The venom on Lin Ke’s cheek burned like molten zinc.
He wiped the sizzle of rotting acid against the coarse sleeve of his tunic. He took a layer of dead skin with it. The physical pain was a cold, clean baseline that focused his divine sense into an ice-pick point.
Outside the granite vault, the wet whistle of high-pressure air hissed three times in rapid row.
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
Three more blood-iron needles punched into the stonework archway. It sent stone shards spraying across the landing. The needles didn’t ricochet. They drilled two inches into the rock and burst into sizzling puddles of dark crimson bile, releasing noxious purple fumes that choked off the stairway.
“Heat seekers,” Lin Ke muttered, crouching below the stone lip. “They aren’t aiming by sight. They’re tracking heat wave.”
Above the entrance, Meng Shan’s heavy iron slab-shield boomed as two projectiles slammed into its outer face. The massive shield shook with a dull CLANG, sending sparks skittering across the courtyard fog.
“Six hostiles on the outer edge wall,” Meng Shan’s voice rumbled down the shaft, flat and unshaken. “Air-powered bone-reed pipes. Tightly packed heart-blood forward thrust. Speed is four hundred paces per second.”
