Three point four tons of cold-rolled steel, cast bronze, and dying clockwork surged across the narrow iron ledge of the flagship’s ram.
Zhu Heling moved not with the grace of a warrior, but with the terrifying, blind driving force of a runaway railway locomotive. His boilers were cooled, his arms were seized, and his voice was reduced to a ragged animal gasp. Yet the forty-foot mainspring coiled in his spine was releasing its final fifty thousand foot-pounds of stored clockwork energy in a single, total rush.
The physical mass of Zhu Heling’s charging chassis was three point four metric tons. At a speed of six point two meters per second, the striking force carried by his iron body was eighty-five thousand blasts of heat. Equivalent to the impact of a thirty-two-pound solid cannonball fired from a naval gun at point-blank range. Nothing on the forward deck of the warship could have resisted that impact. A solid oak inner wall two feet thick would have been crushed into kindling in an instant.
The iron plates beneath his cleated boots shivered and groaned, the rivets popping along the forward seam as his massive chassis sped up across the wet metal.
Ten paces away, chained to the ram, Yan Zhiqiu looked up into the charging face of the mechanoid. Her dark eyes did not widen in panic. She didn’t cry out. She drew her breath deep into her lungs, centering her internal spirit upon the broken margin of the stone resting on her…
