The four heavy oak mantlets advanced across the wet granite span in locked formation, presenting an eight-foot wall of iron-banded timber that thundered forward like a battering ram.
Over the top of the shields, six ten-foot river pikes thrust forward in a coordinated, waving wave of greased iron points.
Distance: ten paces.
Eight paces.
Six paces.
The lead shield-bearer on the left—a burly river pirate named Black Dog, who had spent ten years boarding salt junks on the northern waterways—roared through his teeth, bracing his left shoulder against the rawhide backing of his mantlet.
Black Dog’s orders were simple. Ram the boy into the stone low roof wall, pin him against the dragon carvings, and let the spearmen behind him pin his thighs to the stone.
Pei Jing didn’t step back.
He didn’t dodge to the left or right where the waist-high stone low roof walls offered only a thirty-foot drop into the boiling rapids.
He stepped directly forward.
His left foot planted into the wet granite paver, his coarse hemp sole biting the stone with total friction.
Python Tendon Stance: Coiled Spring Release.
His balance point dropped two inches. His pelvis rotated forty degrees to the left, coiling his thoracolumbar muscle tissue until his deep spinal rotators pulled tight like the twisted sinew cables of a royal siege giant crossbow.
Both hands gripped the sharkskin handle of the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
He brought the twenty-two pounds of folded hard dark metal steel up over his right shoulder.
He didn’t swing with his triceps or chest.
He uncoiled his spine.
Gale Saber: First Form—Cleaving the Mountain River.
The Cloud-Splitter dropped in an overhead upright cleave.
The twenty-two-pound blade sliced through the cold river mist with a thunderous deep roar, speeding up from zero to one hundred and ten feet per second in less than half a second.
The strike landed directly upon the center of Black Dog’s iron-banded oak mantlet.
KABOOM.
The sound was not that of a sword striking wood.
It was an explosive, bone-shaking blast. The sound of an eight-hundred-pound granite boulder dropped from a cliff face onto a timber cart.
The tiny hard dark metal spine, backed by the diamond-hard high-carbon edge and Pei Jing’s full spinning core mass, struck the two-inch seasoned white oak planks.
The iron bands didn’t deflect the blow.
The forged iron strapping snapped in half with a grinding metal screech. The two-inch white oak planks exploded into hundreds of white splinters.
The blade passed fully through the shattered shield.
The flared twenty-eight-degree chisel head struck Black Dog’s iron-heavy leather helmet.
The helmet caved inward like an eggshell. The chisel edge sliced through the skull vault, split the neck spine. Then it cut the chest bone down to the nipples before stopping cold.
Black Dog died before his nervous system could transmit the sensation of impact to his brain.
His shattered mantlet and split corpse collapsed into the mud-slick pavers, spraying dark bright red blood across the men behind him.
The three leftover shield-bearers froze in animal shock, their eyes bulging as Black Dog’s blood splattered across their visors.
A handheld blade had just split through an iron-banded oak mantlet and an armored man in a single dropping blow.
Pei Jing didn’t wait for their brains to recover.
He didn’t pull the blade back along its entry path.
Rotational Inertia Recovery.
The chisel head reached the level of Black Dog’s chest bone. Then, Pei Jing’s left shoulder engaged Voluntary Joint Popped joint, slipping his shoulder socket one tiny fraction of an inch to redirect the downward vector into a level pivot.
His left hip snapped forward.
The Cloud-Splitter burst out of Black Dog’s ribs, spinning in a vicious, level waist-level arc.
SHING-CRACK.
The blade struck the second mantlet on Black Dog’s right.
The two-inch oak buckled, the shieldman behind it taking the twenty-two-pound bone-shaking shock directly into his ribs. His chest cage caved inward with a sickening crunch of broken bone, the cut end of his ribs puncturing his right lung.
The man was thrown bodily off his feet, crashing into the two spearmen behind him and knocking their ten-foot pikes wildly into the air.
The four-shield line was broken.
The eight-foot timber wall crumbled into a chaotic ruin of shattered planks, tangled pikes, and bleeding bodies.
“Spear him! Thrust! THRUST!” a squad leader screamed from the third rank.
Two spearmen thrust their ten-foot river pikes toward Pei Jing’s chest in desperate, uncoordinated lunges.
Pei Jing didn’t block with his blade.
He stepped inside the reach of the pikes with Silent Footwork.
His left forearm wrist guard came up. It turned aside both ash-wood shafts outward with the hardened carbon-steel armor plates:
Clack.
