The heat rising from the backup spreading bus behind Power yard 404 was enough to wilt pine needles from sixty paces away.
Air above the heavy copper feeder cables warped and shone like grease in a hot skillet.
Nearly one million megajoules of stepped-down, filtered sky energy were pooling inside the power yard’s spreading end-post. It waited behind the main disconnect like a trapped flash flood behind a wooden gate.
“It will detonate!” shrieked an elder from the Iron Sword Sect, his knuckles white as he pointed at the trembling iron junction box. “The vessel can’t hold the ocean! The mortal shell will burst. The resulting blast wave will rip the northern half of the Jiuzhou Continent into cosmic gravel!”
Across the terrace, hundreds of fighters began to scramble backward toward the cliff edge, trampling their own stitched hems in a wild bid to distance themselves from the humming shed.
Frank stood in the gravel yard, wearing his canvas shop apron and holding a wooden clipboard with a yellow legal pad clamped to its face.
He was chewing the eraser off a yellow number-two pencil, calmly checking off line items as if reviewing an invoice for drywall screws.
“Relax, you drama queens,” Frank muttered, not even bothering to look up from his checklist. “A transformer doesn’t detonate unless you short the backup or starve the load. It’s a flow pushback balance problem. Any town work that commissions a four-thousand-volt spreading feeder without a battery energy storage bank deserves to have…
