The sky over the capital, Jeen-Haark. Castle Haark.

  A few minutes after the Northern Port was turned into a flaming hell, they appeared over the capital itself. Twelve Su-34 frontline bombers, having passed over the city at a threateningly low altitude, settled into a wide, perfectly measured circle, trapping Castle Haark in a slowly tightening ring. Their roar, echoing off the ancient walls and high towers, filled the city with a sound it had never heard before—a deep, vibrating, all-pervading hum of inevitable doom.

  On the upper platforms of the castle towers, the mages of the Royal Guard scrambled in organized panic. In their blue and white, rune-embroidered robes, they ran back and forth, dragging heavy tomes and setting up magical amplifying crystals at pre-marked positions.

  "All hands to positions! Formation 'Celestial Shield'! Faster!" Archmage Yamirei's voice was as taut as a drawn bowstring, but it still held the steel of a leader.

  But the mages couldn't concentrate. The deafening, eardrum-crushing roar of the Russian planes was more than just noise. It was a psychological weapon. It shattered their thoughts, broke their concentration, made it impossible to hear the words of their incantations and feel the flows of mana.

  "This… this damned noise… I can't weave the spell! The mana is dissipating!" one of the younger mages cried out, clamping his hands over his ears and swaying back and forth.

  Yamirei shot him a withering glare. "Cast aside your fear! Use this noise! Weave it into your fury! Feed on it! Concentrate!"

  Obeying his iron will, the mages gathered the remnants of their courage. They raised their carved staves in unison. On their crowns, dazzling fireballs began to ignite, growing with each second, absorbing the power of their creators. The mages chanted their spell in unison, and the air around them crackled with an overabundance of mana, while blue sparks danced along the stone masonry of the towers.

  "ON TARGETS! FIRE!"

  Dozens of fireballs, each the size of a human head and burning with the fury of a small sun, launched from the staves and, leaving smoky trails, streaked into the sky. It was an impressive, deadly salvo, capable of incinerating an entire squadron of wyvern lords.

  But the Su-34s were not wyverns. To the pilots, the attack registered on their thermal imaging systems as a salvo of low-velocity projectiles launched from approximately eight hundred meters altitude. The objects were large, slow, and unguided.

  "Grach-1, observing multiple low-velocity thermal signatures from the surface," the lead pilot reported. His voice was professionally flat. "Velocity approximately sixty meters per second. Ceiling well below our current altitude. No adjustment required."

  He watched the thermal traces on his display. The fireballs climbed for approximately four seconds, then began to decelerate. Their range was roughly four hundred meters of vertical travel—sufficient to reach a wyvern at patrol altitude, or a siege tower at the base of the walls. Against aircraft operating at three thousand meters, they were simply the wrong weapon.

  From the castle walls, the mages watched their salvo reach its peak and begin to fall back. The spells had not been broken. They had not been disrupted. They had simply run out of range, the way an arrow runs out of range, the way any projectile runs out of range when the target is unreachable.

  This was, in some ways, worse than disruption. Disruption implied an enemy who had learned to counter their power. What they had just witnessed was an enemy who had not needed to.

  Some of the younger mages sat down on the stone parapet. They had nothing left to sit on except the ground.

  The mages on the castle walls watched in horror as their most powerful defensive spell, which had consumed almost all their strength, vanished uselessly into the empty sky. Some of them fell to their knees, their faces contorted with despair and disbelief. They had just unleashed all their power into nothing. And the twelve steel demons, paying them no mind, continued their deadly, unhurried dance.

  Kingdom of Louria. Capital City of Jeen-Haark. Castle Haark.

  In the war council chamber, where all the dispatches were being funneled, the atmosphere was one of agony. Each report, relayed by the pale manacomm operators, was another nail in the coffin of their kingdom.

  "Report! What's happening on the ground?!" General Patagene's voice was hoarse; he was trying to maintain his composure, but his eyes, darting across the map, betrayed his panic.

