The scent of hot copper and cold rock settled over the basin floor.
Lin Ke stood at the northern end-post pylon, his fingers tracing the braided copper bus cable where it anchored into the five-hundred-pound iron pylon. Beneath his boots, the rock shook with a faint, sixty-cycle hum—the surrounding static of the approaching storm charging the hematite veins deep in the mountain.
“We have a flow pushback bottleneck,” Lin Ke said. He looked down into the deep fissure around the pylon’s base.
Shen Yue looked up from her water flask, her face pale. “The copper traces are rated for sixty thousand current units! What bottleneck?”
“The dark rock bedrock,” Lin Ke replied, kicking a piece of crushed melted rock waste into the gap. “Dark rock is dense, but its deep-rock moisture content is under two percent. When seventy percent of a sky strike hits these eight pylons in two split seconds, the surface rock will suffer charge saturation.”
Meng Shan stepped forward, his massive meteor-iron shield slung across his broad back. “What happens when it saturates?”
“Ground flashover,” Lin Ke said grimly. “The electricity can’t penetrate deep into dry rock fast enough.
It will seek the path of least pushback: reflecting back upward along the surface flat stone slabs like a claymore mine. The blast wave will detonate the quarry floor from underneath.”
