Bronze talons tore through the mist with the piercing shriek of parted silk.
Lu Chen held his ground.
Inside the narrow doorframe of the Nine-Mile Red Sedan, a single backward step would leave him off-balance on the slippery stone ledge outside.
He shifted his weight four inches to the left, dropping his right shoulder and bringing up the heavy iron spine of the ox-bone cleaver.
Clang!
The impact rang like a blacksmith’s sledge striking a cold anvil.
The shock rattled through the radius and forearm bone of his forearm. It sent a dull ache into his shoulder socket.
The bride’s bronze-tipped fingers rebounded. He scraped sparks across the notched iron blade that smelled sharply of scorched hair and ancient tomb green rust.
The inside of the bridal carriage was barely four feet wide and five feet tall.
It was an enclosed wooden coffin lined with velvet.
There was no clearance for long martial forms, wide sweeps, or leaping footwork.
Here, survival came down to butcher angles, brutal short-arc leverage, and the shearing torque of raw muscle.
The Mountain Bride moved without human joint limitations.
Her mummified shoulder popped from its socket with a sickening wet crunch, her left arm spinning three hundred and sixty degrees on its axis to whip back around from an impossible angle.
Her blackened talons slashed downward, raking across Lu Chen’s chest.
The oiled cloth of his vest parted like rotten paper.
Four jagged lines opened across his chest muscle and collarbone. He exposed the dark, slate-gray deep skin beneath.
The hardened skin of his Peak Flesh Tempering held against the main force of the blow, preventing the curved bronze points from collapsing his ribs or shredding his lungs.
Yet the cold bit deep.
A layer of gray necro-frost instantly coated the edges of the deep cuts, numbing the nerve endings and threatening to turn the cut muscle fibers to brittle glass.
Lu Chen’s jaw tightened.
His breathing stayed slow and even.
“Too cold,” he muttered under his breath.
Inside his chest, the Asura Crucible responded with savage fury.
The internal blood fire roared into overdrive, pumping boiling life-force through every scorched spirit vein in his torso.
His skin heat spiked wildly, climbing past fifty degrees and surging toward fifty-five degrees.
The tracking data flickered and dissolved.
Across his chest and shoulders, the charcoal-black melted rock waste veins beneath his skin began to pulse with a dark, ember-like orange glow.
The blood that welled from his chest wounds was not mortal red.
It was scalding crimson, steaming at over fifty degrees as it dripped onto the cedar floorboards.
His blood struck the bride’s stitched bridal robes. Then, the ancient silk hissed and began to bubble.
It burned like packed lye, eating through the stiff gold phoenix embroidery and searing the mummified gray flesh beneath.
The corpse shuddered, emitting a low, hollow hiss that sounded like escaping steam.
At fifty-five degrees, Lu Chen’s radiant body heat became an elemental hazard inside the enclosed wooden box.
His bare forearms pressed against the cedar doorframe as he drove his way deeper into the cabin.
Wherever his skin brushed against the century-old dry cedar, the wood began to smoke.
Fine curls of gray vapor rose from the window moldings and the armrests.
The red velvet cushions beneath them smoldered. Their pile turned black before bursting into sudden, hungry yellow flames.
Within seconds, the cabin became a choking kiln.
Flames crawled up the silk-draped inside walls, crackling greedily against the bone-dry timber. Meanwhile, the supernatural chill of the Mountain Bride battled the roaring heat of Lu Chen’s blood.
Lu Chen ducked his head beneath a falling beam of burning cedar.
He stepped directly into the bride’s guard, ignoring the smoke stinging his eyes.
His left elbow snapped outward. He drove with eight hundred pounds of torque directly into the desiccated side of the bride’s neck.
The impact jarred her skull, tilting the eight-sided bronze mirror sideways and disrupting her cryo-deep ring.
In that half-second opening, Lu Chen twisted his hips.
He drove off his rear heel. That brought the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver downward in a tight, upright chop aimed straight for her chest bone.
Crack!
The notched iron edge tore through the rotting bridal brocade, shearing through the desiccated skin and slamming directly into her spectral chest cage.
The sound was horrifying.
It wasn’t the wet slicing of meat, nor the dry snap of firewood.
It was the screech of cold iron biting into stone-hard, frozen granite heavy by hundreds of years of packed tomb malice.
The blade sank four inches deep, wedging between her third and fourth ribs.
A blast of oily, black corpse vapor erupted from the wound, smelling of rancid pork fat, sulfur, and stale canal mud.
Yet the bone didn’t shatter.
The stone-hard ribs clamped shut around the iron spine like the jaws of a steel bear trap.
The cleaver was stuck fast.
Instant freeze.
A wave of packed, sub-zero frost surged outward from the bride’s wound, racing up the iron flat of the blade in jagged white crystals.
The frost leaped onto the wooden handle, numbing Lu Chen’s right fingers and freezing the skin of his knuckles to the polished ox-bone grip.
If he let go, he would be disarmed inside a burning box with a Tier-2 Uncanny horror.
If he held on, the frost would creep past his wrist and freeze his wrist blood vessel solid.
“Stubborn bone,” Lu Chen grunted.
He didn’t let go.
Instead, he tightened his grip, planting both boots deep into the smoking timber.
He opened the main valves of his central spirit vein. That forced the molten current of the Asura Crucible directly down his right arm into the handle.
White steam blew up from his hand with a sharp crackle.
The ice encrusting his knuckles boiled away in an explosive hiss of boiling spray. It scorched the skin of his palms red but keeping his blood flowing hot and strong.
His tendons strained against his forearm bone. The dense fibers were humming under nearly nine hundred pounds of locked-muscle tension.
Sideways tearing force: near the breaking threshold of mortal joint cords.
Yet his Flesh Tempering held.
The scorched melted rock waste-veins lining his forearm functioned like internal iron splints, distributing the crushing moving shock across his entire upper torso.
The Mountain Bride didn’t yield.
Deprived of her cryo-blast wave, she resorted to the raw, clockwork violence of an ancient animated oddity.
Her desiccated legs whipped forward, wrapping around Lu Chen’s waist like bands of frozen hemp rope, trying to crush his hip bones and rupture his main thigh blood vessels under brutal crushing pressure.
Her arms clamped around his neck and shoulders, the bronze-tipped talons digging through his flesh down to the shoulder blade.
Blood hissed where her frostbitten claws touched his feverish skin, billowing foul gray steam that smelled of scorched fat and tomb dust.
Her face—the flat, eight-sided plate of ancient green rust bronze—slammed forward until it was barely six inches from his eyes.
The dark, shiny surface of the mirror began to churn wildly.
The drowned silhouettes trapped beneath the metal coalesced into a single, screaming vortex of jade light.
A piercing, high-hum whine rose from the bronze, shaking so hard that the teeth in Lu Chen’s jaw began to rattle against his gums.
The mirror was charging a point-blank blast of pure cryo-malice.
At this range, six inches from his brow, the beam would bore through his forehead, freeze his brain tissue into slush. Then it put out his fire in a single heartbeat.
The burning roof of the sedan groaned above them, the cedar rafters collapsing in a shower of blinding sparks.
Locked in mutual strangulation within the roaring flames, Lu Chen met the swirling jade glow of the bronze mirror with cold, unblinking eyes.