Striking force doesn’t negotiate with arrogance. It only measures mass, speed, and the sharpness of the cutting edge.
Chief Bayan’s twelve-foot ash lance arrived at thirty-five miles per hour. The three-sided iron blade was eighteen inches from Pei Jing’s chest, propelled by eight hundred pounds of armored steppe warhorse and backed by four converging lances from the front cavalry rank.
Pei Jing didn’t block with the flat of his blade.
He didn’t try to divert the iron points.
At the exact heartbeat the lead lance tip crossed the threshold of his clothing, Pei Jing sidestepped to the left by two inches.
It was a minimal, tiny shifted weight of his balance point. His right shoulder rotated inward by six degrees. He allowed Chief Bayan’s twelve-foot lance to whistle past his right armpit with less than eight tiny fractions of an inch of clearance. The sheer shifted weight of air tore at his coarse hemp sleeve, but the iron touched nothing.
Then, Pei Jing rotated his entire physical frame like a heavy-duty flywheel.
His straw sandals locked into the blue-black river ice.
