The Man Who Returned didn’t strike Magistrate Ren. He struck the balance. With a single, explosive motion of his right arm, the headsman brought the gold-silver metal-wrapped shard-blade down upon the central pivot point of the Lead Scales of Khorat. Inevitability Severance: The Broken Scale. It wasn’t a physical strike against lead. It was a severance of the concept of justice itself—the razor-sharp amputation of moral guilt from the physical plane of the Seventh Void. The heavy lead beam shattered into three twisted pieces, the iron chains snapping with the sound of gunshots, the granite stone base splitting down the center and exploding into a cloud of sharp, flying shrapnel.
The spirit backdraft of the shattered scales exploded through the Sanctum like an arcane bomb. The grey courtroom circle collapsed instantly into screaming static. The thirty thousand ghosts wailed—a sound of huge, echoing grief—before being pulled back into the fractures of the floorboards, their souls sucked down into the Stygian vaults as the legal turf dissolved. Magistrate Ren was thrown twenty feet across the silver glass, his court blindfold torn from his face, dark blood pouring from his eyes and ears as the backlash of his destroyed craft shattered his skull.
