After shattering the Kingdom of Louria, Russia forges a fragile peace in a new world. But peace is a fleeting dream. From opposite horizons, two new powers rise, threatening to plunge the fledgling alliance into an age of darkness and war.

  To the west, the formidable Parpaldia Empire, ruler of the Third Civilization, views the newcomers as an existential challenge to their iron-fisted dominion. As diplomacy crumbles in the face of imperial pride, the drums of war begin to beat.

  At the same time, far to the north in the secluded Kingdom of Topa, the World Gate bursts open, spewing forth endless legions of demons under the command of an ancient evil—the Demon Lord Nosgorath. A small Russian expeditionary force is all that stands between the kingdom and annihilation. In a desperate battle of steel, fire, and dark magic, they not only face a demonic horde but also unearth a long-buried truth: these monsters are the creations of the ancient and god-like Ravernal Empire. And a terrifying prophecy warns that its return is near.

  Caught in a war on two fronts, Russia must battle the tyranny of an empire in the west and an ancient, unknowable evil from the north, knowing that each hard-won victory only brings them one step closer to facing an even greater enemy from the dawn of time.

  The Western Ocean. The Empire of Gra-Valkas. The office of the Director of the Intelligence Bureau.

  The Empire of Gra-Valkas. The capital city is Ragna. The central headquarters of the Bureau of Intelligence and Information Warfare.

  An oppressive silence reigned in the sterile, windowless office, decorated with gray concrete and polished steel. The only sounds were the soft hum of ventilation and the occasional hiss of pneumatic mail delivering encrypted messages to neighboring departments. Behind a massive black bakelite desk sat a man known in the highest circles of the Empire only by his position—the Director of the Intelligence Bureau. His austere gray tunic was immaculate, and his cold eyes seemed capable of freezing any careless thought of the interlocutor.

  "Your Excellency, please." — the colonel, the head of the analytical department, a man in an immaculate black uniform, silently entered the office. He put his gloved hand to the peak of his cap and placed on the table a voluminous folder made of thick gray cardboard with the stamp "Top Secret. Personally in hand."

  The director, without changing his position, took the folder. He opened it and began to study the contents methodically, page by page. There were more than just reports inside. There were grainy, captured photographs of Russian ships in the port of Mayhark; diagrams of their weapons, hastily sketched by agents; and, most importantly, analytical calculations by the precision engineering department. His eyebrows, which had been drawn into a straight line, rose slightly.

  The Director set down the last page and was silent for a moment.

  "When did this arrive?"

  "The preliminary assessment — four weeks ago, Your Excellency. The full technical analysis was completed six days ago."

  "And why am I reading it today?"

  The colonel's jaw tightened slightly. "The operational planning division classified it as regional intelligence — Rodenius theater, low direct relevance to our current operational axis. I overruled that classification this morning."

  The Director looked at him.

  "Correct decision." He placed his hand flat on the folder. "Is this Russian Federation a threat to us?"

  "Yes, Your Excellency. The technical gap alone would be sufficient basis for that assessment. But there is a second factor." The colonel pointed to a specific page. "They are establishing themselves on Rodenius. Permanently. Bases, resource agreements, political architecture. They are not passing through. They are building." He paused. "Our projected operational timeline for western theater expansion crosses Rodenius within eighteen months. These are not two separate intelligence problems."

  — I would ask you to pay special attention to the forms 304-986HA and 3054-2345AT, which our colleagues from the development department have attached. They believe that we are facing a technological gap, the nature of which they cannot yet explain.

  The director flipped through several pages. One of them showed a blurry photo of a Ka-52 attack helicopter hovering over a forest on the Rodenius continent.On the other was a distant, degraded image of what the analytical department had tentatively classified as a fixed-wing jet aircraft, photographed from a commercial vessel at anchor approximately four kilometers from the Russian forward base at Sloboda. The image quality was poor — the agent had used a concealed lens from distance, unwilling to risk closer approach to a facility that maintained active perimeter surveillance. The aircraft's lines were partially visible, enough for the engineering analysts to begin a preliminary structural assessment. Not enough to be certain of anything except that it was not propeller-driven and not built on any design principle they recognized.

  — Did they... learn how to build rotary-wing aircraft and jet monoplanes? For the first time, something like surprise mixed with cold analytical interest was reflected on the Director's face.

  — That's right, Your Excellency. Rotorcraft, or "helicopters" as they call them, are capable of vertical takeoff and hover in the air. This gives them tactical flexibility that is inaccessible to our aviation in supporting ground troops — they can strike from behind hills and forests, while remaining invulnerable to our artillery. As for the second object... our engineers still can't believe this data. It moves without a piston engine, using a certain principle of "jet thrust". Its speed, according to preliminary estimates, exceeds Mach two, which is twice the speed of our best fighter "Antares".

  — I see, but is their fleet strong? The Director asked, already anticipating the answer.

  — Your Excellency, I hate to admit it, but their fleet… He's from another era. The ships are smaller than our Atlastar, but their power plants, judging by acoustic reconnaissance data, are not steam-powered, but gas-turbine-powered, which gives them a huge advantage in speed and maneuverability. And their main weapon is not artillery. They use "guided missiles". Self-propelled projectiles capable of changing course in flight and, apparently, equipped with their own radar guidance systems. They can hit targets at distances of over a hundred kilometers. According to the most conservative estimates, our military technologies are ahead of ours by a whole century.

  The director leaned back in his chair and slowly sighed, turned the sharp pencil in his hands, and then said in a calm but full of hidden threat voice:

  — Very interesting… They must have fought a very long and brutal war in their world, just like us. War is not only about blood and money, it is also about progress. The engine of civilization. It's a pity that there," the Director jerked his finger upward, in the direction of the offices of the imperial government, "they won't understand this. The success of the breakneck annexation operations of these underdeveloped states has clouded their eyes with an eyesore of pride. How are preparations going for the start of the operation to "subdue" Leif?

  — The first and second armored divisions of the national army have replenished their reserves and are ready to land. But the commander-in-chief of the fleet, Admiral Caesar, is acting up. He raised a fuss in the Ministry of Defense, he does not want to send an aircraft carrier into battle, considering it "not an impressive enough weapon for a show flogging." He insisted on personally leading the expedition on an Atlastar-class superdreadnought.

  The director smiled faintly. "Caesar and his floating fortress. He sees greatness in this, and I see a monstrous concentration of resources in one point vulnerable to missiles. Idiots..."

  — I see. Send it to the analytical department. Assign the highest threat level to the Russian Federation. Start a total collection of information. And prepare a report for the Emperor. It's a very sensitive report. We must not seem alarmist. But to keep silent about such a threat is tantamount to treason. You can go now.

  — There is! The colonel put his hand to his cap, turned on his heel and left the office, leaving the Director alone with a new, terrifying reality.

  The Continent of Grameus. The Northern Wastes. The Valley of Forgotten Souls.

  The old shaman of the Black Fang orc clan was trembling. But he was not trembling from the piercingly cold wind that whistled through the bare rocks, but from a primal terror that had gripped his soul. He stood on a cliff and looked down into the Valley of Forgotten Souls. Just yesterday, this valley had been empty and silent. Today, it was teeming.

  Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of creatures. Goblins with eyes burning with malice, savage orcs whose tusks were stained with fresh blood, giant trolls clad in crude black metal—they were gathering under banners this world had not seen for five thousand years. A banner with a crimson eye on a black field. But the most terrifying thing was not their number. The most terrifying thing was their discipline. This was not a chaotic horde. They were forming up into disciplined, perfectly straight legions, their movements mechanical and horrifying. Someone had subjugated their primal fury to his own cold, merciless will.

  Suddenly, the air in the valley grew still, and then it shuddered. The thousands of creatures, as one, in an absolute, unnatural silence, fell to their knees. From a cave in the center of the valley, cloaked in clouds of black, acrid smoke and a wave of unnatural cold, He emerged. His figure, in spiked obsidian armor, seemed like a clot of night itself, and in the slits of his helmet burned two inhuman fires, full of an ancient malice. His steps left no prints on the frozen ground—he was floating a few inches above it.

  "Nos-go-rath…" the shaman whispered, syllable by syllable, and his heart seemed to stop from terror. "He… has awoken…"

  He saw the Demon Lord slowly raise his clawed hand. Darkness swirled in it, and in that darkness, one could see distorted, screaming faces—the souls of those he had devoured. Then he clenched his fist, and the entire army of many thousands, in a single, unified motion, let out a deafening, monstrous roar that sent rocks tumbling from the cliffs. It was not a battle cry. It was the voice of death itself. A roar that promised the end of all living things.

  Beside the Demon Lord, two figures materialized from the darkness, each twice the height of an orc—a massive, crimson-skinned Red Ogre and an icy, blue-skinned Blue Ogre. They bowed before their master.

  "The time has come," Nosgorath rumbled, and his voice seemed to sound not in the shaman's ears, but directly in his mind. "The world has forgotten us. It is time to remind them. Begin the Great March. Destroy the pathetic wall of these insignificant mortals. The Topa Kingdom will be the first to fall. Cleanse this continent, prepare it for the return of the True Master."

  The shaman, realizing that he was eavesdropping on a conversation of the gods of darkness themselves, turned and, stumbling, began to run. He had to warn his clan. He had to warn everyone. But hearing the rising thunder of the march of hundreds of thousands of feet behind him, he knew it was already too late. An ancient evil had returned to this world, and its hunger was limitless.

  350 kilometers west of the coast of the Leifor Empire.

  The storm came from the west. It wasn't the storm of wind, salt water, and lightning familiar to sailors, but a hurricane of steel, fire, and predatory ambitions hitherto unseen. The Gra-Valkas Empire—a name that, just six months ago, had not appeared on any navigational chart of the Second Civilized Zone, was now whispered with superstitious horror in every port tavern and closed analytical center of the "civilized" states. Appearing out of absolute nowhere, from foggy, uncharted waters far beyond the known shipping lanes, this new power acted with the speed and efficiency of a perfect killing machine.

  First, the primitive tribal unions on the western archipelagoes silently vanished—they were simply erased. Then came the diplomatic incident that became the point of no return: the cold-blooded murder of the Gra-Valkan ambassador in the Kingdom of Paganda. The response was immediate. Landing ships of unknown design, belching black smoke, disembarked legions clad in gray onto the shores of Paganda, the "younger brother" and protectorate of the mighty Leifor. The kingdom fell in a week.

