The gap appeared with the sound of a shattering skylight.
Lin Ke was half a mile down the curtain wall. Just then, the pressure differential hit him, whipping his cloak around his thighs and filling his ears with a sudden, empty pocket-like roar.
On the castle walls of the Eastern Redoubt, fifty feet of defensive shield simply vanished.
Where a shimmering amber honeycomb should have met the sky, there was only raw, freezing mountain wind and the screaming trails of three hundred falling fire-arrows.
*
“What blew?!” Lin Ke shouted, sprinting along the wet stone low roof wall.
Around him, mortal laborers and outer students were diving behind merlons. Fire-arrows arced through the gap, burying themselves in wooden supply sheds and turning crates of dry hardtack into crackling torches.
A young array apprentice was kneeling in front of the wall rack. He wept as he wildly tried to yank a charred six-sided tile from its brass mounting slot.
