The agreement signed with King Dunbar was a brilliant political coup for Maximilian, but it immediately imposed a logistical burden bordering on the impossible. The price of the alliance—the total, simultaneous destruction of the Fort Astra Garrison and its quarter-million Imperial soldiers—required the deployment of four MSW-1 devices. Each device was a precarious nightmare, an exquisitely engineered balance of lethal chemistry and raw magical power, now resting entirely on the shoulders of Max's fledgling military organization. Max designated the mission Operation Redoubt, a single, decisive act of mass devastation that would define Valum's terrifying power and irrevocably alter the balance of continental power. This operation was, in essence, the baptism by fire for what Max had already formally decreed, in his internal security papers, as Scorpia's Air Force.
The central and most immediate challenge was volatility. The MSW-1's core components were a death sentence waiting for the slightest mistake. Nitroglycerin, the powerful chemical explosive that Max's new chemical plants had only just begun to produce, was stabilized using advanced cooling gels and housed in heavily insulated copper canisters. Yet, its inherent sensitivity to shock meant the airships could not encounter any significant turbulence. More critically, the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen—the cryogenic fuels necessary for the final, devastating thermobaric phase—demanded absolute temperature control. These liquids required continuous, inefficient refrigeration by complex, mobile steam-powered cooling units installed within the airships' central hulls, units that had to be constantly replenished with pressurized steam to prevent the volatile liquids from boiling off and breaching their mana-infused containment systems. Transporting this cargo was not merely military logistics; it was akin to hauling four highly unstable, ticking chemical bombs across hundreds of miles of hostile territory. The engineering teams calculated their margin for error in degrees Celsius and milliseconds of pressure variation.
To manage this extreme peril, Max commissioned two new, larger airships—The Raptor and The Vulture—to join the reliable The Deliverance and The Swift, forming the initial four-ship squadron. These airships were immediately fitted with Max's newest, most critical defensive technology: the Honeycomb Mana Shield System. This apparatus was Max's direct, technological countermeasure to the Imperial Elemental Mages who could potentially target the airships with focused fire, wind, or elemental disintegration spells. The system worked using a dense series of specialized mana conduits woven directly into the airship's structural frame and connected to a central mana reservoir. When triggered, it instantly drew ambient mana to materialize a defensive barrier composed of thousands of small, overlapping hexagonal cells of solidified, high-density mana. The shield did not fully repel energy; it dispersed the impact force across its structure. "The shield is purely defensive, Captains," Max had stated during the final, tension-filled briefing. "It buys you precious time. Its genius lies in the honeycomb structure. A focused fire blast or a projectile will destroy a single, localized cell, but the energy is absorbed, and the adjacent cells instantly refresh the destroyed area. It prevents catastrophic cascading failure, giving you the time needed to escape." Each airship was to carry one MSW-1, carefully cradled in a bespoke, triple-redundant shock-dampening rig, guarded by a specialized engineering team whose sole, harrowing job was to monitor the cryogenic pressures and mana levels until the precise moment of deployment. The successful launch of this four-ship squadron, equipped with this hybrid magical and technical defense, was not just a mission launch—it was the physical and organizational start of Scorpia's Air Force.
The airship captains and crew of this nascent Air Force were a unique, tightly wound synthesis of personnel. The pilots were a mix of former Imperial airship veterans who had defected to Max's system of meritocracy, and highly trained Valum engineers who had mastered flight mechanics alongside engine maintenance. Their psychological state was a highly pressurized, fragile balance of professional focus and profound, shared dread. They were disciplined, precise, and intensely proud to operate the most advanced, feared machines in the world, yet they understood the cargo they carried was not a weapon of conventional war, but an instrument of mass, cold-blooded execution. The knowledge that they were about to vaporize a quarter of a million human beings—a feat of devastation unparalleled in this world's history—sat heavily in the tense, silent atmosphere of their cockpits. They were not mages who cast fire; they were technicians delivering a calculated, scientific annihilation, and that realization was a heavy moral burden.
Inside the command gondola of The Raptor, Captain Elara (a former Imperial pilot whose family had been ruined by feudal taxation) gripped the control wheel, her knuckles white. She spoke only in clipped, technical absolutes. The cabin was dominated by the faint, rhythmic pulse of the shield generator and the hiss of the overworked cooling units.
"Pressure readings on Canister Three, Engineer," Elara ordered, her voice a forced monotone to mask the anxiety. Canister Three held the volatile liquid hydrogen.
"Fluctuating, Captain. The boil-off rate is exceeding parameters. The coolers are maxed, and the steam pump is losing pressure," replied the engineer, his eyes glued to the brass pressure gauge. "We need to drop the load soon, Captain, or the containment mana will fail. We are currently beyond safety limits." The engineer's acknowledgment confirmed the crew was constantly operating in the red zone of Max's safety tolerances.
The deployment itself required a masterwork of complex logistical coordination. The airships launched under the cover of a thick, pervasive mountain fog just after midnight, flying dark—all running lights extinguished—in a tight formation. They flew not directly south toward the immediate Imperial concentration, but far west in a wide, sweeping arc over the uninhabited, sprawling forests of the former neutral lands before turning sharply back toward the Fort Astra target. This circuitous route was a calculated risk, designed specifically to skirt the established detection range of the Imperial Scrying Mages and avoid the now-porous, but still active, Imperial quarantine lines. Their entire flight path was a strategic lie.
Communication was managed exclusively through encrypted radio signals, a protocol Max enforced rigorously to prevent any single point of failure or capture. They would receive their final strike coordinates—a precise four-point grid corresponding to the Garrison's Command Center, Main Barracks, Logistics Hub, and Munitions Depot—via radio only minutes before the strike. This strict operational procedure prevented any potential captured agent from revealing the target coordinates under duress, ensuring Max maintained full tactical control until the last possible moment.
Max personally oversaw the loading of the final components onto The Raptor, giving Captain Elara one final, clear instruction that resonated in her memory: "The target is the logistics hub and main barracks. No deviation. If you are detected, shields on high draw, evade, and complete the delivery. The mission objective is not survival; it is annihilation." As the four massive, silent shapes slipped into the dense mist, their cargo of volatile chemicals and terrifying mana-infused technology humming faintly, the air squadron represented not just a tactical success, but the physical embodiment of a new, industrialized military age—the true, cold-blooded beginning of Scorpia's Air Force