Four huge shapes dropped from the vaulted ceiling of the round hall. He plunged eighty paces through the freezing air before slamming onto the suspended star-iron narrow high walkway with the thunderous impact of falling meteors.
The entire bridge shuddered wildly, the punched holes in grating groaning under the sudden application of sixteen metric tons of moving mass.
They were Heavy Netherworld Executioners. Elite Precursor defense iron-puppets designed specifically to purge secret technicians who tampered with the core memory buses. Standing over twelve feet tall, each build possessed four massive arms forged from blackened star-fallen iron. He ended in high-pressure bone-shears that hissed with escaping cryo-steam. Their broad torsos were armored in linked plates of frozen dark rock, and behind their slotted iron visors burned twin pale-blue sensor arrays that locked directly onto Lin Tao.
Four point two metric tons each, Lin Tao analyzed. He measured their moving shifted weight as his left eye tracked their advancing gait. Air-powered high-pressure actuation running on high-pressure liquid silver. Their main directive is simple: destroy the test screen and sever the physical probe link before the null-mask commit finishes.
Lin Tao couldn’t move.
His star-white-gold metal pen was still seated in the moving bus trace of the spinning green jade ring. He held the write-commit channel open. If he withdrew the needle before the final validation checksum completed, the cache registers would experience a partial write failure, instantly corrupting the index tree and risking total mental desynchronization for millions of sleeping souls on…
