The pinky finger of Frank’s right hand was calloused, stained with faint traces of blue carpenter’s chalk, and fully plain by rings of spirit-jade. When it tapped the grapefruit-sized orb of twelve-thousand-degree magma, it didn’t deliver a mountain-crushing blow. It delivered an impulse of pure sound hum modulation.
Ting.
The sound was no louder than a small bronze bell chiming in an empty garden. Yet the crystal-clear lattice of the molten rock, frozen at total zero speed by the domain ruleset, possessed an infinite sound Q-factor. In a medium where speed is clamped to zero, shaking energy can’t fade into surrounding air. It can’t radiate as sound waves through the air, nor can it escape as heat into the floor. It could only travel inward.
Along every atom-deep bond of the magma orb, the tiny impulse of Frank’s pinky tap propagated at sixty-four hundred meters per second. It reached the core of the stone, reflected off the boundary walls. Then it inverted its phase by exactly one hundred and eighty degrees. Then, through the points of contact where the magma orb touched the suspended thicket of frozen attacks, the inverted ringing hum leapt across the entire array.
It leaped into the sixty thousand suspended spatial guillotines. It leaped into the frozen gouts of blazing bright fire. It leaped into the static sheets of blood-acid rain, the stone-hard hurricane frost. The serrated iron chains hanging rigid in the air. Within three tenths of a second, every single hostile attack suspended within…
