The shattered ruins of the black-ice throne exploded into shards of razor frost.
From the crushed debris, General Meng Guan rose with a deep-throated shriek that rattled the underground roots of the Great Wall.
The nine-foot crystal-clear titan was no longer human. Thick plates of blue-black ice-slow bone wrapped his ribs like warped cataphract armor. The four backup bone scythes jutting from his shoulder joints bent with monstrous high-pressure tension. Ice-cold malice circulated through his pale ice-marrow at terrifying pressure. He dropped the surrounding air in the Glacial Crypt past sixty degrees below zero.
Lu Chen didn’t yield an inch of ground.
His bare, slate-hardened chest radiated a ferocious heat aura, white plumes of high-pressure steam venting from his collarbones. Beneath his skin, the thirty-six awakened Asura channels roared as his Five-Viscera Blood Cauldron pumped liquid fire through his arteries.
In his calloused hands, the twenty-eight-pound Great Blood Severing Cleaver was already awake.
Internal animal fat channels hissed within the star-iron spine. He drove the heat of the black glass cutting edge past three hundred degrees. A blinding cherry-gold heat haze distorted the freezing air along the razor edge, flashing drops of sub-zero water drops into screaming steam.
Lu Chen advanced across the black frozen ground. He closed the distance with heavy, measured strides that cracked the bedrock beneath his boots.