  "The Admiralty… is completely destroyed," a miraculously surviving naval officer reported, his face black with soot. "The entire Northern Port is on fire. The coast is blockaded by four of their ships. They're sitting at a range where they can shell us like we're on a firing range. We can't do anything to them."

  "Their 'steel dragons' are flying at an altitude and speed that make any of our magical attacks pointless," Archmage Yamirei said with bitterness. He, the greatest mage in the kingdom, was forced to admit his utter powerlessness. "Our fireballs simply can't reach them."

  "The Royal Dragon Rider Corps… has ceased to exist," General Miminel, the air force commander, added quietly, almost in a whisper. "One hundred and fifty of our best aces. Annihilated in minutes. I… I sent them to their deaths."

  A heavy, suffocating air hung in the room. Everyone present understood: this was the end. The war they had so confidently started was lost. And lost so crushingly and humiliatingly that they couldn't have imagined it even in their worst nightmares.

  At that moment, Chancellor Maus rose from his chair. He had been calculating since the first report had come in. He had four facts: the fleet was gone, the air force was gone, the ground forces were broken, and the Parpaldian delegation had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room for the last two hours without offering anything.

  He crossed to the Parpaldian emissary.

  "Lord Keltos." His voice was controlled. He was not going to beg. Begging would not work on Parpaldia — they respected leverage, not desperation, and he had very little leverage left. But he had to try. "The Russian Federation is a threat not only to Louria. Their capabilities exceed anything currently deployed in the Three Civilized Areas. Once we fall, nothing prevents them from continuing west." He paused. "I am asking for a joint response. Not charity. A strategic alignment based on shared interest."

  Keltos looked at him with the expression of a man who had heard this argument before, in other rooms, from other losing powers.

  Emissary Keltos looked at Maus on his knees for a moment. Then he looked at the other men in the room — the generals, the archmage, the staff officers, all of them watching with the particular quality of attention that people give to something they cannot change.

  He reached into his dispatch case and placed a sealed document on the table in front of the kneeling chancellor.

  "This is formal notification," he said. "Effective from the date of this document, the military cooperation agreement between the Parpaldia Empire and the Kingdom of Louria is suspended pending review." He straightened his case. "The review will take as long as it takes."

  He did not say: *you have failed us.* He did not say: *we do not back losers.* These were things that did not need to be said. The document said them in the precise, bloodless language of imperial bureaucracy, which was more final than any insult.

  The Parpaldian delegation walked out. Their footsteps were unhurried. One of the attachés pulled the door closed behind him with careful, professional quietness.

  The sealed document sat on the table. No one moved to open it.

  After these words, without waiting for a reply, the Parpaldian delegation marched out of the hall. The heavy oak door slammed shut behind them, and the sound echoed like the gavel of a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

  Patagene said nothing for a long moment after the Parpaldian delegation had left.

  Then he walked to the window and looked out at the courtyard below, where the stables were, where he could see grooms moving with the ordinary purposeful movements of men who did not yet know that the last military alliance of the kingdom had just walked out the door in black robes.

  "So," he said finally. His voice was completely level. "We are alone."

  No one answered. There was nothing to say.

  "General, please, calm yourself!" one of the councilors tried to intervene.

  "WHAT NOW?!" Patagene snarled at him.

  The councilor, stammering, voiced an idea born of desperation: "The Russians… they haven't used their ground forces in full strength yet. They're still in the Gim area. If we gather all our heavy cavalry, all our remaining knights… and launch a sudden, massive strike…"

  The word "strike" hung in the air. For a moment, a silence fell over the hall, and then a feverish buzz began.

  "Yes! Our knights are the best on the continent! On the ground, they are invincible!"

  "If their infantry is as weak as their honor, we can trample them!"

  This was agony. They were grasping at the last, most insane straw. They had seen their fleet and air force wiped from the face of the earth by a weapon they couldn't even comprehend, yet they still believed in the magic of a cavalry charge.

