Central World. Southwest of the Magdola Archipelago.

  Airspace above the 0th Magic Fleet.

  The piercing, high-pitched trill of the Light-Compression Engines sounded like the dying wheeze of a cornered beast. The fuselage of the heavy magic attack aircraft, the Beta-2, trembled from nose to tail. The mana-converters on the wings were glowing white-hot, emitting an uneven, pulsating blue light. Like a living creature, the plane rasped and vibrated, squeezing the last scraps of power from its overloaded system just to stay airborne.

  The commander of the 6th Squadron, Sky Knight Omega, gripped the control stick tightly, feeling sweat stinging his eyes beneath his flight goggles. His heart hammered in his chest as if trying to break through his ribs. His hands trembled betrayingly—a lingering aftereffect of the encounter with Gra-Valkan air defenses during the first, disastrous run.

  In the recent assault, the unthinkable had happened. His squadron—the elite, the pride of the Empire—had not just been stopped. It had been scattered like a flock of sparrows. Those "bullets of light" that tore through the wings of his wingmen... that wasn't magic. It was a rain of molten metal, creating a wall impossible to pass through.

  We are the defenders of civilization, he repeated mentally, trying to suppress the panic. We cannot lose to savages. Mu would never betray us; Parpaldia fell due to its own stupidity. But we are Mirishial! We are the pinnacle!

  However, reality was taking a sledgehammer to his convictions. The smoking ships below—the majestic Orichalcums and Mithrils—were burning.

  "Attention all aircraft! Acoustic contact and visual confirmation!" A crackling voice from the mana-comm slammed into his ears, yanking Omega from the abyss of fear. "Group target! Azimuth two-two-zero! Altitude—four thousand! Count—forty... no, more!"

  Omega looked up. High in the blue sky, black dots appeared. They were growing frighteningly fast.

  "This is Beta-1," he wheezed into the airwaves, forcing his voice to sound steady. "Sixth Squadron, listen to my order! Those are enemy strike groups. Bombers. If they break through to the fleet now, while the ships' shields are overloaded, we will go to the bottom. Don't lose your nerve, boys! Our mission is interception! Break their formation! Force them to drop their bombs into the sea! The honor of the Empire is in your hands!"

  "Roger that! For the Empire!" the pilots responded. Their voices trembled, but they held the fury of the doomed.

  Sixteen surviving Beta-2s, battered and overheating, pulled their noses up. It was a suicide attack: heavy attack aircraft against an armada holding the altitude advantage.

  The sky filled with a new sound. If Mirishial engines "sang," Gra-Valkan engines roared. The low, thick, bass rumble of dozens of radial piston motors drowned out everything around. It was the sound of raw industrial power devouring oil and air.

  "Target in sight! Single-engine monoplanes! Flying in tight formation!"

  Flying to meet the mages were Sirius dive bombers covered by Antares monoplane fighters. They did not sparkle with magic. They were painted in dark green and gray camouflage—predatory, angular machines with retractable landing gear.

  "They are splitting up!" Omega's wingman shouted.

  Part of the Gra-Valkan formation, the escort fighters, shot sharply upward, taking the high ground for an attack. But the bomber group was left without immediate cover.

  Idiots! They are too overconfident! They left the bombers exposed! The thought flashed in Omega's brain like a spark. It was a chance. The only chance.

  "Sixth, follow me! Attack the group of 'bomb trucks'! They are sluggish! Shoot them down!"

  Omega poured all his mana into the engine. The turbines howled at the edge of audibility. The speed of his Beta-2 reached 410 km/h—the limit at which the airframe began to vibrate. He chose a target—the outermost flight of the enemy strike machines. His two wingmen fell in on his tail.

  "Distance one-point-five kilometers! Closing! Fire nose emitters when ready!"

  He could already see the rivets on the enemy's skin. The massive machines with non-retractable "spatted" landing gear (like a Junkers Ju 87, but faster) seemed like easy prey.

  Mirishial pilots were certain: a bomber is always slower than a fighter, especially a magical one.

  The enemy spotted them. The lead element of the Sirius flight wagged its wings. And suddenly, tongues of blue flame erupted from their exhaust stacks. The engines roared on emergency power.

  Instead of turning to fight or breaking formation, the Gra-Valkan bombers simply... accelerated.

  "Wha...?!" Omega's eyes nearly popped out of his head.

  The distance, which was supposed to be shrinking, froze, and then began to increase.

