The titan didn’t fall.
Eighteen tons of fine china armor and mass-manipulation arrays don’t topple from a single cracked mid-air ring. The Kernel Archon simply rebalanced its internal gravity engine with an ear-splitting high-pressure whine, shifting forty percent of its downward mass into its right foot. The shattered quartz flat stone slabs beneath its left heel ground into fine white flour under the redistributed load.
Its silver face rotated one hundred and eighty degrees on its neck metal tube. It stared down at Tie Shan with blank, shiny contempt.
The crimson rune on its face flashed twice.
PULSE.
A ball-shaped wave of gravity distortion blew up outward from the green jade core in its chest.
The air didn’t blow outward. It collapsed inward, then exploded in a violent outward shear. Tie Shan was hurled twenty paces backward across the shattered floor flags, his body skipping twice across the jagged quartz before slamming into the base of a thirty-ton dark rock server monolith.
CRACK.
