Lu Chen’s twelve-pound ox-bone cleaver hummed in his grip, fine gray granite dust still trickling from its notched iron spine.
The weapon was an inch thick, forged from cold pig iron and heavy with the stone-hard thigh bone of a mountain beast. Across its pitted surface ran dark, rusted stains from dozens of butchered corpses and dissected abominations.
Lu Chen brought the heavy tool before his chest.
The freezing mountain draft screamed through the canyon, carrying flakes of rime and the bitter stench of ancient embalming fluid. The wind bit at his bare skin, yet around his forearms, the air wavered with heat distortion.
Without breaking stride, Lu Chen dragged the freshly punctured meat of his left palm straight across the serrated iron spine of the weapon.
Bright red blood at seventy degrees poured into the cold, porous metal.
The steel reacted instantly. The frozen water drops coating the blade flashed into white vapor with a violent, spitting hiss.
The blood didn’t drip off. Driven by the tiny blood vessel pull of the weapon’s cursed micro-fractures, the scalding crimson essence was greedily sucked into the iron lattice. The notches along the spine flared with a dull, smoldering cherry-red glow, as if an old forge were waking from a century-long sleep.
A wave of white-hot air rolled off the heavy cleaver, distorting the mountain fog within two paces.
Forty-five seconds.
That was all the fuel his blood had left before the melted rock waste-veins froze and his heart gave out under freezing arrest.
The Eight-Armed Corpse-Lord didn’t understand human limits, but it understood the sudden threat of heat. The Uncanny lived in cold. Yang-fire blood was poison to its rotting spirit.
With an unearthly shriek that shook the loose shale of the cliff face, the nine-foot bronze horror charged.
Its eight limbs spread wide, iron talons hooking into curved sickle blades that spanned the entire four-pace width of Dead Man’s Ridge. Corpse frost billowed from its open maw in dense clouds, crystallizing the falling sleet into jagged needles.
There was no room to flank. No room to circle.
Only a head-on crash on a crumbling stone ledge.
Lu Chen charged directly into the storm of bronze.
His straw sandals tore through the gravel, each stride planting his weight deep into the granite spine. The fused melted rock waste across his broken ribs strained against his chest wall with a dull, throbbing ache. But his balance point was rock-solid.
To a mortal warrior, the nine-foot monstrosity was an unbeatable bronze demon.
To a county dead-house apprentice, it was merely an overgrown carcass held together by crude pins, dried sinew, and bad taxidermy.
Ten paces.
Five paces.
The Corpse-Lord’s lowest right arm whipped outward in a blinding level slash, aimed straight at Lu Chen’s knees to sever his legs at the tendons.
Lu Chen didn’t jump. Jumping on ice meant death.
He dropped his hips, sliding forward on his lead heel. Then he drove the red-hot spine of the Calamity Cleaver diagonally upward to meet the strike.
SHING-CRACK!
The crash didn’t bounce.
The white-hot edge of the cleaver bit into the green bronze arm right at the elbow joint. The precise load-bearing flaw where mortal tendon had been grafted to cast metal with royal liquid silver solder.
The heat shock melted the solder in a heartbeat.
With a brutal twist of Lu Chen’s forearms, the twelve-pound cleaver snapped fully through bone, bronze, and cursed sinew.
The Corpse-Lord’s lower right forearm flew spinning into the fog, spraying black, frozen marrow that hissed and boiled away in the scalding air.
One limb cut.
The Corpse-Lord roared, its jade eye-flames flaring with maddened fury.
Before the cut limb even cleared the ridge, its upper four arms plunged downward together, a linked cage of iron talons designed to pin the cleaver and rip Lu Chen’s skull from his shoulders.
Pulling the blade back would trap the heavy edge. Lu Chen stepped deeper into the creature’s chest instead.
He rotated on the ball of his left foot. He swung his entire torso in a tight, violent pirouette. The turning force traveled from his calves, through his melted rock waste-welded ribs, and erupted into his shoulders.
