Chapter 9 - The Sky Shrouded in Wire
Zephyr dragged himself to the precipice, his claws digging deep into the crumbling stone.
Below, the sky had turned into a slaughterhouse.
Ignis descended like an eclipse. She didn't bother using stealth; she folded her wings and torpedoed straight through the electrical net, ignoring the crackling runes that sparked uselessly off her obsidian hide. She slammed directly into the lead crawler, crushing the heavy steel cab into flat scrap with her hind talons.
The machine exploded in a geyser of diesel and shrapnel, but the Irondeep dwarves were prepared.
"Fire! Second battery, deploy the pins!" shouted a booming voice amplified by a brass horn below.
From four surrounding ridge lines, dozens of heavy ballistas tripped their winches simultaneously. A cage of tungsten cables whistled through the night air, crossing over each other, weaving an inescapable web.
Three harpoons hit their mark.
One pierced the thick meat of Ignis’s left shoulder; two more sank deep into the base of her right wing. The cables snapped taut instantly, anchored to four-ton crawler chassis that locked their hydraulic brakes into the bedrock.
Ignis shrieked, a sound so violent it shattered the windows of the dwarven machines half a mile away. She thrashed, tearing one crawler off its tracks and swinging it through the air like a flail, but the other three anchors held fast.
"Pump the frost-salt!" the brass voice roared. "Choke her core!"
Green, vaporizing frost-salt pumped through hollow lines inside the cables, spraying pressurized liquid ice directly into her open wounds. The violet light along her spine flickered violently, then dimmed to an icy blue.
Zephyr watched from above, his breath catching in his throat. His mother—the unkillable, terrifying god of the sky—was being dragged down toward the dirt, her wings tangled, her fire suffocating under chemical frost.
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Soldiers swarmed her legs like ants, raising pneumatic spears tipped with serrated obsidian.
She was losing.
