Wind howled through Dead Man’s Ridge, carrying the sharp stench of frozen iron and burst marrow.
Beneath Lu Chen’s feet, the mountain trail was nothing more than a jagged spine of gray granite, barely four paces wide. To the left lay a sheer upright drop into churning white fog. To the right, a jagged deep pit of black shale that dropped three thousand feet into the frozen riverbed below.
Scattered across the frost-crusted rock were the shattered planks of the royal armored wagon and the splintered remains of thirty courier guards. Their blood had already pooled into dark, frozen disks against the stone, their ribcages torn outward like broken birdcages.
In the center of the narrow ridge stood the shattered hull of the ten-thousand-pound iron coffin.
All seven crushing weight chains had snapped like rotten twine, their heavy links twisted into jagged curls of cold metal. Rising out of the splintered iron casing was a dark shape that choked the mountain draft with pure, choking rotting frost.
Nine feet tall. Broad as a temple gate.
The entity had once been Prince Rui. That scion of royal blood had sought immortality through forbidden corpse-grafts. Now, very little human meat remained. His skin was a seamless shell of cast green bronze, thick with green rust and etched with ancient crushing weight magic charms that had bled black rot into the metal.
From his massive shoulders and ribs sprouted eight heavy bronze arms. Each limb ended in five jointed iron claws, blackened by hundreds of years of pickled grave-soil and arsenic.
In the empty sockets of his skull, two pinpricks of jade eerie glow flared with cold, unblinking malice.
A sharp amber haze flickered across the lower periphery of Lu Chen’s vision, cold and urgent against his optic nerves.
Three thousand units.
The sheer volume of condensed malice streaming from the bronze monstrosity pushed against Lu Chen’s temples like a lead weight. The surrounding heat around the corpse had plummeted past thirty degrees below freezing, coating the shattered stones in a crystal-clear sheen of blue frost.
Lu Chen took a single breath.
The bowl of rendered sheep fat he had swallowed moments before ignited inside his gut like oil poured over white-hot coals.
His blood fire roared to life. His inner body heat surged past sixty-five degrees. It sent waves of boiling Yang life-force surging through his scorched backup spirit veins.
Steam erupted from his bare collarbones and shoulders in dense white plumes. It hissed wildly as the sub-zero mountain draft struck his skin. The frost beneath his straw sandals instantly dissolved into boiling mud. It exposed the barren gray granite beneath.
The Corpse-Lord turned its bronze head. The spine bones in its neck ground together with the sound of iron millstones crushing river stones.
“Meat,” the thing groaned.
The voice was not human. It was a hollow, echoing deep ring that rattled through the bronze plates of its chest. It shook the marrow in Lu Chen’s shins.
The Corpse-Lord dropped into a low, hungry crouch.
Then it lunged.
Nine feet of cast bronze and dead sinew exploded across the narrow ridge. The gaining speed was impossible for a creature of that mass. The granite beneath its back heels crushed into a cloud of gray grit. It sent blast waves shooting through the stone ledge.
Lu Chen raised the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver in his right hand, bracing the thick iron spine with his left palm.
The Corpse-Lord’s upper two arms smashed downward in a devastating double-axe blow.
CLANG-CRACK!
The crash sounded like a bronze battering ram shattering a drop-gate. Two tons of impact drove into the iron blade. The sheer bone-shaking shock tore through the bones of Lu Chen’s forearms. It ripped the heavy weapon from his numbed grip.
The cleaver cartwheeled through the frozen air, burying its heavy bone edge six inches deep into the upright granite cliff face thirty paces behind them.
Disarmed on a ridge four paces wide, Lu Chen held his ground. Retreat meant the deep pit.
He dropped his balance point, planting his back foot into a fissure in the rock. The muscles across his thighs corded like twisted hemp rope, his black glass melted rock waste-veins glowing with a dull, underground amber beneath his slate-gray flesh.
Molten Tiger Vajra Body: Full Engagement.
The Corpse-Lord’s second pair of bronze arms swung forward in a crushing level pincer, iron claws whistling through the air at faster-than-sound speeds.
Lu Chen raised his forearms, crossing his wrists to form an iron wedge.
CLANG!
A blinding corona of orange sparks sprayed into the fog, lighting up the sheer rock walls of the gorge in sudden, violent daylight.