The ten-foot pikes glanced harmlessly off his wrist guard. That left their wielders fully overextended and defenseless.
Pei Jing took half a pace forward.
The Cloud-Splitter chopped downward diagonally.
Ssshh-clack.
The flared chisel head sliced through both spearmen’s forearms at the elbow. It was followed by an immediate level back-snap that split both their throats.
Both men dropped their cut weapons. They clawed at their spurting necks as they collapsed over the stone low roof wall. They plunged thirty feet into the roaring brown rapids below.
The bridge was twelve feet wide.
A twelve-foot span was a sharp-angled bottleneck.
Only three men could stand abreast. With Black Dog’s corpse and the shattered mantlets choking the central pavers, the leftover seventy cutthroats behind them were tightly packed into a helpless, choking column.
The men in front couldn’t retreat because the forty men behind them were shoving forward in blind panic. The men behind couldn’t see what was happening. They only heard the terrifying detonations of shattering oak, the wet sounds of shearing flesh, and the agonized shrieks of dying men.
“Back up! Back up, you fools!”
“I can’t breathe! Who’s shoving from behind?”
Pei Jing advanced like a machine on an iron rail.
Step. Root. Swing.
Gale Saber: Third Form—Parting the River Mist.
Every stroke was carried out with clean, steady care.
No wasted flourishes. No dramatic shouts.
He used the twenty-two pounds of the Cloud-Splitter as a heavy-duty shear. When an iron truncheon came up to block, the hard dark metal spine shattered the truncheon. A leather cuirass tried to absorb the cut. Then, the high-carbon edge parted the leather and bone beneath it like damp parchment.
A third shieldman was split from shoulder to hip.
A fourth took the eight-sided iron handle knob to the bridge of his nose, his facial bones collapsing into mush.
Three more cutthroats were swept off the stone low roof wall by a low, level leg-cleave, their screams swallowed by the roar of the rapids.
In less than three minutes, twelve corpses stacked up on the center span of the East Stone Bridge.
The stone drainage deck drains along the dragon low roof walls were choked with clotted blood, spilling thick, dark red streams down the granite piers into the churning river below.
The sound profile of the bridge changed fully.
The roaring jeers, the mocking shouts, the hammering of truncheons—all of it vanished.
The fifty cutthroats leftover on the eastern span stumbled to a dead halt. Their boots skidded in the blood of their fallen comrades.
Men stood pale, trembling. Their weapons shook so wildly in their numb hands that the iron ferrules rattled against the stone pavers.
They looked at the twelve corpses stacked three feet high across the twelve-foot gap.
And standing atop Black Dog’s shattered mantlet was Pei Jing.
His faded grey homespun robe was soaked in blood crimson from his chest to his boots. Steam rose from his shoulders in the freezing morning mist, his breath coming in slow, rhythmic, silent exhalations.
The Cloud-Splitter rested in his right hand, the dark gunmetal surface dripping dark, thick fluid that washed into the rain puddles.
Not a single chip marred the high-carbon edge.
He tapped the oiled satchel at his waist, verifying that the Black Mountain Whetstone had not shifted during the violent exchanges. The dark stone remained nestled against his hip. Its dished center waited for the evening’s stone upkeep.
In Pei Jing’s eye field, the monospace ledger flashed with blinding, crystal-clear runes:
The breakthrough settled into his central nervous system with an instant body posture.
The slight lag between his intent and the weapon’s physical flight path vanished entirely. The twenty-two pounds of hardened steel ceased to exist as a separate mass. It had become an integrated body-leverage lever anchored directly to his lower-back bones.
Pei Jing looked across the pile of corpses.
His eyes found Iron Claw Hu Biao standing thirty paces back on the eastern bridge pillar.
The fifty cutthroats between them took a collective, reflex step backward, shoving against each other in sheer, pure terror.
No one stepped forward. No one raised a pike.
“Get out of my way, you useless dogs!” a savage roar tore through the mist.
Hu Biao shoved through the ranks of his trembling men, his heavy iron-shod boots kicking aside a dropped spear.
The gang leader stepped onto the blood-soaked center span of the bridge.
His shaved scalp was veins and sweat, his teeth bared in an animal snarl of pure, murderous hatred.
His three-pronged hard dark metal claws clicked against his belt rivets with a cold, metal rasp:
Clack-rasp.
“You want my head, boy?” Hu Biao roared, stepping over the corpses. “Come and take it!”