The falling flakes were large, dry, and silent, drifting down through the copper-red light of the eclipsed moon.
Between the fallen timber canopy of the command tent and the shattered barrier of Trench Line Two, the wooden walkway planks were bathed in steam rising from fresh crimson puddles. Sixty royal veterans lay dead or dying in the mud, their iron-banded bucklers split in two, their lances snapped like dry reeds.
In the center of the hall stood the three barbarian Titans.
Mountain-Crusher Tie Le loomed four hundred pounds wide, his twin eighty-jin serrated cleavers resting across his shoulders, the dark hard steel dripping gore onto his bare, scarred arms. Beside him, Shadow-Blade Aguda crouched on the frozen gravel, his spine curved into an unnatural hungry S-shape, the black glass-toothed bone sickles hovering inches above the ice.
Ten paces behind them, Iron-Skull Ba Tu slowly spun his sixty-jin meteorite-iron flail. The braided steel chain emitted a steady, low-hum that shook through the frozen ground: whirrr... Whirrr... Whirrr.
And confronting them was a single youth.
Pei Jing stood twelve paces away.
He wore no mountain-scale cuirass. He wore no iron helmet. Over his coarse linen undergarments he wore only a plain charcoal-grey robe, its wide sleeves rolled back to the forearms, revealing lean, pale wrists bound in simple oil-tanned shark-skin bracers.
