In the high, cold air above Fort Astra, the four black silhouettes of Scorpia's Air Force reached their precise target coordinates. Below, the sprawling Imperial garrison remained utterly oblivious, its lamps burning brightly, its soldiers sleeping, its commanders ignoring the Emperor's frantic, desperate warning. Inside the command gondola of The Raptor, Captain Elara received the final coded confirmation. "Deployment sequence initiated," she whispered, her voice a thin, steel wire of professional control, deliberately ignoring the paralyzing sense of dread that permeated the cramped cabin. The engineered countdown began. She saw the other three airships—The Vulture, The Deliverance, and The Swift—maneuver into their designated drop zones over the main barracks, the logistics hub, the command center, and the massive munitions depot. Each MSW-1 was aimed to achieve maximum, non-overlapping coverage.
At T-minus zero, the airships' bomb bays opened. Four separate MSW-1 devices—five-foot steel cylinders packed with nitroglycerin, cryogenic liquids, and raw mana stabilizers—plunged silently toward the sleeping city below. The deployment was silent, gravity doing its horrifying work. The airships immediately executed a rapid, upward banking maneuver, fleeing the radius of the coming cataclysm. The impact of the first device, aimed at the command center, triggered the chain reaction. There was no conventional explosion; instead, the area over the fort was instantly consumed by a rapid, unnatural wave of silence. The internal mana-vacuum mechanism activated, sucking the air out of a vast, precise area. In that terrifying microsecond of vacuum, the lightning runes fired, igniting the residual air into plasma, rupturing the core copper canisters.
What followed was not a simple boom, but a prolonged, monstrous roar—the sound of an atmosphere being violently devoured. The initial chemical and magical explosion was immediately dwarfed by the thermobaric wave. The released liquid hydrogen, oxygen, and refined petroleum instantly vaporized, igniting in a flash of heat that temporarily eclipsed the moon, creating a sustained, annihilating pressure front. This pressure wave didn't just explode outward; it pulverized and crushed inward simultaneously. Within the central blast zones, the fate of the two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers was instantaneous and absolute: the air was forcibly removed from their lungs, their eardrums burst, and their bodies were then simultaneously incinerated by the impossible heat and crushed by the overwhelming, localized pressure wave. Buildings did not simply catch fire; they imploded, turning stone and steel into fine dust. The airships, now miles away and relying entirely on the humming energy of their Honeycomb Mana Shields to absorb the titanic shockwave, were violently buffeted by the force that rolled across the entire valley.
The Fort Astra Garrison was not defeated; it was annihilated. Where a sprawling military city had stood minutes before, there was now a quartet of massive, blackened craters and a vast, smoking, desolate plain. Nothing remained standing, and more disturbingly, nothing remained whole. The destruction was absolute, clean, and terrifyingly surgical. Two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, the largest concentration of Imperial power outside the Capital, had been rendered into ash and dust in less than a minute.
Hours later, far to the South, the war council of King Collin I of the Southern Dominion was mired in desperate, grinding planning. General after general reported catastrophic losses and the relentless, methodical pressure of the remaining Imperial legions who were pushing them towards the coast. Their cause, born of ambition, felt like it was dying a slow, conventional death, exactly as Max had predicted. King Collin, though outwardly resolute in his regal robes, was pale with stress and exhaustion. "We cannot sustain these losses! The Emperor is dedicating his entire force to our destruction. We needed the Sorcerer's aid days ago, not weeks! If that Fort Astra Garrison attacks our flank tomorrow, we are finished, regardless of our treaty!"
Just as despair settled like a shroud over the room, an exhausted, mud-caked scout staggered into the chamber, ignoring all protocol and collapsing at the foot of the dais. He was a veteran soldier, but his eyes were wide, vacant, and haunted by something far worse than battle. "Your Majesty... the North... the sky..." he gasped, unable to form a coherent sentence. Before the generals could arrest him, a more coherent, equally terrified report arrived via a series of frantic, breathless riders. The message, corroborated from multiple independent sources—local merchants, desperate farmers, and forward scouts who had witnessed the event from a safe distance—was identical: Fort Astra had vanished.
The head councilor, the man who had returned from Scorpia just days before, seized the report and read the details aloud, his voice shaking with a terror that transcended politics: "The earth smoked. There was a light, a sound like God's final judgement. Where the Fort stood, there is only... a hole. No survivors. No bodies. The entire garrison is gone. Annihilated. There is no Imperial flank."
A profound, absolute silence descended upon King Collin's war room, far heavier than the sound of any field battle. The generals, men accustomed to seeing mass death and the dismemberment of bodies, looked utterly sickened. They had expected an aerial bombardment, a clever flank, perhaps a terrifying siege weapon designed by a powerful mage. They had not anticipated total extermination—a force that simply erased its target from existence.
King Collin slowly rose from his chair, gripping the edge of the table so tightly his knuckles were bloodless. The terror on his generals' faces was palpable, but Collin, the political animal, saw past the fear to the terrifying, glorious political reality. Maximilian Scorpia was not merely an ally; he was an overwhelming, unstoppable force of nature. He had delivered precisely what he promised, on time and with chilling efficiency: the complete neutralization of a quarter of a million soldiers for the simple price of a trade agreement. The sheer, cold brutality of the MSW-1 strike was a declaration of power that no emperor, no legion, and no magic could counter.
Collin smiled, a thin, fearful, but ultimately triumphant smile that stretched his taut face. He looked at his generals, whose eyes were no longer focused on fighting the Imperial counter-attack, but on the terrifying, absolute power of their new, industrial partner. "The alliance holds," King Collin stated, his voice now firm and ringing with renewed authority. "Maximilian has paid his tribute in absolute fire, settling our account with the Emperor. Our debt is now to his factory, not his lineage. We hold the line, gentlemen. The Empire's spine has just been broken." The Southern Dominion was saved, but the cost was a terrible knowledge: Max was not a king to be challenged, but a force to be obeyed. The civil war was now effectively over; the only remaining question was how long it would take the remaining Imperial forces to realize that their entire military framework had been rendered obsolete in a single, silent, deadly night.