The huge shadow of the Viridian Dragon-Hound fell across the arena floor like an iron drop-gate dropping shut.
In the eastern watching terrace, three veteran beast-taming elders clutched their robes and bowed their heads in grim resignation.
“Turn away, children!” one elder cried hoarsely. “A mortal skeleton can’t endure three thousand tons of draconic moving driving force!”
Beside the central royal pavilion, Grand Elder Yan slumped against a marble banister. His knuckles were pale and bloodless.
“It’s finished,” Yan whispered, his throat very thirsty with grief. “A peerless grandmaster of stone-built harmony... Swallowed before his divine treatise could even be transcribed.”
On the royal platform, Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao bared his teeth in an ugly, triumphant grimace.
“Die, insolent dog!” Tianxiao spat, leaning over the shattered stone railing. “Let the monster chew your bones to powder! That’s the price for lecturing royalty on sound deep ring!”
Around the colosseum bowl, fifty thousand spectators gasped all at once.
The beast’s massive lower jaw plunged downward like an excavator bucket falling from a five-story crane.
Three nested rings of emerald fangs, each the length of a broadsword and coated in venom, sliced through the air with a piercing sonic screech.
The sky shifted weight alone was violent enough to rip linen robes to shreds.
A empty pocket cone formed behind the plunging snout. It dragged shattered flat stone slabs and clouds of mortar dust into the vortex.
To any martial artist in the Jiuzhou Plane, an attack of this size presented an impossible hard choice.
If one tried to block, twenty-eight tons moving at forty miles per hour would pulverize spiritual shields and reduce bones to jelly.
If one leaped backward, the empty pocket cone would drag the fighter straight into the tooth-lined maw like a dry leaf swept into a fire.
The only traditional response was a high-tier movement art requiring three years of piled up spiritual essence.
Frank, however, was not a traditional martial artist.
He was a senior builder with twelve years of site-watch experience and an approved eye for machinery clearance envelopes.
To Frank’s aiming cross-helped vision, the dropping forty-foot beast didn’t look like an avatar of ancient wrath.
It looked remarkably like an unbolted high-pressure backhoe arm dropping due to a cut pressure hose.
The entire downward strike was locked into a single, rock-solid arc.
The neck muscles were fully extended, the tendons were rigid as steel cables. The beast’s balance point had crossed the tipping threshold beyond its forepaws.
“Zero lateral tracking,” Frank observed, his internal clock ticking down with clean, steady care. “Massive heavy rush. Once the boom starts dropping, the worker has zero steering power until bottom-dead-center.”
In the world of buggy physics engines, there was a well-known exploit for attacks with too much startup animation and zero angular correction.
It was called hitbox desynchronization.
An entity’s motion bounding box descends at end-post speed along a fixed rail. Then, the crash mesh only registers an overlap if the target remains inside the main swept volume.
Step outside that volume by even half an inch during the active damage frames, and the crash engine simply calculates a complete miss.
The screen in Frank’s eye flickered with crisp, glowing-green text:
The timer hit zero.
The foremost canine tooth—a serrated spike of jade-colored bone thick as an oak trunk—dropped to within four inches of Frank’s forehead.
Frank didn’t sprint. He didn’t dive into the dirt. He deployed no shimmering barrier of defensive Qi.
He simply shifted his weight onto the outer welt of his left work boot.
With a smooth, unrushed motion, he slid his left foot three inches to the flank.
Seventy-six point a tiny fraction of an inch.
That was all.
It was the precise distance a seasoned carpenter stepped aside to let a swinging two-by-four pass overhead without grazing his hard hat.
SHUUUUU—!
The huge upper jaw crashed past Frank’s left ear.
The emerald fang brushed past the coarse denim fabric of his sleeve by a tiny clearance of two point seven five tiny fractions of an inch.
Frank moved during the precise three-frame motion window before the beast’s nearby blast wave detached from its snout. Because of that, he slipped fully through the pressure slope.
He generated zero counter-rough churning.
To the naked eye of fifty thousand watching fighters, what just occurred defied every known law of physics and training logic.
The young mortal in indigo denim had not dodged.
He had simply ceased to occupy the space where the attack landed.
KABOOOOOOOM—!
The Viridian Dragon-Hound’s snout struck the solid mountain stone of the arena floor with the earth-shattering force of a falling meteor.
A blast wave of green fire and crushed granite erupted in all directions.
Flat stone slabs three feet thick buckled and shattered into powdery dust.
A trench eight feet deep and thirty feet long tore through the center of the arena as the beast’s twenty-eight-ton bulk slid forward under its own driving force.
Clouds of crushed stone and white-hot steam billowed fifty arm-lengths into the air, obscuring the pit in a solid veil of gray.
A dreadful, heavy, choking silence fell over the colosseum.
Crown Prince Chu Tianxiao let out a ragged laugh from the royal terrace.
