The air in the burning vault was no longer gas. It was a shimmering, blazing bright star-fire of white-hot liquid silver vapor and sulfur flames.
The heat had spiked past eight hundred and eighty degrees. The hem of Lin Tao’s patched linen tunic began to smolder, charring into black ash. The brass buttons on his leather belt grew scalding hot against his skin.
Lin Tao sprinted through the blinding white glare, his boots crunching over iron floor plates that were already glowing a dull, semi-clear red.
Tie Shan followed right away behind his heels, his massive frame shielding Lin Tao from the direct radiant blast of the ball-shaped core. Tie Shan’s Iron-Bone thickness was being pushed to its total living limit. His bronze skin was blistering. It smoked with faint white steam as his under-skin fluids began to boil under the extreme heat flux.
Yet the giant didn’t falter, his footsteps falling with rhythmic, machine-like care directly into Lin Tao’s wake.
Lin Tao reached the acute corner behind the northern intake baffle.
He raised the four-inch cold-drawn steel land-mapper metal pen. He locked his left eye onto the swaying map point junction where the two star-iron plates overlapped.
Lin Tao drove the plumb point of the steel metal pen directly into the hairline fissure between the two star-iron plates.
CRACK!
A sharp, sound blast wave rippled through the iron floor.
A circular boundary of pale emerald light snapped into existence around them. It formed a four-foot cubic zone of total, motionless calm. Inside the boundary, the howling roar of the eleven-hundred-degree fire vanished instantly, replaced by a tomb-like, chilling silence.
Tie Shan tumbled into the square, collapsing onto his hands and knees beside Lin Tao.
The giant drew a deep, shuddering gasp of air. The air inside the four-foot boundary was not merely cool. It was icy cold, smelling of pure mountain ozone and untouched morning frost. The blistering heat from his bronze skin faded away in seconds. That left his broad back coated in shivering goosebumps.
Lin Tao was kneeling at the threshold. His right hand was locked onto the steel land-mapper metal pen anchored into the seam.
Holding an unrendered boundary open against a thousand degrees of surrounding heat pressure was inflicting total calculating strain on Lin Tao’s nervous system. The Precursor running system was attempting to resolve the heat-powered rule-break, feeding back massive corrective spark pulses through the steel metal pen into his arm.
Blood began to pour from Lin Tao’s left nostril, hot and salty, dripping onto his linen sleeve.
His body heat spiked rapidly past thirty-nine point eight degrees. The veins across his temples bulged like thick blue cords, throbbing with violent brain pressure. His vision was swimming with a blizzard of green and violet glowing static.
Lin Tao drew a ragged breath, tasting copper on his tongue.
Beside him in the four-foot cool square, Tie Shan crouched with his back pressed against the dark rock foundation plates, his massive arms wrapped around Lin Tao’s knees to brace him against the violent sound buffeting. The giant’s bronze skin was covered in cool water drops from the unrendered air. But his eyes were wide with wonder. He watched the roaring white inferno lick against the invisible cubic boundary, unable to cross the exact outer edge.
“Fire bends,” Tie Shan murmured, his deep voice trembling with respectful awe. “Like water hitting rock.”
“The fire can’t burn where the mountain forgot to build a surface, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao whispered hoarsely, blood dripping steadily from his left nostril onto his torn sleeve.
Every breath Lin Tao took burned with deep nerve fire. His eye nerve was screaming with glowing-green static. His heart was pounding at one hundred and eighty-eight beats per minute as his bio-electric system absorbed the massive back-EMF surging through the steel metal pen. The bones of his right forearm ached as though wrapped in ice. At the same time, his skull felt ready to crack under the mounting body recoil.
Through the shimmering white wall of flame, the central Precursor sphere was turning the color of liquid sunlight.
The core heat hit eleven hundred and twenty degrees. The twelve-foot sphere was floating on a cushion of wildly displaced magnetic flux, its foundational star-iron anchor bolts shearing in half with sharp, rifle-shot cracks that sprayed red-hot rivets through the air. Molten bronze was sloshing in the lower channels like boiling soup, releasing thick, violet plumes of chemical smoke that coated the vaulted ceiling with shimmering soot.
Inside the four-foot cool square, the sense contrast was so extreme that it felt like an impossible dream.
Three inches from Tie Shan’s bare shoulder, the white-hot star-fire vortex raged at eleven hundred degrees, melting the star-iron plates into liquid orange melted rock waste that pooled like water on the floor. Yet inside the unrendered boundary, a drop of sweat on Lin Tao’s brow remained cool. It rolled down his cheek without evaporating. The air was still, cold, and fully untouched by the howling hurricane of fire outside.
Lin Tao’s teeth were clenched so hard that blood seeped between his back teeth, staining his lower lip crimson.
His left eye was burning with blinding glowing static. Every nerve in his right arm throbbed with the intense spark back-EMF surging from the Precursor engine. He was holding open an illegal map point in reality’s memory table. The running system was fighting to close the gap with every split second.
“Hold the corner, Lin Tao,” Tie Shan whispered hoarsely. His broad hands locked around Lin Tao’s knees like iron clamps. “I hold you. You hold the needle.”
“I’m holding it, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao gasped through the pain. “The counter is almost full.”
The heat runaway had entered its end-post phase.