‘This is how it will go: first, I will slice off a few key pieces of your bodies: your feet and hands, to immobilise you both, then your noses, ears and tongues. And then, when you are lying here on this helipad pleading with your tongueless fucking mouths for me to stop, then—only then—will I kill you out of mercy.’

Alby said nothing.

‘You know,’ Aloysius said, ‘you’re not a very nice man. I sense a lot of anger issues in you.’

Jaeger Eins stepped forward menacingly, holding up the filament weapon.

‘You’re right, Captain. I am not nice. Not in any way. I am going to enjoy this very, very much—’

An explosion boomed from nearby.

And suddenly a whole section of the rim of grey ring-wall right next to the rig blasted upward in a billowing cloud of flames and dust, sending thousands of stone chunks spraying into the air.

And with that explosion, everything on the rig went to hell.

The explosion was, of course, the result of Rastor’s first shoulder-launched missile striking the western side of the ring-wall.

The blast tore a hole in the rim of the massive wall and seawater immediately began to funnel through it en masse, into the city-maze.

And the rig, so close to this new hole in the wall, rocked wildly and then . . .

. . . lurched sickeningly toward the maze, carried on the mighty rush of inflowing water.

With the floating oil rig’s anchor free of the sea floor, suddenly the Red Horizon Star-4 was swept like a bath toy—its decks tilting wildly, almost through forty-five degrees—toward the broken wall surrounding the city-maze and the colossal waterfall of seawater gushing over it.

On the helipad, as the rig lurched, Jaeger Eins was hurled to the ground.

Alby and Aloysius fell, too.

So did their two guards.

Quick as a cat, Aloysius took the opportunity to side-kick one of their Squire-guards, sending him sliding down the length of the helipad and off its lower edge, into the raging waters below.

Alby saw his chance and, still handcuffed, he dived toward Jaeger Eins and unleashed a double-fisted punch that broke the nose of the leader of the Knights of the Golden Eight.

Having stunned Eins, Alby snatched the filament weapon from Eins’s grasp and quickly used it to cut his flex cuffs.

The glistening fishing line–like wire sliced through the plastic flex cuffs easily, it was that sharp.

He dived over to Aloysius and cut his cuffs just as . . .

. . . borne on the seawater funnelling through the broken rim of the ring-wall, the rig came to the top of the wall . . .

. . . and was swept over it.

And suddenly Alby’s world went vertical.

As the rig toppled over the wall and plummeted into the city-maze, Alby and Aloysius searched for any handhold they could find.