The forty-two-meter span of cold-iron mid-air cable bucked and whipped like a living snake above the boiling liquid silver lake.
Tie Shan stepped onto the two-inch wire first. His heavy, iron-shod boots found the narrow curved steel, his dense mortal marrow adjusting instantly to the violent forty-eight-cycle ringing shaking. Behind him, secured by the braided hemp tether, Lin Tao balanced on the wire. That kept his balance point low and his arms extended to counter the wind-cutting downdraft.
Every three seconds, a massive blast wave from the reaper’s thrashing heads washed over them. He carried sheets of freezing spray that coated the cable in slick, dangerous liquid silver.
In moving load-bearing building, Lin Tao calculated as the cable swayed two meters from side to side, the ringing hum of a suspended cable is proportional to its tension and inversely proportional to its linear mass. Tie Shan’s dense mortal frame adds one hundred and twenty pounds of damping mass, suppressing the second-order ringing tones before they can reach the shearing threshold.
Tie Shan moved with terrifying, machine-like focus.
Each step was deliberate, heavy, and unmoving. His calloused toes curled over the curved iron wire, his calves and thigh muscles absorbing the high-hum shaking before it could disrupt his core balance. A sudden blast of spark-charged wind threatened to peel them from the cable. Then, Tie Shan dropped to one knee on the wire. He clamped his left arm around the cold iron until the gust passed.