“Hahaha! Did you see that?! Crushed! Not even an intact tooth left of that arrogant peasant!”
“Silence, Your Highness!” Hall Master Han roared, dragging his battered body forward. “You speak of a grandmaster whose toe-dirt you’re unworthy to lick!”
“Look!” an eagle-eyed elder from the Beast Pavilion suddenly screamed. He pointed into the swirling curtain of dust. “Look at the impact crater!”
A gust of wind whipped across the colosseum floor, slicing through the smoke.
At the deepest point of the trench, the Viridian Dragon-Hound’s lower jaw was wedged firmly into six feet of shattered bedrock, its neck muscles straining wildly to pull its teeth free.
And standing right away beside the beast’s left eye—fully untouched, fully unrushed, without a single speck of dust on his blue denim jacket—was Frank.
Several hundred inner students fell backward off their wooden benches in pure mental collapse.
“The Flawless Void Evasion!” an ancient elder gasped, falling to his knees on the flat stone slabs. “The legendary Wuji Void Slip recorded in the lost scrolls of the Ancient Era!”
“Moving without disturbing the wind!” another elder murmured in awe. “He didn’t resist the beast’s driving force. He stepped outside its path! The strike didn’t miss him—space itself parted before him!”
“Look at his pulse!” Grand Elder Yan cried, clutching his chest. “His heartbeat hasn’t sped up by a single beat! He stood beneath thirty tons of dragon-force with complete peace!”
High in the eastern stands, Princess Jiang Ling’er gently tapped her copper steam gauge. Her fine china face glowed with total vindication.
“Standard clearance protocol,” Ling’er murmured to Shen Shitou. “Master didn’t use spatial folding. He simply calculated the spinning radius of the beast’s atlas vertebra and used a seventy-six tiny fraction of an inch shifted weight window.”
Shen Shitou nodded heavily, his grip on the forged iron sledgehammer tightening with respectful solemnity.
“Master always taught us: if an excavator boom is dropping, you don’t throw your body against the bucket,” Shitou said firmly. “You step past the clearance envelope and let the machine bury itself. The granite floor did the work for him.”
Niu Mang took another bite of his cold roasted sweet potato, chewing thoughtfully.
“Told you,” Niu Mang muttered around a mouthful of starch. “Master’s got no patience for bad workers. That dog swung wide, dropped its nose into the dirt. Now it’s stuck in a trench of its own digging.”
Down in the pit, the Viridian Dragon-Hound let out a muffled, furious roar through the crushed rock wedged in its throat.
The beast’s jade scales rippled with blinding, uneven pulses of emerald lightning.
Its massive hindquarters bunched, claws digging into the bedrock as it prepared to thrash its four-ton skull sideways to turn the tiny human beside it into paste.
The beast’s massive left pupil—a slit of upright crimson swimming in venom—snapped toward Frank with ancient hatred.
Frank looked straight into the dragon’s bloodshot pupil.
He saw the burst blood vessels and the uneven twitching of the tear duct.
He saw the swollen, inflamed flesh behind the beast’s left hearing horn. There, a jagged lump pulsed with dark violet foul fog.
“Look at that tremor in the jaw hinge,” Frank muttered. He shook his head with the weary disappointment of a building checker discovering black mold behind newly installed drywall. “High-hum shaking from the ear canal has fully shot your motor reflexes. You couldn’t chew a biscuit straight right now, let alone a builder.”
The beast’s neck muscles bunched like twisted steel cables.
The forty-foot titan prepared to whip its head to the left, aiming to sweep Frank into the stone outer edge wall.
Frank didn’t step back.
He didn’t draw a spirit sword or reach for a royal magic charm.
Instead, with a movement as casual and practiced as a livestock farmer checking a heifer for ticks, Frank extended his bare right hand.
His fingers were calloused from hauling bags of high-pressure lime and turning rusty steel wrenches.
His thumb, broad and steady, hooked cleanly into the soft crevice directly behind the beast’s left earlobe. Right at the juncture where the skull plate met the third neck vertebra.
The exact body cross-section where the beast’s main fluid-draining drainage canal came together with the skull sense spirit veins.
Frank didn’t strike with lethal force.
He didn’t channel a single thread of offensive Qi.
He simply leaned his body weight forward by two degrees, applying an exact, tuned four-pound pressure tap with the fleshy pad of his thumb.
Click.
It wasn’t a sound heard by the crowd.
It was an internal deep ring felt only by the dragon-hound itself.
The beast’s huge skull froze mid-thrash.
The furious, earth-shaking roar died instantly in its throat.
Every muscle along the beast’s forty-foot spine locked like a tripped circuit breaker. Its jade scales shook with a high-pitched metal hum.
Frank kept his thumb planted firmly against the soft hollow behind the ear, his expression fully blank.
“Easy there, big guy,” Frank said in a calm, flat builder’s voice that drifted across the silent arena floor. “Let’s take the pressure off before you blow a seal ring.”