  This news reached Leiforia, the capital of one of the five Superpowers, and caused a storm of indignation such as not even the ancient chronicles remembered. It wasn't just a violation of borders. It was an unheard-of insult, a gauntlet thrown in the face of a thousand-year Empire by a bunch of base-born barbarians.

  The Emperor of Leifor ordered the insolent upstarts punished. And the Empire responded with all its might.

  The sea was rough. The majestic Western Armada—the flower and pride of the fleet, the fifth superpower—cut the waves with their stems, heading toward occupied Paganda. It was a truly magnificent spectacle, capable of inspiring awe in any enemy... of this world.

  Forty-three pennants sailed in strict cruising formation. The core of their combat power consisted of forty ships of the line—multi-deck giants of bog oak, whose sides bristled with hundreds of bronze cannons. The flagship was the 100-gun leviathan Saint, a masterpiece of shipbuilding whose masts seemed to scratch the sky. Bringing up the rear were three specialized ships—"Dragon Carriers," floating bases for wyvern lords.

  "Wind—three points off the bow, headwind speed increasing!" reported the watch officer on the Saint's bridge.

  "Hold formation," Fleet Admiral Ball ordered calmly without turning around.

  He stood on the quarterdeck, feeling the salty breeze on his skin. Despite the headwind, the armada's sails were filled as if a hurricane were hitting them from the stern. It was magic. Priceless artifacts—"Tears of the Wind God"—pulsed with azure light on the mainmasts of each ship. Mages-operators in the holds directed flows of ether, creating artificial thrust that allowed these wooden colossi to ignore the whims of the weather and maintain a cruising speed of twelve knots. Admiral Ball felt like a master of the elements. He was a product of his era—competent, tough, but fatally confident in the immutability of the rules of war. In his world, where linear tactics and wind magic dominated, his fleet was invincible.

  Weeks of exhausting search passed. Finally, the manacomm on the bridge came alive with an alarming crackle.

  "Admiral! Urgent report from aerial reconnaissance!" A young communications lieutenant ran up to Ball, forgetting protocol. His face was whiter than canvas.

  "Report. Did you find their fleet?"

  "The reconnaissance squadron reports... that there is... only one ship."

  Ball abruptly lowered his spyglass and drilled the officer with his gaze.

  "One? Are you mocking me, Lieutenant? The barbarians threw one boat against the Armada of Leifor?"

  "N-no, sir, Admiral! The scouts are in a panic. They claim it is... it is a mountain of steel. An object of anomalous size. Estimated length—over two hundred meters. No sails. No oars. Instead of masts—iron towers spewing smoke. And... guns. The scout swears the gun turrets are the size of a house."

  Silence hung over the bridge. The officers exchanged glances. The description sounded like the ravings of a madman. A ship made of steel cannot float. A ship of such size would break apart on the very first wave.

  Ball frowned. He was an experienced warrior and sensed danger, but his mind refused to accept the impossible.

  One ship. Even if it's iron. Even if it's big. I have forty-three ships and thousands of guns. And I have wyverns.

  "Stop listening to the tales of frightened boys," the Admiral's voice clanged like a cannon breech. "It's just a big, clumsy barbarian barge. We will crush them with numbers and skill."

  He turned to the signalmen.

  "Relay the order to the 'Dragon Carriers'! Launch the Wyvern Lord squadron! Mission: achieve air superiority and attack 'top-down' with fireballs. To the main fleet forces—reform into line of battle! Raise the power of the 'Tears' to maximum! We are moving to engage! Burn that misunderstanding!"

  A sea horn boomed piercingly and mournfully, and other ships picked up the sound. The forest of masts sprang into motion. Obeying a single will, dozens of ships began the complex deployment maneuver.

  Work boiled on the flat decks of the carrier ships. A deafening, guttural roar rang out, making blood run cold in veins. Handlers knocked shackles off the monsters' paws.

  Wyvern Lords—the elite of the air forces, giant reptiles clad in light armor with a wingspan of ten meters—took off one after another, running along platforms installed on the sides of the ship, and launched into the sky. Forty predatory silhouettes, flapping their leathery wings, formed into an attack wedge and rushed with a roar toward the horizon, where, smoking with black coal, a lone steel fortress bearing the name battleship Atlastar awaited its victim (or its executioner).

  At that same time. Gra-Valkas Empire, Atlastar-class super-dreadnought.

  Fire Control Station and Battle Bridge.

  Inside the armored womb of the citadel, bathed in the dim red light of combat mode, reigned an atmosphere having nothing in common with the heroic chaos on the enemy's decks. There was no place for shouting, waving flags, or prayers here. It didn't smell of the sea, but of ozone from the operation of high-voltage tubes, tobacco, heated bakelite, and machine oil.

  The background noise consisted not of the sound of waves, but the rhythmic, mechanical clatter of the electromechanical computer, the rustle of chart recorders, and the calm voices of operators in heavy headsets relaying coordinate numbers.

  Captain Luxtal stood leaning over the navigation table, on which markers representing ships were being moved by long wooden plotting rods. A tall, gaunt officer with a face devoid of age and emotion, he looked not like a warrior, but like a chief engineer at a complex manufacturing plant. For him and his crew, the coming slaughter was an equation. Complex, with many variables, but having only one correct solution dictated by the laws of ballistics and the strength of materials.

  "Bridge, this is Radar," the radar operator's voice sounded with a slight metallic distortion. "Group surface target. Bearing two-seven-zero. Range — thirty-two thousand meters. Speed — twelve knots, headwind. Observing formation change: ten vanguard pennants attempting to come abeam, executing a classic 'pincer' envelopment maneuver."

  Luxtal smirked with just the corner of his mouth.

  "Predictable," he said quietly, looking at the map. "Line tactics of the age of sail. They are trying to close to musket shot range to realize their numerical advantage. Naive. They think the sea is a flat plane where the number of cannons decides the outcome."

  However, Luxtal would be lying to himself if he didn't admit that his own situation was just as absurd from the standpoint of naval science. Sending a super-dreadnought into enemy waters without a screen of escort destroyers and cruisers was a glaring violation of Gra-Valkas doctrine. But such were the political ambitions of Admiral Caesar, who had demanded a "lone show flogging," sacrificing sound tactics for a theatrical gesture. Fortunately for the crew of the Atlastar, the technological abyss between them and the locals made this calculated risk acceptable.

  Around him, fire control officers worked like a single, fine-tuned mechanism. Data from radar and Zeiss optical rangefinders was fed in a continuous stream into the AA Fire Control Director and the main artillery computer. Inside the bowels of the giant analog machine, brass gears, camshafts, and differentials spun, grinding through information: wind speed, air humidity, charge temperature, planetary rotation speed, and barrel wear.

  This was the pinnacle of Gra-Valkas technological thought — the ability to turn the chaos of death into the dry figures of elevation angles.

  "Attention, 'Air'," the Air Defense officer's tone changed, becoming slightly harder. "Long-range radar detects separation of air targets from the carrier group. Twenty... no, forty contacts. Biological signature confirmed. Proceeding in close formation, altitude echelon — one thousand five hundred meters."

  "That's their 'Dragon Corps'," the Executive Officer commented, checking a reference book. "Wyvern Lords. The locals consider them the pinnacle of aerial warfare."

  "To us, they are simply low-speed aerial targets with no armor," Luxtal cut him off coldly. "Anti-Aircraft Director — distribute targets. 127mm dual-purpose guns — load shells with proximity radio fuzes. 40mm and 25mm autocannons — fire when ready. Create a dense screen."

  He straightened up and looked through the armored porthole at the ship's prow. There, like sleeping volcanoes, towered the Main Battery turrets.

  "To Main Battery. Priority target — enemy flagship group in the center of the formation. Ammo type — high-explosive, with delay. Upload solution to guidance system. Open fire only on my order."

  His voice was calm, as if he were ordering lunch in the officers' wardroom. No pathos. No hatred. Only the professional competence of an executioner.

  The deck beneath their feet shuddered barely noticeably. The colossal turrets carrying 460-millimeter guns began to turn. Hydraulics sang their song of pressure in the hundreds of atmospheres. Multi-ton barrels, capable of hurling a shell the weight of a car over the horizon, slowly rose, searching the morning mist for Admiral Ball's sails, still invisible.

  "Captain!" the Radar report came again, faster this time. "Air targets entering engagement zone. Identification complete: closing speed 350 kilometers per hour, maneuvering weakly. Confirming: these are wyverns. They match the target profile from the incident in Paganda."

  Luxtal didn't even turn his head toward the operator. He made a barely perceptible gesture with his hand, and the intelligence officer immediately pulled up a summary of last week's combat experience on a secondary screen.

  It wasn't a memory of glory or the screams of dying enemies. It was a dry stream of statistics: effectiveness of 25mm shells against scales — 98%, average ammo expenditure per wyvern — 40 rounds, vulnerability to shrapnel fields — critical.

  He wasn't remembering a battle, but data.

  These so-called "wyverns"... For Empire officers raised in a world of oil and steel, they were an anachronism, an evolutionary mistake that local barbarians had foolishly turned into the foundation of their aerial doctrine. In the Imperial Fleet classification, they were listed under the index Biological Assault Unit (Small).

  Luxtal's memory produced the tactical-technical file compiled after Paganda. The engineering section had spent two weeks on it, working from wreckage, body measurements, and observation data from the squadron pilots. Their final classification index was Biological Assault Unit (Small) — a designation that the pilots had found quietly hilarious and that the engineers had meant entirely seriously.

  Maximum observed speed in attack dive: two hundred thirty kilometers per hour.

  Cruising — no more than one hundred eighty. Service ceiling — four thousand meters, but combat effectiveness is retained only up to one and a half. Armament: one "fireball" — a clot of low-temperature plasma generated by laryngeal glands using the creature's internal mana. Muzzle velocity — subsonic, ballistics atrocious. Even the old "Douglas" transports of his world could dodge such a "projectile" with a simple slip maneuver. And the funniest part — ammo capacity. One, maximum two shots, after which the creature requires several hours for metabolic "reloading."

