Trapped against the massive cast-iron blast damper at the dead-end of the chimney pipe, Auctioneer Yan reached the limits of mortal terror.
His three broken bone stumps twitched in stale soot, oozing yellow marrow and frothing black bile.
His leftover upper scythe trembled in the dim eerie glow of the sulfur vents.
Then, the panic in Yan’s bulging eyes curdled into suicidal malice.
“If I rot,” Yan snarled, his out-of-joint jaw clicking erratically, “you burn with me!”
The black demonic cords grafted to his spine began to swell, pulsating with sickly viridian light.
The demon marrow inside the leftover ivory scythe turned molten. It hissed like sulfur acid as Yan tried to overload the graft’s core osteocytes.
Corpse-shrapnel blast, Lu Chen’s test mind registered instantly. Volumetric blast radius: eight paces. Tightly packed bone fragments traveling at five hundred feet per second. Blast charge time: zero point six seconds.
