The fire started in the dead of night.
At first, it was just the scent—faint but acrid, like burning oil. Then came the shrill whistle of the night shift alarm, and by the time Emil Dufort reached the eastern wing of Leclerc Works, the sky had turned orange.
The warehouse was an inferno.
Flames licked at the rafters, feeding on wood, tar paper, and crates of raw steel. Men ran with buckets, shouting orders over the roar of collapsing scaffolds. Someone was sobbing near the cooling vats. The smoke twisted upward, thick and foul, blotting out the stars.
"Get the water mains open!" Emil shouted, wrenching a hose valve with bare hands. "We cut firebreaks through the western frame! Move the tanks—now!"
A blast rocked the floor as a row of welding gas tanks ignited in sequence.
The east wall buckled.
And just like that, half the forge collapsed.
The Aftermath
By dawn, the flames had died—but the factory looked like it had been shelled.
Three prototype frames—Mk VI testbeds—were gone. Two workbenches melted. The roof over the eastern wing sagged inward, raining ash and soot. A smell of charred rubber and burnt copper lingered.
Henriette surveyed the wreckage, her face hard as iron.
"This wasn't a boiler fault," she said. "It started in a cold-storage unit. That's not where sparks happen."
"So?" Emil asked.
"So it was lit on purpose."
Roland, covered in soot, emerged from the ruins holding something in a gloved hand: a broken matchbox. On it, faded Cyrillic script.
"Russian?" Henriette asked.
"Could be German," Emil said grimly. "Or just someone who wants us to think it's either."
"What do we do now?"
He looked at the ruined forge.
"We adapt. We rebuild. And we don't slow down."
A Fortress of Industry
Over the next week, Leclerc Works became something new.
A barbed-wire fence rose around the perimeter, reinforced with guard posts.
Passes were issued. Names checked. Workers scanned.
Steel shipping manifests were now coded.
A second vault—deep in the foundry—was built to house the Sanglier blueprints.
The town called it paranoid.
But Emil called it war-proofing.
"We were a factory," Roland muttered one night, checking the locks on the vault. "Now we're a citadel."
"That's what the future demands," Emil replied.
Rebuilding the Dream
Within two weeks, the first Mk VI frame was complete—thanks to Marianne's reallocation of materials and Henriette's brutal negotiation with a mining cartel in Lille.
The new design was sleeker, heavier, more modular. Two turrets. Sloped armor panels. Interchangeable tread configurations for trench warfare or open plains.
"You're building a beast," Bruno, the lead machinist, murmured. "But it moves like a dancer."
Emil nodded. "And when it dances, the enemy dies."
Still, they'd lost momentum.
Every delay, every fire, every missing shipment felt like invisible hands pulling at his coat.
Someone didn't just want him dead.
Someone wanted France's steel revolution dead before it started.
A Message from the East
Then came the telegram.
Encrypted. Official seal. Henriette read it aloud:
"German armored divisions observed conducting test maneuvers east of Metz. Suspected reverse engineering of battlefield wreckage. A new model—codename Donnerschädel—is in development. Intended to counter French Mk line. Estimated production: 3 months."
A chill settled in the room.
"We started an arms race," Roland said.
"No," Emil corrected. "We won the first lap. Now the race has begun."
Henriette folded the telegram carefully. "They're adapting too quickly. We need a leap. Not an iteration. Something that changes the entire calculus."
"Then we build the Sanglier Mk VII," Emil whispered.
"That's not even a design yet."
"Then we'll make it one."
The Next Evolution
That night, Emil locked himself in the design room.
He pulled out blank parchment and began sketching.
Six suspension bogies per side.
High-torque diesel hybrid engine.
Twin-turret offset design with vertical stabilization.
Air-cooled barrel systems for sustained fire.
Front-mounted mine plow for trench clearing.
He didn't stop for hours. Not even as dawn broke.
When Henriette entered with coffee, she paused at the doorway.
"What is that?"
"Not a tank," Emil said. "Not even a siege engine."
He held up the sketch.
"This is the first real war machine. And it doesn't care who stands in front of it."
Steel and Blood
Three days later, the first Mk VI was loaded for field trials.
This time, Emil wouldn't go. He stayed behind to oversee production of two more units, with Marianne leading a new diagnostic division.
But as the flatbed departed the yard, Emil whispered to himself:
"You can sabotage the machine. Burn the blueprints. Kill the maker. But the idea? You'll never unmake it."
And far to the east, in a forested valley near Metz, the Donnerschädel prototype snarled to life—its silhouette taller, meaner, and forged from stolen dreams.
The steel war had entered its next phase.
And the world would never be the same.