Chairman Pago was no longer a merchant; he was a gambler who had seen the bottom of his stack. In seventy-two hours, the cheap, standardized commodities of Skyreach had swept through Rust-Water Port like a viral infection. The Golden Gear’s potteries had gone silent, the lumberyards were paralyzed by strikes, and even Pago’s personal guards were caught using those half-silver lighters. His vault was hemorrhaging liquidity, and his authority was dissolving into the mud. If the sun rose on a standing Skyreach warehouse, the city would no longer belong to him.
“Burn it! Grind that warehouse and everyone inside into ash!”
Pago huddled inside a reinforced black carriage, hidden in the curtain of rain. He shrieked at the mob before him, his pig-kin face slick with oily sweat and his eyes clouded with the lunacy of the cornered. Before him stood the Blood Shark Mercenaries, the most vicious pack in the port. Their leader, a mutant crocodile-man covered in moss-green scales, idly licked the edge of a jagged, dripping machete.
“Relax, Chairman,” the mutant hissed. “Three hundred men, each with three jars of black-fire oil. We won’t just take the warehouse; we’ll burn the entire Lower District if the price is right.”
“The goblin dies! The fox in the white suit dies!” Pago hurled a heavy sack of gold through the window. “That’s the down payment. I want bodies!”
“Move out!”
Hundreds of torches ignited, fighting the downpour. Three hundred killers, armed with steel and incendiaries, howled into the storm as they charged the massive shipyard—Old Gob’s temporary headquarters.
Inside the shipyard’s second-floor office, the night sky was stained a bruised crimson by the approaching torches. The roar of the mob drifted through the glass, punctuated by the sharp crack of shattering ceramic.
Jasta sat in a velvet armchair by the window, cupping a steaming cup of tea. He didn’t bother looking at the carnage outside. “A pity,” he murmured, blowing the steam from his drink. His tone carried the disappointment of a critic watching a poorly paced play. “I expected Chairman Pago to possess more creativity. A price war? A logistical blockade? Even a clever frame-up would have been respectable.”
“Instead, he chose the most primitive, unoptimized tool available: Violence.”
Old Gob was vibrating under the desk, clutching an iron box of aluminum Sky Credits. “L-Lord Jasta! There are hundreds of them! The Blood Sharks! They eat people! Shouldn’t we... evacuate?”
“Evacuate?” Jasta smiled, adjusting his pristine cuffs. “Gob, remember this: the pinnacle of commerce is not rolling in the muck with your rivals. It is building a machine that flattens the muck entirely.”
“Mr. Brad, clear the floor.”
Downstairs, the Blood Sharks had reached the perimeter. “Smash it! Throw the oil!” the crocodile leader roared. Thugs slammed a heavy ram against the corrugated iron gates while others lit fuses on their fire-pots.
From deep behind the iron doors, a low-frequency vibration began to rattle the dock's structural supports. It was a guttural, twelve-cylinder diesel growl—the sound of an ancient predator waking from a slumber of steel. The noise drowned out the thunder and the screams of the mob. Puddles on the ground danced in rhythmic ripples.
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“What is that?” the leader stammered, blinking in confusion.
KRA-KOOM!!!!
The heavy iron gate didn't yield to the ram; it was launched outward by a staggering Kinetic Impulse. Twisted sheet metal became a projectile, flying twenty meters and crushing two mercenaries into the pavement. Through the rising dust, two blinding searchlight beams—multi-million candela industrial strobes—pierced the dark, turning the dock into a white purgatory.
“My eyes! I can’t see!” The killers shrieked, their retinas suffering from immediate Lumen Overload.
Out of the light roared a deep-blue titan draped in reactive armor plating: the Land Crawler Mk.II - Command Variant. It was no longer an ore-hauler; it was a mobile fortress. Sharp alloy spikes were welded to its V-prow, and its oversized run-flat tires ground through the debris with indifferent ease.
Brad leaned out from the top turret, his bare, bronze-skinned muscles slick with rain. He gripped the handles of the 30mm Twin Water-Cooled Heavy Machine Guns, a wet, unlit cigar clamped between his teeth.
“Evening, trash,” Brad yelled over the engine’s idle. “This is your ‘Negotiation Strategy’? Torches and scrap metal? Cute.”
“Kill them! It’s just an iron box!” the crocodile leader screamed, waving his machete. “Break the wheels! Drag them out!”
