In the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the world was reduced to a single, immense naval chart spread across the black lacquer table. Qin Shi Huang stood over it, a silent, motionless predator studying the movements of his prey. Red pins, updated every hour by a stream of encrypted telegraphs from spies in Manila, marked the inexorable advance of the Great White Fleet. He saw their course, their speed, their arrogant, parade-ground formation. He saw the trap they intended to spring—a classic, overwhelming blockade designed to force his smaller, less powerful navy into a decisive, suicidal battle. And in their perfect, predictable, textbook strategy, he saw the fatal flaw. They saw the ocean as a two-dimensional board. They had forgotten the depths.
He made a small, almost imperceptible gesture to an aide. A single, coded message was dispatched, a ripple sent out across the world to the hunter waiting patiently in the dark.
Deep beneath the churning, sunlit waters of the Luzon Strait, Commander Li Jie felt the message arrive. It was not a sound, but a series of precise, rhythmic vibrations tapped against the hull of the Long Jiao 01 by a submerged communications buoy. He decoded the message in his head, his heart a cold, steady drum. The eagles have landed. Begin the hunt.
He was no longer a lone wolf. He was the alpha of a pack. Around him, unseen in the blue gloom, were four other Dragonfish submarines, the first graduates of the secret program at Dragon's Tooth Cove. For three days, they had lain in wait, silent and submerged, an invisible net cast across the main shipping channel. The tension inside the steel hulls was a physical thing, a crushing pressure that had nothing to do with the sea outside. It was the weight of knowing they were the tripwire for the entire war.
"All boats, signal received," Li Jie said into the speaking tube, his voice a low, calm whisper. "Assume final attack positions. Target priority is the lead column. Await my command to fire."
He raised the periscope, its polished lens breaking the surface with barely a ripple. And there they were. The sight was so majestic it was almost paralyzing. The Great White Fleet, steaming directly towards them in four perfect, breathtaking columns of white and gold. Sixteen battleships, the very embodiment of America's industrial might, moving with the serene, unshakeable confidence of a force that did not believe it could be challenged. He could see the sailors on their decks, the glint of the sun on the brass instruments of a ship's band practicing on the fantail of one of the vessels. They were blind, deaf, and steaming into a perfectly prepared killing ground.
He felt no hatred. No malice. Only the cold, clean focus of a hunter. He began to call out the firing solutions, his voice the only sound in the cramped, silent control room. "Target, lead battleship, Connecticut-class. Range, eighteen hundred yards. Angle on the bow, ninety degrees starboard." He gave the other boats in his wolfpack their targets, his commands relayed by the submerged buoy. "Fire on my mark. Three… two… one… Mark!"
Across a two-mile front, ten torpedoes, a salvo of German steel and Chinese audacity, leaped from their tubes.
On the flag bridge of the USS Connecticut, Admiral "Fighting Bob" Evans was in high spirits. The sea was calm, the sky was clear, and he was about to lead the most powerful fleet in human history into what he was certain would be a glorious, one-sided victory. The British Admiral, Cradock, stood beside him, his face a mask of grim, nervous tension, a mood Evans found faintly irritating.
"A fine day for a battle, wouldn't you say, Admiral?" Evans boomed, clapping the Englishman on the shoulder.
Before Cradock could reply, a series of shouts erupted from the lookouts in the crow's nests, their voices high and cracking with panicked disbelief.
"Wakes! Wakes to port! Multiple wakes!"
"Torpedoes! Torpedoes off the starboard bow!"
Evans and his officers rushed to the railings. The serene blue water was suddenly, impossibly, scarred with a dozen white, churning streaks, converging on his fleet from multiple directions at once. It was a perfectly coordinated, multi-pronged attack. His mind, trained for the stately ballet of battleship engagements, struggled to process the sheer scale of the ambush.
The klaxons on the Connecticut blared, their frantic, jarring alarm echoed across the fleet. Orders were screamed. Rudders were thrown hard over. The majestic, perfect columns dissolved into a chaotic scramble as sixteen behemoths tried to evade the invisible sharks tearing at their flanks.
It was too late.
A torpedo slammed into the hull of the USS Vermont, a massive explosion ripping a gaping hole in her side just below the waterline. She immediately began to list, thick, black smoke pouring from her wounds. Moments later, the British cruiser HMS Kent, which had been sailing alongside, was struck by two torpedoes in quick succession, her back broken, she began to sink with horrifying speed. Then, a third ship was hit. The battleship USS Kansas shuddered as a torpedo detonated her forward magazine. A brilliant, terrifying column of orange and black fire erupted from her bow, and the great ship, pride of the fleet, simply vanished in a cataclysm of her own making, her bow section vaporizing as the rest of her hull plunged stern-first into the depths.
