The pressure on Floor Two felt like an iron slab strapped across Lin Ke’s ribs.
At eight times static gravity, the air was dense enough to resist the passage of his open hand. Every breath needed a conscious, violent contraction of the between-rib muscles. He dragged oxygen into lungs that felt tightly packed by wet sand.
Around them, the wide dark rock hall was littered with the groaning wreckage of outer students.
Over half the testers who had survived Tier One were pinned flat to the floorboards, their arms splayed, unable to lift their foreheads off the flat stone slabs. The spiraling stone stairwell leading up to Floor Three rose at the far end of the hall, carved into the massive stone dark rock spine of the tower like a narrow chimney.
Lin Ke halted twenty paces from the archway.
Behind the jagged shadows of the entrance pillar, three distinct energetic signed names flickered: cold, hungry, and silent.
The Three Blades of Meng.
They were crouching in the alcoves above the first five steps. They gripped heavy, gravity-forged iron falchions. Set on higher steps, they held the gravity high ground. When Lin Ke’s squad passed beneath the low arch, the three men intended to drop down. That let eight times normal weight multiply their downward blade speed into armor-shearing driving force.
Their targets were obvious: Lin Ke’s and Meng Shan’s Achilles tendons. Sever the tendons under eight-fold load, and the victim would never stand again.
Lin Ke tapped his iron metal pen against his leather wrist guard.
The hall fell into neural frozen stillness. The sluggish dust motes falling from the ceiling hung suspended in mid-descent.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the breach.
Run 01: Meng Shan raises the tower shield and charges through the archway. Result: Meng Shan absorbs the first two downward chops, the iron falchions biting deep into the shield rim. But the third blade ricochets downward at an acute angle, catching Lin Ke’s right shoulder. Under eight times normal weight of downward gaining speed, forty pounds of iron delivers the striking force of a falling boulder. Lin Ke’s right collar bone shatters into four fragments. Shoulder nerve bundle crushed. Permanent right shoulder drop.
Run 03: Lin Ke fires Crimson Yang heat rays from his palm to force them out of the nook. Result: The dense, high-gravity air diffuses heat wave over distance. The blades still drop before the heat inflicts disabling burns.
Lin Ke blinked, returning to the crushing heaviness of meatspace.
The sharp ache of phantom bone fragmentation pulsed in his collarbone.
He reached into his sleeve, found the iron metal pen. Then he drove the sharp point into his left thumb pad until the skin gave way and blood bubbled over the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered under his breath. “Main.”
He turned his head slightly toward Shen Yue, his voice barely louder than the hum of the dark rock floor.
“Shen Yue. Blue-Four magic charm. Target the ceiling keystone three feet above the archway.”
Shen Yue’s eyes flicked to the dark archway, instantly understanding. Her hand slipped into her cuff, two fingers pinching a heavy, dark-blue Frost-Anchor variant modified with an inversion rune.
“Meng Shan, hold position. Don’t enter the arch,” Lin Ke commanded.
Lin Ke took a single, deliberate step forward. That let the heel of his iron boot strike the flat stone slab with a sharp, ringing clack.
The bait took.
From the shadows above the stairwell, three figures in dark leather lunged downward, their faces twisted in savage grins. Three massive falchions whistled through the air, their heavy blades sped up by eight times normal weight into screaming streaks of black steel.
“Deploy!” Lin Ke barked.
Shen Yue didn’t aim at the men.
With a whip-like flick of her wrist, her magic charm flew upward. It struck the center of the dark rock keystone directly above the ambushers’ heads.
Tock.
The magic charm flared with a bone-shaking pulse of violet light.
Heavy local gravity inversion wave. For two seconds, the area beneath the archway didn’t register eight times normal weight.
It spiked to sixteen times static load.
The results were total for the ambushers.
The falchions—each forged from eighty pounds of dense spirit iron—instantly became twelve-hundred-pound anchors.
The three men didn’t swing them. The weapons dragged their owners out of the air like falling anvils. Their arms were wildly wrenched from their shoulder sockets with sickening pops of out-of-joint padding.
SLAM. SLAM. SLAM.
The three blades smashed into the dark rock floor with bone-shaking force, cracking the flat stone slabs to powder.
Pinned by the sheer, impossible weight of their own weapons, the ambushers crashed down on top of their handles. Their forearms were trapped beneath the iron guards, their wrists crushed against the floor, unable to pull their hands free.
The sixteen-fold field decayed back to eight, but the damage was done. Their shoulders were out-of-joint, and their wrists were pinned flat under the dead weight of their own blades.
Lin Ke stepped through the archway, his stride smooth and unrushed.
He didn’t draw a blade. He didn’t waste Qi on flashy strikes.
With three swift, measured kicks of his iron-toed boot, he drove the blunt edge of his sole into the axillary nerve clusters beneath their exposed armpits.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The three men howled as their upper limbs went fully limp, their nervous systems short-circuiting under targeted blunt trauma.
Lin Ke stepped over their writhing bodies and climbed onto the second stair tread.
The leader of the Three Blades lay pinned beneath his falchion, spitting bloody foam onto the shattered stone, glaring up at Lin Ke with poisonous fury.
“You... You slippery bastard,” the leader choked out, his jaw grinding against the dark rock. “You think you’re clever?! You won’t make it past Floor Four, Lin Ke! Iron-Fist Han is waiting at the Choke-Point with fifty pounds of poisoned lead in his knuckles!”
Lin Ke paused on the stair, looking back down at the bleeding man with dead, unblinking eyes.
“Then tell him to bring more weight,” Lin Ke said flatly. “Eight times gravity isn’t enough to slow me down.”