To the six thousand royal soldiers watching from the castle walls of Fort Ironpass, the sight bordered on living madness.
An eighty-foot mobile castle of oak and hammered bog-iron was rolling forward across the frozen ground. It was flanked by five thousand heavy cavalry and pushed by eight adult mammoths. Against this rolling avalanche of timber and iron, a solitary youth in a plain charcoal-grey robe was sprinting across no-man’s-land alone.
Pei Jing had left his wooden sword sheath behind in the sally port.
He held the Cloud-Splitter in a two-handed grip. Right hand jammed against the crossguard, left hand anchoring the handle knob, the twenty-jin hard dark metal blade lined up at forty-five degrees across his right hip. Across his back, the worn bamboo walking staff of Sword Saint Lu Tingxuan was bound securely with leather thongs.
His boots didn’t sink into the drifts.
Under the consolidated footwork of the Mortal Grandmaster, his plantar muscle tissue engaged the frozen crust with zero impact rebound. Each stride covered eleven feet of level distance, his body skimming the glazed ice like an iron weight launched across greased marble.
He sped up from zero to forty-five miles per hour in one point eight seconds.
