The whip didn’t strike like leather. It struck like lightning through a transformer bank.
An arc of emerald, high-voltage rotting star-fire snapped across thirty yards of empty air, slicing through an eight-inch bronze support cable with an ear-splitting crack and showering the narrow high walkway in droplets of molten metal.
The bridge lurched ten feet to the left, swaying sickeningly over the twenty-fathom drop.
Lin Ke dropped to one knee on the punched holes in iron grating. His right hand gripped his spirit-iron crowbar. Meanwhile, his left arm throbbed with the dull, sickening ache of thirty-a split second of mental lag.
The Ashen Corpse-Puppet Master surged forward on eight clockwork spider legs, the air-powered pistons in his joints shrieking with high-pressure steam. His four arms cracked twin soul-flaying whips in alternating figure-eight patterns.
Behind him swarmed four hundred iron-forged zombie automatons.
They weren’t shambling corpses. They were mass-produced combat husks forged from cold-iron and corpse-steel, moving with horrifying, timed together agility.
Their bronze boots were locked onto the narrow high walkway handrails. They used the heavy metal channels as energized power bars to draw huge spark charge from the cluster’s power rails.
