The fiends covered the last two hundred paces in twelve seconds. Those at the edges crashed against the walls. Their feet sent white chips of rock into the air. The ones in the middle kept coming. The smell of scorched tin and bile reached Pei Jing before their scythes did.
At nine paces, the walls pushed the front rank so close together that the fiends struck one another’s plates when they lifted their arms. Pei Jing dug his boot heel into the gravel and let the Nine-Pillar Golden Core turn with his hips.
He used a woodcutter’s stroke. The edge swept across the mouth of the gorge.
The air went first. A line of packed force tore through the front rank before the star iron reached it. Six fiends dropped. The blade took the next one at the shoulder and kept going. Shells broke all along its arc. Eighteen bodies came down in a tangle of legs and black fluid.
The weight of the blade kept pulling after the cut. Pei Jing let it go up instead of trying to drag it to a stop. One fiend sprang over the bodies in front of it. The Bone Blade came back down and split it in the air.