  During the invasion of Paganda, he had personally watched from the bridge as their guards squadron of "Dragon Riders" tried to intercept a flight of "Antares" carrier-based fighters. It couldn't be called an aerial battle. It was species selection. Gra-Valkas pilots, raised in the crucible of their world's total war where the sky turned black with thousands of machines, perceived this as skeet shooting. The "Antares" would get on the tails of the clumsy carcasses, squeeze the triggers for two seconds — and twenty-millimeter shells tore flesh and wing membranes to shreds. The wyverns fell without ever understanding who killed them. For the Gra-Valkas military machine, operating with radars and automatic cannons, they posed no greater threat than a flock of aggressive geese to a turboprop airliner.

  Luxtal allowed himself a mental smirk that didn't reflect on his stone face. The enemy was acting predictably — betting on their "elite," not understanding that in the age of motors, the elite is engineering school and octane rating, not a lizard's pedigree.

  His gaze slid to the auxiliary air wing status monitor. The "Antares" fighter. The pinnacle of engineering thought from the "Gra-Industries" concern. Striving for air superiority, Gra-Valkas engineers had created a masterpiece. It was an all-metal low-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear and a closed cockpit canopy. The designers achieved the impossible: they combined the phenomenal horizontal maneuverability of biplanes of the past with the power of an 1130-horsepower radial engine. The result was a chimera machine capable of spinning around its own axis in a dogfight, yet accelerating to five hundred fifty kilometers per hour, leaving any organic life far behind. Armament — two wing-mounted 20-millimeter cannons and two synchronized rifle-caliber machine guns over the cowling — guaranteed that one aimed burst was enough to turn any wyvern into a rain of meat and bones.

  "Captain, Radar report," the operator's sharp voice interrupted his musings. "Group air target. Bearing two-seven-five. Data updated. Target speed increasing... Current — three hundred fifty kilometers per hour. Proceeding in a wedge, maintaining altitude echelon."

  Luxtal's gaze, previously relaxed, focused. His brow twitched barely noticeably.

  "Three hundred fifty?" the number flashed in his brain like an alarm signal. That was one hundred twenty kilometers faster than the Pagandan wyverns. Moreover, it was faster than many early airplanes of his world.

  "Almost fifty percent faster than standard..."

  His mind, working like a cold, precise mechanism, instantly reconstructed the tactical model.

  So, these Wyvern Lords are not just 'large specimens.' This is a product of directed breeding or magical mutation. Barbarians incapable of creating an internal combustion engine went down the path of biological acceleration. They breed 'living fighters,' trying to compensate for technological backwardness with the brute force of muscle and magic. Curious. It is a dead end, of course, the limit of biology, but for their level — an impressive achievement. Leifor truly justifies its status as a regional superpower.

  Three hundred fifty kilometers per hour made them dangerous. At that speed, they could close the distance to drop their magic projectiles in mere minutes if the AA gunners delayed.

  "Captain! Targets in visual acquisition zone via main battery optical directors!" the senior gunnery officer turned to the command chair. "Distance — twelve thousand meters. Moving in a tight group, not breaking interval between units. Too bunched up for planes..."

  The officer hesitated for a second, but then the predatory excitement of an experimenter flashed in his eyes.

  "Permission to use experimental ammunition? Incendiary shrapnel. For the main caliber."

  Luxtal froze. A development of the Imperial arsenals, intended to create a wall of fire in the path of enemy bombers. A giant 460-millimeter shell packed with hundreds of incendiary tubes and fragmentation segments, which upon bursting turned a sector of the sky into a fiery hell.

  In his world, against high-speed, maneuvering metal planes scattered in space, this shell showed dubious effectiveness. But here...

  He looked at the tactical schematic. Forty wyverns flew in a tight "parade wedge" formation, wing to wing, like medieval knights at a tournament. They didn't know what a radar fuze was. They didn't know what a shrapnel cloud was. They were setting themselves up for the hit.

  It was a chance not just to destroy the enemy, but to stage a demonstration of absolute, overwhelming horror. A priceless opportunity to gather data on the effect of super-heavy shrapnel on biological masses.

  "Granted," said Luxtal, and his voice sounded like a sentence of doom. "Main battery. Load. Set time fuze for ten thousand meters. Medium-caliber AA — fire when ready to finish off stragglers. Wipe them from the sky."

  At that very second, the measured, low-frequency hum of the super-dreadnought's turbines was torn apart by the sharp, hysterical wail of klaxons. The sound, reflecting off armored bulkheads, penetrated every compartment, from the boiler rooms in the hold to the rangefinder posts at the masthead.

  Red emergency lights flashed, flooding the endless corridors and casemates with ominous, bloody light, turning sailors' faces into masks. This was not a magical alarm appealing to the honor of ancestors. It was the impersonal, industrial signal of a death machine demanding everyone take their places on the assembly line of murder.

  Airtight bulkheads slammed shut with the heavy hiss of pneumatics, sealing off damage control sectors. In the ammunition magazines, the chains of elevators rattled. Hydraulic hoists drove an endless stream of death upward to the guns: heavy 25-kilogram unitary shells for the 127-millimeter dual-purpose guns and cassettes for the 25-millimeter autocannons. The steel giant, which a minute ago seemed asleep, woke up and bristled.

  Twelve twin mounts of 127mm guns located along the sides came to life. With the hum of electric motors, their barrels reared into the sky and synchronously, as if commanded by an invisible puppeteer, turned to the starboard bow, tracking the approaching dots.

  Next to them, "nests" of thirty-eight triple 25mm autocannons rotated predatorily, their crews in flight helmets and flak jackets already clutching the aiming handles.

  At the same time. The Leiforian flagship Saint. The Leiforian Fleet.

  On the high bridge, open to the four winds, Admiral Ball watched the sky with predatory satisfaction, never taking his eye from his spyglass.

  "Look at them!" he exclaimed, pride ringing in his voice. "My falcons! The flower of the Empire!"

  The Wyvern Lord squadron was commencing its attack run in the classic "Spear" formation. Forty winged beasts flew wingtip to wingtip, maintaining perfect intervals. Their black armored scales glistened, and the powerful beats of their wings were perfectly synchronized. It was a spectacle of terrifying, primal beauty—a triumph of biological might and training.

  "That iron island isn't even trying to take evasive action! They aren't launching their flyers!" Ball chuckled, already anticipating his triumph. "Fools! They rely too much on their armor. They'll only realize their mistake when concentrated Dragon Flame turns their decks into a molten lake and claws tear through their crew! Nothing can withstand an attack from above!"

  To the Admiral, the dense formation of wyverns was a sign of strength and discipline.

  He did not know that for the artillerymen of another era, a dense aerial formation was a gift of fate.

  Grade Atlastar battleship Air Defense Rangefinder and Command Post (KDP).

  Inside the rotating armored dome, it smelled of heated metal, tobacco, and the concentration of an imminent battle. There was no room for emotions here. Only numbers.

  Relays clicked. The mechanical brain of the analog AA Fire Control Director whirred, spinning brass drums as it calculated lead.

  "Visual contact steady! Distance—twenty thousand meters!" the senior rangefinder operator reported impassively, turning the handwheels of the stereoscopic optics and holding the crosshairs on the lead wyvern of the wedge. "Target angular velocity constant. Altitude—one thousand five hundred. Approach vector stable."

  "Central Station: data entered. Wind and drift corrections generated. Line of sight synchronized with guns," the mechanical voice from the speaker sounded like a verdict.

  Although the wyverns were already within visual range, Atlastar remained silent.

  Firing at small maneuvering targets from twenty kilometers away with 127mm guns was a waste of barrel life. Dispersion would be too great, and the flight time would allow the targets to change course. The industrial predator was patient. It waited until the prey approached a distance where the mathematical probability of a hit approached unity.

  "Starboard batteries! Load shells (High-Explosive with Proximity Radio Fuze)!" the command rang out over the internal comms, ringing with steel.

  Inside the dual-purpose turrets, the heat was infernal. Loaders, muscular lads working like automatons, rammed heavy shells into the breeches. Massive wedge breechblocks clanged shut, cutting off the noise of the outside world.

  "One—ready!"

  "Two—ready!"

  Green readiness lights flared on the fire control panel.

  The rangefinder needle crawled inexorably to the left, counting down the last meters of the Leifor elite's lives.

  15,000 meters...

  12,000 meters...

  The wyverns still flew in a tight "box" formation, confident in their invulnerability. They had driven themselves into a trap.

  "Distance—ten thousand! Entering effective engagement zone!" the operator's voice hardened, excitement cutting through. "Final correction. Fuzes set to detonate on radar reflection."

  The AA division commander, watching the approaching black cloud through the periscope, waited another two heartbeats. He needed to let them get a little closer. So the steel wall of shrapnel would become insurmountable.

  The needle touched the red mark. Eight thousand meters. Guaranteed kill distance.

  He pressed the talk switch sharply, and his voice broke into a roar:

  "BATTERY! BARRAGE! RAPID! FIRE!"

  BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!

  It wasn't the classic "salvo" familiar to sailors of the age of sail, where hundreds of cannons fire out of sync. It was the staccato, yet rhythmic, deafening cacophony of an industrial hammer, sending a fine tremor running through the entire 70,000-ton hull of the steel colossus. The entire starboard side of Atlastar was instantly enveloped in clouds of brown, acrid gunpowder smoke. Twelve long dual-purpose barrels, recoiling sharply in their cradles, spat death one after another at split-second intervals, creating a continuous stream of steel. Long, dagger-like tongues of muzzle flash tore through the air, and the steel deck around the mounts began to be covered in a ringing, melodious rain of smoking, hot brass casings.

  In the sky, eight kilometers from the ship, two assault squadrons of Wyvern Lords rushed forward at their maximum speed—350 kilometers per hour. For a medieval world, this was an unthinkable, lightning-fast attack, a "bolt of lightning" impossible to dodge. But for the electromechanical "Mark-1" ballistic computers and fire control directors of the industrial age, they weren't flying. They were crawling across the sky like sleepy autumn flies in syrup. For the soulless machine, this was not a heroic assault, but simply a set of linear equations with predictable variables.

  The commander of the vanguard squadron, seeing a series of flashes on the distant gray cliff, only smirked contemptuously into his mustache beneath his helmet visor.

  Shooting? From such a distance? he thought with the arrogance of a veteran. They are panicking. Even the best magic ballistae only hit at one and a half kilometers. We still have a long way to fly.

