The shrieking whistle of tightly packed air preceded the steel by ten paces.
The lead flying sword was a wind-cutting needle of forged wind-steel. It was wrapped around in a spiraling vortex of pale jade spiritual fire. It crossed forty paces in a split second, moving at faster-than-sound speed, its striking force enough to punch through an eight-inch granite wall.
If Lin Ke tried to block that strike with his calloused palms, his glass spirit veins would shatter from moving signal shock before the heat vent could open.
“Meng Shan!” Lin Ke commanded. “Deploy ground!”
Meng Shan didn’t hesitate.
With a roar that rumbled like deep earth-shaking plate friction, the giant lunged forward two paces, planting his iron-shod boots into the mud track.
He swung the massive five-foot spirit-iron baffle plate off his shoulder. It slammed the three-inch-thick steel edge into the solid mountain stone with titanic force.
CRACK.
The rock beneath the road split, swallowing the lower edge of the shield to a depth of four inches.
* * *
Meng Shan locked his knees, dropping his balance point into the Distributed Earth-Core Stance.
His bare forearms—veined and scarred—turned the matte, non-porous grey of weathered dark rock.
Within his spine, the three massive parallel channels engaged in perfect, tripartite lockstep:
Shard One: Water’s skin. The skin of his shoulders and chest tightened. He formed a dense living baked-clay layer to resist heat ablation.
Shard Two: Slamming shunt. The direct load-bearing path from his collarbones down through the pelvic arch into the bedrock opened wide, aligning his skeletal frame into a nonstop load-bearing truss.
Shard Three: Cardiovascular buffer. The internal core channel locked at forty percent pressure, suppressing heart-rate spikes and holding blood pressure perfectly flat.
BOOOOOOOM!
The faster-than-sound flying sword struck the exact dead-center of the iron shield.
The crash was not a metal ring. It was an explosive blast.
A blinding blast wave of green wind-fire and shattered mud erupted outward in a thirty-foot circle, stripping the pine bark from the trees along the cliff face and blasting the rain puddles into boiling vapor.
The granite roadbed beneath Meng Shan’s boots groaned.
A web of jagged fractures spiderwebbed across the rock, streaming five paces in every direction.
A normal fighter attempting to block a peak Stage 3 strike with raw muscle would have suffered total blood-vessel blowout. Their main heart artery burst, their collar bones shattered, their lungs flooded with internal blood heavy bleeding.
Meng Shan’s boots slid backward by half an inch.
That was all.
The eighty thousand newtons of linear moving impact rushed down the giant’s spine, bypassed his organic organs entirely, and was shunted directly through his heels into the bedrock of the mountain pass. The mountain itself absorbed the blow, groaning beneath the road.
Standing two paces behind the iron shield, Lin Ke caught the bone-shaking sound backwash. The air smelled of burning pyrites, crushed rock, and the sour sulfur of raw fire coal.
Even shielded behind Meng Shan’s massive bulk, the surrounding blast wave rattled the bones in Lin Ke’s ribs. His Vitreous Glass Spirit veins (Bing-Mai) had zero living rule-following—no elastic tissue to cushion transverse clockwork blast waves. The high-hum shaking sent a sharp, crystal-clear ache singing along his outward channels, like frozen quartz shaking against an anvil.
Lin Ke’s jaw tightened until his back teeth ground together. Back in the Seventh Ward’s drafty triage shed, Apothecary He’s grumpy voice had barked the truth while wrapping Lin Ke’s forearms in bitter-soaked linen: “Your channels are glass, boy! One hairline fracture from a stray impact and you’ll bleed out spiritual fire before I can reach the tourniquet. Flesh doesn’t get a second draft!”
Wounds in meatspace were permanent. There was no rolling back burst vessels. If a moving spike cracked the brittle quartz walls of his arm, he would be nursing bone splints and He’s foul willow broths for three months.
Meng Shan’s chest rose and fell in a single, calm, deep breath in.
Not a single drop of blood escaped his lips. His eyes remained clear, dark, and unmoving as mountain granite.
On the other side of the smoke, the lead guard gasped. His eyes were wide with horror. He felt the spiritual feedback lash back through his sword-intent thread.
The wind-steel blade bounced off the battered baffle plate. It spun wildly through the air like a stunned hornet, its refined spiritual matrix warped and flickered with pale gray static.
“What kind of monster is that?!” the lead swordsman shouted, his voice cracking with shock. “A mortal melted rock waste-hauler blocked the Gale-Piercing Sword?!”
* * *
The lead sword was halted, but the Tri-Star Formation didn’t halt.
Forty-five split seconds after the first impact—exactly as Lin Ke’s simulations had calculated—the two flanking swordsmen reached the apex of their approach.
They didn’t waste time trying to breach Meng Shan’s iron-hard iron inner wall.
Using the giant’s stationary shield as an obstacle, the two masked guards vaulted ten feet into the air. They leapt cleanly over the iron barrier.
In mid-flight, both men drew twin four-foot curved sabers from their waists.
The steel blades ignited with roaring ribbons of orange spiritual flame. Burning-grade Yang fire that hissed against the damp mist.
Their bodies crested the shield.
With twin snarls of triumphant slaughter, the two flankers dropped toward the unarmored figures standing behind the giant, their flaming sabers arcing downward in a headsman’s cross to cleave Lin Ke and Shen Yue in half.