On the flagged upper terrace behind the shrine’s bronze bell post, Daro Kesh stood alone with his boots set shoulder-width apart on the frost. He had left the bladeless handle of his shattered Bronze longsword hooked securely at his left hip. In his right hand he held the three-foot iron patrol sword salvaged from Reth Mal’s guards. He didn’t raise the weapon in the high, rigid overhead block that had defined his Dark Unwavering Plane for fourteen years at the black-roof school. Against Heaven’s Measure, a rigid wall was merely an anvil asking to be split.
The pale blade came down through the pine tops at a forty-five-degree angle. Not a piece of forged metal. But a six-foot condensed edge of pure ordering pressure that turned the falling snow and pine needles around it into powdered white frost. It aimed straight through the terrace’s center toward the wooden ridgepole of the incense hall below. There, Ilyra was still shouting for the cooper’s children to clear the doorway.
At the last half-breath before impact, Daro stepped diagonally into the strike’s weak side and breathed his newly earned Early Jade focus—Adaptable Depth—down the length of the borrowed iron patrol sword. Instead of opposing the downward vector head-on, he tested the falling weight against the space Ilyra needed below, tilting his wrist so his blade admitted the first three inches of the Measure’s sideways tearing force and used the strike’s own driving force to slide its nose eastward.
