Bent iron was still ringing through the narrow alley when Lu Chen moved.
Zhao was still trying to understand why his four-foot hickory heavy club had crumpled like rotten melon rind against an apprentice’s chest. His bloody fingers twitched, unable to let go of the splintered timber.
Lu Chen didn’t give him time to understand.
His left hand shot forward. He clamped around Zhao’s right wrist like an iron band fresh from the forge.
With a short, downward twist of his forearm, Lu Chen wrenched the heavy club free. The torque tore Zhao’s leftover thumb joint cord with a heard pop, peeling the weapon away as easily as husking corn.
Zhao opened his mouth to shriek, staggering backward on trembling legs.
“Balance is broken,” Lu Chen said under his breath.
He took a half-step forward, planting his left boot into the mud. Then he drove the heavy heel of his right foot straight down onto Zhao’s left knee.
It wasn’t a martial flourish. It was the precise, cold motion of an apprentice stamping down on an ox bone to split the marrow.
CRACK!
The sound was sharp, wet, and final.
The kneecap crumbled under four hundred pounds of focused downward pressure. The joint folded backward at an unnatural angle, the torn joint cords snapping like frayed hemp twine beneath the skin.
Zhao hit the cobblestones with a strangled wheeze. He grabbed his ruined leg with both hands as vomit and bile surged past his lips.
Before Zhao’s shoulder even touched the mud, the second student—Hu—lunged from the right.
Unlike Zhao, Hu had seen the impact. Panic had dilated his pupils until the irises were barely visible. But the driving force of his charge couldn’t be stopped in the slick hall.
“Die, monster!” Hu screamed, swinging his heavy club in a desperate, two-handed level sweep aimed straight at Lu Chen’s floating ribs.
Hu put every ounce of his muscular weight into the blow, twisting his hips to maximize shear. He intended to cave in the rib cage, puncture the spleen, and sweep the apprentice into the gutter.
Lu Chen stayed planted.
In a confined space between two timber walls, dodging wasted time and surrendered footing. He simply pivoted his hips five degrees, presenting the fortified lateral cage of his lower thorax.
The Ox-Demon Iron Skin answered his call.
The charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his side squeezed tight. It pulled his between-rib muscles into a rigid, linked slate barrier. The skin took on the dull, non-shiny gray of mountain dark rock.
THWACK-CLANG!
The impact was ear-splitting.
The heavy iron hoop binding the center of Hu’s heavy club slammed squarely against Lu Chen’s eighth rib.
The wood didn’t crack this time. Instead, the half-inch iron band flattened against Lu Chen’s flesh, the rigid curve buckling into an inverted V-shape as the blast wave hit an unmoving wall.
Hu felt the rebound travel through his arms like a lightning strike.
The shock snapped the skin off his palms and rattled the teeth inside his jaw. His vision flashed white, his shoulders dislocating by half an inch from the violent recoil.
Lu Chen’s breathing didn’t hitch.
His body absorbed the shock, funneling the blunt energy down through his hips and into the granite paving stones beneath his boots. The stone beneath his left heel cracked with a faint spiderweb fracture.
“Brittle steel,” Lu Chen observed flatly.
Before Hu could pull his trembling hands back, Lu Chen stepped inside the man’s guard.
He didn’t use the sharp edge of his twelve-pound cleaver. Cutting human flesh in the open streets invited annoying questions from the county judge’s court guards. Blood in the gutter drew flies and paperwork.
Instead, Lu Chen brought the heavy, flat iron spine of the cleaver down across Hu’s right kneecap.
SMACK-CRACK!
The flat of the twelve-pound iron spine crushed the joint against the stone floor below.
The kneecap caved inward, bone shards grinding against joint padding like gravel under an iron wagon wheel. Hu’s leg buckled instantly, his scream cutting off into a high-pitched whimper as he folded into the mud beside Zhao.
Lu Chen lowered the cleaver, his eyes shifting toward the leftover man.
Senior Brother Gou had backed up two paces.
The swagger had evaporated from his stance. His mouth was slightly open, his chest heaving under his greasy ox-hide vest as he stared at his two junior brothers writhing in the filth.
