The collapse of forty feet of granite was not an explosion. It was a sky shifted weight that turned the underground air into a solid battering ram.
The seventy-foot golden blade of light crashed into the floor of Sub-Vault Zero with the sound of a falling meteor.
Shen Yue’s multi-threaded magic charm barrier—the three thousand circuit traces she had painted with blood and turpentine—flared once with blazing bright cyan fury, held for three split seconds. Then shattered like blown glass.
The sound backdraft caught Meng Shan from behind.
The big man’s eight-hundred-jin Black Magnetite shield was ripped from his grip, hurtling thirty paces across the vault to bury itself four feet deep into the far granite wall like an axe head in soft pine. Meng Shan slammed into the rubble, his iron brigandine caving inward, coughing a spray of dark lung-blood across the shattered flags.
The dust cloud cleared in the draft of the open sky.
Standing on the crest of the collapsed rubble pile, thirty feet above the shattered basin, was Grand Inquisitor Chu Jue.
The Judge was draped in his clean plum-colored robes, untouched by a single speck of rock dust.
