The beam of land-wide deletion didn’t make a sound as it fell from the thousand-foot Grimoire. It wasn’t lightning, and it wasn’t fire. It was a tube-shaped shaft of pure, light-devouring void, thirty feet in width. It plunged straight downward through the black ink squall like a huge high-pressure punch press.
Wherever the beam passed, the air didn’t ionize. The air molecules were simply excised from the map point plane. That left behind a whistling, total empty pocket that dragged mountain gale-winds into its wake. Its target was the five young fighters standing in their work gear along the outer edge of the blue chalk boundary.
“Worksite defense protocol Delta,” Frank said, his voice quiet, calm, and fully relaxed as he leaned against his folding light metal ladder. “Show these script-kiddies what approved union apprentices can do.”
The blue test box flashed above Class 404 like a green light at a drag strip.
“Anchor plate locked!” Shen Shitou roared. The muscular young smith took a half-step forward. It slammed both steel-toed boots into the dark rock flat stone slabs. He didn’t raise a shield, and he didn’t draw a magic charm. Instead, Shen Shitou drove the rubber-wrapped handle of his sixteen-pound sledgehammer straight downward, pinning the flat iron head into the center of a two-foot bedrock fissure.
