The twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar dropped through empty air.
To any traditional fighter in the world, Tie Shan’s strike would have appeared utterly deranged. A blind, furious hammer blow aimed at an empty map point three feet behind the spinning beast’s flank.
Then, the latency window expired.
The world engine’s deferred crash thread resolved its math queue at the exact heartbeat Tie Shan’s steel chisel reached the lowest point of its swing. The delayed physical mass of the chimera’s tail root materialized exactly at the map point of impact.
KABOOOOM!
The crash sounded like a twenty-four-pound naval cannon firing point-blank against an iron safe.
Forty-eight thousand Newtons of striking force, packed onto the hardened three-inch chisel edge of the cold-drawn pry-bar, smashed directly into the chimera’s main high-pressure articulation bearing. The Precursor alloy, stressed by ten thousand years of unmaintained tension and running under maximum spinning shear, suffered a total clockwork failure.
The four-inch star-steel pivot pin snapped in half with an ear-splitting, crystal-clear SNAP.
