The Cloud-Mist Beast Colosseum was engineered to look like an ancient fiery crater, carved directly into the southern granite foothills of the capital.
Three nested tiers of spectator galleries rose eighty feet above the bloodied sand of the arena floor, capable of seating fifty thousand screaming citizens.
Normally, the Colosseum was a monument to royal dominance over the wild beasts of the Jiuzhou Plane.
Today, it was a slaughterhouse of civil panic.
Frank’s mule cart arrived at the southern outer edge plaza. Then, the grand way out tunnels were clogged with thousands of fleeing nobles, merchants, and guild apprentices.
Stitched silk shoes lay trampled in the mud. Gold-trimmed palanquins were flipped on their sides, blocking the staircases.
People were climbing over each other in sheer, blind hysteria. It screamed as the toxic green sky reflected in the trembling puddles of rain and spilled wine.
Frank brought the cart to an abrupt halt, jumped down from the driver’s bench. Then he surveyed the chaos with a checker’s grim scowl.
“Look at this bottleneck,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Town life safety code needs a minimum of thirty-six inches of clear way out width for every fifty occupants. You have fifty thousand people trying to cram through two ten-foot archways. The flow squeezing ratio is over five hundred percent.”
He unhooked a brass megaphone horn and three heavy rolls of bright yellow marker tape from his leather tool pouch.
“Shitou, take the western arch,” Frank commanded with rapid builder care. “Mang, take the eastern ramp. Establish an orderly escape flow. If people stampede on twenty-degree inclined stone stairs, the crush injuries will cause more casualties than the beast.”
Shen Shitou vaulted off the cart, landing with a heavy thud, holding his twenty-pound sledgehammer high above his head like an unmoving traffic bright light.
“Orderly way out!” Shitou bellowed, his voice carrying the sound deep ring of a mountain avalanche. “Those who shove their brethren shall face the load-bearing judgment of the Star-Forged Sledge!”
Niu Mang planted his hard dark metal digging spade squarely in the center of the eastern ramp, his massive shoulders blocking an entire wave of panicked nobles.
“Left lane for walking! Right lane for carrying injured!” Niu Mang roared. “Anyone pushing gets shoveled into the outer edge drainage ditch!”
The panicked mob, suddenly confronted by two hulking youths wielding heavy-duty implements with military discipline, miraculously separated into two orderly escape streams.
Princess Ling’er stood by the cart, raising her delicate hands to vent gentle, soothing plumes of cooling water vapor into the humid, rotten-egg air to revive fainting maidens and elderly scholars.
“Escape drill established,” Ling’er reported calmly, adjusting her apron. “Discharge rate is now steadied at twelve hundred persons per minute. The stairways are clear of falling hazards.”
Frank nodded in test, turned away from the evacuees. Then he strode through the vacant VIP gate into the main Colosseum bowl.
The scene inside the arena was world-ending.
The central sand pit was bathed in boiling green flames that hissed as they devoured wooden holding pens, training dummies, and iron weapon racks.
Thick, six-inch-width links of black metal lay scattered across the scorched sand, snapped clean in half with jagged, crystal-clear fractures.
Against the outer edge retention wall, two elderly men clad in shredded purple robes were propped against the shattered stonework, coughing up dark mouthfuls of blood.
These were Hall Master Han and Chief Elder Wu, the supreme authorities of the Royal Beast Taming Guild.
Their 2-Star Beast-Tamer staves lay splintered into kindling beside them, their spiritual halos fully put out.
“It... It can’t be...” Hall Master Han wheezed, his trembling, blood-stained fingers clawing toward the broken black chain links on the sand. “The 10,000-Year Star-Forged Cold-Iron Chains... Forged by the founding patriarch... Blessed by nine ages of royal beast masters... Broken by brute force!”
Chief Elder Wu clutched his cracked ribs, his face deathly pale. “The beast’s bloodline has achieved half-step Rank Three! Its draconic fury rejected the cold-iron crushing weight! Heaven has abandoned our guild!”
Frank walked across the scorching arena sand, his heavy work boots crunching steadily against the gravel, fully ignoring the heat streaming through his soles.
He stopped beside a massive snapped chain link.
The link was six inches thick, forged from dark, lustrous cold-iron that pulsed with faint, dying blue runes.
Frank bent down on one knee.
He didn’t inspect the spiritual runes. He didn’t check for leftover demonic intent.
He pulled his yellow carpenter’s pencil from behind his ear and tapped the crystal-clear, jagged surface where the metal had snapped.
Tink.
The sound was brittle, sharp, and high-pitched.
Frank tapped his temple with his pencil. His internal console pulsed amber:
Frank ran his calloused thumb along the jagged fracture face. That let out a heavy, disappointed sigh.
“Look at this granular cleavage plane,” Frank muttered, shaking his head. “Classic hydrogen embrittlement. Not a single trace of ductile necking.”
