An Early Jade fighter of the High Court’s Retrieval Office closed ten paces of open stone. Then, he didn’t move with the whip-crack speed of an assassin. He moved like a retaining wall collapsing down a narrow alley.
With Keth Or’s first long, gliding stride across the black slate flat stone slabs, the air between his broad-bladed glaive and Seyun’s chest grew so dense that the loose stone dust suspended in the vault was squeezed downward onto the floor in a flat grey sheet.
Behind the four-foot granite dressing-screen, nineteen-year-old Mina felt the sudden spike in air pressure pop her ears as she kept one arm braced across Halin’s shoulders to hold the recovering boy down behind the stone cover.
Beside her, Halin pressed his un-injured left palm against the cold stone floor to steady his trembling knees. His eyes were wide as the frost crystals on the outer rim of the granite screen began to crackle under the advancing Early Jade aura.
Two paces to Seyun’s right, Daro Kesh lunged forward on an intercepting slanted to drive his broken Bronze sword into the side of Keth Or’s advance before the commander could reach Seyun.
Keth Or had already calculated Daro’s intercept into the shape of his opening movement.
