Date: Year 931 — Month 1 — Day 4 Location: Eisenmeer – Southern Coast, Former Human Confederation Territory Subject: Naval Construction Operations – Krüger-Werke Consortium Facility
The first thing visitors noticed about Eisenmeer wasn't the sea.
It was the noise.
Steam whistles shrieked at dawn. Iron cranes groaned overhead. Railcars screeched across metal tracks, hurling smoke into a sky already veiled in soot. Men shouted over the roar of furnaces. Cargo clanked. Hammers rang like church bells.
This was no longer a city. It was a machine.And the Reich was its engineer.
Once the prized harbor of the old Human Confederation, Eisenmeer had been known for its calm bay, cobbled market squares, and merchant ships that carried spices, glass, and dyed silks along the southern coast. But that was before the demi-human annexations. Before the city was gutted, stripped of its ports, and left in ruin.
Now, it had returned to human hands — not under the soft banner of the Confederation, but the black-and-red steel of the Reich.
And where trade once ruled, war now reigned.
The harbor district stretched for nearly 10 kilometer — all of it repurposed.
Where sandstone merchant docks had once stood, now loomed massive drydocks carved into the shore like moats. Each trench held the skeletal body of a ship — destroyer-sized vessels, plated with riveted iron, their hulls already blackened by forge soot and primer paint. The air was thick with the scent of grease, sea salt, and burning coal.
Dozens of cranes pivoted above the warships, lifting hull beams, steam pipe sections, and naval gun turrets into place. Engineers swarmed the scaffoldings like insects, hammering bolts, welding seams, sealing boiler casings.
One ship already bore a name stenciled in white paint along its curved iron bow:RNS Eisenklaue — "Iron Claw."
These were the Reich's first true sea war machines — longer than river barges, but leaner than cargo ships. They bore reinforced bows, armored smokestacks, and twin rudder shafts. Internal chambers were divided into boiler rooms, barracks, ammunition bays, and bridge compartments. The main deck would soon mount rotary steam-powered cannons and spotting scopes.
Everything was built from scratch — by humans who had never seen an ocean before last year.
Overseeing it all was the Krüger-Werke Consortium, a private company that had once specialized in locomotive repair but had been seized and repurposed under contract from Otto Eisner's Ministry of Technological Advancement.
Now headquartered in a repainted banking hall near the docks, Krüger-Werke operated as both contractor and enforcer. Their insignia — a silver gear wrapped around a naval anchor — was stamped across every blueprint, steel crate, and engineer's armband.
Inside their central planning tower, six floors tall with rusted rafters and reinforced glass windows, foremen barked through brass speaking tubes.
"Drydock 3 reporting turbine leak—boiler room pressure spiking!"
"Redirect weld teams to Slipway 2 — turret base is behind schedule!"
"Krüger inspectors arriving in one hour — I want every wrench clean!"
Each department had its own uniform trim: black for engineers, red for welders, gray for crane operators, yellow for steam-fitters. Safety was strict. Penalties for disobedience ranged from fines to reassignment at inland smelters — a quiet sentence of exile from the coast.
But no one disobeyed. Not here.
The Reich was watching.
Beyond the shipyards, Eisenmeer had begun to grow again, but in a new image.
The old Human Confederation districts — marble archways, mosaic courtyards, crumbling bell towers — had been left intact in places, but most had been either stripped down or repurposed. One former cathedral now served as the Naval Housing Commission, with rows of steel bunk beds replacing pews.
Streets were straightened for tramlines. New railroads entered the city from the northwest, connecting it to the mountain supply routes. Each day, cargo trains thundered in, pulling black wagons packed with raw iron, sulfur barrels, timber, and canvas rolls stamped with red Reich sigils.
At Central Yard 9, offloading never stopped.
Steam hissed from vent towers. Dock workers in soot-black coats loaded crates onto wheeled trams. Overhead, cranes moved along gantry arms, dragging entire boiler units toward waiting ships. An alarm bell rang every 30 minutes — not for danger, but for shift rotations.
Even the city's skyline had changed.
Atop the harbor cliffs now stood the Reich Naval Authority Tower, a square, steel-faced structure lined with radio antennas and blinking signal lights. Within its top floors, naval planners reviewed ship schematics, coastal patrol schedules, and future sea route explorations.
Otto Eisner's name was stamped across every file.
His technological ministry owned this city's heartbeat.
And still, the people of Eisenmeer worked.
Thousands of them — men from the mountain communes, farmers from Larrak Valley who had never seen seawater, even ex-Confederation citizens who had pledged loyalty in exchange for food and rations.
They filled the city's iron-clad tenements, eating from soup halls, sleeping six to a room. Children played with wooden toy ships carved to resemble the destroyers rising in the docks. Women cleaned laundry with lye soap while Reich propaganda songs played from crackling loudspeakers.
Some remembered the old days.
Most didn't talk about them.
A few blocks from the main port, in a sealed, glass-roofed chamber deep within Krüger Facility 3, engineers stood around a glowing steam core.
The steam engine — their pride.
A six-cylinder behemoth with a twin-piston layout and dual-pressure release chambers. It had taken six months to prototype. Now, it would power the RNS Eisenklaue's entire propulsion array.
One engineer adjusted the brass pressure dial while another scribbled combustion notes on a clipboard.
"Fuel mix calibrated," one said.
"Gauge within safe range," replied the other.
"Begin slow rotation. Let's see if she purrs."
The engine groaned. Hissed. Spun once—then again.
Then roared.
A blast of hot vapor shot from the exhaust, rattling the floorboards.
The room filled with cheers. One man wiped his eyes with an oily glove.
"It lives."
Back outside, night approached — but the sky was still glowing orange from the smokestacks, not the sun.
The cranes did not stop.The ships did not sleep.And Eisenmeer, once a jewel of commerce, now throbbed with war-blooded purpose.
The Reich had no coastline before.
Now it had Eisenmeer.
And it would not be taken again.