The thirty Corpse-Mantis Guards formed a tight, nested outer edge around Lu Chen, their barbed appendages clicking against the granite flags in rapid, nervous row.
From ten paces away, their anatomy was a horrifying proof to the royal court’s razor-sharp depravity.
They wore the gold-trimmed layered-scale armor and silk surcoats of the Great Yong Emperor’s personal vanguard. But their human biology had been hollowed out and rebuilt.
Beneath the gold leaf mail, their abdomens were elongated and segmented, pulsing with dark, toxic fluids.
Their forearms had been surgically cut at the elbow and replaced with three-foot blades of glossy black mantis hard shell, lined with recurved teeth as sharp as black glass scalpels.
At the center of the formation stood the squad leader.
He towered seven feet tall, armored in gold dragon mail.
His spine had been split to accommodate four fully developed raptorial arms.
