To survive a self-running execution sweep, one doesn’t outrun the light. One controls the terrain.
Tie Shan didn’t sprint in a straight line toward the central fissure.
Even with his Iron-Bone body refinement, sprinting headlong into the focal path of two Nascent Soul-tier matter-deletion beams was suicidal. The beams didn’t wound flesh. They unlinked physical map points from the reality registry. If a beam grazed his shoulder, his arm would vanish into non-existence. That left behind no wound to tourniquet or heal.
Instead, Tie Shan moved in a zigzagging, explosive bounding stride. He used the thirty seated star-copper bypass bars as physical deflectors.
BOOM!
The first beam lanced down from the daemon’s curved array. It struck the granite three paces behind Tie Shan’s trailing boot, shearing a three-foot trench through the dark rock with a dry, electric whisper. The stone didn’t shatter. It simply dissolved into glowing wireframe voxels before vanishing into starlight.
Tie Shan’s boots tore through the frost-crusted dark rock as he lunged between the shunts. Every stride was an act of brutal body-leverage defiance. Carrying the eighty-pound heavy dark metal-alloy master shunt in his left hand while holding the twelve-pound iron pry-bar in his right, under a 2.4x gravity pull, needed an energy output exceeding four thousand watts. His thigh muscles burned with muscle burn. His heart pounded against his ribs like a bronze hammer in an iron chest.