  He didn't know two things. First: heavy 127-millimeter shells, accelerated to supersonic speeds, would cover these eight kilometers in just twelve seconds—barely enough time for him to take three breaths. And second, the most terrifying: the enemy wasn't even trying to hit them "bullet on bullet." The mathematics of war had changed.

  The chronometer in the fuze mechanism inside each shell counted down the set number of rotations.

  The sky in front of the lead squadron's nose suddenly ceased to be blue. It turned black and scarlet.

  Hundreds of shells detonated synchronously, lining up in a perfect geometric plane right in the path of the living wave. This created a solid, impenetrable wall in the air.

  These were not simple high-explosive bursts. Upon detonation, each special shell ejected a forward cone filled with hundreds of steel tubes containing an incendiary mixture and thousands of submunitions. In the next instant, from friction with the air, these tubes ignited themselves, creating a temperature of three thousand degrees. A roaring curtain of fire, liquid metal, and red-hot shrapnel arose before the wyvern formation, spreading hundreds of meters in width and height.

  The effect was instantaneous and horrifying.

  Unbearable heat and blinding light, accompanied by a roar resembling the sound of the fabric of the universe tearing, covered the first assault squadron entirely.

  A moment—and the aerial pride of Leifor ceased to exist.

  Dense scales and steel knightly plate armor didn't melt—they evaporated. Leathery wings flared up like oil-soaked parchment, instantly depriving the creatures of support. The bodies of dragonoids and humans were torn to shreds by the kinetic energy of the shrapnel.

  Twenty of the Empire's best aces, heroes of hundreds of battles, along with their mighty beasts, were simply erased from reality. They turned into a cloud of greasy black smoke, gray ash, and bloody mist, through which only small, charred fragments fell to the water, impossible to identify.

  The riders of the second assault squadron, flying an echelon higher and slightly behind, froze in horror, pulling on their reins. Their wyverns whined pitifully, shying away from the wall of fire. Human minds refused to accept what they saw. Their brothers, their invincible vanguard, had just been annihilated. Not in fair combat. Not by the magic of a great archmage. They had been deleted from existence with a snap of fingers, as if the gods decided to punish them for their pride.

  "Scatter! Break formation! Attack in a fan! Individually!" roaring into the manacomm crystal, the commander of the second assault group screamed. His face under the helmet was deathly pale, lips trembling, but professionalism hammered in by years of drilling miraculously prevailed over paralyzing terror.

  Flying in close formation against such power, a "wall of death," was tantamount to collective suicide. The only chance was to turn from one big target into twenty small ones.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  "For Leifor! Charge!"

  The surviving wyverns, breaking formation, rushed down and to the sides, trying to escape the strike of the dual-purpose guns. Before their gaze, through the dissipating smoke of the slaughter, the ship finally appeared in all its absurd, blasphemous grandeur.

  It was a mountain of steel. No sails, no oars, no signs of life on the decks—only rotating turrets and barrels spewing smoke. an entire maritime citadel of gray metal plowing through the waves. The Wyvern Lords under the riders growled gutturally, their ancient instincts as apex predators screaming danger, demanding they turn around and run to the ends of the earth from this iron monster.

  But the riders were warriors of Leifor. The elite. Loyal to their reputation, their oath to the Emperor, and the rage blinding their eyes at the sight of their friends' deaths, they suppressed their animal fear. Encouraged by the growling of their dragons and their own scream of despair, they threw themselves into a dive at maximum speed. Into a final, suicidal attack on this iron fortress, hoping to break through the wall of fire and strike with magic at point-blank range.

  They crossed the five-kilometer mark. Then three.

  And then Atlastar showed them what real anti-aircraft fire was.

  "Gods... What magic is this?!" one of the riders managed to wheeze, instinctively covering himself with a shield from the blinding tracers.

  He received no answer. In the next instant, the air around him exploded.

  This wasn't a main caliber shell, but merely a 25-millimeter high-explosive tracer round from a triple AA autocannon working in "hosepipe" mode. The projectile struck the breastplate. Hardened Leiforian steel would have withstood the strike of a spear or a crossbow bolt, but physics worked differently here. The shell didn't try to pierce the armor—it detonated on contact.

  The blast wave and hundreds of microscopic fragments struck the rider in the chest and neck. The impact was so forceful it was as if a battering ram had hit him at full gallop. Ribs turned into bone meal, internal organs received a hydrodynamic shock. Bloody foam sprayed from under the helmet visor. The knight, already dead, continued to grip the reins by inertia while his wyvern, its spine severed by the burst, fell downward in convulsions.

  The last surviving flight commander looked around in horror. His world had turned into a boiling cauldron. The sky, clear a minute ago, was crisscrossed by hundreds of fiery lines. The air howled from passing projectiles. His comrades, the Empire's elite, the pride of the nation, were being mowed down like grass. He saw his wingman's wyvern literally torn in half by a hit from a 127-millimeter proximity-fuzed shell—the beast's carcass and the rider turned into a red cloud instantly blown away by the wind.

  And yet, despite this steel rain, despite the understanding that this was the end, the ancient instinct of a warrior drove him forward. Obsession with honor overpowered the instinct of self-preservation.

  "I'm taking you with me!" he screamed, tearing his voice, and directed his bloodied Wyvern Lord into a final, suicidal dive, aiming for Atlastar's bridge. He wanted to break through the veil of fire. He wanted to see fear in the eyes of these cowards hiding behind iron walls.

  But the port-side 25-millimeter autocannon, operated by a gunner watching the attack through an optical sight, coldly corrected the trajectory.

  A short, "cutoff" burst of five rounds put an end to the history of Leifor's air forces.

  The last shell struck precisely at the joint between the pauldron and the heavy armet helmet. The energy of the explosion did not dissipate. The shockwave compressed the rider's head inside the helmet. The steel crumpled like paper. The helmet, which was supposed to protect, became an instrument of execution, turning skull and brain into a bloody pulp in a fraction of a second.

  The knight's consciousness went out faster than a nerve impulse could transmit the signal of pain. His limp, slack body slowly slid off the saddle of the dying dragon. Man and beast, symbols of a passing era, fell into the indifferent gray-green waves, disappearing forever into the wake foam of the steel leviathan.

  The cannonade ceased. The AA gun barrels, shimmering from overheating, smoked.

  In less than seven minutes of combat, the sky over Atlastar was sterile clean. Not a single survivor. Forty elite aerial fighters, years and fortunes invested in the training of each, disappeared without managing to even scratch the paint on the dreadnought's superstructure.

  On the surface of the ocean, only fragments of wings and oily slicks floated, slowly settling underwater.

  Bridge of the Western Armada flagship, the battleship Saint.

  A deathly, ringing silence reigned on the captain's bridge of the 100-gun giant. Hundreds of officers and sailors, who just a minute ago had been watching the attack of their "falcons" with hope and pride, now stood frozen like pillars of salt. Their faces were as white as sheets, their mouths hung open in a silent scream. They saw everything with their own eyes, but their minds refused to process the information they had received. Their "gods of the sky" fell like shot ducks. They simply… fell.

  "Admiral Ball…" the voice of the young lieutenant, the manacomm operator, trembled, breaking into a shriek. He convulsively gripped the glowing communication crystal, his fingers in their white glove turning pale. "Signal lost. The second assault squadron is silent. The first… is silent. The carrier wave is empty. They are not responding. None of them. Life signatures have extinguished."

  "What?.."

  Admiral Ball turned slowly. His face, which had always been a mask of haughty superiority, was now distorted by a grimace in which rage battled with encroaching madness. He snatched the powerful spyglass from his adjutant and drilled his gaze into the horizon.

  In the eyepiece, he saw HIM. A gray, steel cliff, serenely cutting through the waves. No smoke from fires, no list, no commotion on the deck. And an absolutely, defiantly clear sky above it.

  "You lie! This cannot be!" Ball hissed, lowering the glass. The horror of a man whose world had just been turned upside down could be read in his eyes. "We are Leifor! A Superpower! How can we suffer defeat at the hands of some barbarians with a single ship?! One! Against the full might of our fleet!"

  His mind was stalling. It was an equation that had no solution within the framework of his logic. If the enemy cannot be defeated in the sky, if he cannot be shot to pieces from afar… Then only one thing remains. The thing that has always worked. The ancient right of the strong. A strike face-to-face.

  Despair transformed into fury.

  "If they want war, they shall have it!" Ball rumbled, and the veins on his neck bulged. "They won't be able to shoot at point-blank range! They don't have enough broadside guns to stop us all!"

  He drew his ceremonial saber and pointed the tip at the horizon, as if trying to impale the distant steel silhouette.

  "ALL SHIPS! MAXIMUM ARTIFACT POWER! PUSH THE TEARS TO THE LIMIT! FULL SPEED AHEAD!" his scream, amplified by wind magic, rolled over the waves. "WE ARE CLOSING THE DISTANCE! PREPARE TO BOARD! RAMMING SPEED! I WILL EAT THEIR LIVERS—EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM! I WILL TEAR THE HEART OUT OF THEIR CAPTAIN WITH MY OWN HANDS! MOVE!"

  "But, Admiral… their guns… the distance… we will expose ourselves to a broadside volley…" tried to timidly object the old navigator, whose gut instinct was screaming suicide.

  "SILENCE! COWARD!" Ball roared, spraying spittle. "Stomp them into the ocean floor! Obey the order! Relay to the entire fleet: General Attack! Close distance at any cost! Glory to the Empire or death!"

  "Aye, sir…" the pale signal corps officer whispered and rushed to the signal halyards.

  Red attack pennants soared above the flagship. Huge sailing ships, their rigging creaking from the limit load on the magic crystals, began to accelerate, reaching speeds of twenty knots—deadly for wooden hulls—as they rushed into the maw of the steel beast that had been waiting for exactly this. Admiral Ball had signed the death warrant for thousands of his sailors, never realizing that he was leading them not into battle, but to the slaughter.

  At the same time. Super-dreadnought Atlastar.

  Main Battle Station (Citadel).

  The furious rattle of anti-aircraft guns in the armored conning tower was replaced by a concentrated, businesslike silence, broken only by the rhythmic clicking of the ballistic computer's electromechanical relays. The smell of gunpowder, penetrating through the ventilation, mixed with ozone and the scent of heated bakelite.

