch Containment Mesh.
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
A blinding, razor-thin shockwave of golden-violet electromagnetic energy flashed outward from Austin’s breastplate.
A textbook **Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)**—a multi-million-ampere magnetic surge expanding through the lower atmosphere at the speed of light.
The pulse swept over the fleeing fleet in a microsecond.
*VZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-CRACKLE!*
Every single engineering shortcut the Great Yan Dynasty had taken came home to roost at once.
Their ancient levitation keels ran raw First Epoch crystals without Faraday cages, surge suppressors, or ground-isolation chokes. When Austin’s magnetic wavefront sheared across three feet of unshielded Cold-Iron plating, the collapsing magnetic field induced hundreds of thousands of volts of uncontrolled back-EMF directly into the crystal lattices.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-POP-POP-POP!*
Sparks sprayed from brass helm consoles across eleven bridges. Scrying crystals popped like flashbulbs from dielectric breakdown. Wire bundles wrapped in waxed silk smoldered and smoked behind ornate mahogany paneling.
Under every hull, the glowing turquoise runes flared a violent electric purple, hissed, and snuffed out:
`[CRITICAL ALERT: INDUCED BACK-EMF SURGE DETECTED]` `[ANTI-GRAVITY LEVITATION COILS: EMP OVERLOAD / OFFLINE]` `[PRIMARY CRYSTAL MATRIX: SHUTDOWN COMPLETE]` `[AERODYNAMIC LIFTING-BODY GLIDE MODE: ENGAGED]`
Without levitation magic, five-hundred-foot iron hulls ought to have dropped like dead anvils.
Instead, the Great Yan shipwrights’ conservative naval architecture saved eight hundred lives. The broad, shark-shaped iron hulls and flared ventral stabilizers functioned as massive, rigid lifting bodies. The broad hulls caught the dense mountain thermals, converting dead falling weight into forward aerodynamic lift.
The entire Imperial Armada banked into an unpowered glide.
*WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH.*
Like eleven colossal iron geese caught in an updraft, the warships settled into a graceful, synchronized spiral descent.
The wind shrieked through their rigging as they banked together in a tight echelon formation. The cold mountain thermals caught their broad underbellies, funneling them down through the natural air currents straight toward the graded gravel terraces of the eastern ridge.
Down on the ridge, the arrival was textbook.
One by one, the warships leveled out twenty feet over the pea gravel, skimming above the newly graded drainage ditches.
Their heavy oak-and-iron landing skids bit into the terrace with rhythmic, scraping thuds:
*THUD... SKIDDDDDDD.* *THUD... SKIDDDDDDD.* *THUD... SKIDDDDDDD.*
Each vessel plowed two uniform furrows through the loose rock, shedding kinetic momentum across four hundred yards before sliding to a smooth, parallel halt.
*Ssssssssssssh.*
Three minutes later, all eleven warships sat parked in an immaculate row across the eastern terrace.
Spaced exactly thirty feet apart, nose-first, perfectly parallel to the gravel access road, lined up right beside the crippled *Sun-Slayer*.
Aboard the fleet, eight hundred marines and three hundred elders sat plastered against bulkheads and gun mounts, clutching their temples in teary, concussive bewilderment. Zero fatalities. Zero hull breeches. Every structural rib held, every rivet stayed seated.
They had just been pulled over, grounded, and parallel parked by an act of celestial traffic enforcement.
Up on the plaza, Austin watched the dust settle over the eastern ridge.
He nodded once, thoroughly satisfied.
"Twelve unauthorized commercial vessels grounded with zero casualties," Austin said, clicking his yellow grease pencil shut with a sharp *snap*. "Staged inside designated overflow boundaries per Class-B municipal transit code."
He turned on his heel and walked over to the supply shed beside the cooling yard.
A minute later, he emerged, leaning his weight into the handles of a heavy-duty industrial handcart fitted with fat pneumatic turf tires.
Racked three high on the cart were twelve massive, forged-steel assemblies. Each one tipped the scales at eighty pounds, finished in thick safety-yellow powder coat with hardened ratcheting jaws and tamper-proof locking collars:
**Heavy-Duty Commercial Wheel Clamps**.
Austin wheeled the cart to the rim of the plaza, looking down at Tie Kuang, who was still frozen in the bunker doorway with his mouth hanging wide open.
"Tie Kuang!" Austin called down, rapping the yellow steel clamps with his pipe wrench: *CLANG.*
"Y-Yes, Master Austin?!" the dwarf stammered, scrambling out while grabbing his hard hat with both hands.
"Fetch your half-inch pneumatic impact wrench and a deep-well socket set," Austin instructed, hoisting an eighty-pound yellow boot onto his shoulder. "We’re heading down to the overflow lot. I want boots on every single landing skid before the registered owner shows up to dispute the tow."
Jiang Taixu hurried down the timber stairs, staring at the yellow steel jaws in utter terror:
"G-Grand Senior! What manner of heavenly seals are those yellow frames?! Are they the Soul-Locking Shackles of the Netherworld?!"
Austin let out a weary foreman sigh, adjusting the forged iron on his shoulder:
"They're Denver boots, Jiang Taixu. Forged manganese-alloy, rated for eighty thousand pounds of static shear. If those boys try to spool up their keels with these locked onto the skids, they’ll rip their own mounting stringers straight out of the hull. And torching them off with an oxyacetylene rig is a class-two municipal felony."
Austin hitched the eighty-pound clamp higher onto his shoulder and started down the gravel path toward the parked armada:
"Grab the hoses and the placards, boys. Let's go boot a navy."