The stray lash of Crown-grade pressure didn’t come down as a physical blade. It came down as a wave of crushing, white-hot thickness that spilled off the bottom iron metal ring of Nara Soth’s ash walking staff. Just then, she took the main impact at the northern notch.
Nara’s single right arm held the upright line of the staff without yielding a fraction of an inch, driving nine-tenths of the dropping force straight into the cracked flat stone slab beneath her boot. Yet the leftover tenth—a whistling, razor-edged wash of tightly packed air and raw Crown-tier spirit vein weight—skated outward across the chalk rim directly over Halin’s left forearm.
Seyun didn’t pull his right hand back from the three copper needles.
Instead, he dropped his right elbow flat across the reed mat between the northern notch and Halin’s wrist, angling his own forearm like a low stone breakwater while keeping his thumb and forefinger locked on the Answering Edge boundary at the boy’s outward gate.
There was no miraculous training trick waiting to save him when that Crown-tier wash struck his skin. Seyun was an Early Bronze fighter—hardened by real combat, sharper in senses than men twice his age, and capable of reading the seams in higher-realm techniques through his Spirit vein Ledger—but his flesh, bone, and spirit veins were still Early Bronze. Understanding the shape of a mountain didn’t make a man’s forearm as heavy as granite.