  "Captain! Radar and optical reconnaissance data!" the sharp voice of the Combat Information Center's senior operator cut through the silence. "The enemy is changing formation. I observe a massive turn to an intercept course. The entire group, forty-four pennants, is forming into a line abreast and coming at us full speed. Speed increased to twenty knots—we are detecting anomalous ether disturbances astern of their ships; likely using magical boosting."

  The operator checked the firing tables for a second.

  "Estimated time until entering the point-blank range of their broadside artillery—thirty minutes. Estimated time until optimal range for our Main Battery... we are already in it, sir. Targets locked."

  "Understood," Captain Luxtal gave a barely perceptible nod, not taking his eyes off the tactical tablet.

  On the glowing schematic, the red triangles of enemy ships, like a maddened herd of bison, were breaking formation, striving to close the distance for a ramming strike. Luxtal shifted his gaze to the chronometer above the map. The aerial battle had taken exactly nine minutes and forty seconds. Total destruction of the enemy's elite aviation. Losses—zero. Ammunition expenditure—minimal. Result—absolute.

  A shadow of a cold, contemptuous, almost squeamish smirk twisted his thin lips.

  They don't just lag behind us by centuries, he thought, watching the enemy's primitive maneuver. They are from a different geological epoch. They saw with their own eyes how their 'dragons' were turned into mince without even getting close to us. And what is their answer? A linear attack. A suicidal dash straight at the barrels of 46-centimeter guns. They aren't even trying to disperse or lay a smoke screen. They do not understand the concept of over-the-horizon combat. They think bravery compensates for the laws of physics. How pathetic they are in their ignorance.

  Luxtal straightened up. It was time to show this world why the Gra-Valkas Empire called this ship the "God of War."

  "To the Fire Control Director!" his voice was firm, low, and cold, like the Krupp armor steel from which the keel of this leviathan was cut.

  "Relay my order to all Main Battery combat stations. Priority target number one: the largest pennant in the center of the enemy formation. Classification—hundred-gun ship of the line, flagship. Input data into the central fire control computer!"

  Deep within the ship, in the turret compartments, work began to boil. Huge shell bogies brought monstrous cigars to the breeches—460-millimeter armor-piercing shells weighing almost one and a half tons each.

  "Shells—armor-piercing, with base fuze! Use caps with dye markers for visual identification of splashes!" Luxtal continued to command. "To secondary 155-millimeter batteries port and starboard—distribute targets along the flanks of the enemy vanguard. Gunners—complete concentration, coordinate salvos based on data from the 15-meter rangefinder!"

  Luxtal looked at the rangefinder operator.

  "Open fire distance—thirty-five thousand meters. It is the limit of visibility, but their formation is dense; it will be hard to miss. Start with a ranging half-salvo from turrets number one and two. Fire when ready! Execute!"

  A hundred people in the tower and at stations, connected by invisible threads of discipline and technology, exhaled as one:

  "Aye, sir!" the officers answered in unison.

  The ships of the Leiforian fleet, led by the blind rage of their admiral and the desperation of their crews, sailed, violating the laws of nature. Magical artifacts, "Tears of the Wind God," encrusted in the mainmasts of each pennant, pulsed with blinding azure light, working at the limit of their power. They created a local weather anomaly around each hull—a constant, storm-force tailwind that filled the heavy canvas sheets with a guttural howl. Wood groaned. Shrouds rang like taut strings ready to snap. Old hulls, not designed for such a race, vibrated, and the water at the stems boiled with brown foam as the ships tore through the waves at a speed of 20 knots—unthinkable for a line fleet in combat order.

  The armada was not sailing—it was flying into the attack, closing the distance to the lone gray silhouette on the horizon with fatal inevitability.

  As they approached, what had seemed from afar simply a "large ship" began to take on its true, mind-crushing scale. The haze over the water dissipated, and details previously hidden by distance now became nauseatingly clear.

  "Enemy ship in direct line of sight, Admiral! Optical contact steady!" reported the executive officer. He tore himself away from the spyglass, and Ball saw his cheek twitch. "Distance—twenty-five thousand meters."

  Admiral Ball, without saying a word, brought his spyglass with magically enhanced optics to his eye. The lenses brought the horizon closer, and the Admiral's heart skipped a beat.

  He saw HIM.

  It was not a ship in the usual sense. It was a moving mountain of steel, painted the color of a stormy sky. Not a single mast. Not a single sail. No decorations, golden figureheads on the bow, or carvings on the stern. Only bare, brutal functionality. Its deck was flat and wide, like a city square, and cyclopean structures towered upon it—three gun turrets, each the size of a small fort. From them protruded barrels of such length and thickness that they seemed like the trunks of fallen ancient oaks cast in metal.

  The ship did not fight the waves—it ignored them. Its giant, knife-sharp stem ripped the ocean open, throwing tons of water aside, moving with the unwavering, granite confidence of a predator who knows he is the strongest in this forest. Along the sides, like needles on a hedgehog, dozens of smaller barrels could be seen, predatorily turning toward the Leiforian squadron.

  Ball lowered the glass slowly, as if in a dream. His gaze was riveted to this technogenic monster, which had single-handedly, without moving from its spot, wiped the flower of his aviation from the skies.

  "What the hell is that?.." he whispered with just his lips, so quietly that only the wind heard him.

  Ball's face began to gray, taking on the shade of ash. All his feigned imperial arrogance, all the confidence in the invincibility of the armada nurtured for centuries, began to crumble like plaster during an earthquake. It was as if he had been dipped into an ice hole. His legs trembled treacherously—it was not the fear of battle, but the primal, irrational horror of a creature encountering something that violates the very laws of the universe. His fingertips tingled as if from an electric shock. Sweat on his back turned cold.

  Iron doesn't float. Guns of that size burst when fired, beat panically in his brain.

  But he was a Fleet Admiral. A representative of a dynasty that had been sending the Empire's enemies to the bottom for three hundred years.

  With an effort of will, grinding his teeth, he forced himself to straighten up. Pride and courage hammered in by drill held his disintegrating consciousness together like a corset.

  Let him be a demon. Let him be a monster. But he is one. One! And I have forty-four ships. Four thousand guns. Twenty thousand sailors. If we get within pistol shot, we will bury him with cannonballs, board him, burn him with magic! We are Leifor!

  "To the signalmen!" his voice cracked, but immediately gained a steely, albeit brittle, hardness. "Hoist the 'General Attack' flags! Relay to the fleet: maneuver 'Steel Sickle'! Reform into column formation! We will envelop him from the bow! Prepare for sequential broadside salvo by the entire fleet!"

  Trumpets sang. Signal flags soared on the yardarms.

  The ships of Leifor, demonstrating the highest seamanship, began a complex and majestic maneuver. Spreading across the water's surface, they began to stretch into one long, deadly line. Their plan was a classic of sailing warfare: cross the enemy's T (the famous "Crossing the T"), so that each of the forty ships could discharge its broadside into the defenseless bow of the enemy one by one, turning it into a sieve.

  But they were fighting against an admiral who had read different textbooks.

  When the Leifor fleet was completing the reformation and had closed the distance to fifteen kilometers, Admiral Ball saw with horror that Atlastar was changing.

  Its giant turrets came into motion. With a quiet hum audible even here (or was that buzzing in his ears?), the second and third main battery turrets began to rotate.

  They did not wait for the enemy to come abeam. They turned slowly, lazily, like slothful titans, straight toward the armada advancing on them, lifting their monstrous maws to the zenith.

  Luxtal did not intend to play a "knightly duel." He simply turned the guns.

  And so, when the Leifor vanguard reached the twelve-thousand-meter mark—a transcendental, absolutely unthinkable distance at which no gun in the history of this world could even hope to hit a target—the gun barrels on Atlastar smoked simultaneously in a flash that was, for now, silent.

  At the same time. Super-dreadnought Grade Atlastar. Combat Information Center.

  "Range to lead group—twelve thousand meters. Target bearing constant. All meteorological data entered. The ballistic computer has generated a firing solution," the voice of the senior artillery officer in the headset was dry and sterile, as if he were reading a weather report rather than a death sentence for thousands of people.

  Luxtal stood with his arms crossed over his chest, looking at the instrument gauges where needles, quivering slightly, indicated the readiness of the hydraulics.

  "Main battery. Ranging half-salvo from turrets B and C. Target: the center ship in the formation. One shell per barrel. Fire."

  Deep within the bowels of the turrets, breechblocks weighing a ton clanged shut. The firing circuits closed.

  Two 460-millimeter guns, their barrels reared toward the sky, bellowed simultaneously. A deafening roar, which not even the walls of the citadel could drown out, shook the hull. The ship, with a displacement of 72,000 tons, rocked on the water. Two armor-piercing shells, weighing one and a half tons each, tore free from the rifling and soared into the stratosphere with a muzzle velocity exceeding the speed of sound.

  Leiforian Flagship Battleship Saint.

  For Admiral Ball and his fleet, it was a mesmerizing and unfathomable spectacle. They saw two blinding flashes on the horizon, silent at such a distance.

  They are shooting? Again? Into nothing? Ball had just enough time to think.

  The seconds dragged on, viscous as pitch.

  And then the silence over the sea was torn apart. It wasn't the whistle of a cannonball. It was a sound like tearing fabric, only amplified a million times. A piercing, low, vibrating howl, transitioning into the roar of a diving train. As if giant invisible claws were ripping the very sky above their heads. The air thickened.

  "Shells! Incoming!" the lookout on the mast screamed frantically, instinctively hunching his head into his shoulders, though that could not save him from a hunk of metal of such weight.

  The first shell, having traveled a high ballistic arc, struck the water with a monstrous splash just one hundred meters off the port side of the column formation, precisely between the third and fourth ships. A pillar of water, dirty white and dense as a wall, surged up to the height of the mainmast, dousing the decks with an icy downpour and shards of seabed rock.

  The second shell landed fifty meters astern of the last ship in the vanguard, raising a wave that forced the fifty-meter frigate to dance on the swells like a woodchip.

  And only then, seconds after the impact, did the sound of the shot itself reach the fleet—a heavy, rolling rumble, resembling a distant clap of thunder.

