The downward flight path of the sixty-pound wolf-tooth iron mace was governed by thirty-two hundred foot-pounds of bone-shaking driving force.
Chief Tie Mu stood in his iron stirrups, his massive back muscles bunched beneath his black iron scale armor, his face twisted in a feral snarl. He channeled every ounce of his Bone Cleansing Peak power into the strike. A martial discipline that had crushed rival warlords, shattered guard post shields, and crushed royal cavalry columns across seven border campaigns.
The air beneath the dropping iron flanges tightly packed with a high-pitched, shrieking whistle.
Pei Jing didn’t try an orthogonal block.
An orthogonal block against an incoming sixty-pound iron mass moving at thirty feet per second was a rule-break of body-leverage. Even with a jade-iron skeletal lattice, the bone-shaking transfer would shock his shoulder capsule and waste seventy percent of his muscular energy in absorbing the impact.
Instead, Pei Jing carried out an off-axis forty-five-degree flank step.
His left boot slipped sideways across the slick horse carcass beneath him. His right heel dropped into a narrow seam between two granite threshold flat stone slabs. His balance point lowered by four inches, tilting his torso twelve degrees off the central strike plane.
