The lightning didn’t smell of clean ozone. It smelled of burnt grease, fried skin, and wet dog.
Lin Ke kicked open the rusted iron trapdoor of the dead-house alley. Then, the narrow passageway was already bathed in a blinding, stuttering strobe of blue-white spark arcs.
The alley was barely eight feet wide, wedged between the crumbling brick wall of an abandoned foundry and the mossy retaining wall of the lower canal. Mud, rotting straw, and puddles of rotten-egg runoff covered the uneven flat stone slabs.
In the center of the alley stood Meng Shan.
The giant was isolated. He had been sent to scout the outer edge thirty minutes prior and had left his massive thousand-pound Earth-Crag Bastion shield chained to the workshop bench. He carried only a four-foot iron melted rock waste hammer used for breaking fire scale.
Surrounding him in a tight, hungry diamond were four fighters in midnight-blue tunics heavy with silver layered-scale plates: elite Foundation Establishment guards bearing the crest of the Grand Fortune Clan.
In their gloved hands, they held Soul-Severing Chains. It was heavy, braided links of meteorite iron and copper alloy that crackled with nonstop, forty-thousand-volt lightning arcs.
Two of the chains had already wrapped around Meng Shan’s hammer wooden handle, the metal glowing blazing bright cherry red. Current poured through the iron into the giant’s wrists. The other two guards were circling, their whip-like chains whistling through the fog. They looked for an opening to wrap around Meng Shan’s neck and chest…
