Until you stand twelve paces in front of a Jade-realm fighter who has decided to kill you, the word realm sounds like a tidy mark on a judge’s slate—a step above Bronze, two steps above Flame, measured in spirit vein capacity and courtyard rank.
When Commander Keth Or leveled the point of his forty-inch broad-blade at Seyun’s breastbone in the fractured granite row of stone pillars, the difference between Flame and early Jade was not a matter of rank. It was the difference between a wooden rowboat and the winter sea.
“Stay back, boy!” Hall Mistress Soran’s voice rang out sharply behind Keth Or as she surged forward across the cracked flat stone slabs. She drove her seventy-two-inch white-ash spear at the back of Keth Or’s left shoulder to force him to turn around.
Keth Or didn’t turn around. Knowing that Soran was still four paces behind his rear heel and that seizing or killing the bearer of Uren’s tablet would accomplish his main recovery order in a single stroke, the early Jade commander left his back brigandine plate to take the grazing edge of Soran’s spear-wind and poured eighty percent of his Spatial Crushing straight down the twelve-pace lane onto Seyun.
