The Black Stone Deep gap was a tiered arena of black hard speckled rock and blue ice-slow ice.
At six thousand feet above sea level, the air was thin, tasting of powdered quartz and frost. Wind poured over the knife-edge granite rim at twelve meters per second, howling. It snapped past upright rock spires that rose like broken spears into the slate sky.
Pei Jing lay prone on a ledge of dark hard speckled rock, twenty feet above the deep gap floor.
He had removed his boots. He wrapped his feet in strips of cured rawhide to prevent the scrape of hard leather against frozen rock. The hood of his wolf-fur cowl was pulled low, shielding his eyes from flying ice granules.
Beneath him, eighty paces down the ravine, the monster beast was feeding.
It was a Two-Tailed Wild Boar—a Tier 1 mutant hunting beast of the Cang Mountain crags.
The beast was eight feet long from snout to croup, standing four feet high at the muscular ridge of its withers. Its mass was huge. At least two hundred and eighty pounds, or over six hundred pounds of dense muscle, fat, and bone.
What made the animal terrifying to mortal hunters was its armor.
Over twenty years of seasonal wallowing in the pine-scented seeps of the Black Pines, the boar had coated its flanks in thick layers of cedar pitch. Into this sticky gum, it had ground quartz gravel, iron melted rock waste from old surface veins, and river sand. The compound had hardened in the sub-zero mountain cold into an artificial back shell two inches thick. A natural composite armor that deflected crossbow bolts and turned the edges of iron spears.
Protruding from its lower jaw were twin tusks.
Fourteen inches of dense, curved ivory, yellowed at the base and polished to razor points at the tips. The tusks were thick as a man’s wrist, capable of disemboweling a draft horse with an upward toss of the head. From its rump whipped two thick, muscular tails, each tipped with a hard spur of hardened joint padding.
Pei Jing conducted his careful check.
His floating sight screen activated in silent slate monochrome:
Twenty-two thousand blasts of heat.
That was the clockwork payload of a runaway two-ton iron ore cart plunging down a mine shaft. Attempting to meet such a mass head-on with a three-foot saber was suicidal. The load-bearing shock would shatter his arms, crush his ribs through his Iron Cloth, and pulp his internal organs.
An arrow to the flank was equally futile. A sixty-pound hunting bow couldn’t penetrate two inches of quartz-impregnated pine resin.
The only viable path was body leverage.
Behind the massive, four-inch-thick skull plate and below the ear canal lay a narrow three-sided hollow: the retromandibular fossa.
In all mammalian quadrupeds, this gap between the climbing jaw ridge of the jaw bone and the atlas vertebra was protected only by thin sheets of muscle and the parotid salivary gland. Beneath that tissue lay the neck-vein foramen and the skull-base gap—the main sky-slit leading directly into the medulla oblongata and lower brain.
A blade driven into that hollow at a thirty-degree forward angle bypassed all bone armor, severing the central automatic switchboard instantly.
Pei Jing slid down the rear chimney of the hard speckled rock shelf.
He reached the deep gap floor sixty paces upwind of the feeding beast.
The boar was ripping apart the frozen root system of an ancient dwarf pine, its tusks tearing through frozen earth with wet, bone-shaking cracks. The sound of grinding rock echoed off the canyon walls.
Pei Jing drew the three-foot mountain saber with his right hand.
The high-carbon sanmei blade gleamed with cold specular clarity in the grey light.
He raised his left arm.
His left wrist snapped backward twenty degrees.
THWIP.
A single six-inch spring-steel flying needle shot from his rawhide forearm wrist guard, crossing forty paces in three-tenths of a second.
The needle was not aimed at the armored flank.
PING.
The three-sided needle-point arrow struck the boar’s left gristle ear, piercing the thin tissue and embedding itself an inch into the opposite rock wall.
The effect was instant.
The giant boar froze. Its red, piggy eyes snapped toward the source of the whistle.
It saw the human standing alone in the center of the snowy canyon.
A deep-throated, ground-trembling roar tore from the beast’s throat. A bone-shaking blast of hot, rotten-egg breath that blew snow three feet into the air. The twin muscular tails whipped against its flanks with wet slaps.
The beast lowered its massive head, pointing its fourteen-inch ivory tusks directly at Pei Jing’s chest.