  "I am at maximum thrust!" the wingman screamed. "Commander, I cannot catch them! They are pulling away! The bombers are outrunning us in a straight line!"

  The Sirius (an analogue to late-war dive bombers) could reach speeds up to 450-480 km/h in level flight. The Beta-2, structurally a magical analogue to 1930s aircraft with fixed landing gear and poor aerodynamics, looked like a kite trying to catch an eagle at its limit of 410 km/h.

  "This... simply cannot be!" Omega said with amazement and horror, watching the black silhouettes with crosses on their wings easily, with mocking nonchalance, pull away from his best interceptors. "These machines, loaded with bombs, are faster than our empty fighters?! What kind of devilish engines are they using?!"

  "Commander! From above!"

  The wingman's scream interrupted his thoughts. Omega looked up, but it was too late.

  The Antares fighters, which had "left" earlier, were actually just gaining altitude to attack. Now they were falling upon the Mirishial squadron from the direction of the sun. It was the classic "Boom and Zoom" tactic.

  Long tracers of 20mm cannon fire stitched through the wings and cockpits of the Betas.

  "Break! Evade..." Omega yanked the control stick, but his wingman had already turned into a ball of fire.

  They weren't hunting. They were being hunted. The difference in technology wasn't just noticeable—it was fatal. The mechanical physics they despised was now methodically, coldly, and ruthlessly crossing them off the list of the living.

  Central World. Southwest of the Magdola Archipelago.

  Flagship HME battleship Colebrand.

  "All stations! Prepare to repel a massive air attack! Air defense—sector barrage fire! Barrier mages—redirect energy from engines to shields!" Captain Cromwell's voice cracked into a wheeze. He understood: they were about to be slaughtered.

  Death circled above the Mirishial squadron, blocking out the sun. Hundreds of black dots—Antares fighters and Sirius dive bombers—lined up in a "carousel" formation that was terrifying in its mechanical precision. Their low, vibrating hum, drifting down from the heights, penetrated not into the ears, but directly into the chest, causing an irrational sense of nausea and panic. It was the sound of thousands of horsepower encased in metal.

  Tension bordering on hysteria reigned on the decks of the sparkling white ships. Young sailors and cadets, the elite of the fleet, rammed magic cartridges into the breeches of the Actaeon anti-aircraft light cannons with trembling hands. They were used to drills where the enemy was slow and understandable. But now, a cloud controlled by the cold, industrial logic of murder hung over them. Officers in full dress uniforms, stained with dark patches of sweat, shredded their vocal cords trying to maintain formation and discipline. They understood: this was a trap. They were targets in a shooting gallery.

  And then, as if on an invisible conductor's signal, it began.

  The flights of Antares fighters went into a dive.

  WROOOOOOOOOM...

  On the wings of the diving Sirius bombers, aerodynamic sirens—Gra-Valkas's famous "Jericho Trumpets"—switched on. This sound—a piercing, rising howl resembling the scream of a falling soul—was a psychological weapon more terrible than the bombs themselves. It paralyzed the will, forced men to hunch their heads into their shoulders, and turned humans into trembling biomass.

  "THEY ARE DIVING ON US! FIRE!" the air defense officer screamed.

  Beams of light struck the sky. But the planes were too fast, and the gunners were too terrified.

  A rain of lead poured down from the heavens. Large-caliber 12.7mm machine guns and 20mm aircraft cannons of the Antares opened up with suppressing fire. Tracer bursts stitched through the air and slammed into the magical protection.

  The Aegis water domes reacted. The surface of the force field rippled, absorbing the kinetic energy of thousands of bullets. The water boiled, turning into steam. Bullets, losing inertia, flattened against the dense structure of magic.

  But physics cannot be cheated. Every hit was a blow. Every bullet transferred energy to the barrier, forcing the magic crystal generators in the holds to overheat.

  "Overload in the primary circuit! Crystals in the 'red zone'! Structure unstable!" magi-engineers shouted into the speaking tubes.

  The shields began to flicker. Breaches appeared in the "water armor" in places of the densest fire. And then the lead began to drum on the decks, mowing down anti-aircraft crews, tearing flesh and metal. Blood mixed with sea foam on the teak planks.

  Then the Sirius bombers entered the final stage of their attack. Dive angle—80 degrees. Speed—extreme.

  "BOMBS!"

  Synchronously, as if on parade, black droplets separated from under the fuselages of dozens of machines. 250- and 500-kilogram high-explosive aerial bombs rushed toward the ships.