Both men had been crippled in less than five breaths. Neither had drawn a drop of blood from the apprentice.
“You,” Gou breathed, his voice cracking with disbelief. “You hide your training to entrap students!”
“I wash corpses,” Lu Chen said. “Step aside.”
“Arrogant dog!” Gou roared, spitting blood from a bitten tongue, “you think you can bully the Iron Fist School?”
Gou reached into the collar of his vest and drew a heavy, three-foot iron rod. Not banded wood, but solid, fluted black iron forged in the county weapon forge shop.
At the same time, the rusted bronze ring on Gou’s right thumb flared with an oily, unnatural green soft glow.
A chill draft suddenly cut through the alley. It carried the sickening reek of stale river silt and drowned rot. The green rust on the ring cried dark, thread-like tendrils of frost that slithered up Gou’s forearm. It tightened the veins along his wrist until they blackened like charred hemp.
Gou’s eyes flooded with dark veins, his strength multiplying as the ring siphoned his life-force to fuel his muscles.
“Die under my rod!” Gou bellowed, leaping forward with a furious two-handed downward cleave aimed straight at Lu Chen’s skull.
The heavy iron rod hissed through the freezing mist, fast as a striking viper.
Lu Chen’s eyes narrowed.
He sensed the familiar, putrid signed name instantly. It was the same icy stench that had clung to Lady Yan’s waterlogged corpse in the dead-house.
An oddity ancient object, Lu Chen thought. A contaminated relic.
He didn’t use the cleaver to block.
Instead, Lu Chen raised his left forearm horizontally, meeting the dropping iron rod midway through its arc.
BAM-CRUNCH!
The solid black iron rod crashed directly onto the slate-hard ridge of Lu Chen’s forearm bone.
The impact was so fierce that the blast wave blew the puddle water outward in a four-foot ring.
Yet Lu Chen’s arm didn’t break. The charcoal melted rock waste-veins along his forearm flared with intense heat, his body heat spiking past forty degrees. Where the cold iron pressed against his skin, white steam hissed wildly into the air like water dropped onto a red-hot stove.
Against the unbending thickness of the Ox-Demon Iron Skin, the solid iron rod groaned.
The thick black iron bent into a distinct forty-degree curve across Lu Chen’s arm, its driving force put out fully.
Gou’s face went chalk-white.
The demonic strength granted by his bronze ring vanished like mist in the sun, snuffed out by the overwhelming heat pouring from the apprentice’s body.
“My turn,” Lu Chen said.
Before Gou could release the bent iron rod, Lu Chen’s right boot snapped out.
A short, brutal front kick drove straight through the space between Gou’s thighs, landing with pinpoint accuracy on the apex of Gou’s right kneecap.
SNAP!
The kneecap blew backward through the joint capsule.
Gou’s right leg bowed inward like an archer’s overdrawn recurve bow, the calf bone snapping clean with the sound of a dry branch stepping under an elephant’s foot.
Gou hit the muddy flat stone slabs with a deep-throated shriek that scraped the skin off his throat.
The bent iron rod clattered into the gutter, splashing dirty runoff across his twisted face. He rolled on his side, hands clawing at his shattered knee, tears and snot mixing with the grime on his pockmarked cheeks.
Lu Chen stepped forward through the rising steam.
He looked down at the three writhing men with the calm, detached gaze of a butcher inspecting carcasses hung from curing hooks.
Gou’s teeth chattered wildly as he looked up. With a trembling left hand, he fumbled at his boot shaft, trying to draw a hidden skinning knife.
He left the cleaver where it was.
He raised his right boot and brought it down heavily onto Gou’s right wrist, pinning the arm flat against the granite stones.
Crack. The small bones of the wrist groaned under the weight.
“Don’t move,” Lu Chen said softly.
As Gou screamed, the green-black bronze ring on his thumb began to shake wildly.
Dense, icy mist seeped from the green rust engravings. It hissed wildly as it made contact with the boiling heat streaming from Lu Chen’s boot.
In the lower periphery of Lu Chen’s vision, the amber crucible screen flared with blinding crimson light.