Chapter 64 : The Lion-Wing Beast
The cannon's bore pointed through the aperture and toward the facing mountain. Evan registered the system of iron chains in the room — each connected to a pulley assembly built into the walls, invisible but audible — as Elder Taishan worked through them in sequence: elevation adjustment, azimuth, then the loading chain that seated a stone cannonball in the barrel.
A goblin was sent to light the boiler. The pressure gauge climbed. When it reached the designated mark, Taishan pulled the firing chain.
The steam detonation was enormous in the enclosed space. The ball left the barrel, crossed the valley, and struck the facing mountainside. Trees came down. The impact cloud rose and dispersed. Birds and other things fled from the impact zone in every direction.
Shuang, from deep in Evan's hair, was startled into a sound she immediately suppressed. The steam flooding the room provided cover.
Evan watched the impact and calculated. The stone ball, on striking, had shattered into secondary projectiles — a fragmentation effect that gave it something resembling explosive yield. Against unarmored targets, formidable. Against a knight who had developed sword-aura, significantly less so. Against a Great Knight, essentially irrelevant.
The three elders were watching him with the satisfaction of people who have produced an effect.
On the mountain across the valley, a Lion-Wing Beast had been walking with her cub.
The cub was one month old. The cannonball arrived without warning. The stone hit the cub directly and reduced it to components, and the fragmenting rock swept outward across the area in a fraction of a second. The mother's defensive instincts fired — a protective layer materialized around her body from pure reflex — but they fired after the cub was already gone. The shockwave launched her into the air. She came down injured but functional, and stood in the settling dust looking for something that was not there.
Only blood on the ground. A crater. Broken trees.
She turned toward the steam rising from the second level of the fortress.
The fireballs came down like weather. Dozens of them, then more, filling the valley with sound and fire. The goblins at the entrance were inside and barred before the second wave arrived; two of them didn't make it in time and the barred door muffled the sound they made.
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The fortress held. The vines and accumulated organic material on its exterior caught and burned, but the steel beneath was exactly what ten thousand years without rust suggested it was. Inside, the temperature rose and the three elders went the color of old ash.
Taishan reached for the chain that would close the firing aperture.
"Wait," Evan said.
He rose from the floor — not the enchanted bracers, not a spell anyone present would have recognized, just the accumulated effect of months of training with the unnamed technique expressing itself in a moment of particular calm — and went out through the aperture.
The Lion-Wing Beast saw him appear in the air at her level. Her mouth opened.
He extended one finger.
Yin-Chill Strike. The syllables he had worked out over two weeks of adjustment, the resonance that made the array run clean. The grey mist condensed into a column that rotated as it moved, the light within it going strange, carrying the cold of deep shadow and something else — the spiritual-force component that rode alongside the dark element and struck a different layer of the target entirely.
The fireball hit the column and went out. The column absorbed it, and the trace of fire it had carried became part of what the column was carrying when it reached the Lion-Wing Beast's shield.
The shield held the physical force. The spiritual component passed through it.
The Lion-Wing Beast fell from the sky. The rage left her eyes before the light did.
Evan applied Core-seal as she fell and collected the body into his storage ring before it reached the ground.
He came back through the aperture and settled to the floor. The three elders looked at him the way people look at something that has rearranged their sense of the possible.
He let them have a moment with it. "I'd like to see the mechanical warrior, if you're willing."
"It no longer functions," Elder Yasa said, with something between regret and relief.
"I'd like to see it anyway. The construction itself is what interests me."
Taishan thought about this and decided. They descended.
On the third level, Evan passed several female goblins in clothing noticeably cleaner and better fitted than what he'd seen below — the current king's household, Elder Yali explained. The king was old; the elders managed governance in practice; the structure preserved the memory of how things had once been organized. Evan noted that Nobi had mentioned none of this, and filed the omission.
The fourth level held a storeroom behind a door that required three keys, one from each elder. When it opened, the mechanical warrior stood in the space beyond.
It was built for goblin scale — roughly twice Evan's height, which made the cockpit above the shoulders clearly sized for a goblin body. The surface showed the same metallurgical quality as the fortress exterior, the deep matte black that hadn't degraded in ten millennia. A small boiler was mounted on the back, the steam-power system integrated into the frame. The pipework was more elegant than the cannon's; someone had understood the engineering at a level that went beyond copying.
Evan walked around it once, looking at the joints and the actuator housings, then stopped at the chest.
There was a panel there. Flush with the surface, invisible unless you knew the seam, with a single inset button.
He pressed it.