  Castle Haark. The Throne Room.

  The enormous throne room was cold and quiet. The only source of light was the tall windows, through which the dim light of the two moons shone. King Haark Lourian XXXIV sat on his throne, his figure seeming small and lonely in the vast space. Before him, on one knee, stood General Patagene.

  "Your Majesty," the general's voice was hollow, devoid of all emotion. "The Northern Port and the fleet docked there have been completely destroyed. The Royal Dragon Rider Corps… has also been annihilated. We have lost control of the air and the sea. By our projections, the enemy's next move will be a full-scale ground offensive. Most likely, their main route of advance will be along the main highway through the artisan city of Birze."

  The king was silent, his face as impenetrable as a mask.

  "I propose," Patagene continued, "that we gather all our remaining forces and set an ambush in Birze. In the dense urban environment, their long-range… weapons will be less effective. We will lure them into the narrow streets and destroy them in close combat. It is our last chance."

  The king slowly raised his head. His gaze was as heavy as lead.

  "Very well, General," his voice was quiet, but there was steel in it. "Proceed. And one more thing… rumors have reached me that some viscounts and marquises whose sons died at Gim are spreading panic and calling for negotiations. Take them into custody. Anyone who sows doubt in our victory is a traitor. And in wartime, traitors meet only one fate."

  "As you command, Your Majesty," Patagene replied. He rose, bowed, and, walking backward, exited the throne room.

  The king was left alone. He slowly stood up and walked to the window. He looked out at his capital, at his castle, at the lands his ancestors had ruled for centuries. And in his memory, as if in real life, the moment replayed when he had stood on a tower and seen the Russians' steel dragon roar over the castle, and how one of his wyverns that had tried to attack it had simply… exploded. He still remembered that thunderous, soul-tearing roar and the predatory, swept-wing shape of that monster. And he remembered the primal, animal terror that had seized him then. A terror that he, the king, had no right to show.

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  A cold sweat broke out on his forehead.

  He understood that Patagene's plan would not work. The evidence for this was sufficient and he did not need to examine it further. What he needed to decide was what came after the plan failed — what he would do, what he would say, and what, if anything, could be preserved.

  He had been king for eleven years. He had been preparing this war for six of them. The shape of his ambition had been so clear, for so long, that he had stopped being able to see around it.

  He turned from the window. There was work to do. There was always work to do, even at the end of things.

  The next morning. The plain before the Lourian capital—Jeen-Haark.

  Under the cover of a pre-dawn fog, a tank column moved slowly, almost silently, across the endless plain. Ten steel monsters—seven T-90M "Proryv" main battle tanks and three 2S35 "Koalitsiya-SV" self-propelled howitzers—crept across the land like predators stalking their prey. The route had been plotted in advance using data from drones, which, remaining invisible to the Lourians, had created a detailed map of the area during the night.

  In the lead T-90M, in the turret, the gunner, Sergeant Kovalev, watched the thermal sight screen. Ahead, four kilometers away, the faint outlines of the giant walls of Jeen-Haark were emerging from the fog.

  "Commander, four klicks to target," he reported. "No activity on the walls. Looks like they haven't spotted us yet."

  The tank commander, Senior Lieutenant Orlov, gave a crooked smirk. "I'd be surprised if they did. They probably haven't even finished breakfast over there." He switched to the common channel. "All 'Boxes.' Occupy firing positions according to the plan. 'Acacias,' prepare to engage coordinates. Awaiting signal."

  At the same time, on the seventeenth watchtower of the northern wall of Jeen-Haark.

  Two guards, wrapped in their cloaks, fought off sleep. One of them, a young kid named Rik, let out a wide yawn. "Ugh, I think I dozed off. Is it my shift already?"

  His partner, an old veteran named Garr, grumbled without taking his eyes from his spyglass, "Hold on… Over there… in the fog… something's moving."

