The silence in the Imperial War Room was no longer the heavy, tense quiet of a calculated military operation; it was the crushing, suffocating silence of absolute collapse. The polished oak table where maps of strategy and troop movements usually lay was now dominated by a single, horrifying artifact: a detailed, scorched-earth sketch of the Fort Astra Valley, verified by four separate Scrying Mages who risked blindness to confirm the impossible. Where two hundred and fifty thousand of the Emperor's best soldiers, the core of the Southern counter-rebellion force, had stood, there were now four enormous, perfectly round, blackened scars. The reports confirmed the terror: no bodies, no survivors, no walls—only ash and a lingering, unnatural heat that even the strongest Earth Mages could not explain. The entire garrison had been erased in a single, surgical act.
Emperor Alaric sat motionless on his throne, his face aged a decade in the span of an hour. The shock had rendered his anger cold and brittle. General Marcus, the chief tactician, stood before the map, his hands clasped behind his back to hide their uncontrollable trembling. His rigid professionalism, honed by decades of conventional warfare, had utterly shattered. "Majesty," Marcus finally managed, his voice a strained whisper, "there is no conventional explanation. The destruction defies all known elemental magic and siegecraft. It was not a magical bombardment. It was... clean. The force was localized, total, and delivered with unimaginable speed. Our mages confirm the ships responsible—those four shadowy vessels—are already back within the Valum quarantine zone, undamaged. They didn't fight a battle; they performed an execution."
The most terrifying, baffling report, however, came from the Investigative Mages who had braved the toxic remnants of the valley. Grand Magister Theron pointed a shaking finger at the report's conclusion. "The surviving Mages, the few we sent to assess the ruins of Fort Astra, report a horrific and inexplicable phenomenon. Once they crossed into the scarred areas, they were struck by magical impotence. Their powers vanished. The air itself is hostile to mana. Spells fizzle; simple elemental manipulation fails entirely. They could not use scrying to analyze the destruction, they could not use elemental magic to clear the dust, and their very connection to the ambient mana was severed. The Mages reported a feeling of void, an absolute magical silence centered on the blast craters. Whatever weapon Scorpia used, it didn't just kill men; it killed the magic in the air. This renders any form of magical investigation, counterattack, or future defense utterly impossible at ground zero. The enemy has created a dead zone."
"It is the forbidden alchemy. It is what Scorpia promised," Theron continued, his voice thin with finality. "He told the Dunbar faction he would eliminate the garrison for a price, and he delivered. This is not war, Majesty; it is technological terror. He has manufactured a tool of annihilation that renders our legions, our fortresses, and our very mages obsolete. Our soldiers fight with steel and fire; he fights with the physical laws of existence and the negation of the arcane. And without airships of our own, we cannot even match his delivery method; we are blind to his movement." Theron's fear was infectious, spreading through the assembled council like a miasma. The generals, men who had commanded armies of hundreds of thousands, now looked at the four black circles on the map and saw the utter futility of their careers. Their experience was worthless; their legions were merely targets.
The political fallout was immediate and catastrophic. The Civil War had just ended, not by treaty, but by a single, terrifying act of leverage. Messengers, riding hard from the South, confirmed that King Collin I had immediately consolidated his power. The remaining Imperial forces in the Southern Dominion, panicked by the news from Astra and seeing their logistical anchor vaporized, had begun to defect in droves. Entire legions, refusing to believe they could withstand a foe that erased cities from existence and silenced magic itself, simply laid down their arms or swore immediate allegiance to Dunbar, recognizing Collin's alliance with Scorpia as the only path to survival. The Southern Dominion was now a legitimate, terrifying military power, secured not by its own merit, but by Valum's terrifying demonstration.
"The cost of one MSW-1 strike," Alaric murmured, his voice hollow. "He traded those lives for trade agreements and a piece of land for his spy post." He looked at Marcus, his eyes suddenly burning with a desperate, frantic energy. "General, mobilize the Northern Legions. We must move our forces to crush Dunbar immediately, before he integrates those Imperial legions! We will commit every available Wind Mage and Clairvoyant to intercept Scorpia's fleet on their next flight."
Marcus, however, was broken. He slowly shook his head, a gesture of deep, agonizing defeat. "We cannot, Majesty. If we pull the Northern Legions, the West—Valum's borders—are completely exposed, inviting a direct ground invasion from a source we cannot counter. Our conventional air defense is useless; we have no aerial navy to match his. Furthermore, we are nearly out of ready-to-use Mythril; the raw ore came from the mines he now controls. We cannot replace the men lost at Astra, and we cannot resupply the remaining armies without the infrastructure that Astra managed. We are fighting a war he controls completely, where our most potent defense—magic—is chemically neutralized at the point of impact."
Alaric slumped back onto his throne, the golden fabric feeling like lead. He realized the terrifying truth: the fall of Fort Astra was not a defeat; it was the systemic castration of the Everwinter Empire's military power. The technological and now the anti-magical divide was an unbridgeable chasm. He had two choices: fight a losing, conventional war against a revitalized South backed by an unstoppable doomsday weapon, or retreat entirely and try to understand the source of the forbidden alchemy before it consumed the Imperial Capital itself. The silence in the war room confirmed the obvious: the Empire was terminally wounded, delivered by the cold logic of an engineer who valued concrete and gasoline over lineage and magic.
The Emperor's options are severely limited. With the South lost and the military paralyzed by fear of the MSW-1 and its anti-magic after-effects, Max is free to focus on his domestic production.