A mortal blacksmith doesn’t strike with his arms. He strikes with the weight of the earth.
Tie Shan began his movement from the soles of his boots.
His triple-soled iron-shod boots dug into the dark rock gravel. He locked his ankles into the granite foundation of Mount Taiyi. Striking force surged upward through his calf muscles, fired through his dense thigh muscles. Then he rotated through his hips with the explosive, coiled power of a siege giant crossbow releasing its iron arm.
His broad back arched. The scarred, corded muscles of his lats and upper back muscle bunched beneath his soot-stained skin, their fibers hardened by nine seasons of nonstop body refinement.
The twelve-pound star-iron pry-bar rose above his right shoulder.
It didn’t wobble. It didn’t drift from the upright plane. The heavy bar moved along an exactly perfect arc, tracing a path dictated by thirty years of mortal quarry labor.
Lin Tao watched the descent through his augmented left eye.
In the a deep hum world engine, high-speed physical strikes were often subject to frame-skipping and crash approximation. Fast arrows could clip through armor. Sweeping sword strikes could register late due to latency desynchronization. But Tie Shan’s strike was not a fast, evasive strike. It was a massive, high-heavy rush moving delivery. A strike so dense with mass and driving force that the physics engine was forced to allocate maximum priority to calculate its flight path.
