The stench of ozone arrived before the sound.
It was with the sickening reek of burning marrow. Not human marrow, but the ancient stone animal fat of dark rock that had rested undisturbed since the world was split from chaos.
Lin Ke stood twenty paces from the edge of the terrace. His right arm was bound tightly against his chest in dragon-bone splints.
The three-hundred-foot dark shape of flickering hex-code runes drifted across the deallocated grey expanse. It moved without driving force. It stepped forward not by pushing against the earth, but by overwriting the space in front of it.
Wherever its outline fell, the world turned flat and colorless, like a charcoal sketch scrubbed out with spit and grease.
“Stay back!” a voice boomed from the guard post ranks.
Elder Duan of the Heavenly Sword Faction stepped forward, his silver-trimmed robes whipping in the icy downdraft. Above his head, a nine-foot flying sword of blue-veined frost-iron hummed with lethal deep ring, streaming the packed sword intent of four hundred years of training.
“Vile demon of the void!” Duan roared, stepping into a traditional mountain-cleaving stance. “Taste the Azure Frost Piercing Star!”