  Their whistle, superimposed on the howl of the sirens, created a symphony of hell.

  This was the moment of truth. Magic against the mass and velocity of explosives.

  One of the bombs struck directly into the bow section of an escort cruiser. The magic barrier, already depleted by machine-gun fire, flashed with a blinding white light and... popped. It simply could not withstand the point-blank impact of such kinetic energy. The steel casing of the bomb punched through the deck and exploded inside.

  The explosion was monstrous. Unlike magic shells, which mostly scorched, this explosion broke the structure. The shockwave turned the hull plating outward inside out. The mast collapsed.

  On the flagship Colebrand, Admiral Battista, clapping his hands over his ears, watched in horror as his invincible fleet turned into a collection of burning torches.

  "Hold shields! Hold at any cost!" he screamed, but his voice drowned in the roar of detonations.

  The sailors, blinded by flashes, deafened by explosions, lost their human semblance. Some fired into the sky blindly; others, driven mad, tried to jump overboard, right into the propellers.

  This was not a battle. This was the industrial disposal of a fleet, conducted with the cold, soulless efficiency of a death conveyor belt.

  The chaos on the decks of the flagship was managed, but no less terrifying for it. Junior officers in once-white tunics now smeared with soot used everything: shouts, magical voice amplifiers, and when that didn't help—the butts of their sidearms and fists to rouse the stunned, shell-shocked sailors.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  "To the guns, you dogs! To the guns if you want to live! Load!" a midshipman roared, dragging the body of a dead man away from the targeting handwheel.

  They understood: a ship is alive as long as it snaps back. In this new war, pity was a death sentence. The officers forced mechanisms and people to work beyond the limit of the possible, maintaining discipline through a fear that was stronger than the fear of death. They had to be the rocks against which this steel storm would break. Even if there was no hope left inside those rocks.

  The smell of burnt wiring and superheated magic ether—the sweet, sickening scent of dying magic—hung in the conning tower.

  "First Lieutenant, sir! Structural integrity of the Water Aegis is collapsing!" the Master Lieutenant of the magic station shouted into the communication crystal, his face, illuminated by emergency red lighting, twisted in horror. "Multiple circuit ruptures! Residual power—fifteen percent! If they continue... we will burn!"

  "Hold the line! Redirect energy from the propulsion screws!" First Lieutenant Keith growled in response, gripping the tactical table until his knuckles turned white.

  He looked at the mana-radar. The dots of the enemy dive bombers were scattering.

  "Listen to me carefully, magic station! As soon as those bastards start climbing and pull out of the dive—DROP THE BARRIERS!"

  It was a crazy decision. To remain naked in battle. But they had no choice. Active high-density Aegis blocked not only enemy fire but also scattered their own magical AA volleys.

  "Give our gunners a clear sky! We must shoot them down while they are vulnerable on the exit from the attack! Let them feel the wrath of the Empire! And then... immediately initialize Terra-Bastion!"

  "Earth element, sir? But the mana consumption..."

  "To hell with consumption!" Keith cut him off. "The bombs are done, but I feel it in my gut—next come the 'fish.' Water dampens the blast wave well, but against a direct hit of a steel slug below the waterline, we need something harder! Harden the hull! Execute!"

  "Y... yes sir!"

  Time stretched into a thick, viscous substance. The seconds of falling bombs seemed like hours. The roar, the vibration of the hull, the groans of the wounded—everything merged into a single hum. Finally, the roar of the Sirius engines changed pitch. Having dropped their deadly load, the lightened Gra-Valkan planes began to shoot straight up into the clouds like candles.

  "Attention! Enemy withdrawing! DROP BARRIERS! FIRE ON THE RETREATING! BURN THEM!" Keith screamed, his voice breaking into a falsetto.

  With a slight rustle, the bluish haze of the protective field vanished from over the battleship. And in that instant, the Colebrand turned into a volcano. Dozens of magical anti-aircraft mounts—"light machine guns" and rapid-fire "fire slings"—opened hurricane fire.

  The roar of shots tore the air. Not lead bullets, but clusters of plasma and magically concentrated light rushed into the sky, leaving crimson tracers behind them. This was vengeance.

  The Sirius bombers climbing away found themselves in the worst position—they exposed their bellies to the strike.

  The first magic charges, endowed with homing capabilities on engine heat, slammed into the bomber formation.

  FLASH!

  Fuel tanks, unprotected by armor from magical heat, detonated. One, a second, a third Sirius turned into fireballs. Duralumin melted and flowed in burning drops into the ocean. Wings tore off, fuselages broke apart.

