Pneumatic Sabers in the Dust

Who in their right mind brought industrial demolition shears to a delicate treasure haul?

Juro rolled across the inverted ceiling planks, coughing against a storm of pulverized cedar. Iron teeth two yards long ground into the pagoda's central support beam above him, spraying white grease and brass shavings into the open air. The suspended scripture vault hung sixty feet out over the empty center of the atrium, chained between four massive counterweights. If those hydraulic shears chewed through the spine before he tripped the release mechanism, the entire chamber would break loose and plummet ten thousand cubits into the boiling sulfur clouds below.

He needed that vault cylinder before the floor fell away.

"Clear the span, rat!" a voice boomed from the breach.

Three Rokan sect disciples dropped through the splintered clerestory. They landed with the dull, ringing crash of iron plate against ancient joists. Each warrior wore lacquered gray armor banded in pressurized copper tubing. Their heavy pneumatic polearms hissed in unison, venting white jets of exhaust across the overturned rafters.

Before the lead disciple could level his weapon at Juro, a flash of red silk cut through the dust.

Ayame dropped from the upper skylight, boots hitting a crossbeam with featherlight precision. Her twin pneumatic sabers cleared their hip scabbards in a double hiss of released compression.

"Disciples of the Iron Sect," Ayame called out, her chin lifted and both curved blades held in a formal dueling salute. "You trespass upon an uncatalogued ancestral site. By the martial customs of the Outer Rim, I offer you formal single combat to settle salvage rights."

The disciples stared through their narrow iron visors. The center enforcer spat a mouthful of chewing reed onto the timber.

"We are under corporate salvage contract thirty-nine," the man growled, raising a massive industrial wrench. "Kill the girl and saw the rafters."

"Barbarians," Ayame muttered.

She lunged.

The Five Breath Cycle flared in her chest. Compressed air surged down the twin tubes along her forearms, charging the pistons within her sabers. With a sharp crack, the curved blades shot forward on their pneumatic slides, leaving arcs of yellow sparks across the lead disciple's chestplate. The strike drove all two hundred pounds of armored enforcer backward into the splintered wall.

Juro did not wait to watch the duel. He sprang along the narrow ridge of an overturned banister, his salvager boots gripping the slick lacquer.

The suspended scripture vault swayed sixty feet above the empty void, anchored by four braided chains running into wall-mounted gear assemblies. To bring the chest down safely, he had to disarm the central lock-train mounted on the north wall. But the building groaned beneath the grinding assault of the foundation shears. Rafters twisted. Mortise joints popped like pistol shots.

A second Rokan disciple spotted him and lunged across the crossbeams, polearm leveled. The weapon's pneumatic tip spat a concussive shockwave of heated steam.

Juro kicked off the banister, twisting midair as the blast sheared away the wood where he had stood a second before. He raised his left arm. The wrist-mounted launcher fired its barbed brass anchor.

The hook caught the teeth of a spinning bronze cog high in the wall assembly. Juro yanked the braided wire taut, drawing his body upward in a sweeping arc. He swung directly over the lunging disciple's head, planting both boots squarely into the warrior's iron helmet. The enforcer pitched forward, losing his footing on the tilting timbers and tumbling into the drop net forty feet below.

Juro touched down upon the narrow maintenance ledge beside the central lock-train.

"Tamaki!" Juro shouted into his collar comm. "How long before that cutter saws us clean off the rock?"

"Ninety seconds!" Tamaki's voice squeaked over the static, backed by the scream of the skiff's overtaxed steam turbine. "The Rokan blades are already halfway through the keel! Heizo is trying to wedge an anchor between their hull plates, but their armor is four inches of solid slag-iron!"

"Ninety seconds is plenty," Juro said, though his boots slid half an inch on the shifting cedar.

He examined the lock housing. It was an ancient clockwork escapement powered by suspended stone counterweights. Four brass tumblers rotated in alternating rhythms, each held by a spring-loaded pressure valve. If he cut the wrong line, the counterweights would drop simultaneously, shearing the vault's suspension cables and sending the chest into the abyss.

His fingers traced the copper fuel lines feeding the lock's internal governor.

The ancient artisans had built the mechanism around the Second Breath of the Five Breath Cycle—a steady, low-pressure exhalation meant to balance opposing currents. Juro drew a deep breath from his own diaphragm, channeling compressed vapor down his arm and into his salvage awl. He slid the narrow brass needle between the third and fourth gear teeth, feeling for the release cam.

Metal shrieked above.

The hydraulic shears sheared through another twelve-inch timber. The entire northern quarter of the atrium tilted six degrees to the port side. Loose roof tiles rained through the empty air, smashing onto the void below like falling hail.

Across the hall, Ayame parried a polearm thrust with her left saber, twisted her right wrist to vent a high-pressure burst, and drove her pommel into the last standing disciple's throat guard. The impact sent the warrior skidding across the overturned floor, his pneumatic rig hissing violently as its pressure line ruptured.

"Juro!" Ayame yelled, leaping over a collapsing strut as the rafters began to split. "The roof is caving!"

"Almost got it!" Juro grunted.

His awl found the hidden cam. Instead of forcing the tumblers, he aligned his internal breath with the bronze-lung manifold strapped to his belt, pulsing a precise burst of high-pressure air into the governor's intake port.

The ancient clockwork chimed.

Four spring-loaded pins snapped back in unison. The heavy brass vault cylinder slid free from its housing, dropping cleanly into Juro's waiting palm. With a smooth rattle of chains, the suspension rigging locked, holding the main scripture vault suspended safely ten feet above the floor rather than letting it drop.

"Cylinder secured!" Juro shouted, shoving the heavy brass tube into his belt pouch.

He had the key to the inner chamber.

Before he could celebrate, a deafening thunderclap ripped through the foundations. The Rokan cutter's foundation shears had finally bitten through the pagoda's central support spine.

The entire atrium groaned. The heavy cedar framework snapped along its center line. A jagged crack four feet wide raced across the floorboards between Juro and Ayame, expanding into a gaping chasm that revealed the swirling orange mist of the aether deep below.

The northern half of the courtyard broke away, sliding downward into the roaring sulfur vents.

"Jump!" Heizo's voice roared through the comms.

The world tilted vertically. Rafters, iron scrap, and Rokan disciples tumbled into the roaring void. Juro fired his pneumatic grapple toward the remaining half of the hall, praying the brass teeth would find purchase before the whole mountain of timber vanished into the sky.