The air around the embedded black glass shell had begun to whistle. A high, wet sucking noise that made the hair on Lin Ke’s neck rise.
A discarded wooden chopstick, blown by the wind across the courtyard flat stone slabs, brushed within three feet of the shell’s tail fin.
Without a sound, the wood stretched into a four-foot noodle of splintered plant fiber, twisted three times like spun sugar. Then it vanished into a tiny black pinprick of empty space.
A nearby spatial collapse event.
In less than three minutes, the holding field on the shell’s warhead would decay fully, tearing a twenty-yard void-rift straight through the courtyard and swallowing the central command vault whole.
*
“Clear the courtyard!” Meng Shan roared, spreading his massive arms to herd forty scared mortal artisans into the deep tunnels.
Lin Ke didn’t roll away.
