There was a strange, tragic comedy in the plight of five hundred elite royal dragon-guards suspended forty feet in the air.
Along the three-tiered gun decks of the Heavenly Mandate, rows of bronze-armored warriors lined the polished hardwood railings. Their heavy breastplates were embossed with coiled dragons. Their five-pace axe-spears were tipped with forged star-steel. Their helms were crowned with dyed scarlet horsehair plumes that fluttered bravely in the mountain wind. They were the Emperor’s personal guards. Men trained to breach sect fortresses and reduce mortal cities to ash.
Yet none of them dared jump.
The problem was not cowardice. It was logistics.
Each dragon-guard wore eighty pounds of cast bronze plate armor, three weapons, and an array of tactical magic charms. Under normal working conditions, a royal guard simply stepped off the railing and floated gracefully to the ground on the ship’s backup floating field, his descent cushioned by anti-fall formations woven into his silk boots.
With the flagship’s power bus melted into melted rock waste, the ship’s backup floating field was fully dead.
In working tactical triage, Lin Tao assessed, his left eye calculating the end-post speed of an eighty-pound bronze suit falling forty feet, high-technology equipment becomes a prison. Just then, the supporting public works fails. An traditional fighter relies entirely on external power grids for mobility. When that grid drops offline, eighty pounds of divine dragon-scale plate becomes eighty pounds of dead weight that will shatter a soldier’s ankles the moment his boots hit the rock.