Hall Master Han froze, his blood-stained lips parting in confusion. “H-Hydrogen... What? Ductile necking?”
Frank picked up a forty-pound broken half-link with one hand. He held it up so the fallen elders could see the grey crystal-clear grain under the green sky.
“Your foundry skipped the backup tempering cycle,” Frank said, his voice flat with builder disdain. “You cast high-carbon pig iron, cooled it in freezing sub-zero salt water to make it rock-hard, and never drew back the hardness in a tempering oven. It has zero cyclic fatigue allowance.”
Frank pointed at the face of the break with his pencil.
“And then you bathed the chains in acid wash to etch your shiny little blue runes. The core hydrogen diffused straight into the iron lattice, creating micro-fissures along the grain boundaries. The beast didn’t break this with supernatural draconic fury. It just leaned on it until the brittle metal snapped along the stress risers.”
Hall Master Han’s mouth worked soundlessly, like a landed carp.
“Impertinent nonsense!” Chief Elder Wu protested weakly, coughing blood onto his robe. “Those chains held three mountain dragons during the Third Northern Expedition! They possess the ancient frost-binding dharma! How could a mortal speak of our sacred metalworking with such disrespect?!”
Frank tossed the broken link to Shen Shitou, who had just jogged onto the sand after securing the western tunnel.
“Shitou. Give it a Charpy impact test.”
Shen Shitou caught the forty-pound iron link in his left hand, set it on a flat granite stone. He raised his twenty-pound sledgehammer. Then he tapped it with a light, five-pound dropping stroke.
CLANG-CRACK!
The six-inch-thick link of ‘iron-hard’ Cold-Iron shattered into four jagged chunks like a baked-clay flowerpot dropped onto a porch!
Shitou scoffed, tossing a crumbly piece of iron aside.
“Master speaks the total Dao of Metalwork,” Shitou proclaimed, his voice echoing across the silent Colosseum. “The arrogant elders relied on brittle outside hardness, mistaking rigid coldness for true strength. But without internal ringing tempering, their grand chains were nothing more than frozen mud!”
Hall Master Han and Chief Elder Wu stared at the shattered iron fragments, their minds fully collapsing.
For three hundred years, the Beast Taming Guild had believed that the Cold-Iron Chains were an unbending divine treasure that only ancient demonic power could overcome.
Yet a teenager in a canvas apron had shattered a link with a casual tap of a hammer!
“Who... Who’s this senior?” Chief Elder Wu whispered, trembling. “To see the tiny grain posture of sky star-iron with a glance... Could he be an ancient Grandmaster Smith of the Heavenly Forge Sect?!”
Before Frank could explain the difference between a blacksmith and a materials science technician, the ground beneath their boots convulsed wildly.
KABOOM!
The underground iron gate at the northern end of the arena was blown fifty feet into the air. It spun like a massive coin before crashing into the empty spectator stands!
A wave of choking, 2,000-degree rotten-egg heat rolled out of the dark holding cave, instantly evaporating the moisture in Frank’s eyebrows.
THUD... THUD... THUD...
Heavy, earth-shaking footsteps approached from within the darkness.
From the churning viridian smoke emerged the huge, forty-foot titan of destruction:
The Viridian Dragon-Hound.
It was a nightmare of ancient biology.
Its massive canine torso was covered in thick, linked emerald scales that bristled with razor-sharp bone spikes.
Its draconic head was crowned by two jagged black glass horns that crackled with arcs of static lightning.
Thick, broken stubs of cold-iron chain still dangled from a heavy collar cinched around its massive neck, chafing into raw, bleeding flesh with every movement.
Its eyes were not the calm jade of a sacred beast.
They were pools of world-ending, blood-red madness, burning with murderous fury as toxic spit dripped from its six-inch fangs, hissing and melting the arena sand into green melted rock waste!
The beast lowered its massive horned head, locked its glowing crimson eyes onto the fallen elders. Then he let out a roar that shattered every leftover pane of glass in the southern district.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR!
Hall Master Han backed away through the sand. “No one can stop a berserk dragon beast!”
Chief Elder Wu shut his eyes, trembling. “Its scales deflect mortal steel, and its soul is burned up by fury!”
Frank stood twenty paces away, hands in his denim pockets.
He didn’t draw a sword. He didn’t summon spiritual qi.
He stared at the beast’s twitching snout. He watched its hind legs tremble and its tail tuck tight against its flanks like an overstimulated hound with an ear infection.
Frank pulled out his yellow carpenter’s pencil with a quiet, irritated sigh.
“Chafing collar, no chamfer on the inner radius, and an untuned sound environment,” Frank muttered. He shook his head. “No wonder the dog has a bad attitude. If someone bolted a rusty iron band around my windpipe and blasted sirens in my ear, I’d bite through the furniture too.”