The steel blades of ten royal broadswords dropped through the candlelight in a timed together arc of execution.
Brother Ren didn’t step back.
The Disgraced Saint lunged forward, throwing his bare hands upward into the rain of hardened steel. His callused palms caught the dropping edges of the two lead swords. The sharp blades sliced through his skin, through muscle and tendons, grinding against the hand bones of his hands with a sickening screech of metal on living calcium. Blood burst from his palms in a hot spray. But the monk’s fingers clamped shut around the bare steel like forged iron vices.
Martyr’s Osmosis.
A third blade thrust forward from the right, punching through his hip and scraping along his pelvic bone. A fourth sword slashed diagonally across his chest, splitting the coarse burlap habit and opening a six-inch furrow across his ribs that exposed the white joint padding beneath.
Brother Ren gasped, a gout of crimson coughing from his lips. But his feet—crusted with old dirt and fresh bright red blood—didn’t slide backward an inch. He took the moving shock, absorbed the tearing trauma into his cellular lattice. Then he held the two swords locked in his bleeding fists. He used his own impaled body as an unmoving wedge that jammed the narrow aisle between the pews.