  A deathly, ringing silence reigned on the bridge of the Saint, broken only by the creaking of rigging and the patter of water streaming off the sails. Officers and sailors, previously filled with the determination to board the enemy, now stood with faces the color of chalk. Their eyes, widened with horror, were riveted to the two gigantic, slowly settling craters in the ocean. The hydrodynamic shock from a miss (!) was of such force that even on the flagship, sailing half a kilometer away, the glass in the stern lanterns rattled.

  "They... they shoot with such astounding precision?! And from such a distance?!" the Executive Officer exhaled. His voice cracked into a whisper full of superstitious fear. "Twelve thousand meters! Gods! Our best culverins, enchanted by magisters, barely hit at two! But these barbarians... they aren't just shooting. They... they are bracketing!"

  He spoke the terrible word. Bracketing. Like on a firing range. As if the Superpower's fleet were merely a set of wooden targets.

  Admiral Ball was silent. He gripped the railing so hard that the old leather of his gloves creaked. He looked at the distant, unperturbed steel silhouette, and a cold realization began to penetrate his rage-clouded mind, freezing out the anger and leaving only an icy, crystal-clear premonition of catastrophe.

  This was not chaotic fire. It was a "bracket." They had caught his fleet in the pincers of their sights. The next salvo would not land in the water.

  "They are mocking us..." Ball wheezed, tasting bile in his mouth. "They could have closed in. But they just stand there and shoot us down like targets in a shooting gallery. They are playing with us like a well-fed cat with a half-dead mouse."

  And, as if in mocking confirmation of his words, the officers saw new flashes on Atlastar's sides—more frequent and smaller—blooming like yellow flowers of death.

  The secondary battery turrets had entered the game. 155 millimeters—"pocket change" for a dreadnought, but a death sentence for a wooden ship of the line.

  CIC, Atlastar.

  "Central Station, data corrected. Entering adjustments: Left zero-zero-two, drop range. Ballistic computer confirms the bracket. Range—eleven thousand eight hundred meters," the targeting operator droned monotonically, spinning the brass handwheels of the fire control director.

  "Targets in secondary battery field of fire. Port and starboard batteries, triple turrets. Target distribution: third and fourth pennants in the enemy column. Shell type—armor-piercing with delay."

  Luxtal didn't even look at the screen. He knew what was about to happen. Physics is inexorable.

  "One shell per target. Armor-piercing. Fire."

  The triple secondary battery turrets, located along Atlastar's flanks above the main deck level, barked with a sharp, dry, cracking sound, distinct from the guttural bass of the 460-millimeter monsters. Six 155-millimeter barrels, once serving as the primary argument of the Empire's heavy cruisers, spat sixty-kilogram steel slugs toward the doomed squadron.

  Ship of the Line Gaufoss, 3rd in the Leiforian column.

  The Captain of the 80-gun ship Gaufoss saw the flashes. He screamed orders to the gunners, demanding they run out the guns, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of the wind and the fear of the crew. He pinned his hopes on the armor—thin sheets of hardened steel, enchanted by the best alchemists to resist fireballs, covered the sides of his ship. This armor was considered impenetrable to standard cannonballs.

  He did not know that flying toward him was not a round shot, but a pointed armor-piercing shell of chrome-nickel steel, tempered by mid-twentieth-century technology, possessing the kinetic energy of a locomotive.

  CRACK!

  The sound of the impact was unlike an explosion. It was the sound of a breaking spine.

  The 155mm shell struck the Gaufoss's side just above the waterline, near the midships frame. The vaunted "anti-magic armor" shattered without even slowing the flight of death. The steel cylinder stitched through the lower deck, smearing gun crews across the bulkheads, punched through three internal partitions, and—having reached the most vulnerable point of any sailing ship: the powder magazine, where tons of unstable magic gunpowder were stored—activated its base fuze.

  A moment of absolute, unnatural silence as the ship's hull bloated from within like a rubber balloon. And then...

  BOOOOOOM!

  A deafening, low-frequency, monstrous explosion slammed into ears, drowning out the noise of wind and sea. The shockwave rolled across the water, rocking the neighboring ships.

  The Gaufoss didn't just catch fire. It was annihilated. A giant fireball, a hundred meters high, saturated with millions of razor-sharp splinters, pieces of torn rigging, cast-iron cannons, and fragments of human bodies, burst outward, ripping the planking apart. The 80-gun giant broke in half like the spine of a beast being snapped. The stern and bow reared up, and in mere seconds, amidst a vortex of steam, foam, and burning oil, went underwater with a monstrous hissing and gurgling.

  At that very moment, the second shell, intended for the fourth ship in the line, deviated slightly, sheared off the target's mainmast, snapping it like a matchstick, and—failing to detonate upon impact with the wood—plunged into the water. A deep underwater explosion occurred beneath the hull, and the hydrodynamic shock bent the frigate's keel into an arc. With a crunch, the ship ground to a halt, instantly losing way.

  On the bridge of Atlastar, the same businesslike atmosphere reigned. The artillerymen did not see blood and horror. They saw only splashes and objective damage assessment data.

  "Observing detonation of target number three," the spotter reported impassively. "Total destruction. Target number four—structural damage, loss of way. Shifting fire."

  Flagship Bridge Saint.

  Admiral Ball felt heat on the back of his neck on the bridge of the flagship. He turned around and went rigid. The third ship in his line no longer existed. Where a proud sailing vessel had been a second ago, now there was only a gigantic, churning crater, a carpet of debris, and a cloud of steam.

  "One shot... With one shot... into splinters!" his mind refused to accept it.

  "SHIP OF THE LINE GAUFOSS... IT... IT HAS DISAPPEARED!" the manacomm operator screamed in a hoarse voice breaking into a falsetto, clutching the vibrating, hot communication crystal until his fingers hurt. "The entire crew... perished!"

  This hysterical scream jerked Admiral Ball out of his stupor.

  The horror gripping his heart cracked, giving way to blind, irrational rage—the last defense of a mind confronted with the incomprehensible.

  "Damned bastards!" he roared, foam appearing on his lips. "I will not let you shoot us like targets! ALL SHIPS! OPEN FIRE! FULL BROADSIDE AT THE ENEMY SHIP! IMMEDIATELY! FIRE EVERYTHING YOU HAVE!"

  The order, born of desperation, was executed. Discipline, hammered in by years of drilling, worked reflexively. Leifor's battle formations, previously majestic and orderly, became enveloped in chaos. Ship captains, to carry out the order, began turning their broadsides, breaking formation.

  A minute later, the entire horizon was covered in thick, acrid, dirty-white smoke from hundreds of shots.

  BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!

  Two thousand guns of the Leifor fleet bellowed simultaneously. Mage-gunners, tearing their throats, shouted spells of "Wind" and "Fire" enhancement, pouring their life force into every shot, hoping their magic could extend the flight of the cannonballs. The sky darkened with cast iron.

  But this was not a battle. This was the agony of a dying dinosaur trying to bite a meteorite.

  Physics was inexorable. Cannonballs, even enhanced by wind magic, flew in a steep, powerless arc. They lost energy with every meter.

  Most of them, thousands of heavy balls, plopped into the water without flying even a third of the way, raising a wall of useless splashes. Some, fired from the best enchanted long-barreled guns, flew further, but still fell kilometers short of Atlastar.

  Not a single ball. Not a single magic bolt. Nothing even touched its gray, indifferent side. Smoke from their own volleys blinded Leifor's gunners, but the enemy saw them through the smoke with their radar eyes.

  In response to this pathetic, helpless cannonade, Atlastar spoke for real. This time—not for ranging.

  "Central Station! Full salvo Main Battery! Destroy!"

  Turrets A, B, and C—nine barrels of monstrous 460-millimeter caliber—recoiled simultaneously.

  Earth and sky shuddered. The shockwave from the shot was of such force that the water around the dreadnought depressed as if struck by a giant fist. Nine fireballs the size of a house burst from the muzzles, merging into the single roar of an awakened volcano.

  KA-BOOOM!

  Nine one-and-a-half-ton armor-piercing shells, each the size of a small boat, each a complex mechanism of death, left the barrels at supersonic speed. With a howl reminiscent of the sound of the fabric of reality tearing, they went to the zenith, to crash down on the Leifor fleet vanguard from the heavens a minute later.

  On the bridge of the Saint, the manacomm operator, watching the vanguard through a magic viewer, froze. His face turned into a frozen mask of insane horror. He saw those "suitcases" falling from the sky.

  He opened his mouth trying to report, but only a strangled, gurgling wheeze escaped his throat.

  Where the pride of the fleet, the ships Toronto and Leiforia, were sailing, it wasn't explosions that blossomed. The Sun rose there.

  A firestorm, born of the simultaneous detonation of shells and magazines, consumed two battleships at once. Wood, canvas, people, guns—all disappeared in a fraction of a second, turning into atomic dust. The shockwave snapped the masts on nearby ships like dry matches.

  "Ship... of the line Toronto..." the operator spoke in shock, syllable by syllable, when his speech returned, staring at the empty, boiling water. "And... the hundred-gun battleship Leiforia... They... they were... sunk! Instantly! They are gone!"

  Admiral Ball turned purple upon hearing the report of the Leiforia's demise. Blood rushed to his head with such force that his ears rang. He struck the polished oak rail of the bridge with his fist, leaving a deep dent in the wood.

  "Leiforia!" he wheezed, spraying spittle. "Flagship of the First Squadron, bearing the holy name of our capital! Symbol of the Empire's invincibility!"

  His mind could not grasp what had happened. That ship was a masterpiece. Its hull, reinforced with the rarest adamant plates and enchanted by the High Magister to reflect any magical damage, was considered absolutely invulnerable. At home, they believed that Leiforia could withstand a direct hit even from Dragon's breath. But a single salvo, one "spit" from the cursed steel cliff, simply wiped it off the surface of the ocean, turning it into a cloud of superheated gas. The grandeur of centuries was destroyed in a second by crude, soulless mechanics.

  Ball stood gripping the railing until his fingers cramped. He silently, with a glazed stare, watched the methodical, industrial extermination of his fleet.

  It was a slaughter. Ship after ship, the best sailing vessels in the world, the pride of the shipyards, turned into splinters.

  BA-BANG! — another explosion of a 460-millimeter shell tore apart the stern of the battleship following behind, and it, nose rearing up, plunged into the abyss.