  Rik lazily walked over to the edge of the tower. "What could be moving out there? A herd of wild bulls?"

  "Those aren't bulls," Garr's voice grew tense. "They're… they're made of metal. They look like… like giant beetles. Gods, it's… it's their siege engines!"

  Rik grabbed the manacomm crystal in a panic. "Seventeenth tower to headquarters! Enemy… detected north of the wall…"

  He never finished the sentence. At that moment, ten kilometers away, three "Koalitsiya-SV" howitzers, having received targeting data from a drone, fired their first salvo. Three 152-millimeter high-explosive shells, arching high into the sky, streaked towards their target.

  To Garr and Rik, it looked as if the wrath of the gods had descended upon them. A silent flash—and the seventeenth watchtower, which had stood guard over the capital for centuries, along with its defenders, turned into a cloud of stone, dust, and fire.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The sounds of the explosions, reaching the city a second later, were like thunderclaps splitting the very earth. Alarm horns began to wail within the walls of Jeen-Haark. The assault had begun.

  General Patagene ran into the operations room, buckling the clasps of his gilded ceremonial armor on the move. "What's happening?!" he roared. "Where did they come from?! How did they bypass our ambush in Birze?!"

  A staff officer, pale as death, ran up to him. "Lord General, their siege engines… they're firing on us from a distance of ten kilometers. Our patrols didn't even have time to spot them."

  Ten kilometers. Patagene froze for a moment. That was a distance a good rider would cover in half an hour. And from that distance, they were raining death upon them.

  "Send out the heavy cavalry! Four hundred of our best knights!" his voice was hoarse but full of fury. "Their artillery is stationary while it's firing! Our strength is in speed! Let them hit their flank, sow chaos! But tell them not to get carried away. The mission is a reconnaissance in force! Probe them and retreat immediately! Is that understood?!"

  "Yes, my lord!"

  When four hundred heavy knights, clad in full plate armor, rode out of the northern gates of Jeen-Haark, it was a majestic sight. The earth trembled under the hooves of their warhorses. Their armor gleamed in the sun, and the plumes on their helmets fluttered. This was the elite of the army, the living embodiment of Louria's military might.

  "We are granted the honor of tasting the enemy's blood first! For Louria! For the king!" their commander shouted, and the squadron, like a steel avalanche, charged.

  Inside the lead T-90M.

  "Commander, I've got movement," the gunner, Kovalev, reported calmly, looking at the thermal sight. "Mass cavalry exit from the gate. Range, thirty-five hundred. Coming straight at us."

  "Idiots," Senior Lieutenant Orlov said curtly. "A frontal charge. Against tanks. With lances. I didn't even see shit this crazy in Chechnya," he thought with grim irony. "Machine gun to combat readiness. Main cannon is for walls and fortifications. The Kord will be enough for these riders. Conserve the shells. Work the leaders first."

  The 12.7mm Kord heavy machine gun on the tank's turret came to life. The gunner, looking at the screen, placed the crosshairs on the figure of the knight commander and squeezed the trigger.

  To the Lourians, it was like the wrath of an invisible god. In their ranks, silently and suddenly, bloody flowers began to bloom. The 12.7-millimeter bullets, flying at supersonic speed, didn't just pierce armor. They shattered it. A bullet's impact on a breastplate turned a knight's insides into a bloody pulp. A hit on a horse tore it in half.

  One of the knights got "lucky." A bullet struck his pauldron, tore off his arm, and threw him from his saddle. He was left alive to watch as the steel avalanche, his proud order, was turned into a bloody meat grinder.

  "Retreat! Everyone fall back!" one of the surviving officers screamed.

  But it was too late. In a matter of minutes, less than half of the four hundred elite knights remained. The survivors, driven mad with terror, turned and fled back to the saving walls of the city, leaving behind a field strewn with the bodies of their comrades. The shock of being mowed down like grass, they who were invulnerable, encased in steel gods of war, was more terrifying than any wound.