  One of the clumps of magic stitched right through the cockpit of a flight leader. The pilot didn't even have time to realize he had died—his body simply vaporized. The uncontrollable machine tumbled and went into a corkscrew downward, crashing into the waves with a fountain of spray.

  "YES! Burn, you iron scum!" the cries of delight on the Mirishial bridge were wild, primal. They saw that their enemy was mortal. That he could be killed.

  But a monstrous price was paid for this momentary triumph.

  "Report! Reactor status!" Admiral Battista, staggering, grabbed the edge of the commander's chair. The fog of concussion clouded his eyes.

  Captain Cromwell turned to him. His face was gray as ash. He looked not at the Admiral, but through him, at the indicators flashing red.

  "Mana-accumulators... drained to 45 percent, sir," his voice was dry and lifeless. "We spent half the strategic reserve in ten minutes of combat. The efficiency of the Earth Shield will be lower than calculated. Main battery reload will slow by a third."

  Cromwell paused and added, as if summing up a life:

  "Confirmed kills—sixteen units."

  "Sixteen..." Battista whispered. A bitter sneer distorted his lips. Two hundred machines in the sky. And sixteen shot down. That wasn't even ten percent. "Too few... And too late. We are merely scratching the leviathan."

  And then the Manacomm exploded with a new scream, full of inhuman despair:

  "ADMIRAL! LOW-FLYING TARGETS! Bearing two-four-zero! Coming in right over the water! Distance eight kilometers! There are many of them! Eighty... ninety! They are carrying 'fish'!"

  Battista jerked his binoculars up. There, on the horizon, almost touching the wave crests, came the Rigels. Torpedo bombers. They were coming in a wide front to put the squadron in a "pincer," giving no opportunity to evade. Their long, cigar-shaped aerial torpedoes gleamed dully under their wings.

  "Torpedo attack... 'Hammer and anvil'..." he wheezed, realizing the enemy's tactical pattern. The bombers forced them to cluster and drop shields, and now the torpedo bombers would finish them off like fish in a barrel.

  In his eyes, empty just a second ago, the fire of the last, insane fury of a cornered beast flared up.

  "Activate Terra-Bastion! All energy to the lower hemisphere!" Battista screamed, losing his voice. "TO BATTLE! DESTROY THEM ALL! MAIN BATTERY—RAPID FIRE INTO THE WATER IN FRONT OF THEM! CREATE A WAVE! SHOOT THEM DOWN!"

  The battleship Colebrand shuddered, spewing a hail of magic shells from all barrels, trying to place a wall of fire and water between itself and inevitably approaching death. But the propellers of the torpedo bombers were already howling a requiem over the greatest fleet of the magical world.

  At the same time. Air Group of the Gra-Valkas 2nd Fleet.

  Airspace above the epicenter of the battle.

  Eighty Rigel torpedo bombers, like a school of hungry gray sharks that had scented blood, glided a meter above the crests of the waves. Their radial Sakae engines were running at the limit, vibrating so hard the pilots' teeth chattered. Each of them carried a "long lance" beneath its belly—a 450-millimeter (in the aerial version) aerial torpedo equipped with stabilizers for high-speed drops.

  Lieutenant Commander Passim, commander of the combined strike group, gripped the control yoke with white-knuckled fingers. The wind whistled through the loosely closed canopy, mixing with the smell of high-octane gasoline and fear.

  The sky above already belonged to them—the Antares fighters had done their job, carving up the magical "eagles" of Mirishial. Now nothing prevented the Rigels from entering their attack runs. Nothing, except the wall of fire being spewed by the doomed ships ahead.

  The enemy fleet, stripped of its protective water domes, resembled a wounded beast determined to take the hunters into the grave with it. The snow-white sides of the battleships were soot-stained and the masts were shot away, but hundreds of barrels of magical artillery were pointing down at the water.

  "Attention strike groups!" Passim's voice on the airwaves was distorted by static, but firm. "Execute 'Anvil' tactics! Flights Alpha and Bravo—approach from the port bow! Charlie and Delta—starboard! Pin them down! Don't let them turn away!"

  It was a classic of naval warfare, honed to perfection by Gra-Valkas. Attack from different angles, forcing the enemy to expose their broadside to one group of torpedoes while trying to evade another.

  "Copy that, Commander! Breaking formation!"

  But Mirishial did not intend to surrender silently.

