Straw exploded off the floor in a cloud of yellow chaff and blinding dust.
Before the glowing iron poker could touch his brow, the older merchant moved with unnatural, liquid speed.
His neck snapped sideways with the wet, sickening crunch of parting bone, tilting at an impossible ninety-degree angle against his shoulder.
The polite, timid smile on his face tore open.
It didn’t open like mortal lips parting in surprise.
The skin split cleanly along the black catgut seams from chin to ear, peeling backward like a burst sausage casing to reveal what lay beneath the borrowed human face.
A three-sided, razor-jawed vulpine skull emerged from the flap of peeled skin.
It was covered in coarse silver-white fur glazed with a thick crust of blue frost rime. Its slit yellow pupils glowed with the famished cruelty of an ancient hunting beast.
Four rows of semi-clear, needle-like fangs snapped together with a ringing metal clatter.
Beside it, the younger merchant let out a high-pitched, warbling screech. A sound so piercing that the paper windows along the bunkhouse hall shredded to ribbons.
Two iron animal fat lanterns hanging from the ceiling exploded into showers of flying clay shards.
“Foxes!” someone shrieked from the common hall. “Mountain skin-foxes!”
“Bar the door! Bar the door before they get out!”
A heavy thud echoed from behind Lu Chen as Escort Leader Jiang and four panic-stricken guards slammed the thick oak bunkhouse door shut. They dropped a four-inch iron bar across the iron brackets.
They didn’t think about helping.
In the face of the Uncanny, mortal martial artists had only one instinct. Trap the horror in a confined box, even if it meant burying their own ally alive.
Lu Chen kept his back to the barred door.
His amber eyes remained locked on the two mutating horrors in the narrow six-foot-wide hallway.
The woolen trading coats shredded into rags of wool and bloodstained lining.
From beneath the stolen clothes, long, skeletal limbs sprouted, their joint angles reversing with rapid, rhythmic pops like snapping kindling.
From their lower spines, eight sinuous, matted tails whipped into the air, churning the freezing draft into a swirling vortex of razor-sharp ice crystals.
The surrounding heat in the hallway plunged instantly to twenty degrees below zero.
The moisture on the wooden walls froze into white needles. The cedar floorboards groaned and tightened, cracking under the sudden heat shock.
The older fox sprang first.
It didn’t run along the floorboards. It ricocheted off the left wall with shocking driving force, its four bone-tipped claws gouging deep furrows into the solid pine planks.
The beast lunged through the freezing air, its needle-fanged jaws aimed directly at the main neck blood vessel in Lu Chen’s throat.
Its bone claws whistled as they sliced through the air, trailing a ribbon of pale-blue rotting frost designed to freeze human blood on contact.
Lu Chen gave no ground.
In a narrow hall six feet wide, retreating only surrendered the initiative to an agile hunting beast.
He planted his rear right boot into the timber floor, the sixty-five-degree heat of his sole scorching a black ring of charred wood into the grain.
He lowered his balance point by four inches, channeling the huge torque of Molten Tiger Vajra Body through his hips and lower-back spine.
He brought his left forearm up in a tight, blocking arc.
Beneath the coarse linen of his sleeve, the charcoal-black melted rock waste veins running from his wrist to his collarbone flared with dull crimson soft glow.
CLANG!
The fox’s bone claws slammed directly into Lu Chen’s bare forearm.
The impact sounded not like flesh meeting bone, but like a heavy iron chisel striking a solid bronze metal bar at full swing.
The striking force was staggering. Over eight hundred pounds of dynamic sideways tearing force crashing against his skeletal frame.
The floorboards beneath Lu Chen’s boots groaned, splintering beneath the load.
Yet his arm didn’t yield by a fraction of an inch.
The sub-zero Yin frost coating the beast’s claws met the sixty-five-degree blood in Lu Chen’s scorched spirit veins.
HISSSSSSS!
A violent explosion of scalding white steam erupted at the point of contact.
The pale-blue ice coating the fox’s claws shattered into boiling droplets, vaporizing instantly into white mist.
The beast let out a shrill, pained yelp as the extreme heat backlash scorched its tender toe-pads. That turned its white fur into blackened, smoking cinder.
“Too cold,” Lu Chen said softly.
Before the first beast could recoil off his forearm, Lu Chen’s right hand moved.
He didn’t reach for the ox-bone cleaver at his hip.
In close-quarters combat inside a six-foot hallway, a twelve-pound cleaver needed an eighteen-inch swing clearance. Time the agile second fox would use to strike his flank.
Lu Chen drove his right fist forward in a straight, piston-like strike.
Molten Tiger Punch!
His knuckles, calloused like iron horn and dense as lead, slammed directly into the older fox’s exposed chest bone.
BOOM!
The impact sounded like a battering ram smashing into a frozen hide drum.
The beast’s breastbone cracked under the blunt blast wave, its internal organs tightly packed against its spine.
The fox was hurled backward six paces, crashing through two wooden bunk beds and reducing the heavy cedar frames to flying kindling.
Behind Lu Chen, a razor-thin gust of freezing wind whistled toward his nape.
The second fox had scaled the ceiling beams.
Hanging upside down from the cedar rafters by its rear claws, its eight tails lashed like barbed whips, aiming to wrap around Lu Chen’s throat and snap his neck spine from above.
Its human-faced jaw unhinged, revealing a dripping black stinger hidden beneath its pale tongue.
Lu Chen didn’t turn around.
His ears twitched, tracking the subtle shift in air pressure and the sharp smell of rotten animal fat drifting from above.
He drove his right elbow upward in a savage, upright smash.
The pointed bone of his elbow caught the dropping beast flush in the lower jaw.
CRACK!
Fourteen needle fangs shattered like brittle glass, spraying fragments of ivory and black venom across the ceiling.
The second fox shrieked in agony, tumbling from the rafters onto the floorboards in a tangle of thrashing tails and matted white fur.
Its eight tails whipped in a desperate counter-attack. He struck Lu Chen’s chest and shoulders like iron flails.
Each tail strike carried enough striking force to crack the ribs of a mortal martial artist.
Yet the frozen fur struck Lu Chen’s chest. Then, it met the slate-gray muscle wall of a fighter whose flesh had been hardened by three hundred units of molten malice.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The blows left only faint red welts on his chest, each impact muffled by the dense lattice of lead-hardened muscle fibers.
Worse for the beast, the fire heat streaming from Lu Chen’s chest began to singe the fur on its tails. It filled the narrow hall with the foul, choking stench of burning horn-protein.
The second fox scrambled backward in terror, its slit yellow eyes widening. It realized the truth.
This was not mortal meat.
This was a walking crucible of molten iron.
Across the ruined bunks, the first fox dragged itself from the splintered timber, its broken chest heaving as it bared its leftover fangs.
Both beasts crouched low, their eight tails bristling like iron needles, preparing for a coordinated death-lunge.
Lu Chen reached down to his waist.
His calloused fingers closed around the thick hemp grip of the twelve-pound notched ox-bone cleaver.
He drew the heavy blade with a slow, grinding hiss of iron against leather.
The unpolished iron spine of the weapon caught the dim glow of his flaring melted rock waste veins. It reflected a dull, blood-red sheen across the narrow bunkhouse.
“Stay,” Lu Chen said.