The four-bladed rotating star-iron drill struck Tie Shan’s twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar with the shrieking fury of a mountain avalanche meeting an unbending cliff of granite.
SKRRRRRRR-BOOM!
A blinding blizzard of white-hot friction sparks erupted from the point of contact, lighting up the shadowy round hall in jagged flashes of electric violet and amber light. The spinning speed of the drill—spinning at six thousand turns a minute—screeched against the hardened sixty-degree chisel edge of the pry-bar, tearing tiny shavings of star-metal from both weapons. The intense friction heated the contact point past eight hundred degrees in less than two seconds. That turned the tip of Tie Shan’s tool a bright, blazing bright cherry red.
The sheer linear moving driving force carried by the eighteen-ton bronze giant statue was total. Forty-five thousand Newtons of forward clockwork thrust channeled into a single point of impact.
Tie Shan’s heavy iron-shod boots were driven backward across the dark rock floor.
SCREEECH.
The friction between iron soles and polished dark rock carved two glowing, cherry-red trenches twelve paces long across the round hall floor. It filled the air with the pungent stench of melted stone glass and scorched leather. Small flakes of dark rock, white-hot by the pressure, popped and pinged against the giant’s bare shins like hot buckshot. The floor beneath them groaned as underground foundation arches carried the huge moving shifted weight into the bedrock.
