Zhu Heling did not retreat alone; he pulled back to his war-engine.
Leaning against the heavy iron tread of the Grand Borer, the Scholar hauled on a brass lever mounted to the side of the chassis. A valve opened with a bone-shaking hiss of tightly packed air. From the rear of the machine, two armored tunnel diggers connected a four-inch copper-wound air-powered hose to the backup tank of fuming aqua regia, preparing to flood the entire central floor in a hundred-gallon wave of boiling acid.
“Melt the whole floor!” Zhu Heling shrieked, his mouth swollen and bloody, his right eye blazing with unhinged fury. “I don’t care about the Master builder’s stone stand! I don’t care about the keystone! Dissolve his legs! Burn him to the marrow!”
The two tunnel diggers opened the main stopcock.
Inside the four-inch hose, seventy pounds of tightly packed spirit-acid began to surge, the thick rubberized leather bulging and shivering like a swollen black snake as the boiling liquid rushed toward the high-pressure spray nozzle.
Qiao Ming saw the hose swell.
He didn’t draw his lead line-weight. Against a flexible, four-inch high-pressure hose, a blunt lead weight would merely bounce off the rubberized surface without severing the flow.
