Catgirls and Irises

[Alternate history, Western fantasy, firing squads, dark, brutal, not a romance novel] 1793, Toulon, amid blood and chaos. A young artillery captain witnesses a weapon that will change everything: the Aether Cannon. It can reduce anything to dust, but the price is the flesh and blood of its gunner. Amid the ruins, he discovers another “secret weapon”: Vivian, a silver-haired catgirl who has been tortured by the nobility and is barely clinging to life. Her body is covered in wounds, and her eyes hold nothing but an abyss of fear. The future leader of France sees her potential. He doesn't care about her trauma, only whether she can become the blade he needs to conquer Europe. He drags her out of the dungeon and throws her into a far larger cage called “war.” This is a story about how war twists everything. A dark epic about a cat-eared girl struggling to find “protection” amid an emperor's ambition, the schemes of foreign races, the shadow of the exterminators, and her own trauma... (I'm not very good at writing blurbs.)