  The commander of the heavy cavalry staggered into the operations room. His armor was pierced in several places, and blood flowed from a wound in his side. "General…" he rasped, falling to one knee before Patagene. "From the sky… fiery lines flew… they… they just cut us down… we couldn't do anything…"

  Patagene looked at him in silence. His best cavalry order had been annihilated in minutes. "What do you think, gentlemen?" his voice was quiet and empty.

  "We need to make them come closer!" one of the strategists leaped up. "Send the heavy infantry forward! Let them take the hit on their shields! And while they do, the light cavalry will outflank them and hit them from the rear!"

  It was a desperate, insane plan. But it was a plan. Patagene nodded.

  The battlefield before Jeen-Haark.

  A new wave poured from the gates. Thousands of heavy infantrymen, formed into a dense "tortoise" formation, moved slowly forward, shielded by enormous tower shields.

  "What the hell…?" gunner Kovalev muttered in the lead T-90M. "Living battering rams."

  "Machine guns, open fire!" Senior Lieutenant Orlov commanded.

  The machine guns chattered again, but this time, the effect was different. The 7.62mm rounds sparked off the massive shields but couldn't penetrate them. "Commander, they're holding!"

  But then the heavy 12.7mm Kord machine guns came into play. Their bullets, possessing immense kinetic energy, punched through the shields, tearing apart the soldiers standing behind them. The "tortoise" began to fall apart.

  But one infantryman continued to stubbornly advance. His shield, in the shape of an elongated teardrop and made of a strange, dull metal, withstood hits even from the heavy machine guns. "Commander, look at this one!" Kovalev reported. "It's not penetrating!"

  Orlov zoomed in on him with his optics. He saw how the bullets, striking the angled surface of the shield, didn't punch through but ricocheted off to the sides, whining into the sky with a piercing shriek.

  "Sloped armor…" Orlov said with a mixture of astonishment and professional respect. "Well, I'll be damned. They have their own tank designers here or something? They're using rational angles to deflect kinetic energy. Even if the armor isn't thick, the right angle works wonders… But for a hand-held shield, held by a man, to deflect rounds from a Kord… I've never seen anything like it."

  "What are we going to do, Commander?"

  "This smartass is going to be a problem if he reaches our positions," Orlov decided. "We need to get that shield. For our scientists. Kovalev, high-explosive on that stubborn bastard! Not at the shield. Next to him. Let the shockwave take him out."

  But before he could fire, hundreds of light cavalry poured out from ravines on the flanks. "We're being outflanked!" one of the tankers reported.

  At the same time, on the bridge of the frigate Admiral Essen.

  "Comrade Captain 1st Rank," the communications officer reported. "Request received from 'Ground' group. They're asking for air support. Coordinates are…"

  "Acknowledged," Nikitin replied. "Contact 'Priboy.' Tell them to send in the 'Alligators'."

  Over the battlefield, with a deafening roar, four Ka-52 attack helicopters appeared. They came in from the rear, catching the Lourian cavalry by surprise. Hell began again. The 30mm 2A42 cannons, spitting fire, turned the riders and their horses into bloody shreds. Unguided S-8 rockets blanketed entire squadrons, turning them into blazing pyres.

  "Berkut-01, combat mission complete. Returning to Priboy," the calm voice of the helicopter flight leader came over the radio.

  On the ground, the lone infantryman, the one with the strange shield, watched as his army, his last hope, died in the flames. He was left alone. Utterly alone on a field strewn with the bodies of his comrades. And he understood that it was all over.

  Qua-Toyne Principality. Port Maihark. Naval Command.

  The manacomm report from the observer post east of the Lourian border arrived at the third hour past noon. Nouka read it standing, as had become his habit with Russian operational reports.

  The capital of the Kingdom of Louria was under aerial observation. The Russian ground advance had reached the outer fortification line. The Lourian cavalry counterattack had been repulsed with approximately sixty percent casualties. Russian losses: none confirmed.

