Zellheim's walls were frozen as hard as a slab of black iron.
Though the wind was less bitter than it had been days before, it still scraped across faces like a dull knife cutting flesh. Two young nobles wrapped in heavy fur coats huddled behind the battlements, clutching hand warmers that had long since gone cold and stamping their feet.
"Have you heard?" The lord's son on the left sniffled, burying his face in his fox-fur collar. "Rations at the front have been cut by another twenty percent. My old man was counting the gold bars in our cellar last night. Said he was getting ready to move them south to Free Port."
The young man on the right sighed, breathing out a cloud of white mist. "Move? Where can we run? If the Blackflame Legion really comes, those iron monsters could plow through the entire duchy. And His Highness just had to meet them head-on. What's wrong with negotiating a dignified peace?"
"Dignified?" The baron's son scoffed. He was about to add a few barbed remarks when the masonry beneath his feet suddenly trembled.
"An earthquake?"
The two looked up in confusion and gazed north.
At the horizon, a vast black silhouette slowly emerged from the far edge of the white snowfield.
As it drew closer, its outline became clear-it was a moving mountain of steel.
The fortress plowed across the earth, cutting the sunlight into a cloak before it. That shadow swelled and spread in silence, swallowing the road to the Royal Capital first.
"That's..." The baron's son's voice cracked. "That's the Empire's Boundary Stone! Hector's Mobile Fortress!"
At that same moment, everyone on the walls knew what it meant.
"Enemy attack!"
A shrill alarm bell shattered the morning's stillness.
The defenders scrambled toward the ballistae in panic.