The crash at Tier Two of the spiral ramp shook the entire twelve-hundred-foot green jade tower.
The lead bronze iron-puppet crashed into Tie Shan’s star-iron totem at thirty miles per hour, its air-powered hammer driving downward with fifty thousand pounds of moving impact. The blast wave blew out the air in an ear-splitting sonic crack. It sent a shower of orange sparks cascading over the ramp’s outer ledge into the dark coolant deep pit below.
Tie Shan’s boots slid backward three inches, carving deep, smoking furrows into the dark rock pavers.
His canvas gambeson tore at the shoulders under the huge muscular strain. But his spine remained unbroken. The twenty-one-ton mass of the meteoritic iron totem absorbed the blow. Its cold crystal-clear lattice scattered the blasting blast wave directly into the tower’s bedrock foundation.
“Hold the stance!” Lin Tao shouted, darting around Tie Shan’s left flank.
The lead iron-puppet’s air-powered hammer was momentarily locked in its extension stroke, its exhaust valves hissing as its pressure pool recharged. In that split-second reset window, Lin Tao lunged forward with his land-mapper metal pen.
He didn’t strike the armored chest. He drove the micro-needle into the exposed high-pressure return line coiled beneath the iron-puppet’s right knee joint.
