The double fell forty feet through the rising plume of black smoke. But it didn’t fall like a stone, and it didn’t drop like a man bracing for shattered ankles.
It dropped with the supernatural physics of Milestone 6: Burdenless Step.
The creature landed squarely on the narrow, iron-rimmed lip of an overturned melted rock waste cart fifteen feet below the truss. Its boots struck the half-inch metal edge without a bounce, without a wobble, and without the slightest give in its knees. The massive striking force of a forty-foot drop was simply nullified, absorbed into the system improvement that Len Vey had earned while repairing the washed-out timber bridge at Highwater Wash seven days ago. The cart didn’t even creak beneath its boots.
To Len, watching from thirty paces away through the swirling orange flames, the sight was a gut-deep, nauseating rule-break of physical reality. He remembered the exact feeling of earning that milestone. The cold mountain rain soaking through his shirt, the three-ton timber bridge-stringer shifting under his shoulder, the painful strain on his spine until the system had recognized his labor and granted Burdenless Step. It was an improvement designed to carry heavy postal freight across broken mountain terrain without crushing the courier’s joints. Now, that same bodily grace had been stripped of human purpose and transformed into an engine of pursuit.
