Portraits revealed through your current reading position.
Li Jun's best friend, an Earth Mover mage-tank whose single-charge shrink wand makes Carl's portal-crane trap possible.
Zhang, Li Jun's bald best friend, arrives breathless at station 36 just as Carl's plan to muscle an interdiction cart into the chamber stalls on the too-narrow halls. A still-human level-28 Earth Mover (a mage-tank hybrid) in glowing black-and-gold segmented armor, he produces the fix: a shrink wand with one charge left, which he'd been saving for an emergency. He's used it to choke a boss by shrinking its collar and to shrink a whole train (killing everyone aboard and jumping him six levels).
His zap shrinks the heavy cart small enough to roll through the twisting hallway, then it pops back to full size in the center of the room — the linchpin of Carl's swarm-funneling trap.
A bald Chinese man in glowing black-and-gold segmented armor, breathless from running, still fully human.
An Earth Mover ally whose shrink wand enables Carl's portal-crane trap.
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