The city of Lysandra, capital of the once-proud Kingdom of Jorailia, was a pressure cooker, the heat steadily rising, the lid rattling with the promise of an imminent, bloody explosion.
The stalemate between King Rouben Yachvili's royalist forces and Noah's alchemical insurgency had become a festering wound, a war of attrition fought in the city's very streets. The grand boulevards were now scarred battlegrounds, the elegant plazas transformed into fortified barricades. The air was thick with the stench of chemical fires, lingering poisons, and the metallic tang of blood.
King Rouben, increasingly isolated in his palace, his mind clouded by paranoia and rage, ordered more desperate assaults. Each one was a costly failure, his legions shattering against Noah's insidious traps and the disciplined, foreign steel of his Celestial Dragon Empire allies.
