Chapter 732: Cannon Fire [Bonus - ]

Chapter 732: Cannon Fire [Bonus Chapter]

The freight elevator dropped them down several tiers and opened onto a warehouse so vast and high-ceilinged that the far wall disappeared into haze.

The air was warm and smelled of machine oil, flux paste and cold tempered steel.

Rows of towering industrial racks climbed toward the ceiling, stacked with heavy crates, wrapped iron chassis and machined parts stamped with glowing blue storage seals.

Overhead cranes glided along brass tracks and shifted whole pallets of raw material with soft hydraulic hums.

Mia pressed her nose to the nearest rack of shiny brackets and stared up at the cranes with her mouth hanging open.

Rika’s phoenix poked out of her collar and cheeped at the glowing seals while Aeliana raised the camera, thought better of it and lowered it again.

Silas walked down the wide central aisle with his boots clicking on dense concrete.

He looked at Valerius with a calm businesslike face.

"Alright, Val," he said, getting straight to the point. "Here’s what we need... Cannons and structural parts for building golems... Not the small residential toys, Industrial-grade chassis, articulating limb-joints, core mounts and reinforced plating."

Valerius’s eyebrows shot up and a startled laugh burst out of him.

"Cannons and golem frames?! Silas, my boy, you’re not outfitting a patrol squad, you’re building a fortress garrison? What do you expect to invade your borders, an entire sky-fleet..."

"Just preparing for contingencies," Silas said with a knowing smile. "Can you supply them or not?"

"Can we?" Valerius clutched his chest in mock offense. "You insult the Sterling name... Follow me."

He led them down an aisle marked with deep red security runes and stopped before a reinforced steel gate.

It hissed open at his touch and revealed an armaments wing where heavy artillery and modular automaton frames rested on hydraulic test beds under cold white light.

Solenne let out a tiny high-pitched gasp and clapped both hands over her mouth.

Her tail started to wag with high speed, whapping against her skirt in a flurry of thuds.

Her golden eyes practically burned with fire as she forgot her timid nature and darted toward the nearest rack of machined parts.

’Oh, the tolerances!’ Her heart raced as she hovered over a row of precision-milled shoulder brackets. ’The casting is so smooth but the secondary casing is a zinc-heavy brass blend, and that will fatigue after four hundred cycles in damp basin soil... I have to inspect every single joint!’

"Wait! Lord Silas, please let me check them!" She dug a pair of brass calipers and a small magnifying loupe out of her satchel and dropped to her knees beside a crate of articulating knee-joints.

Her fingers flew over the metal with expert speed as she tapped a knuckle against the alloy and listened to the chime with her ears swiveling to catch the tune.

"No, not this bin." She shook her head hard and pushed a crate aside. "The carbon content is too brittle! A high-impact recoil would crack the internal race within thirty days... We need the heat-treated cobalt-steel blend from that rack over there!"

Valerius stared at the artificer with his jaw hanging open.

"She... she can hear the carbon temper just by tapping the flange?!" He looked from Solenne to Silas and back again. "That’s foundry-master intuition... We have guild veterans who need three reagent dips to work that out!"

"Solenne designed a Golem called Titan herself," Silas said proudly, folding his arms as he watched her work. "She knows what she’s doing... If she says it’s brittle, we don’t buy it."

Solenne scurried down the aisle like an excited hound on a fresh trail, pointing her calipers at pallets with ruthless technical authority.

"These limb housings are magnificent!" She ran her fingers along a stack of heavy modular arm assemblies. "Dampened hydraulic channels with secondary mana conduits... They can take forty percent torque overload without warping! We need four sets of these for the lower torso assemblies and those swivel plates over there are nickel-forged, completely immune to corrosion from basin mist! I just hope they aren’t too expensive."

Two technicians trailed her with a flatbed cart and tried to keep up.

Every time she flung a hand at a pallet, they scrambled to tag it, and the cart rattled behind her like a duckling following its mother.

Morwenna stalked along behind them and studied the heavy hardware with a grim assessing eye.

