CLANG—SNAP!
On the marble execution platform overlooking the magma vat, two Rank 6 Gacha Tax-Captains swung their glowing purple axes down together, severing the thick star-iron suspension chain holding up the prisoner cage!
Fifty thousand soot-covered miners across Central Smelting Square screamed at once as the ten-ton iron cage. With sixty-year-old Master Tie Shan and his nine-year-old granddaughter Tie Ling locked inside—plummeted straight down toward the bubbling, three-thousand-degree lake of liquid iron!
“Master Tie! Little Ling’er!”
Several burly young blacksmith apprentices in the front row lunged forward with bare hands to grab the falling chain, ignoring the spears pressed against their chests.
“Anyone who touches that chain dies with him!” Tax-Director Zhao sneered on the platform, waving his golden-dice fan. “Captains! Fire twenty SR-Rank Homing Crossbow Bolts into the cage as it falls so no one can fish their bones out of the slag!”
Twang! Twang! Twang!
Twenty purple-glowing heavy crossbow bolts—each etched with a lock-on tracking rune that cost the miners ten thousand Spirit Stones in taxes—streaked from the platform straight toward the falling cage!
