The golden shadow moved faster than human thought.
Da Peng didn’t go down with the sluggish flight path of a carriage rolling down a hill. He fell like a bolt of packed sunlight snapped from the heavens. At more than four times the speed of sound, the sky squeezing preceding his thirty-meter wings generated a visible cone of white vapor, followed instantly by a thunderous, ear-splitting sonic boom that shattered the cloud banks below.
BOOOOOOM!
The bone-shaking pressure slammed into the suspended dark rock pillar where Team Vanguard had barely caught their footing. The stone trembled wildly under their boots, the spatial anchors groaning as the gale tried to tear the floating rock from its space-folding moorings.
“Defensive wards!” Yan Zixuan shouted, throwing his star-iron tower shield forward.
Yet Da Peng didn’t strike the shield with his razor-sharp golden talons. He hadn’t spent a century under Lin Xiao’s tutelage merely to act as an unthinking beast of slaughter. At the very last split second, with the tip of his beak barely ten paces from Yan Zixuan’s nose, the huge roc tilted his main feathers ninety degrees.
The thirty-meter wingspan sliced through the air like twin sky scythes. It curled the four-hundred-li hurricane into a tight, spinning vortex tube of tightly packed air.
