The avalanche of boiling waste scum came down the dark rock cliff like a tidal wave of molten copper.
Two hundred tons of white-hot red stone sludge. It glowed with an angry, cherry-red soft glow and carried thousands of jagged shards of exploded bronze crucibles, roared down the forty-five-degree chute. The heat streaming from the torrent was choking. Thirty paces away, the dry reeds on the stone hut’s roof burst spontaneously into yellow flame.
Across Pit Seven, twenty debt-bound laborers who had been shoveling cold melted rock waste screamed in mortal terror. It scattered like ants toward the sheer rock walls.
There was nowhere to run. Pit Seven was a sunken dark rock bowl with only a single narrow exit ramp. The blazing torrent was sweeping directly across the center floor, cutting off the escape route and threatening to drown the entire lower basin in three feet of boiling, toxic liquid.
“The gate!” a young coolie shrieked, pressing his back against the burning cliff. “The overseer opened the water gate without sounding the warning horn! He wants to boil us alive!”
Tie Shan stepped out of the stone hut, his broad chest bare, his twelve-pound iron bar gripped across his body. The heat washed over his bronze skin, but his new Iron-Bone thickness held firm. His eyes were locked onto Lin Tao.
“We move?” Tie Shan rumbled, his voice cutting through the roar of the avalanche.
“No,” Lin Tao said. He stepped beside him with his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen in his right hand. “Running on loose melted rock waste guarantees a broken ankle. We redirect the flow.”
Lin Tao’s left eye was blazing with emerald wireframe vectors.
The avalanche was following the natural depression carved into the center of the pit floor. A wide, shallow dark rock gully that led straight toward their stone hut before turning toward the lower drainage grates.
Under ordinary physical laws, the thick, sticky, semi-liquid red stone slurry possessed a high multiplier of friction against the rough fiery rock. Because of that friction, the wave was spreading outward laterally, widening its destructive front to cover the entire width of the pit.
If the friction between the fluid and the dark rock channel remained at zero point five eight, the wave would overflow the banks and engulf the stone shelter in less than twelve seconds.
Lin Tao sprinted forward, his boots crunching over hot gravel. He ignored the blistering air that scorched his eyelashes.
He reached the main junction where the dark rock gully branched toward the dormant fiery vent. An ancient, upright Precursor drainage shaft that plummeted two thousand feet into the underground magma chambers. The junction was blocked by a massive, two-ton slab of stone-hard hardwood and piled up cold melted rock waste.
“Tie Shan!” Lin Tao called out. “Clear the hardwood! Open the vent throat!”
Tie Shan didn’t hesitate. The giant lunged across the burning floor, his heavy boots splashing through ankle-deep sulfur mud. He drove the chisel-tip of his twelve-pound iron pry-bar beneath the two-ton hardwood blocked path. He planted his heels into the bedrock, and heaved upward with his newly forged Iron-Bone might.
The muscles across Tie Shan’s shoulders corded like thick iron ropes.
CRACK!
With a bone-shaking grunt of pure, animal strength, Tie Shan ripped the two-ton blocked path from its bedrock seat. He threw the massive timber slab ten feet through the air into the drainage ditch.
The dark, yawning maw of the two-thousand-foot Precursor drainage shaft lay exposed.
The roaring wave of red-hot red stone was fifty feet away, surging forward like a wall of liquid fire.
Lin Tao stepped directly to the lip of the open shaft. He dropped to his right knee. He ignored the blistering heat of the rock that began to smoke against his trouser leg. Then he drove the four-inch cold-drawn steel metal pen into the main foundational anchor of the dark rock gully.
Exploit: Localized Surface Friction Override.
Lin Tao’s left eye locked onto the friction multiplier variable within the local map point volume:
TICK.
Lin Tao twisted the steel needle by a quarter turn at the exact heartbeat of the twenty-four hertz frame refresh.
The physical friction along the twenty-foot dark rock gully collapsed to total zero.
The effect was instant and spectacular.
The leading edge of the boiling red avalanche reached the zero-friction zone. Then, the lateral spreading ceased fully. Deprived of surface drag, the semi-liquid red stone lost its churning tumbling wave and sped up into a terrifying, zero-drag smooth-flowing stream moving at over forty meters per second.
Instead of overflowing the banks and burying the stone hut, the entire two-hundred-ton torrent of boiling red waste scum was sucked cleanly into the narrowed channel.
ROAR!
Like water poured down a smooth funnel, the blazing clouded eye of molten red stone and shattered bronze crucibles plunged straight down the upright Precursor drainage shaft, disappearing into the two-thousand-foot underground deep pit with a distant, muffled boom.
The air in Pit Seven cleared.
The twenty scared coolies, huddled against the far wall, looked out in stunned, numbed disbelief.
Where an inescapable tomb of boiling copper should have been, there was only a dry, clean dark rock gully and the yawning mouth of the deep drainage shaft, swallowing the last wisps of sulfur steam.
In the center of the pit stood Lin Tao, calmly withdrawing his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen from the stone, and Tie Shan. He leaned casually on his iron pry-bar like an ancient titan who had just cleared an irrigation ditch.
From the top of the thirty-foot cliff, a figure leaned over the iron railing. It grabbed a brass telescope.
It was Slag Overseer Meng.
The overseer’s mouth hung open so wide his missing teeth were fully exposed, his face drained of all color until it was as pale as ash.