The iron rams hit the ditch with a dull, heavy, shaking thud that rattled the fillings in Lin Ke’s teeth.
At the base of Seven Star Pass, twenty thousand Great Yan heavy infantry locked their black-bronze tower shields into an unbroken tortoise shell.
From their ranks, hundreds of anti-magic crushing weight magic charms—inscribed on silver foil with null-element ink—flickered with sickly grey light. An arrow or offensive magic charm neared the finger bone. Then, the spiritual energy was sucked into the null-field. It fell harmlessly into the mud like dead sparrows.
*
Behind the low roof wall, three thousand newly minted Golden Core and base students clutched the handles of their standard-issue flying swords, their knuckles white with tension.
“We have no sword-masters!” Elder Wu wailed from the safety of an iron-heavy pillbox, clutching his ears. “To fight a heavy finger bone needs the Grand Nine-Palace Celestial Formation! It needs twelve Golden Core elders chanting the old family coordination mantra all at once! We don’t have twelve elders who know the mantra!”
“Good,” Lin Ke said from his wheelchair. “The Grand Nine-Palace formation has a single point of failure. If one elder gets an arrow through the windpipe, the entire formation loses exact timing and eighty percent of your fighters suffer Qi backlash.”
