What in the name of the gods?
The second Artificer was unwrapping small sticks of what looked like copper, topped with radio receivers. Though she was no expert, Kaori knew enough to recognize a detonator when she saw one. The black, taffy substance was chi residue mixed with sulfur and sawdust—the same explosive that filled their own chi bombs.
They’re planning to blow the tanks?
Could it be true? These were the rebels Yukiko spoke of? And now they were in First House with exactly the same plan as the Kagé?
Could it be?
The first Artificer knelt on the walkway directly above her head, rigging a timer. Perhaps it was light refracting off her breather. Perhaps the faint labor of their breath. But the Artificer looked down through the mesh, sucked in an astonished gasp as he spied them hanging below, and within the beat of a sparrow’s wing, all thought vanished from her mind.
Kaori kicked off the wall, pivoting on her palms and swinging up over the railing. Her heel connected with the False-Lifer’s jaw as Maro took one Artificer’s legs out from under him. The Guildsman wobbled and tumbled off the walkway, brass-gauntlets shrieking on the railing as he arrested his fall, clinging like a tick over the drop.
The second Artificer drew an iron-thrower, aimed it at Kaori’s head just as she seized the False-Lifer’s throat, wakizashi ready to strike. Eight razored needles uncurled in the dark, gleaming in the garish light spilling through the access hatch. Poised at Kaori’s throat, chest, eyes, just like the blade she pressed at the False-Lifer’s jugular. Maro raised his katana, ready to strike at the Artificer aiming at Kaori’s head.
Six of them, frozen in place, each hovering a breath away from murder.
The False-Lifer’s voice was a whisper.
“You would be the Kagé, I presume?”
*
The Earthcrusher hit the walls of Yama like an avalanche, shearing through battlements as if they were dry grass, the men atop them mere dandelion seeds. Chunks of masonry were tossed about like a child throwing unwanted toys, Kitsune soldiers falling like black snow onto crushed granite below.
Each blow from its chainsaw arms was accompanied by a tortured metal shriek, a bubbling blast from its chimney stacks. Kitsune corvettes swarmed around it like mosquitoes, the pilots trying to draw the behemoth away from the city. But the Earthcrusher ignored them, kicked its way through the outer walls of Yama and stomped slowly toward Kitsune-jō.
The shreddermen poured in through the breached walls, each suit a giant in its own right. Ten feet high, legs as thick as old sugi trees, long, chainsaw arms hooked like scythes. Pilot lights shearing through smoke, glittering on the swords of the Tora bushimen who stormed in their wake. Howling fury, Tiger banners whipping in the wind. And having no chance of stopping the Earthcrusher, the men and women manning Yama’s walls screamed their challenges in return and dropped into the storm of blades.
Iron Samurai leaped from the walls and crashed onto the shreddermen roll cages, stabbing and hacking at the pilots within. Shuriken-throwers singing poppopopopopop, spraying death into the Tiger warriors, hoping to stem the red tide. But on they came, like blood from a wound in Yama’s skin, flooding her streets with mayhem and screams.
In the skies above, the fleets were joined, shuriken fire filling the air. The first Kitsune ironclad to charge the Guild fleet had been cut down on all sides by withering hail. As it tumbled earthward, it had fired its grapple lines into a Guild ship, dragging it to its doom, the pair exploding in a rush of wailing hydrogen. The Kitsune Daimyo’s flagship Lucky Fox had followed into the breach, firing its own grapple lines into the Guild ship Blessed Light. Their crews were already locked in deadly battle across the decks.
Michi roared aloud as the Kurea plummeted toward the Honorable Death. The sky between them was filled with dueling corvettes, the glittering rain of shuriken spray, flurries of black snow. A glance west revealed the Phoenix fleet cutting around the Kitsune, encircling despite the desperate charges of the Fox corvettes. Surrounded on all sides, the Kitsune captains had no choice but to charge into the enemy’s open arms.