  The air in front of Passim's cockpit suddenly filled with a crimson radiance. Magic rapid-fire guns of medium caliber, switched to direct-fire mode, opened up with squall fire.

  WHOOSH-WHOOSH-WHOOSH!

  Clots of concentrated magic, leaving crimson ionized tracers behind them, stitched through space. They didn't burst into shrapnel like earthly anti-aircraft shells. They worked like plasma cutters.

  "Bandits right! Dave, pull up!" his wingman screamed.

  Too late.

  One of the "red spheres" clipped the outermost torpedo bomber on the right bearing. There was no flash, no smoke. The duralumin skin simply evaporated, and the aircraft's wing was sheared off as if by a giant laser blade. The machine, spinning around its axis, slammed into the water at 300 kilometers per hour, instantly turning into a pile of debris. The water hissed at the impact site.

  "They're leading us! It's too dense!" panic began to erupt over the radio. "It's a wall of fire!"

  "Hold formation!" barked Passim, feeling icy sweat trickling down his back under his flight jacket. "Cowards have no place here! Target—the flagship! The one with the admiral's pennant!"

  For a torpedo bomber pilot, these last seconds of the attack are the worst nightmare. You cannot maneuver. You must fly straight, level, and at a constant speed, otherwise the torpedo will bury itself in the water ("dive") or break upon release. You are a perfect target.

  THWACK-THWACK-THWACK!

  Clumps of energy, smelling of ozone even through the glass, swept past Passim's canopy. One of the projectiles passed centimeters from the fuselage, and the pilot felt a wave of heat singe his face. The skin of the plane drummed—whether from shards of magic crystals or water kicked up by explosions, he didn't know.

  The battleship ahead grew, turning into a mountain. Passim saw the flashes of its broadside guns. He saw small figures of people in white scrambling across the deck. He saw the black holes of punctures.

  "If I die now, my family will get the pension," an inappropriate, detached thought flashed through his mind. "The main thing—don't drop early. Don't drop early..."

  "Range 1000! 800!" the bombardier-navigator wheezed, looking through the simple optical sight. "Target speed 20 knots! Lead by two hull lengths!"

  Two neighboring planes flared up simultaneously. The one on the left was torn apart by a direct hit to the fuel tank. The one on the right, losing its tail section, dipped its nose and crashed into a wave; its torpedo detonated, raising a pillar of water that covered those following behind.

  Passim clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. He guided the plane through hell, transforming into an extension of the machine.

  "Scatter! Individual runs! For the Empire!"

  "DROP POINT! DROP!" the navigator screamed.

  Passim yanked the lever. The plane, relieved of the 800-kilogram steel "fish," jumped upward, as if rejoicing in its freedom.

  "Bugging out! Full throttle! Climbing right turn!"

  The pilot slammed the throttle quadrant all the way forward, banking into a crazy evasive maneuver. Centrifugal force pressed him into his seat. He managed to cast a glance backward.

  Long white trails on the water stretched toward the side of the Colebrand. There were many of them. Ten. Twelve.

  "You won't dodge this," Passim thought with malicious satisfaction, seeing the giant battleship try to turn clumsily. "You are too proud to dance."

  "Attention! Torpedoes on course! Three... Two..."

  Another red beam grazed Passim's aileron, leaving a smoking hole, but the plane kept flying. He survived.

  And down below, at sea level, steel death was already knocking on hulls protected only by earth magic and the prayers of the doomed.

  Central World. Southwest of the Magdola Archipelago. Flagship battleship HME Colebrand. Bridge.

  "First Lieutenant, sir! Visual contact! Enemy aircraft have released their payloads one and a half kilometers out from the formation! They're staying outside effective small-caliber AA range!" First Lieutenant Kate's voice shook with strain as he peered through the magical sighting scope at the horizon.

  The silhouettes of the Rigels climbed sharply and peeled away, dodging the red tracer streams of the anti-aircraft fire. But there was no relief on the bridge. A heavy, sticky dread hung in the air. To an amateur the enemy maneuver might have looked irrational.

  "Why are they breaking off so early? There's no way they could miss with bombs from that—" Kate cut himself off. His eyes dropped to the ocean surface.

  There, among the whitecaps, dozens of perfectly straight, foaming wakes were racing toward the battleship. Dead fast. Converging on the squadron from every direction.

  A wave of ice-cold terror crashed over him. The image of Clarent's death flashed in his mind: the giant snapped clean in half like a dry twig.