The blast wave tore through the ridge. A slab of granite ten paces behind Lu Chen snapped off cleanly under the sheer lateral force, tumbling down into the bottomless white mist with a distant, vanishing rumble.
Lu Chen’s feet skidded backward two inches, gouging twin trenches through the frozen stone.
His teeth clicked together from the shuddering impact. But the melted rock waste-veins lining his outward bones held firm. The heat streaming from his forearms was so intense that the green rust coating the Corpse-Lord’s iron claws began to scorch. It filled the mountain air with the bitter stench of burning sulfur and boiled fat.
“Tough hide,” Lu Chen muttered.
The Corpse-Lord didn’t pause. It possessed no nervous system to register shock, no human pause to stall its driving force.
Its middle four arms whipped forward in an alternating piston barrage. Four bronze fists, each the size of an iron anvil, hammered toward Lu Chen’s chest, throat, and temples.
Lu Chen leaned inside the pocket.
He deflected the first fist with the heel of his palm, redirecting three thousand pounds of force downward into the mountain ridge. The stone ledge split with an ear-splitting crack, a fracture line racing toward the cliff edge like a jagged bolt of lightning.
He slipped the second blow by half an inch, the wind of the bronze knuckle searing his cheek like dry ice.
With his left elbow, he smashed upward against the Corpse-Lord’s third wrist, altering its flight path just enough to let the fourth fist strike empty air.
The sonic cracks of their exchange echoed between the canyon walls like rolling thunder. Each deflected blow crushed another section of the cliff path, showering the void below with fist-sized shards of shattered granite.
Lu Chen’s test eye tracked every high-pressure tremor in the monstrosity’s torso.
The Corpse-Lord was dense, but its weight spreading was top-heavy. The forbidden graft-seams along its lower ribs were welded with cold-beaten brass. That created crushing weight risers where the living bone of Prince Rui had been forced to fuse with metal.
There.
Lu Chen pivoted on his right heel, dropping his shoulder beneath the Corpse-Lord’s swinging guard.
He drew his right fist back to his hip. The blood in his upper-arm artery surged with scalding pressure, his internal heat spiking toward seventy degrees. The black glass melted rock waste lining his arm spirit veins hummed with a vicious, dry deep ring, superheating the muscle fibers to their total breaking point.
Molten Tiger: Mountain-Borer.
He drove his fist straight into the center of the Corpse-Lord’s chest bone.
BOOM!
The impact blew up through the canyon like a cannon shot.
A ring of white-hot white vapor exploded from the point of contact, blowing the mountain fog back thirty paces in all directions. The green bronze breastplate caved inward by two inches, spiderweb fractures blooming across the green rust-crusted metal.
The Corpse-Lord staggered back half a step. Its jade eye-flames flickered wildly as the blast wave echoed through its spine.
Deep inside its bronze chest, the pickled, shriveled heart of Prince Rui shuddered under the sudden heat shock.
Lu Chen exhaled a ragged plume of gray smoke from his nostrils. His knuckles were raw, the skin split down to the bone, but the blood welling from his wounds didn’t flow. It sizzled against the cold metal, instantly forming hard, dark crusts under his body’s fire heat.
“One crack,” Lu Chen whispered, his voice level and flat.
Before he could pull his fist back, the Corpse-Lord’s middle two arms whipped inward like iron pincers. He clamped shut around Lu Chen’s right bicep and wrist.
The grip was total. Cold, dead bronze pressed into his muscle with high-pressure force, threatening to crush the radius and forearm bone into kindling.
At the same time, the Corpse-Lord’s lower two arms shot forward. He locked around his waist in a bone-crushing vice.
Lu Chen’s boots left the ground.
The nine-foot horror hoisted him into the freezing air. Its bronze jaw dropped open to emit a deep-throated, wet roar that shook the very foundations of Dead Man’s Ridge.
High above Lu Chen’s head, the Corpse-Lord’s top four arms cocked back at the same time.
Four massive bronze fists clenched tight. Their iron talons folded inward to form solid, faceted bludgeons. Frost coiled around the limbs, gathering driving force as they lined up directly over Lu Chen’s skull.
The mountain wind died in the empty pocket of their raised strike.
Down they came—four same-time hammer-blows dropping with the world-ending weight of an avalanche, aiming to smash his head straight through his torso and wipe out the ridge beneath.