The cold air hitting Trenn’s bare face was a shock to his system. It smelled of sulfur, honey, and gunpowder.

  He was breathing. He was himself.

  But the battle on the timber deck wasn't over. And the giant skeletal vessel beneath his feet hadn't slowed; the undead Gem-Croc continued its relentless, autonomous march down the vitrified trench of the God’s Wake, completely uncaring about the war raging on its back.

  "His head is exposed! Take the mage!" a Wolf Kin raider screamed, vaulting over the femur of a dead comrade. He raised a heavy, jagged cutlass, aiming squarely for Trenn’s unarmored neck.

  Trenn kept his battle readiness. The red haze didn’t take him. He acted with the trained, desperate muscle memory of a survivor.

  He jerked his left arm up. The White Metal shield caught the cutlass. Sparks showered over his bare cheek, the impact sending a jarring vibration down his arm, but the divine alloy didn't even scratch.

  He pivoted, letting the raider's momentum carry him forward, and swung the God-Bone club. The runed bone connected with the Wolf Kin’s ribs with a sickening crunch.

  He was fighting differently now. He was a god from the neck down, but fragile flesh above. He kept the shield high, tucking his chin behind the rim, advancing into the fray with brutal, methodical efficiency.

  His sonar pulsed, mapping the deck. Ten feet away, Skate lay as a dense ball of porous black carbonado.

  A spearman lunged at Trenn’s exposed flank. Trenn stepped inside the guard, bashing the spearman’s helm with the flat of his shield. In the same fluid motion, he spun, using the momentum to align himself with the slime.

  His massive golden tail whipped across the deck like a golf club, breaking a Wolf Kin Rider’s legs before striking Skate dead-center. The heavy carbonado sphere launched with terrifying velocity, rocketing directly into the stomach of a boarder charging from the port side. The heavy breastplate caved inward, and the Wolf Kin crumpled to the deck.

  Across the blood-slicked timber, Mara pushed herself up from the deck. The black chitin armor felt like a lead coffin, her muscles screaming from the buckshot. But the hunter refused to stay on her knees.

  Ezy’s spinning gauntlets roared on her left, crushing a boarder’s skull, while Zeen’s covering fire cleared a momentary pocket on her right.

  A Wolf Kin lunged into the gap, driving a barbed spear directly at her chest.

  Mara planted her boots and let Zeen's craftsmanship do its job. The iron tip sparked and screeched against the iridescent black Husk plate, failing to pierce the dense shell.

  Before the raider could retract his weapon, Mara trapped the shaft under her arm and stepped into his guard. She drove her fist upward in a brutal uppercut.

  The jagged raptor-talons punched straight through the leather and chainmail of his throat. She twisted her wrist and ripped backward, tossing the gurgling raider aside just as another Wolf Kin with a heavy iron maul closed in on her blind spot, raising the weapon high to crush her spine.

  CRACK-OW!

  The raider’s chest exploded outward in a spray of burned flesh and pulverized leather.

  Zeen was on the deck, Soul-Bound Musket smoking while it engaged its reloading mechanism.

  He slid between a large Wolf Kin’s legs, scrambled up the wooden mount of an armed Ratling cannon, and threw his entire body weight backward onto the heavy iron firing lever.

  The cannon roared, shooting a red-tipped harpoon that pierced a climbing Wolf Kin’s stomach before exploding, taking out a group of climbers and raining shrapnel on the few Riders below.

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  Ezy was shrieking over the din of the Crusher’s engine. Its spinning gauntlets were the most devastating weapon on board. She had cleared a path between Mara and Zeen, cracking skulls, plates, and sending boarders back down the way they came.

  Only her head protruded from the cockpit, and even that was protected by a lattice of Red Metal. Spearmen couldn’t get close enough.

  The Wolf Kin numbers were thinning.

  A second raider scrambled over the bone railing, aiming a flintlock pistol at the Crusher’s open cockpit.

  A sheet of kinetic ash washed over him. Zeen was fast and small, Almitad’s skull gleaming on his head. The One-Eye amulet in the right socket burned with violet intensity as his musket reloaded.

  "Nobody touches my crew!" Zeen’s voice echoed through the death mask.