In the space of ninety seconds, the Great White Fleet had been bloodied, humbled, and thrown into utter chaos by an enemy they had never seen. Admiral Evans stood on his bridge, his face a mask of pure, incandescent rage, watching his ships burn.
And then, on the horizon, the main Qing fleet appeared. It was pitifully small by his standards—four modern, German-built armored cruisers and a swarm of about a dozen destroyers. But they were not sailing cautiously. They were charging, their bow waves high, racing directly towards the wounded, disorganized American giants. They were attacking with the suicidal, fanatical speed of men who had no expectation of survival.
The Battle of the Luzon Strait had begun.
The air, which moments before had held only the sound of the sea and the wind, was now filled with the deafening, world-shaking thunder of a hundred massive guns firing at once. The American battleships, despite their losses and confusion, were still immensely powerful. Their 12-inch main batteries began to speak, and columns of water, hundreds of feet high, erupted around the charging Qing ships. The sky was filled with the demonic scream of shells, each one the size of a man, arcing across the miles of open water.
A shell from the USS Minnesota struck the lead Qing cruiser, the Hai Chi, directly on its forward turret. The turret and the bridge behind it simply disappeared in a flash of orange fire and twisted metal. The ship, now a burning, leaderless wreck, continued to charge forward.
The Qing destroyers, like a pack of terriers attacking a herd of bulls, raced in between the American behemoths, their smaller guns chattering, firing torpedoes at close range. One of them, its smokestacks riddled with holes, was torn in half by a direct hit from a battleship's secondary battery. It exploded, leaving nothing but a stain of burning oil on the water.
Admiral Evans felt a surge of grim, savage triumph. The submarines had wounded him, but this… this was warfare he understood. This was gunnery and steel. His superior firepower, his thicker armor, his greater numbers—the cold, hard arithmetic of naval power was on his side. He watched as a second Qing cruiser, bracketed by shells from two different battleships, was ripped apart, its magazines detonating in a sympathetic explosion that sent a fireball a thousand feet into the sky.
His fleet was a wounded, enraged giant, and it was swatting its smaller, more agile tormentors from the sky. They were winning. The Qing fleet was being systematically annihilated.
"Signal the fleet," Evans roared to his communications officer, his voice filled with the bloodlust of victory. "Target the last cruiser. I want it on the bottom. Then we form a new line and hunt down those damned submarines!"
In the temple on the mountain, Qin Shi Huang listened to the battle reports being relayed to him. His face was calm, his expression unchanged. He heard of the sinking of the USS Kansas, and he felt nothing. He heard of the annihilation of his own cruisers, and he felt nothing. They were all just pieces on the board. His conventional fleet had been a sacrifice, a pawn sent forward to die. Its purpose was not to win. Its purpose was to hold the American fleet in place, to fix them in a specific grid coordinate on the map, to bunch them together as they closed in for the kill. A purpose they had now fulfilled perfectly.
He looked at the golden bracers on his wrists. He knew the price. He could feel the shadow of it already, a cold hollowness in his core. The power required to erase a stationary mountain was one thing. To unmake a fleet of sixteen moving, steel-clad fortresses, crewed by twenty thousand living souls, was another. He knew this act might cripple him. It might be the last time he could ever wield his power on such a cataclysmic scale.
He did not hesitate. The American fleet was the single greatest conventional threat to his entire global strategy. It was the arm of the only nation on Earth with the industrial might to challenge him. It had to be removed from the board. Utterly.
He took a deep, steadying breath, and reached for the microphone. "Dr. Chen. The time is now. Prepare the resonator for a full-power, wide-area discharge."
He then leaned back, closed his eyes, and began to summon the fire that would burn the world.
On the bridge of the USS Connecticut, Admiral Evans watched the last, burning Qing cruiser list heavily to port. Victory was moments away. It was then that the sky above the battle grew cold. The brilliant, tropical sunlight seemed to dim, to warp, as if seen through a curtain of dark water.
He looked up. A new, terrifyingly bright star was being born in the clear blue sky, directly above the center of his fleet. He stared in frozen, uncomprehending horror, the British Admiral's frantic, dismissed warnings screaming in his mind. The Emperor himself… no defense… a sorcerer…
He finally understood. He had brought his guns to a war against the gods.
"My God," he breathed, his voice a choked whisper.
The silent, grey wave of negation erupted from the sky and washed over the sea.