Austin’s stomach dropped like a freight elevator with a snapped cable.
He stood on the cracked jade dais with the server core clamped beneath his arm. Deep in his dantian, the White Dwarf Seed absorbed the force of ten thousand falling swords and forty-five tons of steel.
It struck its next limit.
The chime was still ringing in his teeth when a screen opened.
The pearl-sized seed flared at three hundred thousand degrees. Its matter packed tighter, reaching the last state before collapsing into something even denser. Its mass rose to that of a large asteroid, though it remained smaller than a songbird’s egg.
The First Epoch containment field held back almost all of it.
The tiny leak was enough to make Austin’s local gravity twelve times normal.
CRACK-CRUNCH-THUMP!
Invisible weight slammed across the Grand Martial Arena.
The thirty-foot pyramid of Cold-Iron swords shrieked and collapsed to twenty feet. The blades pressed together into one solid block of scrap that rang like a huge bell.
The weight spread toward the stands. Bronze armor buckled, teapots burst, and iron rails bent. Ruan’s evacuation kept the crowd out of the worst of it, but several guards fell hard.
Austin saw a guard clutching his leg. This was no longer just a game effect. He tightened the containment field until its edge stopped short of the occupied seats.
“Xiaoyao, get the healers to that guard,” he said. “Ruan, mark every cracked rail for repair. Nobody crosses until the crew checks it.”
Xiaoyao remained upright inside the three-foot safe zone around Austin. He hugged the clipboard to his chest and trembled.
“M-Master, is the mountain caving in?”
“Just a pressure difference. Check your footing and stay inside the line. Step out there now and you’ll flatten your own boots.” Austin nodded toward the damaged rails. “Log twelve times normal gravity and no reinforcement in the stone floor.”
“Y-Yes, Master!”
Xiaoyao wrote with a shaking pencil: Site condition: severe gravity spike. Stonework failing throughout arena.
Pug sprawled on his belly inside the safe zone. He refused to abandon his sword sheath. His middle head pinned it down while the other two chewed its brass fittings.
Austin scratched him behind the middle ears. Pug gave a muffled snort of pleasure and thumped his tail against the cracked jade.
The pavers beneath Austin’s boots had turned to white powder.
A half-inch of decorative stone over weak fill. No rebar cage. No compaction testing. One good bounce and I’m in the storm drain.
Cyan light caught his eye.
His small orbiting ring had grown. Forty-two curls of Cold-Iron from the crushed sword pile had joined the twelve pebbles and thirty pine needles.
Eighty-four pieces now circled his calves in three neat tracks, turning in opposite directions. Their high hum sounded like clean machine bearings.
Austin lifted one boot.
Clomp.
His leg felt as if it were moving through deep mud.
“Twelve percent movement penalty. Great. Feels like size-thirteen muck boots in wet fill.”
He adjusted the brass counterweights on his harness.
Clack, clack.
“Need to rebalance the rig when we get home. My own field is fighting my walk cycle.”
Eighty feet above the sand, Jiang Taixu was sinking.
The twelve-gravity field had caught him like an anchor. His last Cold-Iron broadsword bent beneath him. Blue sparks spat from the flight runes along its blade.
Blood dried on his face. His crane-feather robes hung in strips, and sweat plastered his silver hair to his skull. The crack in his Golden Core pulsed with pain.
He felt the field dragging him toward Austin.
If he fell into it at full force, his bones would powder.
Three hundred years on the mountain. The Southern Sword Saint. The man who had destroyed barbarian armies with one hand. A sovereign before whom governors bowed.
He refused to die as a smear beneath a laborer’s boots.
“IF I MUST FALL TODAY,” he rasped, “MY SWORD WILL SPLIT THIS WORLD IN TWO!”
He bit through the tip of his tongue. Golden heart-blood sprayed across his bent sword.
Jiang burned his half-formed Nascent Soul and every drop of power he had left. It was the final, desperate act of a man tearing out the safety controls because the machine was already failing.
His broadsword vanished.
It did not melt or shatter. It narrowed into a hair-thin line of perfect darkness.
A cut through space itself.
The black seam made no sound. Light bent around it and disappeared. Dust touched its edge and ceased to exist.
It turned toward the center of Austin’s hard hat and fell.
“DIE, HEAVENLY FIEND!” Jiang screamed as his life burned away. “SEVER THE HEAVENS!”
The strike moved at the speed of thought.
Austin stopped adjusting his harness. He looked up at the thin black line and scowled.
“Now he’s messing with the map geometry. I just fixed my frame rate, and this clown is trying to clip through the level.”
He raised his five-foot Stellar-Steel pipe wrench. One hand rolled the brass adjustment nut, opening the hardened jaws exactly three inches.
He planted his feet and aimed the jaws at the falling tear.
The spatial blade arrived.
The wrench was waiting.