The Precursor titan didn’t falter from the loss of its left arm drill.
With a sound roar that rattled the stone ceiling, the machine swung its massive right arm. The three-fingered crushing claw tipped with high-hum sound cutting edges. The three iron talons whistled through the air in a level scythe, aimed to decapitate Tie Shan where he knelt on the cratered floor.
Tie Shan reacted with the ingrained survival instincts of a seasoned miner. He dropped his shoulders flat against the rubble. He allowed the three-ton bronze claw to sweep six inches above his head.
WHOOOOOOSH.
The sound cutting field hummed with such violent intensity that the wind displaced by the swing sliced cleanly through a three-foot granite column ten paces away. That left a mirror-polished slanted cut through solid stone. The upper half of the column slid off its base with a dry scraping groan, crashing into the dark gallery below and scattering shards of marble across the floor.
Lin Tao didn’t look at the cut column.
His test left eye was locked onto the titan’s central chest cavity. He tracked the wireframe shape of its physical boundaries.
To native fighters, the combat golem was a terrifying build of seamless star-bronze and ancient sorcery. But in Lin Tao’s analytical senses, the build was an assembled hierarchy of discrete calculating objects governed by rigid map point transformations:
