“Tear him apart!” Zhu Heling screamed, his voice distorted into a ragged, shrieking whistle as sixteen sea-weights of unvented steam backed up into his throat pipe hub.
The Scholar swung his seven-foot war-cleaver in a sweeping level arc, intending to sever Qiao Ming at the waist. The blade, glowing cherry-red along its serrated edge, hissed through the freezing mist with terrifying speed.
Yet midway through the swing, the clockwork horror that Qiao Ming had predicted on the thousandth step finally showed up within the Scholar’s artificial body.
The Scholar had designed his body in the dry, heated workshops of the Iron Bureau, where surrounding heat levels remained at thirty degrees and sky moisture was strictly controlled. In his calculating hubris, he had failed to account for the extreme heat hysteresis of composite metals when subjected to rapid ice-cold shock. The azure mist rising from the map had chilled the outer surface of his black steel chest-plates to ten degrees below freezing. At the same time, his internal coal-fired boiler continued to pump steam at nearly four hundred degrees into the gear housings. The resulting heat slope generated inner tearing stresses that no known alloy could withstand.
Inside Zhu Heling’s left shoulder housing, the heat swelling of the black steel casing had fully removed the running clearance of the main brass gear-race. The whale oil within the pool, heated beyond three hundred degrees, had degraded into a gummy, carbonized tar that could no longer separate the metal surfaces under high load.
