The sound of eight royal flying swords speeding up in a narrow stone hall was like a swarm of hornets magnified through brass trumpets.
Meng Shan didn’t blink.
He stood in the narrowest neck of the passage. His broad chest was pressed flush against the leather backing of his eight-hundred-jin Black Magnetite shield.
His knees were bent at forty-five degrees, his iron-plated boots locked into the granite flags.
Ahead of him, thirty paces down the smoke-choked tunnel, eight Imperial Iron Guards drew their ritual flying swords from sword sheaths hung with purple silk.
With timed together mudras, the guards ignited the blades.
Eight lengths of hardened, spirit-inscribed steel leaped into the air. It was surrounded by howling vortexes of royal dragon fire.
The swords didn’t fly randomly. They lined up themselves into a high-speed piercing wedge—the Imperial Dragon-Beak Formation—designed to concentrate forty-two thousand Newtons of spiritual force onto a single square inch of armor.