“Stupidity is a hell of a drug,” Brad muttered, spitting to the side before slamming his thumbs onto the trigger plate.
RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT————!!!
The heavy guns unleashed a mechanical roar. Meter-long tongues of muzzle fire licked the rain, looking like twin dragons of light. 30mm armor-piercing incendiary rounds tore through the air in a saturated Metal Storm.
This wasn't a skirmish; it was a Harvest.
The mercenaries charging with wooden shields and leather armor might as well have been made of wet paper. Rounds shredded limbs, disintegrated cover, and reduced the front line to a fine red mist in milliseconds. A single stray hit meant a traumatic amputation; a center-mass strike meant total structural failure of the human body.
The Blood Shark formation collapsed instantly. Their vaunted savagery was mathematically insignificant against Industrial Firepower.
“Face down if you want to keep your heads!” Brad didn't waste ammunition on a total massacre. He suppressed the crowd with a single sweeping burst, then tapped the intercom. “Driver! Flatten the rest!”
The bear-kin driver floored the accelerator. The Land Crawler Mk.II lunged like a berserk rhino. Barricades, carriages, and thugs too slow to move were pulverized by twenty tons of moving mass. The crocodile leader attempted to board the roof, but as he jumped, the turret performed a high-speed traverse. The barrel housing slammed into him like a swinging I-beam, launching him into a brick wall where he ended his life as a wet smear.
In three minutes, three hundred mercenaries were either dead, fleeing, or sobbing in the mud, too terrified to look up.
At the end of the street, Pago’s carriage attempted a desperate U-turn. The Chairman was shaking so violently he nearly fell off his seat. He had just watched his private army get mowed down like dry grass by a machine that didn't even notice they were there.
“Go! Faster!” Pago shrieked, kicking the driver's back.
A horse cannot outrun a turbocharged engine. With a violent power-slide, the Land Crawler Mk.II drifted across the mud, its V-prow stopping mere centimeters from the carriage’s door. The steaming, blood-splattered hull blocked the entire street like a steel mountain.
Pago slumped, staring at the black voids of the barrels pointed at his skull. His silk trousers darkened with a sudden, warm wetness.
The hatch flipped open. Brad hopped down, not even bothering to draw a weapon. He strode to the carriage and ripped the ornate door from its hinges as if it were sodden cardboard. “Yo, Chairman. Fancy meeting you here.”
Brad looked at the trembling pig-kin and pulled a Skyreach Windproof Lighter from his pocket. Snick. He ignited the stable blue flame and calmly lit his cigar, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke directly into Pago’s face. “You like to play with knives when a deal goes south?” Brad leaned in, his scarred face inches from Pago’s snout. “Funny. That’s my favorite hobby too.”
He pointed back at the field of mangled mercenaries and then at his pristine tank. “Now, do you think we can renegotiate that ‘seventy-percent’ cut?”
Pago looked at Brad’s dead eyes, then at Jasta, who was walking toward them—his white suit untouched by a single drop of mud, his shoes perfectly dry. The Chairman’s psychological foundation suffered a total collapse.
“We talk... we can talk...” Pago held out a ring of vault keys with trembling hands. “Take it all... just don't kill me... it’s yours...”
Jasta arrived, using his ivory cane to dismissively push the keys aside. “No, Chairman Pago.” Jasta’s smile, illuminated by the fire and the rain, was elegant and utterly lethal. “We don’t want your keys. We want the Rules.”
“As of tonight, we have recalibrated the rules of Rust-Water Port.”
The Blood Sharks brought knives to a tank fight. The Golden Gear Guild's monopoly is officially dead. Now, Jasta has to decide how to "liquidate" the assets of the fallen Chairman.
Question of the Day: What is the first "Industrial Law" Alex should impose on Rust-Water Port?
?? A) The Anti-Slavery Act: Immediate manumission of all Cat-kin slaves.
Result: Liberation. You gain thousands of loyal followers, but the city's remaining merchant lords will form a secret alliance to kill you.
?? B) The Energy Monopoly: Only Sky-Credits are legal tender for fuel.
Result: Economic Domination. You own the city's pulse. Gold becomes secondary to your aluminum coins.
?? C) The Industrial Quarter: Annex the docks as sovereign territory.
Result: The Engineer's Choice. Build a proper base. Walls, turrets, and assembly lines inside the city. A fortress within a corpse.
Follow and Rate for more industrial madness!