In the shattered ruins of the VIP trial booth, the acrid stench of burnt hair, scorched ozone. Then it boiled away dark wood hung thick as heavy-duty grease.
Chief Arbiter Han spat out a mouthful of soot and blood, his trembling fingers clawing at the cracked marble flooring. His once-spotless royal afro puff was smoking wildly, singed unevenly on the left side where a stray lightning arc had cooked his ear into a weeping blister. Beside him, Arbiter Zong was whimpering like a beaten dog. His soot-blackened hands grabbed his broken ribs as he coughed up gray ash.
“He... He blew up our console through the neutral ground line...” Zong wheezed, his eyes rolling back in sheer terror. “He didn’t even use a spell! He just drove a copper nail into the mud! Master Han, this man isn’t human! He’s an ancient Primordial Demon of the Void!”
“Shut your useless mouth, you coward!” Han hissed, his voice cracking into a jagged, blood-spitting shriek.
Han scrambled across the floor on his hands and knees. He ignored the jagged shards of dark wood digging into his palms, until he reached the emergency manual override stone stand.
It was an ancient, heavy iron-hard metal pillar that connected directly to the grand coliseum’s main earth-shaking power core—the final failsafe of the Great Da-Qi founding dynasty.
