The wooden cottage on Solitude Spire was small, humble, and delightfully drafty.
Felix kicked off his straw slippers in the bedroom. He climbed into his cot and pulled the wool blanket up.
He adjusted his head on the cool linen pillow, letting out a long, contented breath through his teeth.
"Ah," Felix muttered into the quiet room. "Three o'clock sharp. Right on schedule."
Lyra Ashford hovered near the threshold. She clutched her mithril rapier, her posture taut as a drawn bowstring.
Felix cracked open a single eyelid, glancing at her through the doorway.
"Lyra," Felix called out, his voice already thick with early nap drowsiness.
Lyra flinched, stepping forward immediately and bowing with profound, breathless reverence.
"Yes, Senior Brother! This disciple awaits your divine instructions!"
"If anyone knocks, tell them we're not buying pamphlets," Felix said. He rolled onto his side.
"Tell them to leave a coupon flyer in the rusted tin mailbox by the garden gate. I'm off the clock until four fifteen."
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart thundered against her ribs like a war drum.
He... he is entering the Deep Void Slumber! Lyra realized, her eyes widening with ecstatic, religious terror.
Facing twelve imperial dreadnoughts and forty heavy celestial cannons, Senior Brother does not even deign to look upon them! He treats the Imperial Ashford Clan like door-to-door peddlers selling cheap trinkets!
He closes his eyes to show the Solitude Dao! Lyra thought. Mortal armies cannot touch an enlightened soul! And he has entrusted the defense of the sacred threshold to me!
Lyra clenched her fists, a holy, fanatical zeal burning behind her violet eyes.
"Senior Brother, rest in peace!" Lyra vowed solemnly, her knuckles whitening around her scabbard. "Even if forty cannons fire, this disciple will not let a speck of dust disturb your slumber!"
Felix frowned slightly under the blanket.
"Rest in peace is for dead people, Lyra," Felix grumbled, his eyes already closed. "I'm just taking a power nap. Shut the front door, the draft is blowing on my feet."
"Understood!"
Lyra stepped backward out onto the porch and pulled the heavy cedar door shut with a solid, reverent thud.
* * *
Out on the front porch, the world was on the brink of an apocalypse.
Above the cottage, the twelve sky-galleons of the Ashford Armada drifted lower through the cloud deck. Their massive mana-turbines roared like caged beasts, churning the afternoon sky into a tempest of boiling gray vapor.
Barnaby the clockwork owl sat on his porch beam, his copper gears whirring at triple speed. The black rubber stopper wedged tightly into his beak muffled his outraged shrieks into low, mechanical gurgles: "Mmmph! Mmm-grrr-ph!"
Lyra drew her mithril rapier with a sharp, ringing hiss that echoed across the empty courtyard.
She stood alone atop the porch stairs. Her slender blade pointed directly toward the lead dreadnought.
Her hair whipped wild in the howling wind. Her white apron fluttered like a battle standard.
A single Adept-tier spellblade standing against an entire continental battlefleet.
High on the forecastle, Fleet Admiral Balthazar Ashford lowered his spyglass. His face darkened to the color of bruised plums.
"Where is the master of this spire?" Balthazar demanded, his voice cracking with insulted disbelief.
"Did the squatter disciple just... walk inside and close the bedroom shutters?!"
The imperial flag-captain stared down through his own looking glass, his jaw slightly dropped.
"Admiral... our lenses show the peasant boy removed his slippers and climbed into bed," the captain stammered.
"He appears to be... entering a sleep state."
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A vein throbbed violently against Balthazar's gilded helm.
"He went to sleep?!" Balthazar roared, his astral mana erupting in a corona of crimson sparks that scorched the polished teak deckboards.
"The Western Sky Armada of the High Sun Empire stands before his doorstep! Forty celestial aether-cannons are aimed at his head! And he goes to take a nap?!"
The sheer, unprecedented disrespect hit Balthazar like a slap across the jaw.
In all his three hundred years of service to the empire, kings had groveled before his fleet. Sect patriarchs had offered their daughters in tribute to spare their mountains from bombardment. Sovereigns had negotiated terms of surrender from their golden thrones.
Never in imperial history had anyone responded to an Ashford war-fleet by pulling a blanket over their ears.
"Insolent, backwater mongrel!" Balthazar snarled, raising his leviathan greatsword high above his head.
"He mocks the dignity of the imperial crown! He believes our mercy is weakness! Gunnery crews, hear my command!"
The entire fleet echoed with the frantic pounding of steel boots.
"Disregard all capture protocols!" Balthazar bellowed through the acoustic horn.
"Engage the Overcharge Matrix! Heat all forty aether-cannons to five hundred percent capacity! Obliterate this entire peak! Turn every rock, every weed, and every bone on that island into incandescent astral slag!"
