KRA-THUD!
The sound of Keth Or’s redirected glaive striking Seyun’s double-handed guard was not the clean ring of sword against spear. It was the dull, bone-shaking boom of a quarry sledgehammer dropping onto an iron wedge set against living bone.
By forcing Keth Or to wrench the broad steel cutting edge upward and westward away from the three-foot bronze test needle, Seyun had saved himself from being bisected from collarbone to hip.
He had also saved the central floor spike from being snapped in half and exploding the northern stone branch.
What he couldn’t escape was the sheer, unforgiving moving driving force of an Early Jade strike that was already three-quarters of the way through its swing. Just then, the commander altered its angle.
Even stripped of its cutting edge and its neat spatial lock, the four-inch-wide steel flat of the glaive carried enough tightly packed Early Jade weight to crack a granite top door beam.
At the instant of contact, Seyun did everything a twenty-two-year-old at Early Bronze could possibly do to survive a blow from a realm three steps above his own.
He drew on Place I beneath his left ribs. He tilted the flat of his twenty-four-inch iron short-blade at a twenty-degree edge so the incoming steel cheek of the glaive would slide four inches downward along his guard rather than driving straight into his heart.
