Eighth Elder Luo plunged through the freezing canyon fog like a falling boulder.
His downward speed reached forty feet per second.
In the mountain gale, his three-layered boar-hide vest snapped wildly against his ribs.
His grafted ape tendons strained against the cold-iron rings hammered into his forearms, dark blood pulsing through mutated fibers thick as hemp cord.
Above his head, Luo held a sixty-pound spiked iron maul with both hands.
The heavy steel flanges were grooved to channel blood, each six-inch spike hardened in arsenic salt water.
“Die in the trench, rat!” Luo bellowed.
His roar echoed off the upright limestone precipices, echoing across the empty fifteen-hundred-foot deep gap.
