Tie Shan’s strike was not born of spiritual dao or sky enlightenment.
It was born of forty years of manual labor in the dark slate quarries of Sector Four, where mortal men broke thousand-ton rock faces with iron chisels, sledgehammers, and raw physical leverage. The master refresh cycle hit its forty-one point six seven split second frame drop. Then, the unchanging map point ward blinked out of existence for zero point zero four split seconds.
In that tiny sliver of non-rendered time, Tie Shan drove the corundum-tipped heel of his fourteen-pound pry-bar straight down into the third spreading seam of the star-white-gold deck.
CRACK!
The star-white-gold floor plate, designed to withstand sky-high pressures but unsafe to focused shear along its clockwork mounting bolts, shattered along the chalk line Lin Tao had drawn. The three-inch-thick metal plate buckled upward, exposing the main ice-cold coolant pipe hub beneath.
There lay the lifeline of the Kernel Sovereign: a massive, triple-flanged brass channel twenty inches in width, pulsing with liquid helium-3 at two degrees above total zero.
“There’s the pipe!” Old Man Geng bellowed from behind them, his sledgehammer raised high.
The Kernel Sovereign sensed the deep hull breach beneath its feet.