"The girl’s got the right of it... Metal that rots in the damp is as good as rotten driftwood. If you’re putting these on walls, they have to take a battering without crying for oil every Tuesday."

"And the weapons?" Silas asked.

He walked toward a row of imposing dark-iron artillery pieces resting on low wheeled cradles.

Valerius stepped up and patted the cold rifled muzzle of the nearest with a proud grin.

"Tier 2 mana cannons! It’s for a standard fortress... Smooth bore, reinforced runic barrel lining, built to fire either solid dense-iron shot or compressed elemental charges... The breach has a triple-layer dampening sleeve, so you won’t crack the stone mounts even with a high-yield battery."

Silas ran his palm along the cool barrel.

He reached out with his regular mana channels and sensed the unbroken flow carved into the steel.

The craftsmanship was immaculate, clean and sturdy and built for brutal continuous attrition.

Morwenna hefted one of the iron shot stacked beside the cradle.

She tapped it with a knuckle, weighed it in her palm and tossed it back with a grunt of approval.

Mia wandered over and tried to lift the next one. She got her arms around it, strained until her ears turned red, and gave up when it didn’t budge.

She patted the shot like a sleeping animal and walked away with great dignity.

"I want to see how it fires before it goes in my Inventory," he said. "No offense to your family’s brand, Val, but I don’t buy siege guns blind... I’m not a rich billionaire that just wastes money."

"Test them? Say no more!" Valerius clapped his hands together. "We have an indoor ballistics range right through that bulkhead!"

He whistled for two depot technicians in heavy leather aprons.

They unlocked the hydraulic wheel clamps of a Tier 2 cannon and rolled the weapon down a side ramp.

The iron wheels groaned under the weight, and the whole procession echoed through the warehouse like a funeral march for somebody’s wall.

The firing gallery at the bottom of the ramp was long and reinforced and lined with shock-absorbent composite tiles and heavy blast curtains that hung like gray sails.

The ceiling lamps ran in a perfect straight line down the range and at the far end of the sixty-yard lane stood a target wall built from five-foot-thick blocks of dense basalt, with glowing barrier wards crawling across its face like green veins.

The technicians locked the cannon’s carriage to the firing platform.

Four iron clamps slammed down on the wheels one after another.

KA-CHUNK! KA-CHUNK! KA-CHUNK! KA-CHUNK!

Solenne scrambled up beside the breech with a rune-slate and a stylus and checked the sleeve seals one by one, muttering numbers under her breath, before she gave Silas a sharp nod and scrambled back down.

"This is good..."

"Stand clear of the breach vents!" Valerius warned, ducking behind a waist-high shield wall of tempered blast-glass.

The others piled in beside him.

Morwenna braced a boot on the glass like a captain at a rail, Mia climbed up onto Rika’s shoulders for a better view, and Rika let her while Aeliana raised the camera and stood very still.

The technicians backed away from the platform with their hands up, and one of them pulled his leather cap down over his ears.

Silas stepped up to the cannon.

He walked to the rear intake manifold and set his right palm flat on the primary activation rune.

HUUUUUUM!

His regular water mana poured into the intake channels as the runes along the dark barrel lit in sequence and flared a deep sapphire from breech to muzzle.

The pressure seals locked home with a heavy clank and the whole gun began to tremble on its carriage.

’Hm... This is good... I need to mount it on the tower as well as on the walls.’’

The iron clamps groaned.

A low hum climbed through the floor and into the soles of every boot in the gallery, and the fine hairs on Valerius’s arms stood straight up under his azure sleeves.

The air in the gallery moved.

Every drop of moisture in the room streamed toward the cannon... Mist peeled off the blast curtains, the damp rose out of the composite tiles in pale threads, and the cold gallery air thinned until it hurt to breathe.

It all funneled into the firing chamber and compressed into a dense core of high-pressure liquid that glowed through the iron like a blue star.

