"We don't climb!" Leon's voice cut clean through the roar of falling iron, sharp enough to reach every corner of the ledge despite the chaos closing in around them. He swung the obsidian axe up onto his shoulder in one smooth motion and vaulted the scorched rail onto the bow deck without breaking stride. "Masterson! Rig the pressure cap on the lower sap line. We're not retreating from this fire; we're building a lift out of it!"With strikes fast enough to blur in the firelight, he sheared through four massive petrified iron-oak taproots framing the ship's resting bench, notching each one together with the zero-tolerance cuts Oakhaven had shown him only minutes before, sealing a multi-tiered wooden piston column into the narrow shaft surrounding the ship in what felt like a handful of heartbeats rather than the careful minutes such work should have properly required.Julian threw himself bodily at the lower deck's bypass lever, hauling it down with everything his exhausted frame had l

The drafting hall inside Lower Bough 12 had gone quiet except for the scratch of graphite on vellum and the steady tap of Leon's living rule against the trestle.Outside, the metallic twilight cast by fifty dreadnoughts still hung over Sylvan-Vael. Inside, under warm resin lamps, thirty shipwrights and framers stood clustered around the drafting table; the surviving lineage of four World-Trees was represented in one room for the first time in longer than anyone there could remember."A single tri-timber frigate is fast and resilient," Leon said, not looking up from his drawings, fingers stained dark with pitch and graphite. "It can outrun a gun-cutter and take a direct mortar hit. But twenty of them can't punch through the defensive sphere around the Iron Nebula. Twenty isolated hulls, and their dreadnoughts overlap their firing arcs and pick us apart one at a time."Masterson leaned his scarred forearms on the table. "And packed tight in a line, their siege mortars saw through us lik

The high-pitched whine of carbide drills tearing into living timber filled the air of Sector Zero with a deafening, relentless screech. On the quarterdeck of The Grain's Honor, three Iron-Scythe Drones had already buried their augers six full inches into the main hatch, sending white plumes of pale sun-birch shavings spraying across the deckboards with every rotation.Leon leaped across the hatch without hesitation, bringing the obsidian axe down in a wide, sweeping arc that caught the lead drone dead center. The volcanic glass blade, sharpened to an edge that could shave a hair lengthwise, sheared clean through the machine's central drive shaft. Sparks and pressurized oil sprayed across the deck as the mechanical scythe shuddered once, twice, and went permanently still."Masterson! Clear the hatch!" Leon bellowed, sweeping the shattered carcass overboard with the heel of his boot before it could jam the mechanism underneath.But for every drone destroyed by hand, three more descended

The air on the quarterdeck tasted of cold ozone and copper. Across the fractured port flank, three frigates drifted as inert monuments of gray cast iron, their crews frozen forever inside the metal their own ships had become.Julian dropped to his knees beside the navigation pedestal, slate shaking in his hands. "The bond structure didn't break, Leon. It inverted. That beam didn't burn anything; it forced a complete atomic substitution. Pulled the organic carbon straight out of the wood and replaced it with dead iron ore."Leon knelt beside him and picked up a stray splinter that had blown across the deck from the wreckage. It looked like wood. It weighed like iron. It felt as cold as a headstone.Something clicked into place: Oakhaven's teachings colliding with the horror of what he was holding."It's not destroying the wood." His eyes widened as the mechanism fell into focus. "It's harvesting it. Pulling out the living resin, the thing that gives timber its elasticity, is its whole

The cathedral-sized chamber thrummed with the pulse of the plasma core overhead. On the catwalk railing, Julian's slate blinked its countdown without mercy: 00:45... 00:44...Less than a minute before the pulse fired across the cosmos.Korvath stepped forward, steel-shod boots clanking on the riveted floor. With a whir of internal gears, his right arm reconfigured the cannon barrels, folding away and being replaced by a long-handled, double-headed axe of shimmering spatial steel."You cling to timber because you fear the rot of flesh and root," he rasped, swinging the blade through the steam in one frictionless arc. "Wood warps. Splits under frost. Burns. Iron, once forged, is eternal. It knows no compromise."Leon didn't flinch. He adjusted his grip, feeling the cool weight of the obsidian axe and the familiar shape of the living rule at his belt."You mistake flexibility for weakness." His voice held steady over the wail of the building core. "Iron breaks because it refuses to yield