  The water around was covered with a black film of fuel oil (from Atlastar's insides, Ball would have thought if he knew), soot, and blood. The ocean boiled with falling debris and bodies. The screams of thousands of dying sailors merged into one continuous howl that was more terrifying than the roar of guns.

  "Curse it! Curse it! Damned spawn! Demons from the abyss!" Ball howled in impotence and rage, tears streaming down his cheeks, mixing with acrid powder soot and salty spray. "Why doesn't magic work?! Why have the gods abandoned us?!"

  An hour passed. An hour that seemed longer to him than his entire life lived.

  Of the great, "Invincible" Western Armada of forty-four pennants, nothing remained. Only smoke and floating planks.

  Only his own flagship, the hundred-gun battleship Saint, miraculously intact but wounded by shrapnel, was still afloat. The rest were either at the bottom or were drifting bonfires. A few frigates on the horizon struck their colors, but Ball didn't look at the cowards.

  The roar of the cannonade ceased. Silence fell—cottony, deafening, terrifying.

  The Gra-Valkas super-dreadnought, having finished its "work," ceased fire. The smoke cleared. The huge gray turret of Atlastar, resembling a castle, turned slowly with the eerie grinding of mechanisms. Three black, bottomless maws of 460-millimeter guns stared straight into Ball's face. From such a distance, they seemed like gates to hell.

  That feeling of imminent doom the Admiral experienced at the beginning of the battle returned, but now it was a hundred times stronger. It didn't just chill—it burned out the soul, leaving only icy, ringing emptiness inside. He, Admiral Ball, heir to a dynasty of naval commanders, commander of the region's greatest force, was left alone. King of ruins. Admiral of a graveyard. A complete, final, shameful defeat that no excuses could wash away.

  Atlastar, not firing, slowly moved toward them. It moved majestically, cutting the waves with its stem like a predator that has already bitten through the victim's throat and is now approaching to finish it off. Or to mock.

  Defeat... the word beat in his inflamed brain like a trapped bird. I lost to barbarians. They are laughing at me. They think they broke me.

  In his soul, incinerated by horror, something dark suddenly stirred. Foul.

  It was no longer martial honor. It was pride reborn into madness. He couldn't return to the Emperor with a report of defeat. But he didn't want to die just like that, like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

  He looked at the approaching steel side and calculated feverishly. They ceased fire. They think we are finished. They will come closer to accept surrender. Close. To pistol-shot range. And then... my guns will pierce them. At point-blank range, magic will work. I will take them with me.

  It was treachery. A violation of all laws of war and the sea. But for a madman, laws are no longer written.

  He slowly straightened up, shaking the hand of the terrified adjutant off his shoulder. Reason extinguished in his eyes, and the cold flame of fanaticism lit up.

  "Raise the inverted flag on the mainmast!" he growled, and his voice was hoarse, alien, like grinding stones. "Signal surrender! Let them approach."

  "S-sir?.. We are surrendering?" the young signalman exhaled with hope.

  Ball didn't look at him. He looked at the maws of the enemy guns, gripping the hilt of his saber.

  "Do as you are told, whelp!" he barked.

  The signalman, pale and shaking, rushed to carry out the order. A white cloth, symbol of surrender and plea for mercy, slowly, jerkily crawled up the surviving mizzenmast. Atlastar slowed down, accepting the surrender. The trap, the last and vilest, was set.

  Admiral Ball, leaning heavily on the railing, slumped. In this second, he seemed a broken old man, but his hand was already reaching for the hidden lever of the general artillery salvo.

  The officers on the bridge, seeing the inverted flag of their empire crawling up, exhaled. It wasn't a sigh of relief, but rather the convulsive gasp of a drowning man given a gulp of air. They were alive. Disgraced, dishonored, witnesses to the death of the Empire, but alive. They exchanged quick, hunted glances, afraid to look at the Admiral.

  "Enemy ship slowing down!" reported the lookout. Hope rang in his voice. "Closing in to accept surrender. Distance—three thousand meters."

  Admiral Ball straightened up slowly. His stooped back became straight as a mast again. He ran a white-gloved hand over his face, wiping away soot and tears, and in his eyes, previously empty and dead, a feverish, absolutely insane fire suddenly danced. It was the look of a man who has already died and decided to take the whole world with him.

  "Excellent... they bought it. They approached. Fools," he whispered, and the smile on his face was terrifying. Suddenly he roared so that the bulkheads shuddered: "GUNNERS! STARBOARD GUNS—TO BATTLE! GUNS TO LOAD!"

  The officers froze. Time stopped.

  "Load double charge!" Ball continued to roar, spraying spittle. "Over the balls—canister and 'firestorm'! Target—their bridge! Glass! Superstructures! We won't pierce their hide, but we will slaughter their crew! We will behead the monster!"

  "Admiral! You... what are you doing?!" the Executive Officer, a hereditary nobleman with an impeccable reputation, recoiled in horror. He stepped forward, shielding the wheel with his body. "The flag of surrender is raised! They ceased fire! To open fire after the signal of surrender is treachery! It is a crime before the laws of war and gods! It is an indelible stain on the honor of the entire fleet! I will not allow..."

  Admiral Ball didn't argue. His hand, moving with frightening speed, snatched a heavy officer's flintlock pistol, encrusted with rubies, from his belt.

  "Treason?" he asked quietly.

  BANG-BANG!

  A deafening double shot at point-blank range tore apart the silence of the bridge. A faint, almost imperceptible cloud of magic powder enveloped the Admiral's figure. The Executive Officer flew back, his back hitting the compass binnacle. A hole gaped in his chest, from which blood gushed in spurts, staining the snow-white tunic. His eyes glazed over in an expression of extreme surprise and unbearable pain. He slid to the deck, wheezing.

  Paralysis reigned on the bridge.

  "What a pity," Ball said in an even, icy tone, ostentatiously blowing smoke from the barrel. "You are all witnesses. Our valiant Executive Officer was hit by a stray fragment... or perhaps a bullet from that devilish ship. He died a hero, defending the bridge. Isn't that right, gentlemen?"

  He swept his heavy, unblinking basilisk gaze over his subordinates. The pistol in his hand was still pointed in their direction.

  No one made a sound. The fear of the "iron monster" on the horizon faded before the animal horror of the presence of this monster in human form right here, two steps away.

  "I asked—isn't that right?"

  "Y-yes sir, Admiral," the ship's captain squeezed out, trying not to look at his friend's corpse.

  "Excellent. Remove this... trash from my bridge. It is unfitting for an officer to lie around like a sack of potatoes."

  Two sailors, shaking, picked up the body and dragged it away. A greasy trail of blood remained on the planks.

  Ball walked to the railing.

  "Listen to me! We are all dead men. The Empire is no more. The fleet is gone. But we have one chance to go down in history not as slaves, but as god-killers!" His voice mesmerized. "They will come close. To pistol-shot range. They are not expecting a strike. Their guns are silent. And then we will put everything into them! Fifty barrels at point-blank! Fire magic at point-blank melts even stone! We will tear the heart out of this steel demon and drag its crew into the abyss with us! Who is with me?!"

  "W-with you, Admiral! For Leifor!" the discordant chorus of voices was soaked not with courage, but with hysteria. The crew, broken, intimidated, infected by the commander's madness, turned into a pack of cornered rats.

  Atlastar approached inexorably. Now it blotted out half the sky. A steel wall the height of a fortress tower loomed over the wooden Saint, casting a long, grave shadow upon it.

  Through the enhanced optics, the ship resolved into details that his mind struggled to catalogue. The hull was uniform gray, unpainted in any ceremonial sense. The turret structures were geometric and massive. He could see movement on the deck — figures in identical gray clothing moving with the purposeful efficiency of men performing a procedure they had done many times. No standards. No pennants. No signal flags beyond the functional minimum.

  It was, he realized, a ship that had stripped itself of everything that was not a weapon.

  The distance closed with frightening speed.

  Eight hundred meters.

  Six hundred.

  In the silence, music playing from loudspeakers on Atlastar's deck could be heard—a victory march. This enraged Ball completely.

  Five hundred meters.

  On the gun deck of the Saint, gunners with burning matches stood by the cannons, holding their breath. Sweat poured into their eyes. Hearts beat so loudly they drowned out the noise of the water.

  Three hundred meters.

  Ideal killing distance. The dreadnought's steel armor filled the entire view. It was impossible to miss.

  Admiral Ball, with a face distorted by a triumphant, devilish grimace, raised his hand with the saber, poising it for the strike that was to become the final chord in the life of this fleet and this country.

  "DEATH TO THE BARBARIANS!" he screeched, bringing down the blade. "FIRE!"

  The starboard side of the battleship Saint, once the pride and symbol of the Empire's might, shuddered for the last time. From all fifty surviving gun ports, tongues of flame and faint puffs of smoke erupted simultaneously. The ship heeled from the monstrous recoil. It wasn't a tactical salvo, but a scream of despair—a suicidal point-blank attack.

  A hail of fifty cast-iron balls enchanted for penetration, bags of canister, and spinning steel chain-shot intended to tear sails and break masts howled across the three hundred meters of water separating the ships and crashed against the hull of the super-dreadnought, which towered over them like a gray basalt cliff.

  BAM-BAM-CLANG-CRACK!

  The sound of impact was deafening but strange. It wasn't the crack of breaking wood the sailors of Leifor were used to. It was a ring. A monstrous, vibrating clang of metal on metal, as if hundreds of smithy hammers struck a giant anvil simultaneously.

  For a moment, the central part of Atlastar disappeared in a cloud of smoke, spray, and magical flashes. It seemed the steel colossus was consumed by a man-made storm.

  On the deck of the Saint, time froze, then exploded with insane, hysterical jubilation. Sailors whose nerves were stretched to the limit believed in a miracle. They saw fire. They heard impacts. They were sure that at such range, their balls had pierced the iron hide, destroyed the crew, blown the bridge to smithereens.

  "We hit! We got them!" artillerymen with soot-smeared faces shouted, hugging and crying from relief and rage. Some threw tricorns into the sky, others fell to their knees thanking the gods of war.

