Across the two-mile-wide silver hangar deck of the Canglan Ark, five thousand twenty-foot-tall Rank 6 Star-Bronze Security Golems stood awkwardly at attention with their detached right arms lying at their feet.
Every time one of the golems tried to bend down with its left hand to pick up its fallen right arm, its bone-dry waist gears let out an agonizing SCREEEEECH-CRACK, and its chest battery light blinked a desperate warning red:
[ WARNING: BATTERY AT 0.008%! DO NOT BEND WAIST OR SYSTEM WILL ENTER SLEEP MODE! ]
“Don’t bend over! Stay right where you are!” Frost-Giant King Gu Shan boomed kindly, walking down the rows of twenty-foot bronze golems like a friendly big brother helping toddlers in a schoolyard. Because King Gu Shan was thirty feet tall, the twenty-foot golems only came up to his chest. “Boys, help these iron veterans pick up their arms! Be gentle with their shoulder sockets—they haven’t had a hot bath in ten thousand years!”
“Right away, Chief Gu!”
Twenty Frost-Giants and five hundred Furnace-Blood Engineers jogged down the fifty ranks of golems, picking up the heavy bronze arms and fitting the ball-joints back into the golems’ shoulder sockets.
However, without lubricant or spirit power to activate the self-repair runes inside the bronze metal, the reattached arms still hung stiffly and squeaked whenever the wind blew.
