Morning glare flashed off the flat steel face of the eight-pound sledgehammer. Eren Tal stepped up to the oak practice bench in the center of the yard. The air was dead still between the timber stacks, heavy with the smell of dry white clay, hickory resin, and the sudden metal ozone of an active transit circuit. Forty feet away over the clover bed, the pale garden moth spirit circled in the sun, its tiny amber return halo pulsing once per second.
Eren planted his iron-shod cart driver’s boots wide in the gravel, checking the sightline with a wheelwright’s habitual caution to be certain Pella and Corvin were safely behind the two-inch ash shield and the moth was forty feet clear of the debris cone. His broad shoulders bunched beneath his linen shirt. His calloused hands slid apart along the thirty-inch hickory helve as he drew a deep breath into his chest and whipped the heavy iron head through a full overhead swing.
At exactly forty-five point two seconds into the two-minute transit window, eight pounds of forged iron traveling at forty feet per second met the brittle white heavy clay keystone of Ceramic Test Arch #01. There was no partial fracture and no lingering spark bridge. The experiment demanded total, instant clockwork total ruin of the endpoint frame.