’Is he feeding a siege gun with nothing but water mana?!’ Valerius’s eyes went wide behind the glass. ’Where’s the powder charge? Where’s the elemental cartridge too...?’

Again and again... It just seemed like Silas like showing off.

"Fusing locked!" Solenne called, with her ears pinned back in eager anticipation. "Mana saturation at ninety-eight percent! The chamber stability is pristine, Lord Silas!"

Silas smiled as a touch of gold glinted in his dark blue eyes.

"Let’s see the punch."

He released the trigger.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The whole gallery shuddered in the concussive roar... The blast-glass sang and dust rained from the ceiling in gray sheets.

Every curtain snapped out flat like a sail in a gale as a shockwave exploded backward out of the breech dampeners and dissolved into a harmless howling cloud of steam.

The slug left the muzzle as a spiral of compressed water and mana, and it didn’t fly so much as vanish.

A streak of blue light tore down the sixty yards in the blink of an eye and the air split behind it with a deafening sonic crack.

CRACK!

It hit the target wall dead center and for one frozen heartbeat the five-foot basalt slab simply held then a spiderweb of cracks raced across it from edge to edge as the stone bulged and the wards flared white before screaming.

BOOOOOOM!

The wall blew apart in a roaring avalanche of pulverized gravel and water, and the barrier wards shorted out with a violent zzt sound.

CRASH!

Chunks of rock the size of cartwheels hammered the far bulkhead. Shards pinged and rattled against the blast-glass in front of them.

The ceiling lamps swung wildly on their chains and threw crazy shadows across the gallery, and a mushroom of dust and white mist rolled slowly down the lane toward the shield wall while the last echoes of the explosion chased each other around the reinforced walls.

...Then the dust thinned.

Where five feet of solid basalt had stood there was a crater.

The back wall behind it had cracked in a perfect star as a single line of scorched glassy stone ran down the center of the lane where the slug had flown, and thin curls of steam rose from it as if the floor itself were exhaling.

Nobody in the gallery spoke and the technicians stood frozen at the ramp with their mouths open as a last pebble rolled off the lip of the crater and tinked onto the tiles.

Silas lowered his hand from the manifold and flexed his fingers.

The barrel in front of him pinged softly as it cooled, and the runes along it faded from sapphire to dull gray one by one.

Mia punched both fists in the air with a squeal while Aeliana’s camera clicked once.

CLICK-WHIRRR!

The picture came out blurry and covered in dust, and she looked at it with deep satisfaction anyway.

"Now that is a broadside!" Morwenna slammed her hand against the top of the blast-glass with a broad savage grin. "Clean kick, zero barrel wobble, and it pulverized five feet of solid rock... Mount six of those along the parapets and no raiding beast will ever get within three cables of your walls!"

Solenne bolted out to the gun carriage and pressed her loupe to the breech collar as she inspected the cooling metal.

"No micro-fractures! The dampening sleeves dispersed ninety-two percent of the recoil straight into the carriage frame! The barrel alignment did not shift by even a tenth of a millimeter!"

"Told you!" Valerius strutted out from behind the shield wall with his chin high. "Sterling Enterprises quality... Nothing less!"

’He pulverized five feet of basalt with water,’ he thought, dusting off his coat with a trembling hand. ’Without breaking a sweat and I’m supposed to beat that man in a rematch.’

He really needed to head to Amazonia...

The technicians finally remembered how to move.

They hurried to the crater with measuring rods, stared at the glassy line down the center of the lane and called numbers back and forth in shaky voices.

Aeliana studied the blurred print in her hand, then raised the camera again and took a second picture of the crater, steadier this time.

CLICK-WHIRRR!

Rika held the phoenix up for a look, and it sneezed a puff of white smoke at the dust before it tucked its head back under her chin.

Morwenna was already counting parapets on her fingers.

"It’s solid," Silas admitted, patting the warm iron barrel with real satisfaction. "We’ll take four of these Tier 2 cannons..."

’I’m sure Thora and Solenne can recreate them with the alloys we have in Blessed Land so we don’t need to buy much...’