The wind howling beneath the funnel was soaked with ozone and boiled away frost. He stood at the outer edge of the dark rock overhang. Lin Tao could feel the static-electric charge on his knuckles prickling with five thousand volts of ungrounded potential. Every hair on his arms stood on end, and small, pale blue sparks leaped between the brass buckles of his land-mapper satchel.
Thirty paces above the terrace, the outermost vanguard ring of Du Cang’s domain—Ring Twelve—was executing a wide sky-high sweep. The fifty swords comprising this ring glided with snake-like grace, their silver blades spaced exactly six paces apart, cutting through the thin air at eighty miles per hour.
Lin Tao raised his right arm. He held a heavy star-iron land-mapper wedge between his calloused fingers. The wedge was four inches long, three-sided, forged from dense, high-carbon Precursor scrap ore that weighed nearly two pounds. Its surface was scored with fine measurement notches, but its mass was solid, unbending iron.
His left eye locked onto Blade #42 of Ring Twelve.
Lin Tao didn’t possess spiritual Qi. He couldn’t guide the projectile with telekinetic will or infuse it with lethal sword intent. But what he possessed was seventeen years of quarry labor, muscular memory sharpened by a million hammer strikes. A sight tracking overlay that calculated curved flight paths down to the tiny fraction of an inch.
