The shock didn’t arrive as an incremental pull.
A living man attempting to drag sixty pounds of dead weight up forty feet of upright air must shift his hips, bend his knees, and gather his breath, telegraphing the heave through the line in a series of preliminary shudders. Up in the dark rafters, the creature operated under no such living constraints. With Hookhold locking its wrists into unbending iron vices and Burdenless Step eliminating the moving heavy rush of its own skeleton, the hunter simply stepped backward off the steam pipe into the open void between the roof beams. It turned its entire mass into a falling balance weight.
Six hundred pounds of upright moving shock slammed through the flax webbing in a tenth of a second.
The sound that echoed through the dark rock pit was not a rip of canvas. It was the sharp, bone-shaking crack of a bullwhip breaking the sound barrier over water, followed right away by the violent, splintering shriek of four-inch white oak.
The force struck Urel directly between his shoulder blades.
The four-inch white oak timber chock—bolted to the granite floor with two five-eighths-inch iron spreading sleeves to anchor his boots—didn’t merely split. It exploded under the sudden sideways tearing force. The oak shattered into sharp, jagged splinters that flew across the bilge water like shrapnel, one of the iron anchor studs snapping cleanly at the floor line with a loud, metal ping.
