The thirty-foot-long paper scroll unrolled across the cracked black pavement with a crisp fwip-fwip-fwip, stopping right in front of Vanguard General Gu Shan’s bruised toes.
Gu Shan stood leaning on his jagged asteroid crutch, his swollen right knee throbbing like a drum. Behind him, his three thirty-two-foot Bone-Captains rubbed their flattened backsides, while the ten thousand thirty-foot Titan warriors craned their thick necks to stare down at the tiny bespectacled bookkeeper standing in front of them.
Abacus Su pushed his round spectacles up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat into his tin megaphone, and began reading in a sharp, rhythmic voice that echoed across the silent starry border:
“Item One: Fifty miles of newly laid, twelve-lane Grade-8 Space Asphalt, cracked down the center line by an unauthorized thirty-five-foot pedestrian wearing spiked star-iron footwear! Material replacement, spirit-tar heating, and leveling labor: Four Hundred and Twenty Trillion Grain-Notes!”
Gu Shan’s jaw dropped open. “Four hundred and twenty trillion?! It’s just black gravel poured in space!”
“Black gravel?!” Ye Guhan stepped forward from the railway crew, his cold face dark with offence as his hand went to the hilt of his Heaven-Leveling Rail Blade. “Each square inch of that pavement contains crushed magnetite star-sand, three layers of spirit-binding tar, and was leveled to within one-thousandth of a hair by my own sword! Calling it black gravel is an insult to the Supreme Highway Sword Dao!”
