The second steel harpoon shrieked through the salt spray with terrifying, destructive fury.
It didn’t strike Qiao Ming. At the exact heartbeat the air-powered valve blew up, Qiao Ming dropped flat onto the iron grating, his bare soles kicking out to lock beneath the narrow high walkway frame.
The three-foot star-fallen steel missile passed through the exact empty space where his chest had been a heartbeat before. It struck the main mid-air thick ship rope of the watching narrow high walkway four feet above the pulpit.
The thick ship rope was a two-inch cable woven from sixty strands of charcoal-hardened iron wire, bearing thirty thousand pounds of dead weight. When the barbed harpoon cut forty of those strands at eighty sea-weights of speed, the leftover wire could not bear the shock load.
With an ear-splitting, metal screech that sounded like an iron bell tearing in two, the main thick ship rope snapped.
The entire southern half of the narrow high walkway dropped five feet with a violent, bone-jarring lurch.
The punched holes in iron floor tilted eighteen degrees to the southwest, dumping Yan Zhiqiu’s quiver and two loose needle-point arrow arrows over the edge into the foaming salt basin below. Yan Zhiqiu slid toward the yawning gap, her fingers clawing wildly at the wet iron grating as her boots cleared the lip of the pulpit.
