The four-fathom war-cleaver was a weapon that needed two hands and eighty foot-pounds of high-pressure torque to wield under normal military conditions.
The mass of the four-fathom war-cleaver was two hundred and forty pounds of dense black steel. When swung at the end of Zhu Heling’s six-foot said clearlybronze arm, the cutting edge achieved a spinning speed exceeding forty arm-lengths per second. The moving driving force carried by that sweeping arc was enough to shear through three ranks of armored legionnaires or cleave the stempost of a river-cutter in two. To try to block such a strike with human bone or an ordinary weapon would have resulted in instant dismemberment.
Yet Zhu Heling, driven by the desperate, uncoiling fury of his forty-foot spinal spring, lifted the massive black-steel blade with his single functional right gauntlet. The steam-tubes along the fuller were cold and dead, but the serrated cutting edge, sharpened on diamond wheels to the sharpness of a razor, whistled through the freezing mist with terrifying speed.
He didn’t swing the blade with the disciplined form of a swordsman. He swung it with the wild, sweeping violence of a scythe cutting through tall grass, aiming to sever Qiao Ming’s legs at the knees.
