Four bronze fists broke the sound barrier before they hit.
The bone-shaking pressure wave tore the collar of Lu Chen’s coarse linen shirt into shredded threads. It screamed against his ears like a falling meteor. Suspended two feet above the granite ridge, pinned by four lower limbs of cold metal, evasion was a physical impossibility.
Lu Chen ignored the grip entirely. He bent every cord of muscle along his chest cage, tucking his chin hard against his chest bone and snapping his skull wildly to the right.
The two uppermost fists missed his crown by the width of a fingernail. The displaced air gouged a twin furrow across his scalp, tearing away hair and skin and spraying dark, steaming crimson into the freezing mountain draft.
The second pair of fists found their mark.
CRACK-CRACK!
The sound was not the dull thud of bruised flesh. It was the dry, total snapping of cured pine timbers under a falling boulder.
Two bronze hammer-blows smashed directly into Lu Chen’s left lateral ribs.
The blow bypassed his slate-hard muscle wall. It drove inward with three thousand pounds of high-pressure force. The fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs snapped inward. It splintered into jagged shards that drove agonizingly close to his left pleural lining.
The sheer blast wave dislodged the Corpse-Lord’s own grip.
Lu Chen was hurled backward through the swirling fog like a stone skipping across ice. He struck the granite ridge thirty paces away. It rolled across jagged shale and crushed rock before his boots dug into the cliff edge.
His heels hung out over the three-thousand-foot deep pit.
Loose gravel spilled from beneath his straw sandals, vanishing silently into the churning gray void below.
Lu Chen pushed himself up onto one knee.
A thick gush of bright red blood surged up his throat, hot and bitter as scalded bile. He spat it onto the gray rock. The crimson puddle didn’t freeze—it hissed at seventy degrees, melting through the surface ice and bubbling with dark frothy foam.
His left lung was tightly packed by thirty percent. Every shallow breath sent electric needles of jagged bone grinding against inflamed between-rib nerves.
In the mortal world, a double fracture of this size meant collapsed lungs, internal drowning, and shock-induced death within five minutes.
In front of him, thirty paces down the narrow spine, the Corpse-Lord was already advancing.
The creature’s nine-foot frame moved with heavy, relentless driving force. Its green rust-crusted chest plate bore the deep fist-depression Lu Chen had pounded into it. But its joints operated without fatigue. It dragged four heavy iron claws along the rock face, gouging long sparks from the stone as it sped up toward the injured mortal.
Lu Chen’s face remained expressionless. His pulse sat at a cold, rhythmic sixty beats per minute.
“Three ribs,” he muttered through blood-flecked teeth. “Displaced. Left flank.”
There was no medicine here. No physician, no splints, no warm fire bowl to set bones.
There was only the fire.
Lu Chen clamped his teeth shut and forcibly squeezed tight his chest muscle. Beneath his skin, the black glass melted rock waste lining his hardened spirit veins began to hum. A dry, gritty grinding that shook along his skeletal frame like a rusted saw blade.
Melted rock-Vein Triage: Forced Caloric Flux.
He commanded his blood heat to detonate.
The leftover fat reserves from the sheep fat he had burned up dissolved into raw, combustive Yang essence. His inner body heat spiked wildly past seventy-one degrees.
In the backup spirit veins surrounding his shattered ribs, the brittle, hardened black glass melted rock waste didn’t merely heat. It began to melt.
It turned into a thick, boiling pitch of melted stone melted rock waste, carried directly by his scalding bright red blood toward the site of the fractures.
The agony was blinding.
It wasn’t the clean pain of an iron blade cutting flesh. It was the nerve nightmare of molten lead being poured directly into the raw marrow of broken bones. White-hot lightning flared across his optic nerves, blurring his vision into a haze of screaming static.
His broken fifth, sixth, and seventh ribs were wildly bathed in molten melted rock waste.
The liquid black glass seeped into the jagged fractures. It filled the voids between the splintered bone fragments. The sub-zero mountain draft washed over his steaming chest. Then, the molten melted rock waste rapidly cooled and hardened, welding the displaced bones together into a crude, fused cage of black, hardened stone.
The ribs were set. Not with mortal marrow, but with brittle, unbending black glass melted rock waste.
A harsh status readout flickered across his pupils, trembling in amber light.
The chest wall held.
His left lung swelled once more, drawing in the freezing, sulfur-tainted air of Dead Man’s Ridge.
Yet the nerve recoil was devastating. The Phantom Agony Syndrome struck his central nervous system like a sledgehammer, sending convulsive shivers through his corded forearms. The lingering malice of the Uncanny whispered through the static, trying to drag his mind down into the frozen dark.
Lu Chen’s right hand moved without thought.
He reached into his left sleeve and drew out the four-inch unpolished iron bone awl.
The rusted iron was cold, biting into the flesh of his fingers.
He pressed the square point firmly against the thick, yellow callous of his left palm. Then, with a practiced, brutal thrust, he drove the iron awl half an inch into the meat of his hand.
Fresh, scalding blood welled up around the pitted shank.
A clean, sharp spike of body reality ripped through his neural pathways, extinguishing the demonic static and snapping his mind back into cold, total clarity.
“Flesh breathes,” Lu Chen whispered, his voice steady as iron.
“Blood resists.”
“Anchor checked.”
He ripped the awl from his palm. The puncture wound hissed as his seventy-degree blood clotted the hole instantly. That left behind a smoking black scab.
He slipped the awl back into his sleeve.
Fifteen paces away, the Corpse-Lord crested the narrow rise.
The creature saw that Lu Chen was still standing. A deep-throated hiss of cold air escaped its split lips. It carried the stench of hundreds of years-old embalming fluid and rotten liquid silver.
It didn’t charge in a straight line this time.
With terrifying cunning, its eight bronze arms plunged downward into the granite ridge. Its iron talons sank into the solid stone like fingers into curdled bean jelly.
With a tremendous heave of its mutated back, the Corpse-Lord tore a four-foot slab of granite from the mountain spine.
It hurled the boulder across the ridge like a siege catapult.
The rock shrapnel whistled through the freezing air, spinning end over end at lethal speed.
His boots stayed anchored to the narrow cliff path.
He leaned slightly to the side, allowing the massive slab of granite to graze his shoulder. The displaced air tore the skin of his bicep. But the stone sailed harmlessly into the deep pit behind him. It smashed against the lower cliff walls hundreds of feet below.
Bare hands could crack bronze, but they couldn’t shear eight limbs before his fire ran out of fuel.
His heat reserves were plummeting toward zero. The forced melted rock waste-weld on his ribs had burned up eighty percent of his digested animal fat.
He had perhaps sixty seconds before his blood heat stalled and sub-zero freezing sickness claimed his heart.
Beside him, embedded six inches deep in the upright granite face where the first clash had driven it, the notched spine of his weapon protruded from the gray stone.
Lu Chen reached out his right hand.
His calloused fingers closed tightly around the coarse rawhide grip of the twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver.
With a sharp jerk of his shoulder, he tore the heavy butcher’s tool free from the rock. Granite dust showered down across his straw sandals as the notched iron spine gleamed dull and menacing in the mountain gloom.
Fifteen paces down the ridge, the Corpse-Lord spread its eight arms wide.
Sixty seconds of fuel. Eight limbs to cut.
“Time for steel,” Lu Chen said quietly.