The twin thirty-pound hammers crashed into the Precursor flat stone slabs for the final time.
There was no explosive crater this time. There was only a dull, pathetic thud as the heavy star-iron heads struck the stone and rolled uselessly to the side.
Bao Shan didn’t rise.
He fell to his hands and knees, his massive chest heaving with convulsive, rattling wheezes that sounded like bellows choked with wet sand. The dark rock plates strapped across his shoulders had shifted fully out of posture, their bronze wire bindings cutting deep, bloody furrows into the skin of his neck. His pupils were blown wide and glassy, fully unfocused as his spit dripped into the crushed stone dust between his trembling knuckles.
His muscles had entered acute tetanic cramping.
Every muscle fiber in his back, shoulders, and forearms was locked in violent, reflex spasms, starved of cellular stored energy and burning with toxic concentrations of body-energy muscle burn. When an athlete expends hundreds of thousands of foot-pounds of energy without a living cooldown phase, the mitochondria deplete their energy stores and the calcium pumps in the muscle cells freeze solid.
Lin Tao stood three feet away. His charcoal-gray traveled clothes spotless, his hands still loosely held behind his back.
