Before Qiao Ming could strike the locking pin, a monstrous roar of grinding bronze tore through the spray beneath the flagship’s ram.
Zhu Heling had not drowned in the flood. The Scholar had climbed.
The ascent of the nine-foot mechanoid was a spectacle of monstrous, unbending desperation. With his dead left arm clattering uselessly against the hull, Zhu Heling climbed using only his right gauntlet and his two said clearlysteel boots. Each strike of his bronze talons bit two inches deep into the oak timbers of the warship, tearing out splinters the size of swords as he hauled his three-ton chassis upward against gravity. He was driven not by reason, but by the blind, unbending fury of an intellect that could not accept the collapse of its counts.
His broad chest, once gleaming with polished cold-rolled steel, was black with coal soot and streaked with yellow sulfuric acid from his burst battery cells. Inside his open chest sky-slit, behind the cracked crystal window, the three hundred brass cogwheels were running in a state of total friction. The diamond pivot of the balance-wheel had fully crushed into fine gray dust, allowing the silver-iron wheel to wobble erratically between its brass bridges. The teeth of the gear catch were jamming with every third beat, producing violent clockwork shuddering that shook the entire upper chassis. A shower of tiny bronze shavings drifted down into the bottom of his torso, smoking as they made contact with the hot puddle of leaked metal tube oil.
