The wedge met the metal pen across an empty map point.
At the exact instant Tie Shan’s twelve-pound pry-bar struck the outside head of the steel wedge, Lin Tao drove the hardened cap of his land-mapper metal pen into the inner seam. Between the mortal tools lay no physical matter—only a tiny gap of unrendered, flickering amethyst voxels where the daemon’s exact timing bus had dropped three in a row packets.
A forty-split-second desynchronization window.
In that tiny sliver of cosmic time, the quarantine boundary ceased to possess a crash box. The physical force of Tie Shan’s seventy-thousand-Newton moving strike was sent through the steel wedge, crossed the unrendered gap without encountering pushback, and coupled directly into the hard dark metal-steel body of Lin Tao’s metal pen.
The laws of Newtonian mechanics, suspended for seven minutes inside the sandbox, resumed execution with the explosive fury of a dam breach.
SNAP!
A blinding blast wave of white light blew up along the base seam.
The six semi-clear panels of the quarantine cube didn’t crack into glass shards. They simply desynchronized. Like a stack of dry parchment caught in an updraft, the amethyst facets tore away from their vertices, curling inward into glowing, two-space-folding planes before dissolving into a blizzard of harmless silver starlight.
