To a mortal observer, Tie Shan was a madman charging an eighteen-ton god of fine china and star-iron with a simple blacksmith’s hammer.
To Lin Tao’s test sight, it was an exquisite exercise in Newtonian mechanics and system latency exploitation.
The Kernel Archon had expended ninety-five percent of its nearby mass-manipulation reserve to generate the gravity vortex. For eighty-three split seconds—exactly two clock cycles at twenty-four hertz—its magnetic deflector shields were fully unpowered while its internal inductors recharged from the main bus line.
During those eighty-three split seconds, the Archon was not an unbeatable sky iron-puppet.
It was merely eighty tons of unshielded, brittle white fine china moving on clockwork bearings.
In high-hum combat physics, Lin Tao analyzed. His left eye projected the flight path vector directly onto his visual field, a massive body can’t change its angular driving force in a heartbeat. The Archon’s left knee joint is already compromised by forty percent. A packed moving strike delivering over thirty thousand Blasts of heat directly into the shear line will shatter the baked-clay housing.
“Low strike!” Lin Tao shouted across the ringing silence of the collapsed vortex. “The knee seam! Drive the wedge!”
Tie Shan didn’t need to be told twice.