  He set the report down.

  For six years, the question of Louria had defined the strategic position of the Qua-Toyne Principality. Every budget decision, every diplomatic calculation, every conversation he had had with Prime Minister Kanata about the future of the state had been conducted under the weight of that question. The Lourian fleet had been larger than theirs. The Lourian army had been larger than theirs. The gap had been widening every year.

  The question was going to be resolved within the week. By someone else. Using methods he could not have imagined eighteen months ago.

  He wrote his situation report to Kanata. He noted the operational progress, the timeline estimate, the status of the humanitarian coordination team that was staged and waiting for authorization to deploy into liberated territory.

  At the bottom of the report, in his own handwriting rather than the formal typeface of official dispatches, he added one line:

  *When this is over, we will need to have a serious conversation about what we owe them, and what they will expect.*

  He sealed it and sent it.

  He looked out at the harbor. The water was calm. It had been calm for weeks now — the Lourian fleet was no longer a threat, had not been since the engagement off the Northern Port. The sea lanes were open.

  He did not find the calm reassuring. He found it informative.

  The night was dark and silent. The sky was choked with thick clouds, and only the faint glow of the stars barely broke through the gloom. Everywhere, except for the rasping breaths of the wounded, there was no sound. The silence was almost tangible, pressing down on the soul, making everyone feel the heavy, hopeless darkness closing in.

  The survivors still stirred, but it was more like the final twitches before death than life. Their bodies ached, and their minds were consumed with mere survival. With each breath, the wounded lost more strength, pained groans escaping their chests.

  The night raid had been Patagene's idea, and it was not a bad one by the standards of the warfare he knew. Under darkness, the enemy's long-range weapons were useless. They could not fire at what they could not see. Close fighting, knife-work, the kind of war the Lourian special forces had trained for in the forest camps east of Jin-Haarg—this was supposed to be different. This was supposed to be their domain.

  The squad commander, a sergeant-at-arms named Torven who had spent twelve years doing exactly this kind of work, led his fourteen men across the field in a line at five-meter intervals. The enemy camp—if it was a camp—showed no fires. That was strange. He had been briefed that the enemy used no magic and therefore would need fires for warmth and light. But there were no fires.

  He filed this information and kept moving.

  At eighty meters, the first illumination round went up.

  It was not a fire arrow. It was not a mage's light spell. It was something that burned white and cold and covered the entire field in the kind of light you got on a cloudless midwinter noon. Every man in the squad became a shadow cast sharp and black against pale ground.

  Torven had time to register this. He had time to understand what it meant.

  He did not have time to give any order before the machine gun opened up.

  The engagement lasted eleven seconds. At the end of it, nine of the fourteen men were down and the remaining five were moving at maximum speed back toward the walls. Whether they made it or not would depend on decisions made in the next thirty seconds by the Russian soldiers who were, apparently, already tracking them with equipment that worked in complete darkness.

  Torven was not among the five. He had been in the first three seconds.

  In the operations room, the runner arrived with the report at the fourth hour past midnight. Patagene listened to it without expression.

  "Casualties?" he asked.

  "Nine confirmed dead. Five returned. Two of the five are wounded."

  Patagene looked at the map.

  "They knew we were coming," he said.

  "Yes, my lord."

  He had sent the best men he had. They had crossed a dark field in silence and been lit up before they reached effective range. Which meant the enemy had detection equipment that worked without light, without magic, without any principle he understood.

  He had known this intellectually since the artillery at Ejey. He was only now understanding it in the part of the mind where it changed how you thought about options.

  "Get me the full list of what we have left," he said quietly. "Cavalry, infantry, archers. Everything. I want numbers."

  "Yes, my lord."

  He sat alone after the runner left. The map on the table showed Jin-Haarg at the center, the enemy positions to the north and east, the roads south still open. Still open, for now.

  He had one decision left to make. He had been avoiding making it since Gim. He could not avoid it much longer.