​The celebration in the Rat's Nest was a muted, desperate thing. While the "rats" toasted their victory with watered-down spirits, Julian sat in the darkness of the warehouse rafters, his back against a cold stone pillar. He wasn't drinking. He was listening to the silence. ​In the corporate world, Arthur Vance knew that the moment you celebrate a victory is the moment you are most vulnerable to a counter-strike. The First Prince was a hammer—blunt and loud. But the Second Prince, Marcus, was a scalpel. ​"You’re brooding," a voice whispered from the darkness. Elena dropped down from a higher beam, landing as silently as a cat. "The men are calling you the 'Thunder Prince.' They think you’re a god of the storm." ​"I'm a man who is nearly out of powder and has a thousand new mouths to feed," Julian replied, his eyes scanning the floor below. "Gods don't worry about logistics, Elena. I do." ​"You’re worried about the bird," she said, looking up at where the crow had been perched. ​"

​The Silent Cathedral was no longer silent.​Deep beneath the city, in the ancient Romanesque aqueducts, the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of stone-work and the steady hiss of steam filled the air. Julian stood on a central dais, watching the "Dwellers" and the Ghost Legion work in a synchronicity that would have made a modern factory foreman weep with joy.​"The mirrors are in place," Elena reported, stepping up beside him. She was dressed in leather brigandine, her shoulder bandaged but her movement fluid. "Silas has his 'runners' positioned at every junction. We can send a light-signal from the Harbor entrance all the way to this chamber in under three minutes."​"Good," Julian said, checking his pocket watch. "Information is the only thing that moves faster than a bullet, Elena. If the First Prince moves a single company of men toward the slums, I want to know before they’ve even finished saddling their horses."​He turned his attention to a long, low table covered in glass vials and

​The air in the "Silent Cathedral" was thick with the scent of ozone and woodsmoke. Since the "Flash-Box" incident at the Palace, the atmosphere in the subterranean base had shifted from one of a temporary hideout to a permanent seat of power. Julian sat at a massive stone slab that served as his desk, lit by a flickering array of oil lamps. Before him lay the "Iron Ledger"—a list of the Empire's struggling industrial assets he had compiled using the Merchant Queen’s intelligence.​"The Northern Iron Mines are failing," Julian said, his voice flat and clinical, as if he were back in a Manhattan boardroom. "The First Prince’s constant wars have drained the labor pool, and the Second Prince’s 'Eyes of the Crow' have assassinated every foreman who tried to demand better conditions. Production is down sixty percent. The owners are desperate for an exit strategy."​Elena leaned against a pillar, her arms crossed. "And you want to be that strategy? Julian, those mines are in the Frost Peaks

​The Silent Cathedral had transformed. The once-damp, echoing halls of the ancient aqueduct were now a cacophony of rhythmic hammering and the roar of coal-fired forges. The "Dwellers," who had spent decades in silent squalor, were now a disciplined labor force, their faces smeared with soot and sweat. But the center of the storm was the dais where the "Architect’s Heart" was being assembled.​Julian had not slept in forty-eight hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his silk tunic—once a symbol of royal waste—was now stained with grease and copper filings. He stood over a massive, cylindrical boiler fashioned from the "liberated" palace copper. To anyone else in the Empire, it looked like a strange, metallic beast. To Julian, it was the 1.0 version of a world-changing engine.​"The rivets are leaking on the southern seam!" Kaelen shouted over the din. The Legionnaire was using a heavy iron hammer to beat the copper sheets into a tighter seal. "Julian, the metal is too thin. If we push the p

​​The "Silent Cathedral" was still thick with the humid, sulfuric scent of the geothermal bypass. The Dwellers moved like ghosts through the mist, their eyes wide with a new kind of terror. They no longer looked at Julian as a prince or even a CEO; they looked at him as a sorcerer who had commanded the very breath of the earth to consume his enemies.​"We have to move, Julian," Elena said, her voice echoing off the damp pillars. She was cleaning her blade with a piece of silk, but her hands were shaking. Not from fear, but from the sheer adrenaline of the slaughter. "The steam we vented... it didn't stay in the tunnels. It surged through the sewer grates in the Upper District. Half the city saw white plumes rising from the gutters like ghosts. They’re calling it an omen."​Julian stood by the ruined steam engine, his fingers tracing the jagged edge of the chasm. "In marketing, there is no such thing as bad publicity, Elena. But in politics, an omen is just a weapon waiting for a handl