"Direction, twenty degrees..adjust, adjust!"
An artillery commander of the Hayes stood at the edge of the blackened land, compass in hand. Behind him, soldiers in gas masks heaved massive shells into place, each one engraved with runes that glowed faintly green.
The cannons waiting beside them were monsters in their own right, engines of war built from the union of alchemy and technology.
These were no ordinary weapons, they were the pride of the Hayes: the magic cannons.
Unlike the crude artillery of steam-powered worlds, these devices married precision engineering with sorcery. Their intricate cores stabilized blasts, while the embedded arrays amplified each strike. These were the monsters that could fire the weapon Hayes scientists called the death bomb.
Each shell carried within it chemical poisons that spread like plague. Once detonated, no living thing could survive the ground it touched.
The commander raised his arm. His eyes gleamed cold through the lens of his mask.
