"What in the world did you get?"
Jenkins asked, his back to the three of them. His sword was a constant blur, swinging forward again and again, but the flashing light of his blade could only sever a few dozen chains at a ti—a drop in the ocean against the overwhelming number of enemies.
A crushing shadow had blotted out the sky. The swarm of chanical birds and chains looked as if it would pour down from the heavens and flatten everything on the ground.
"This!"
Hathaway's voice rang out from behind him. The item must have been with her.
"There's no ti to explain. Leave it here. The three of you, go now. I'll handle this."
As he spoke, a brilliant erald light coated his blade. The slash he unleashed tore a fissure through the ocean of chains that obscured the sky.
Mr. Hood, Mr. Black Cat, and Hathaway wasted no more words, imdiately fleeing in three different directions. None of them held the treasure they had found, so while the chains and skeletal chanical birds tried to obstruct them, the bulk of their force remained focused on the man with the sword on the roof.
The earth began to tremble. It was the most powerful earthquake Nolan had ever experienced, and it struck without warning. Jenkins didn't have ti to check if his friends had escaped. He turned, grabbed the bronze coffer behind him, summoned his unicorn, and rode it into the sky.
"Hurry!"
he urged. The small creature transford into a streak of light, darting toward the fissure Jenkins had just carved. But an endless stream of chains surged upward even faster, converging high in the air before the unicorn, Jenkins, and his cat. They sealed the gap, trapping them completely within a cage of chains and skeletal chanical birds.
Below them, the ground's tremors did not cease. The great manor's foundations were solid and held against the quake, but on the hill right next to it, a small mound of earth began to rise.
A rumbling sound echoed from directly beneath the mound. As the first fissure appeared at its peak, a jet of scorching white steam shot into the sky like a geyser.
The mound grew larger, and the rumbling intensified, joined by the distinctive clack-clack-clack of turning gears. Jenkins made no further attempts to escape. Instead, he cald the unicorn and watched the scene below with it.
A black spiritual aura spread across the land like a black hole, or like a drop of ink in clear water, staining the ground below darker and darker.
Within the gushing steam, Jenkins sensed an extraordinary power. At the sa ti, he saw sothing from the depths of the earth trying to force its way up.
"It's finally here!"
A spinning, brass-colored tal pillar pierced through the mound. Then, with a deafening roar, a colossal structure burst through the earth with incredible speed, rising from the abyss to the surface.
It seed to have an infinite height. Even as its top ascended past Jenkins and the unicorn, its base remained connected to the gaping abyss it had erged from.
This was no humanoid machine, but a gate—a set of thick, tal double doors. The ancient brass, coated in a heavy patina, glowed with a golden hue.
The two doors were engraved using both intaglio and relief carving techniques. One depicted the sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, and trees; the other showed a chanical city and a steel forge. Where the two doors t, a circular orb ford the core of a ritualistic pattern that spread out 360 degrees, like a celestial chart.
The ancient golden gate did not gleam in the overcast, rainy sky, but the patterns on its doors emanated their own eerie, cold, and sinister golden light.
An imnse psychic pressure made it almost impossible for Jenkins to breathe. A power, both chaotic and orderly, began to alter the surrounding environnt—or more precisely, it was transforming organic matter into inorganic tal.
He slled the thick scent of rust and oil in the air. He heard the rhythmic turning of gears, like a pulse. He saw the world around him turning to tal. He felt it:
"This is... the main body. The spherical main body Miss Windsor ntioned... it's behind that gate!"
The Eye of Reality would not lie; the core of the Difference Engine was right behind that gate. But Jenkins understood that it had yet to reveal its true power. Only when those doors opened would he witness the machine's true nature.
"Believer of Lies, surrender the coffer."
A single, solitary chain drifted out from the crack in the gate, floating toward Jenkins on the wind. Against the sky filled with chains and skeletal birds, it looked utterly powerless.
The voice ca from within the gate, as if soone were seated right behind it. But given the thickness of the doors, the space inside wasn't even large enough for a heavyset adult.
This ti, the Difference Engine spoke fluently, not in the halting, broken manner of its previous two appearances. Still, its pronunciation was distinctly inhuman, and anyone could tell how strange the voice was.
Jenkins said nothing. Instead, he swung his sword and severed the chain floating before him.
The severed tip spun as it fell. Though the ground was now covered in a layer of tal, the chain's silver-white point still pierced the surface. The gear-shaped brand on its tip gradually faded, while the rest of the chain dangled in the wind.
The gate opened a crack wider. Without another word, a massive iron barrel covered in shifting runes extended, aiming at Jenkins and the unicorn, who were but white specks in comparison.
"Hm?"
A cannon blast of pure spirit energy incinerated the air and rain, leaving a trail of iridescent color as it slamd Jenkins and the unicorn into the earth below.
It was power in its purest form. The searing energy gave Jenkins no ti to react. As the vanguard of the destructive energy wave struck him and the manor below, the resulting mushroom cloud nearly blasted away the swarms of chains in the sky.
The ground shook, the mountains trembled, and for a mont, everything seed to stand still.
The manor was completely obliterated. The blast had leveled the hill, leaving behind a concave crater like that of a volcano.
The light from the blast was as bright as the midday sun, visible even from hundreds of miles away. A scorching heat lingered in the air. The rain evaporated into steam before it could even reach the ground, mingling with the earlier jets of steam to cover the earth in a shroud of swirling white mist.
High above, the cage of chains and skeletal chanical birds continued its dynamic flow, still producing its regular, rhythmic sounds. Runes shifted between the chains and the birds, binding them into a single, perfect whole.
Raindrops sizzled against the blackened tal barrel, raising wisps of green smoke. The smoking barrel retracted slowly back into the gate, not with the speed it had extended.
The doors closed, leaving only a narrow slit. From the billowing black smoke that seeped through the gap, another chain shot out like a frog's tongue, lashing toward the bronze coffer that had flown from Jenkins's grasp just before he was blasted into the ground.
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