It charged.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The impact of its cloven hooves against the frozen shale sounded like the pounding of a high-pressure trip-hammer.
In two seconds, the six-hundred-pound monster sped up to twelve meters per second. Snow and shattered rock exploded behind its rear hocks in twenty-foot plumes. The sheer shifted weight of air preceded the beast like an invisible wall of wind.
Forty paces. Twenty paces. Ten paces.
Pei Jing stood motionless.
His balance point sank two inches. His breathing stopped.
To an outside observer, he appeared numbed with terror. A frail human youth about to be crushed into bloody slush under twenty-two thousand blasts of heat of bone-shaking destruction.
At three paces—less than two meters of separation—the curved ivory tusks were six inches from his belly. The stench of rotting meat, wild musk, and hot blood filled his nostrils.
Time to impact: one hundred and twenty split seconds.
Pei Jing’s right foot fired.
Gale Footwork: Slip-Arc Pivot.
His rear heel locked into a seam in the hard speckled rock bedrock. His hips snapped forty-five degrees to the left, his torso rotating in seventy split seconds.
The razor point of the right tusk whistled past his linen coat, slicing a clean three-inch slit through the wool without touching the slate-grey rhino-leather skin beneath.
The massive, quartz-crusted shoulder flashed past his chest, close enough that the wind ripped his cowl back.
At the exact heartbeat the boar’s head crossed his midline, Pei Jing struck.
He didn’t swing with a wide cleave.
He thrust.
Both hands clamped around the pigskin-wrapped handle of the mountain saber. His cross-woven back muscles and glutes locked into a rigid high-pressure ram.
He drove the thirty-six-inch blade downward and forward at a thirty-five-degree angle into the soft three-sided depression beneath the boar’s right ear.
SCHLUCK.
The high-hard steel core, sharpened on the Black Mountain Whetstone to specular sharpness, pierced the skin with near-zero heavy drag.
The thirty-six inches of cold iron sank handle-deep into the retromandibular hollow.
The point cut the right main neck blood vessel, shattered the styloid process. Then it punched through the skull-base gap, liquefying the medulla oblongata and severing the upper main spine nerve from the lower brain.
Pei Jing released the handle right away.
Attempting to hold the weapon as six hundred pounds of driving force carried it forward would have out-of-joint his shoulders and torn his rotator cuffs.
The boar’s nervous system ceased to exist.
All motor signals to its legs collapsed in four split seconds.
The massive beast didn’t leap. It didn’t thrash. It became a six-hundred-pound projectile of dead meat and stone armor.
Its snout plowed into the frozen gravel. Its huge driving force carried the carcass sliding thirty feet across the ice, throwing up a five-foot wave of powdered snow before slamming into a fifteen-ton hard speckled rock boulder with a bone-shaking, bone-shattering boom.
CRASH.
The boulder shuddered. A shower of loose shale rained down from the canyon walls.
Then, complete, freezing silence returned to Black Stone Deep gap.
Pei Jing stood where he had carried out the pivot.
His feet had not left their tracks. His breathing remained steady, four seconds in through his nose, four seconds out through pursed lips.
His floating sight screen materialized in brilliant, plain monospace:
Pei Jing walked across the snow to the dead monster.
The beast lay crumpled against the hard speckled rock boulder, its twin tails slack in the red-stained snow. The handle of his three-foot mountain saber protruded from the base of its skull, dark crimson blood dripping sluggishly from the iron guard.
He gripped the handle with both hands, braced his foot against the armored cheek, and withdrew the blade with a heard, wet suction.
The high-carbon edge was unchipped. The blood beaded on the animal fat-treated steel, sliding off like water on greased paper.
Pei Jing drew the antler-handled skinning knife from his boot.
He crouched beside the massive snout. He ran his thick, horn-hard fingers along the curve of the two fourteen-inch ivory tusks. They were flawless, dense as white jade, with sharp serrated tips that had never struck iron. He pulled out a small cold-chisel and mallet from his canvas pack. Extracting the root sockets without fracturing the ivory needed careful, careful percussive taps around the lung-sac bone.
The gallbladder had to come first. Meanwhile, the body heat prevented the bile from congealing. It was followed by three hundred pounds of dark, marbled muscle tissue rich in monster essence.
“The asset is secured,” he whispered into the frozen wind, rolling up his sleeves to begin the cutting-open. “Now, the harvest.”