  "Aha-ha-ha-ha! Got that?! Take that, damned barbarians!" roared Admiral Ball, leaning over the railing. His face was twisted in a triumphant, mad grimace, saliva flying from his lips. In that instant, he felt not like a defeated old man, but like a god of war who had dealt a mortal blow to a giant.

  "Do not dare joke with Leifor! We... What?!"

  His triumphant scream cut off mid-word, replaced by a stifled, gurgling wheeze.

  A fresh sea breeze lazily drove the smoke screen away. The veil parted, and HE appeared before them again.

  Gray. Monolithic. Indifferent.

  Atlastar's side was intact. No holes spewing steam. No torn plating sheets. No screams of the wounded. Nothing.

  The 410-millimeter main armor belt of hardened Krupp steel hadn't even noticed the strike of primitive cast iron.

  Cannonballs meant to smash frigate sides simply flattened against the armor, leaving only gray lead smudges.

  Chain-shot intended to tear rigging bounced powerlessly off steel turrets and superstructures, leaving shallow, pathetic scratches and dents in the paint.

  Magic fire meant to burn rigging merely lightly soot-stained the gray paint of the side.

  Atlastar stood unshakeable. This wasn't just a military fiasco. It was absolute, humiliating proof of their total technological nullity. It was as if a child had hit a tank with a plastic shovel.

  Dead, graveyard silence reigned on the bridge. Only the waves beating against the side could be heard. Smiles slid from faces, replaced by masks of horror. Sailors backed away, dropping weapons.

  Above, on Atlastar's giant turret, the barrels of anti-aircraft autocannons began to lower slowly, with a hum, aiming directly at the Saint's deck. And the three main turrets, unhurriedly, lowered their monstrous barrels to direct fire level. Now, from three hundred meters, they looked point-blank. Nine black holes into eternity.

  "Th-this... impossible... Damned sea monster... Armor... is it harder than adamantite?.." Ball whispered. The musket fell from his hands, hitting the planks with a clatter.

  His insane hope was replaced by icy, all-consuming, grave horror.

  He understood everything.

  They hadn't accepted battle. They simply hadn't noticed it. He violated the laws of honor, committed a vileness, disgraced the uniform and memory of ancestors to deliver this strike—and all in vain.

  He looked at the maws of the guns, in the depths of which the flash of return fire was already being born. He hadn't just lost. He had signed the death warrant for himself and his last ship.

  Combat Information Center of the super-dreadnought Atlastar.

  At the moment the Saint's side spewed fire and hundreds of cast-iron balls struck the gray steel of the dreadnought, no one on the bridge even flinched.

  Inside the citadel, this impact felt surreal. There was no roar of destruction, cracking of bulkheads, or screams of the wounded. There was only a dull, distant hum and a series of ringing, vibrating strikes, like the sound of heavy hail drumming on a tin roof. 410 millimeters of hardened, cemented Vickers armor, designed to take hits from shells of equal caliber, perceived the strike of the linear era as an annoying nuisance.

  "Captain, registering multiple impacts on starboard side. Armor belt, superstructures, turret two," the voice of the senior damage control officer was icy, devoid of even a hint of alarm. "Hull damage—zero. Observing paint chipping and dents on external railings. Integrity not compromised. The enemy opened fire from three hundred meters under a raised flag of surrender."

  There was more than just information in this report. In it rang the deepest, squeamish contempt of professionals for barbarians who possess neither strength nor honor.

  Captain Luxtal, previously observing the enemy fleet's agony with the cold detachment of an entomologist, turned slowly. His face remained a stone mask, but a dangerous, predatory glint flashed in his eyes, scarier than any anger. He saw treachery. And in the code of the Imperial Fleet, treachery was punished in only one way.

  "Attention all battle stations," his voice, amplified by shipwide broadcast, cut through the silence of the bridge like a scalpel. He spoke quietly, but every word fell like a lead ingot. "The enemy has violated the basic laws of war. The flag of surrender was used as bait. Pity is canceled."

  He walked to the viewfinder. The wooden nutshell below, shrouded in the smoke of its shameful salvo, looked pathetic.

  "Return fire—for total, absolute destruction. To Main Battery guns. Target—point-blank. Blow them apart! FIRE WHEN READY!" he spat, and deadly disgust sounded in this order.

  The steel floor underfoot trembled.

  Three giant main battery turrets—nine barrels, each weighing over a hundred tons—came into motion. Servos whined, lowering the monstrous maws down to a negative elevation angle. From a distance of three hundred meters, the muzzles of the 46-centimeter guns looked at the Saint like subway tunnels.

  For the crew on the sailing ship's deck, it was a sight that stopped hearts. They didn't see guns. They saw nine black eyes of Death itself.

  "FIRE!"

  Atlastar shuddered, shifting its entire 72,000-ton hull sideways from recoil.

  The flash was brighter than the sun.

  Nine armor-piercing shells, each weighing one and a half tons, flew out of the barrels simultaneously.

  But before they touched the target, the traitor ship was hit by the muzzle blast. The monstrous pressure of powder gases bursting from the barrels struck the wooden hull like a physical hammer. Sails evaporated instantly, masts snapped and flew into the sea, people on the deck were flattened against bulkheads.

  And then the steel hit.

  The shells didn't explode on contact—wood was no obstacle for them. They stitched through the 100-gun battleship like rifle bullets punch through a rotten apple. The kinetic energy of thirteen tons of metal flying at supersonic speed turned the ship's insides into plasma. The base fuzes triggered deep under the keel, or inside the hull—it didn't matter.

  The water under the Saint boiled and collapsed. The hydrodynamic shock was of such force that the ship's wooden structure disintegrated at the molecular level.

  The Saint didn't sink. It vanished.

  In its place, a dirty-white geyser three hundred meters high shot up to the heavens, consisting of superheated steam, splinters, water, and red mist. The shockwave licked the foam off the waves in a kilometer radius.

  When the mountain of water subsided, nothing remained on the ocean surface. No mast fragments. No lifeboats. No planks. Only a gigantic, churning crater slowly filling with murky foam. Not even bodies that could be buried remained of Admiral Ball and his crew.

  On the bridge of the super-dreadnought Atlastar.

  The hollow echo of the monstrous salvo faded, and an unnatural, cottony silence reigned on the bridge. Only the steady hum of ventilation sucking out the smell of cordite and the faint whirring of gyroscopes could be heard.

  Captain Luxtal stood by the armored glass, looking down at the churning patch of foam and splinters where, just a minute ago, the enemy flagship had been. In his eyes, reflecting the gray waves, there was neither the joy of a victor nor respect for a vanquished enemy. Only a squeamish, icy disgust congealed there, the kind a man feels after crushing a poisonous insect.

  Luxtal stood at the armored glass for approximately ten seconds, looking at the patch of foam and floating debris. Then he turned back to the tactical table.

  "Artillery Lieutenant — report status."

  "Main Battery green, barrel purge complete. Ammo remaining: seventy-five armor-piercing and high-explosive shells per barrel. Secondary battery and AA — expenditure less than five percent."

  "Engines?"

  "Perfect order, sir. No damage. Maximum speed available."

  Luxtal nodded. He looked at the regional map for a moment.

  "Comms — cable the Capital, General Staff. Message: 'Leifor Western Armada destroyed completely. No casualties.'" He paused. "Add a supplementary note: 'Enemy flagship raised flag of surrender, then opened fire at three hundred meters. Flagged for Admiral Staff review as potential violation of naval law of war protocols for future documentation purposes.'"

  The communications officer wrote it down without comment. This was the correct thing to do. You documented violations. You documented everything.

  Luxtal looked east, toward where the Leiforian capital lay beyond the horizon.

  "Belay the message to the landing force. Change of plan."

  He walked to the map and placed his finger on the coastline.

  "Artillery Lieutenant! Report status."

  "Main Battery green, barrel purge complete!" the officer reported crisply. "Breech temperatures within limits. Ammo remaining: seventy-five armor-piercing and high-explosive shells per barrel. Secondary battery and AA — expenditure less than five percent."

  "Engines are in perfect order, sir," added the Chief Engineer. "No damage. We can maintain maximum speed."

  Luxtal nodded. His brain, freed from combat tactics, switched to strategy.

  "Good. Comms, cable the Capital, General Staff. Message reads: 'Leifor Western Armada destroyed completely. No casualties.' Relay to the Landing Force Commander: 'The path to Paganda is open.'"

  "Aye, Captain!" the young communications officer, whose fingers flew over the telegraph key, touched his hand to his cap.

  Luxtal paced the bridge. His gaze fell upon the regional map. Paganda was here, nearby. But the heart of the enemy—the capital, Leiforia—lay just three hundred fifteen kilometers to the east. A straight shot by sea. And right now, no one was guarding that path.

  If he returned to Paganda, Leifor would have time to gather new forces. Time to dig in.

  But if he struck now...

  "Belay that message to the landing force!" he sharply shouted at the radio operator. The lieutenant froze, having not yet sent the code. Luxtal walked to the map and jabbed his finger at a point on the mainland coast.

  "We have a change of plan. A strategic one."

  He walked to the huge viewport again and looked east, to where the ancient capital lay beyond the horizon, in ignorance and tranquility, confident in its safety.

  "Since they did not wish to learn a lesson in politeness on the open sea, we will pay a return visit right to their home. We will deliver the Emperor's message to the doorstep of their palace."

  He turned to the helmsman.

  "Course—nine-zero, due East. To Leiforia. Engineering—all ahead flank. Squeeze everything out of the boilers."

  "Aye! Course to Leiforia! All ahead flank!" the roar of commands rolled through the ship.

  The turbines howled, gaining power. Huge propellers frothed the water, and the 72,000-ton colossus, leaving behind only a graveyard of splinters and dead men, began to turn. Atlastar shuddered from the surging might, accelerating to its limit of 30 knots.

  Luxtal watched the horizon.

  You thought war was a knightly tournament? You thought you could kill an ambassador and hide behind magic? No...

  A picture was already forming in his imagination: his ship entering the capital's harbor. A defenseless city under the sights of nine 460-millimeter barrels. Panic. And a flag of surrender—a real one this time.

  Well, let's see how you sing now, when the main battery guns knock with high-explosive shells right on the golden gates of your imperial palace, he thought, and a barely perceptible, predatory smile appeared on his thin, bloodless lips—the smile of a judge passing a death sentence.

  This was no longer war. This was coercion into unconditional surrender.