"Engaging Overcharge Matrix!" the gunnery officers screamed.
WHIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
High in the sky, forty massive cannons began to pre-charge.
The process was far from quiet.
Synchronizing forty million units of aether required hundreds of massive copper vacuum converters.
Along the flanks of the twelve warships, colossal cooling fins popped open with sharp hissings of superheated steam. Heavy runic circles, twenty paces wide, flared with blinding sapphire-and-scarlet fire across the ship hulls.
And then, the sound began.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
It was a piercing, deafening, sub-harmonic acoustic whine.
The sound of unshielded, vibrating mana coils resonated at thirty thousand hertz. It tore through the air, bypassed stone walls, and vibrated through the marrow of living bones.
The pine trees shed their needles in vibrating showers. The cracked flagstones rattled against each other like dice in a leather cup.
Windowpanes buzzed violently in their frames. The glass sang a high-pitched song of structural stress.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
* * *
Inside the bedroom, Felix lay on his cot, flat on his back.
He had placed his linen pillow over his face. Then, he had pulled the wool blanket over the pillow. Then, he had pressed his palms firmly against both sides of his head.
It was completely useless.
The acoustic whine of forty pre-charging siege cannons was not an ordinary sound. It was an electromagnetic vibration that bypassed ears entirely, rattling directly against the skull bones.
It felt like someone had taken a dentist's high-speed drill and applied it directly to the center of Felix's forehead.
It felt like being trapped in an elevator with a leaf blower and screeching seagulls at three in the afternoon.
Beneath the pillow, Felix's left eyelid twitched violently.
Once. Twice. Three times.
A deep, throbbing headache blossomed right behind his eyeballs, pulsing with cruel, rhythmic ferocity.
Ding.
The AetherDeck screen illuminated the room with a flashing red alert:
【 Status Debuff: Extreme Sleep Deprivation | Irritation Level: 99.9% | Trigger: Rude noise outside bedroom | Recommended Action: Find whatever is screeching and hit it with a slipper. 】
[AETHERDECK OS: BIOLOGICAL HEALTH MONITOR]
Warning: Critical Sleep Disruption Detected!
Sleep Quality: 0% [ABSOLUTE TRASH]
Cause: Unshielded High-Frequency Acoustic Coil Whine
Noise Level: 114 Decibels (Equivalent to jet engine on rug)
[ACTIVE STATUS DEBUFFS]:
• Interrupted Afternoon Nap (-20% Stamina Recovery)
• Throbbing Temporal Migraine (-15 Patience)
• Irritated Slacker Rage (Hostility Slider: Maximum)
[Notice]: Auto-Sleep routine aborted. Have a nice day!
Felix slowly removed the pillow from his face.
He stared at the low wooden ceiling beams.
His eyes were completely bloodshot. Dark purple circles hung beneath his lower lids. His brown hair, normally pleasantly messy, was sticking up on one side like an electrified haystack.
Felix lay in silence for five seconds. He listened to the unbearable whine coming through the thin walls.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Felix took a slow, deep breath through his nose.
His hands did not shake. He did not yell. He did not curse.
He radiated an aura of exhausted deadpan apathy. The cold mood could have frozen a volcano solid.
"I gave them five minutes," Felix whispered to the ceiling, his voice terrifyingly quiet and hollow. "I gave them four whole minutes to pack up their hot-air balloons and leave."
He slowly sat up on the edge of the cot.
Every joint in his neck clicked with cold, ominous precision.
"All I wanted was twenty minutes of sleep," Felix muttered. He rubbed his nose where a headache hammered.
"Twenty minutes. That's all. A quick nap to claim my afternoon stamina bonus."
He slid his bare feet into his frayed straw slippers.
Floorboards groaned beneath his feet. The sudden gravitational density leaking from his chest pressed downward.
Deep inside his solar plexus, the 1.0-Earth-Mass planetary core was spinning.
Because Felix was irritable, his breathing had grown slightly shallow. Because his breathing was shallow, the gravitational dampers on his core slipped by a fraction of a millimeter.
Around the legs of his wooden cot, the air warped. Dust motes floating in the afternoon sunbeams stopped falling, suddenly pulled toward Felix's chest by an inescapable, miniature orbital field.
Felix picked up his cracked obsidian slate from the crate and shoved it into his sleeve.
"Coil whine," Felix muttered, his voice flat as a funeral shroud. "Cheap, unshielded, budget-tier copper coils. The worst kind of engineering in the universe."
He stood up.
He didn't draw a sword, because he didn't own one. He didn't activate a battle stance, because he didn't know any.
He shuffled slowly toward the door in his slippers. He looked like an angry neighbor annoyed by a Sunday weed whacker.
Outside, Lyra stood with her rapier raised. Her teeth were gritted against the deafening whine.
Behind her, the front door latch clicked open.
The afternoon nap was officially over.