The newly fused black glass melted rock waste across his fifth and sixth ribs creaked under the extreme twisting strain, grinding with the sound of crushed gravel. But the hardened weld held firm.
Calamity Cleaver: Full Kinetic Whirlwind.
The twelve-pound red-hot cleaver became a blurred level crescent of whistling steel and boiling steam.
CHOP!
The glowing edge slashed through the air in an unstoppable arc of crushing force.
It struck the Corpse-Lord’s middle two left arms right at the shoulder sockets. The cast bronze plates shattered like green fine china under the combined impact of seventy-degree blood heat and twelve thousand pounds of spinning force.
Both left arms tore free from the torso in a violent eruption of rotten embalming fluid and shattered bronze rivets.
Three limbs cut.
The Corpse-Lord staggered sideways, its asymmetric weight throwing its balance into complete chaos.
Deprived of three limbs on its left flank, its heavy bronze torso dipped toward the deep pit. Yet the ancient malice driving the dead flesh didn’t falter.
It swung its massive upper right arm in a desperate, frenzied backhand blow, aiming to crush Lu Chen’s exposed neck with its jagged bronze elbow.
Lu Chen’s vision narrowed to a single point.
His whole body was screaming. The amber timer in his sight flickered down to twenty seconds. His lungs burned as if filled with sulfur embers, each breath pulling scorching heat through his very thirsty windpipe.
He ducked beneath the whistling backhand. The iron claws caught his canvas travel sack. It tore the cloth to shreds and scattered coarse rock salt into the mountain wind.
The white salt crystals drifted into the Corpse-Lord’s open wounds, sizzling furiously against the rotting tissue and making the monster howl in agony.
Rising from his crouch, Lu Chen gripped the cleaver with both hands.
His slate-gray biceps knotted to the thickness of forged iron. The black glass melted rock waste beneath his skin flared blindingly bright, streaming waves of heat that turned the falling snow into scalding mist.
He drove the cleaver upward in a reverse rising slanted cleave.
CRACK-SHEAR!
The glowing red blade bit into the Corpse-Lord’s upper right shoulder, sinking deep into the junction of collarbone and bronze plating.
The pushback lasted less than a tenth of a second.
Then the heat sliced through the leftover royal bronze rivets, cleaving the massive fourth arm entirely off the torso.
The fourth limb spun through the air, clattering wildly across the stone before tumbling over the edge of the cliff into the bottomless deep pit.
Four arms cut.
Half of the monstrosity’s upper weaponry had been reduced to smoking stumps, spurting rotting black bile that sizzled on the freezing granite.
The Corpse-Lord reeled back three paces, its surviving four limbs thrashing the freezing air in a chaotic, wounded frenzy. It emitted an ear-splitting howl of rotting agony that echoed down the three-thousand-foot canyon like a dying dragon.
Yet the sheer violence of their clash had taken a fatal toll on the mountain itself.
Beneath their feet, the narrow spine of Dead Man’s Ridge groaned.
A series of violent, gunshot-like cracks tore through the gray granite. Fissure lines webbed across the entire stone shelf, spreading thirty paces in every direction.
A massive section of the cliff path, fifty feet long and ten feet wide, tilted outward by several degrees.
Loose shale and shattered boulders cascaded into the deep pit, vanishing into the churning gray fog below.
The entire ridge was collapsing.
The Corpse-Lord, blinded by rage and ancient malice, lowered its mutilated, smoking frame. Its leftover four bronze arms spread wide. Its jade eyes burned with suicidal fury as it prepared to lunge for a final, mutual destruction.
Lu Chen stood on the shifting stone shelf.
His boots were planted firmly on the tilting rock. Steam poured from the notched spine of the Calamity Cleaver in thick white gusts. The blade still was dripping with his scalding bright red blood.
His heat reserves were at two percent. The fire was down to its final embers.
There was nowhere left to run. No ground left to stand on.
Lu Chen locked his cold, unblinking eyes onto the bronze horror’s chest, tightened his grip on the heavy cleaver, and leaned forward into the falling deep pit.