The iron-hard metal combat pitch shook beneath Ba Shan’s eight-foot frame like a drumhead under a heavy iron mallet.
The titan of the Mountain-Moving Sect dragged his three-ton Mountain-Splitting Halberd across the stone slabs, carving a two-inch trench of sparkling white fire through the iron-hard metal stonework. His chest, thick as an ancient oak barrel, rose. Then he fell with heavy, deep-throated breaths that sounded like air-powered bellows in a heavy-duty iron foundry. Around his thick shoulders swirled dense, earthen-brown zhenqi that condensed into ghostly silhouettes of crumbling dark rock cliffs and soaring mountain peaks.
Ba Shan halted thirty paces away, sneering down at Niu Mang with eyes burning with savage, bloodthirsty contempt.
“Little worm,” Ba Shan rumbled. His voice shook the sand on the floor and rattling the brass railings of the lowest spectator boxes. “You brought a manure scoop to face the Mountain-Moving Halberd? For eight hundred years, my clan has split dragons and cut earth-shaking plates with this old family iron! Your backwater master must have sent you to die so he could save on grain rations! Kneel before me. I might only slice off your ears instead of crushing your mortal bones into road aggregate!”
In the high royal boxes, the high-born spectators laughed in cruel excitement, waving silk handkerchiefs and cheering for the coming soon slaughter of the rural laborers.