  "Torpedoes! All-ahead flank attack!" Kate bellowed at the top of his lungs, drowning out the sirens. "Hard-a-starboard! It's a pincer!"

  The special kind of organized chaos that comes right before disaster erupted on the bridge. Officers, pale as corpses, screamed orders down the voice pipes, trying to force thirty thousand tons of steel to turn; but inertia didn't care.

  Captain Cromwell went cold. He understood: there was no time left to maneuver. Gra-Valkas had calculated the attack perfectly; the torpedo bombers had boxed them in.

  "Too late to turn…" he whispered. "Colebrand won't get her bow around in time."

  Comms with Variant, steaming in their wake, went dead. The ether was nothing but static and the screams of dying men from the escort ships.

  Cromwell snatched the all-hands microphone.

  "ALL HANDS! TORPEDOES TO PORT—IMPACT!" His voice turned to steel. "MAGES—ACTIVATE TERRA BASTION! PRIORITY UNDERWATER HULL! MAXIMUM DENSITY! PUSH THE CRYSTALS TO THE LIMIT!"

  It was their last, desperate play. Earth magic. The Colebrand's hull glowed not blue but a heavy amber-gold. At the molecular level the steel began to shift: thickening, turning viscous, impossibly tough; enough to take a blow that would shatter granite.

  ONE SECOND… TWO…

  The impact wasn't a sound. It was an earthquake.

  Three torpedoes, each packing hundreds of kilograms of high explosive, slammed into the port side within a fraction of a second of one another.

  B-B-BOOOM!

  The battleship leapt like a kicked horse. The deck dropped out from under everyone's feet. Cromwell lost his balance and crashed temple-first into the mag-radar console. Darkness swallowed him, but sheer will dragged him back. Hot blood poured down his face, half-blinding him, yet he hauled himself upright.

  Men were screaming. Instrument glass had exploded across the deck. Lights flickered.

  "Damage report!" Cromwell roared, spitting blood.

  He didn't really need one. He looked out the starboard bridge window and froze.

  "Merciful gods…"

  The neighboring Mythril-class battleship Variant, pride of the fleet, steaming three cables off their beam, had eaten four torpedoes. She'd burned all her mana trying to shoot down the planes; no juice left for Terra Bastion.

  It was apocalyptic. Water spouts rose higher than the masts. Then, with a screaming, tearing shriek of tortured metal, her keel gave way under the hydrodynamic shock. The ship simply folded. Bow and stern collapsed together like a house of cards. Her boilers detonated, hurling a multi-thousand-ton main turret skyward like a child's toy. In seconds Variant vanished beneath a mountain of steam and fire, taking the flower of the navy with her.

  Colebrand had survived by nothing short of a miracle. And magic.

  "Earth barrier held, sir!" Kate reported, uniform torn, face black with soot, clinging to a stanchion on the listing deck. "Armor belt's buckled all to hell but no breaches! …But that's it. Mana capacitors are dry. Residual power thirty-five percent. We can't raise Aegis again. One more wave and we're dead."

  Dead silence rang through the bridge. They'd beaten off the attack. They were alive. But the fleet was gone. Of the proud armada only the smoking, battered flagship and a couple of burning destroyers on the horizon remained.

  Every pair of eyes, wide with animal fear and pleading, turned to the admiral.

  Battista stood at the shattered panoramic window, staring at the oil slick and wreckage where Variant had been moments ago. His shoulders sagged. Every ounce of imperial arrogance had bled out of him along with the lives of his sailors. In that hour he aged fifty years.

  "We're not winning this battle," he said quietly, voice like dead leaves in the wind. "This isn't an enemy… it's a force of nature. Steel has defeated magic."

  He turned slowly to Cromwell. Tears of helplessness stood in his eyes.

  "Save whoever we still can. Course zero-nine-zero. To Kartalpas… We're withdrawing."

  "Sir?"

  "You didn't hear me, Captain? WE'RE RUNNING!" he suddenly screamed, voice cracking into a shrill screech. "Damn the crystal burn! Squeeze every last knot out of the engines! Burn the crystals to ash if you have to, but get us the hell out of here! MAXIMUM SPEED—RETREAT!"

  "Aye aye… retreat," Cromwell echoed, tasting nothing but ash in his mouth.

  Battleship Colebrand, trailing a plume of black smoke and dying magical sparks, began her slow, shameful turn away from the graveyard of her sisters, beneath the indifferent gaze of the satellites high in orbit.

  The age of Mirishial dominance was over.