The final sixty seconds arrived with the total collapse of color.
The deep violet sky bleached into a blinding, monochromatic gray. Every rock, every cable, and every strand of hair on their bodies lost its hue, rendered in stark, high-contrast silver and charcoal. The sky moisture was so thoroughly stripped that Lin Tao’s lips cracked, a tiny drop of blood drying instantly into a dark crust.
The thirty star-copper bypass bars began to sing.
It wasn’t a musical tone. It was the terrifying, ringing drone of metal shaking under the influence of a huge, approaching magnetic field. The three Precursor star-iron spires at the center of the plateau hummed in sympathetic deep ring, their ancient, twisted surfaces shedding flakes of hundreds of years-old black rust to reveal the silver-alloy channels beneath.
Lin Tao tightened his grip on his land-mapper metal pen, his knuckles pale. His hardened left collar bone throbbed with a dull, rhythmic ache that matched the a deep hum refresh cycle of his test HUD. His breath was shallow, his heart beating in rapid, measured pulses against his ribs. He had spent months preparing for this meet, calculating fading away matrices and testing grounding alloys. But facing a Seventh-Rank sky enforcement entity was not a textbook test model. It was a live system crash in physical space.
