Ten thousand flying swords covered the sky above Canglan Citadel. Their cold-iron blades hid the sun.
Jiang Taixu had spent three hundred years forging them, including the last eighty in the frozen pools of the Northern Marches. Each blade carried his sword intent. Their combined shriek shattered lanterns and windows for three miles around the arena and shook roof tiles from the pagodas.
Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators ducked beneath the benches, clutching their bleeding ears.
Jiang hovered in the blizzard with the cold certainty of an executioner.
“SWORD RAIN OF THE NINE VOIDS!”
He drove both arms downward.
“SHRED HIS FLESH! DESTROY HIS TOOLS! BURY HIS SOUL IN STEEL!”
The sky screamed.
Ten thousand blades plunged at three times the speed of sound. White trails twisted behind them. The falling mass could break through the mountain’s bedrock and flatten a city district.
Governor Zhao dropped behind the royal barrier. Ruan’s guards guided the last spectators into the stairwells while Ouyang and Tang pulled loose tools off the dais. Nobody waited for a prophecy or a rescue order.
Austin did not move.
He kept the First Epoch server tucked beneath his left arm. Beside him, Xiaoyao raised the birch clipboard over Austin’s hard hat like an umbrella. His knees knocked together.
“M-Master! The sky is falling! The clipboard isn’t rated for ten thousand swords!”
“Step behind the safety line,” Austin said, guiding him back with one boot. “And put that down before you get a splinter.”
Pug trotted across the cracked tiles, untroubled by the screaming sky. He had found a fallen lacquered sword sheath. His middle head held the brass fitting while his left head tore at the leather. His stubby tail spun with delight.
Austin looked up at the silver avalanche.
An amber warning filled his vision.
Austin’s right eyelid twitched.
“Fourteen frames per second? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
He pointed his wrench at the falling swords like a construction foreman catching a crew destroying a finished job.
“Ten thousand separate blades, each with its own lighting and smoke trail? Who designed this, a summer intern trying to melt the hardware?”
The swords drew closer. Austin’s rant only gathered speed.
“You don’t render every screw and bevel at full detail from half a mile away! Use simple shapes until they get close! Stop drawing what the camera can’t see! My fans are screaming, the physics is stuttering, and the whole sky looks like a slideshow. This is unplayable garbage!”
He shook his head.
“Unacceptable site conditions. Massive sight hazard. Total waste of memory. I’m clearing this junk off my screen.”
He did not run for a bunker or raise a ward. Instead, he turned his pipe wrench and planted its hardened head against the jade dais.
CLACK.
Then he opened a tiny link between the wrench and the White Dwarf Seed in his dantian.
The seed contained the crushing force of a star. It also held a magnetic field strong enough to bend the path of iron across the arena.
That force ran down the Stellar-Steel wrench and into the sky.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ-VUMMMMMMM!
A deep hum rolled through the ground. Teeth rattled. Boot soles buzzed against the stone.
The swords were now fifty yards above Austin.
Every iron blade struck the magnetic field and stopped dead.
Their soul-bonds burned away as violent currents flashed through the metal. Jiang Taixu’s three hundred years of spiritual work peeled off the blades like cheap tape under a heat gun.
The falling points turned aside. Ten thousand swords folded into a silver funnel above the pit.
Then they dropped like a bucket of nails beside a scrapyard magnet.
SWOOSH-SLIDE-CLATTER-CLANG-CRASH!
The blades missed Austin by a full yard. Guided by the field around his grounded wrench, they landed in a neat thirty-foot pyramid of scrap iron.
CLATTER-THUD.
Three seconds had turned the Southern Sword Saint’s world-ending army into stacked salvage.
Austin lifted the wrench and rested it on his shoulder.
The frost clouds broke. Warm afternoon light poured across the arena.
His HUD chimed.
Austin breathed out in satisfaction.
“There. Sixty frames. No stutter. That’s how it’s supposed to run.”
He kicked a loose sword handle near the heap.
“Forty-five tons of good Cold-Iron, already cut to size. Good carbon content, no slag inside. Tie Kuang is going to lose his mind when we dump this into the Floor Two smelters.”
Pug sniffed the pile, snorted with all three heads, and pulled a leather sheath strap free. He dragged it across the sand with his tail wagging.
High above, Jiang Taixu balanced on his one remaining sword. His jaw hung open. His silver eyes moved blindly over the pyramid of scrap.
Then he vomited a stream of black blood across his white robes.
The destruction of ten thousand soul-bonds tore through seventy percent of his spirit veins. A thin crack spread across his three-hundred-year-old Golden Core.
“My blades,” he wheezed. “Three hundred years... stacked like scrap behind a barn...”
A deeper rumble rose beneath his feet.
The force of forty-five tons of falling steel had passed through Austin’s grounded wrench and into his dantian. The White Dwarf Seed drank in the surge and pressed against its next limit.
DING.
A clear tone rang like countless hammers striking steel.
The Level 32 Breakthrough had arrived.