Northveil coastline. 11:30 PM.
The night in Northreach was traditionally a sanctuary of cold, rhythmic solitude, defined only by the relentless crashing of the North Sea against the jagged obsidian cliffs. But tonight, the atmosphere had been violated. The freezing air, plummeting well below the zero mark, was no longer capable of numbing the mounting tension that clung to the shoreline like a physical weight. Northreach—a territory long dismissed as a "discarded wasteland" by the pampered, silk-clad nobles of Sol-Regis—had been transmuted. It was now an industrial leviathan, a fortress of steel and stone that breathed with the rhythmic hiss of high-pressure steam and the ethereal hum of mana-reactors.