  On the starboard side of the deck, the grim reality of the boarding party’s numbers was taking its toll. Wutren lay bleeding out against the railing, and Janaree’s broken body was gone, blasted over the edge.

  "Up… Climb!" Wutren had gasped with his last breath.

  The three pups’ survival instinct overrode terror. They scrambled up the massive, inverted ribs of the Gem-Croc like a jungle gym, their small claws finding purchase in the porous white bone as they fled upward toward the rear tower.

  Below them, Vavnaar was a localized hurricane of grief and steel.

  The Alpha had abandoned all technique, all defense. He hacked with Silver Flash, his massive frame soaked in the blood of Tribane’s riders. He didn't look at the pups fleeing up the ribs to the towers, and he didn't look for his mate amongst the debris under them. He cleaved through weapons, armor, and bone, screaming a wordless, guttural howl of pure agony for his fallen mentor and his mate.

  He swung the greatsword in a massive, telegraphed arc that cut a raider in half, but left his own flank entirely exposed.

  A Wolf Kin spearman ducked under the humming blade and lunged. The barbed spearhead punched through the overlapping leather of Vavnaar’s side, sinking deep into his ribs.

  Vavnaar’s howl hitched into a wet gasp. He dropped to one knee, the heavy greatsword clattering onto the timber deck.

  The spearman wrenched the weapon free, sending a spray of blood across the white bone and wooden deck. He raised his weapon to deliver the killing blow to Vavnaar’s neck. "Tribane sends his regards, exile."

  A frantic flutter of pink and yellow dropped from the sky.

  Bomber swooped low over the spearman’s head. The Giant Moth furiously beat its wings, releasing a thick, choking cloud of iridescent moth-powder directly into the raider’s eyes and lungs.

  The spearman shrieked, dropping his weapon to claw at his burning, blinded eyes, leaving himself open.

  Vavnaar’s sword pierced his belly and drove upwards, cutting the Wolf Kin from navel to his shoulders. His body split in a fountain of blood as it crumbled to the ground.

  The tide of the battle broke. Seeing the golden avatar defending himself with calculated precision, the Crusher tearing their flank apart, and the sheer, unkillable resolve of the Fox and the Wolf, the morale of Tribane’s riders shattered.

  "Fall back! Fall back to the bikes!" a surviving squad leader screamed.

  The remaining boarders scrambled for the ropes, sliding down to the ground with practised speed. Engines revved into a deafening roar as they climbed onto the back of the surviving bikes and peeled away, kicking up clouds of vitrified glass dust as they tore down the God's Wake.

  Trenn lowered his shield, his chest heaving. Sweat stung the burn scars on his cheeks. He looked around the devastated deck, retrieving Skate, who happily melted back over his crown.

  "We repelled them," Trenn gasped, leaning heavily on the God-Bone club. "They’re retreating."

  Zeen did not lower his weapon.

  The gnome stood perfectly still, his head tilted. Through the left, empty socket of Almitad’s skull, he saw the dust cloud of the retreating motorcycles.

  But through his right eye—the violet, heat-seeking lens of the One-Eye amulet—the dust was an illusion. The mist was transparent.

  He stared down the long, straight corridor of the God's Wake.

  "They aren't retreating," Zeen’s hollow, mechanical voice drifted down from the tower, chilling the sweat on Trenn’s neck. "They're clearing the firing line."

  "What?" Ezy called out, spinning the Crusher’s chassis to face the horizon. "Zeen, what do you see?"

  Zeen’s hand trembled on the stock of his musket. Through the violet void-sight, he saw the heat signatures of the motorcycles pulling to the extreme left and right flanks of the trench.

  And in the center of the path, sitting directly in the wake of the Red God, was a vehicle four times the size of a motorcycle.

  It was a wall of riveted iron blocking the trench. Dual steam-stacks belched black heat into the sky. Massive, heavy-treaded tracks ground against the vitrified stone. Protruding from the center of the sloped, armored glacis was the thick, cast-iron barrel of a siege cannon, and it was aimed squarely at the center of the Bone Ship’s chest.

  "It's a landship," Zeen whispered, the horror leaking into his resonant voice. "A Wolf Kin tank. And it's aiming right at us."

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