The blast from the opposite mountain ridge arrived four seconds before the roar.
Lin Ke stood on the upper castle walls of the West Bastion, the cold wind whipping loose strands of hair across his temples. His knuckles rested against the rough, lead-capped castle walls. He felt the deep load-bearing shudder traveling through seventy feet of solid stonework.
Across the narrow gorge, perched on a limestone shelf eight hundred paces away, three monstrous siege engines loomed like giant skeletal spiders.
The Blood Lotus Sect’s Bone-Grinding Trebuchets were not built from pine or oak. Their massive throwing arms were assembled from spliced ribcages of ancient horned drakes, bound together with black, throbbing tendon ropes that cried crimson marrow.
THWACK-CRACK.
The balance weights—sacks filled with two hundred cut human torsos wrapped in hardened pitch—slammed down into the dirt.
A blood-iron boulder the size of a hay wagon arced across the sky. It left a greasy, black vapor trail in the thin mountain air, whistling like a dying fire.
BOOM!
