At fifteen times static gravity, Lin Ke’s teeth felt heavy in his gums.
Every single movement cost three times the energy of the tier below. The blood inside his main neck blood vessels thrummed like muddy river water forced through a narrow under-road drain. The black dark rock flat stone slabs of Floor Four radiated a sound hum so violent it made the marrow of his shins ache.
At the far end of the chamber, standing dead-center in the narrow arched portal leading to Floor Five, waited Iron-Fist Han.
The mercenary was massive—standing nearly seven feet tall, his bare torso glistening with foul-smelling, greenish oil. Under fifteen times normal weight of static load, his sheer bulk should have pinned him to the floor. But Han’s physical frame had been mutated by fifteen years of drinking toxic copper-lead decoctions.
His forearms were swollen to the size of tree trunks, mottled with dark grey and metal blue veins. Over his knuckles rested heavy, spiked gauntlets of black spirit-iron, forged specifically to crush stone.
“You made it past the boys on Floor Two,” Han rumbled, his voice like iron millstones grinding ungreased.
He took one step forward. The dark rock flat stone slab beneath his boot cracked with a sharp, bone-shaking snap.
Under fifteen-fold gravity, Han’s massive body weighed over four thousand pounds. Every punch he threw would carry the striking force of a catapult shot, amplified by gravity gaining speed into armor-shattering devastation.
“Zhao Wuji paid for your skull, Clerk,” Han sneered, lifting his blackened fists. “I don’t need fancy techniques. One punch to your chest, and your iron bones will pierce your own lungs.”
Lin Ke stopped twelve paces back. He reached into his waistband, his fingers closing around the iron metal pen.
The chamber froze into dead stillness. The cracks streaming from Han’s heavy boot hung motionless in the stone.
In the mental sandbox, Lin Ke ran the frontal crash.
Run 01: Direct melee clash. Lin Ke steps inside Han’s guard, driving an iron metal pen strike toward the mercenary’s throat. Han ignores the strike, letting his stone-hard collarbone deflect the point, and unleashes a straight right punch into Lin Ke’s chest bone. The black spirit-iron gauntlet impacts with four thousand pounds of striking force. Lin Ke’s Ashen Iron ribs hold for a heartbeat before buckling inward. Blunt heart deep bruise. Main heart artery sliced open by bone fragments. Fatal heart flutter and death in four seconds.
Run 03: Meng Shan attempts to absorb Han’s punch alone. Result: Meng Shan’s ground-rods hold, but the sheer nearby impact punctures his heavy tower shield, shattering Meng Shan’s forearm and crushing his collar bone.
Lin Ke snapped back to meatspace, his chest burning with the phantom agony of a crushed heart.
He reached beneath his leather tunic, drew the iron metal pen. Then he jammed the needle point into his left thumb pad.
The clean, stinging pain broke the phantom shock, a heavy droplet of blood welling against the iron.
“Branch checked,” he whispered into the heavy air. “Main.”
He turned his eyes slightly toward Meng Shan.
“Asynchronous bending,” Lin Ke murmured, his voice flat and steady. “He’s relying entirely on forward moving driving force. When he commits his downward mass, don’t meet him flat. Give him an angled plate and anchor to bedrock.”
Meng Shan nodded, his jaw set like an iron vise. He stepped forward three paces, his spiked boots digging into the stone.
“Die, fire rat!” Han roared.
The mercenary lunged.
Under fifteen times static gravity, Han didn’t run. He dropped his weight forward like a falling boulder, his black gauntlets whistling through the tightly packed air. His right fist dropped in a terrifying, slanted hammer-blow aimed straight at Lin Ke’s skull.
“Meng Shan! Deflect forty degrees!” Lin Ke shouted.
Meng Shan stomped both heels into the dark rock.
CRACK.
His iron ground-rods bit into the floorboards, pinning his lower body to the bedrock. Instead of holding his tower shield square against the blow, Meng Shan tilted the heavy iron face forty degrees to the left, angling the surface into an inclined ramp.
KABOOM.
Han’s massive iron gauntlet slammed into the angled shield.
The sound was like an artillery shell exploding in an enclosed vault. The dark rock floor beneath Meng Shan’s boots shattered into a crater of white powder. But the angled plate did its work. Sixty percent of Han’s downward moving driving force slipped sideways, glancing off the greased iron face and slamming into empty air.
The massive driving force dragged Han forward, overextending his right shoulder.
For half a second, the mercenary’s balance broke. His right arm was extended, exposing the underside of his elbow.
Lin Ke moved.
He didn’t swing a sword. He didn’t waste time on a windup.
Sliding beneath the overextended limb like water through a crack, Lin Ke drove two rigid fingers—heavy by his Ashen Iron Lattice—straight into the soft, unarmored fluid-draining hollow beneath Han’s right elbow.
“Heat vent,” Lin Ke whispered.
He didn’t hold back. He opened the exhaust ports of his Crimson Yang cooling loop fully.
A packed, white-hot pulse of pure fire heat—over eight hundred degrees of white-hot Yang fire—blasted directly into the deep tissues of Han’s arm.
Under normal circumstances, a fighter’s flesh would simply burn.
But Han’s body was not normal. His tissues were soaked with volatile, raw copper-lead solutions that had piled up in his fluid-draining reservoirs over fifteen years of toxic conditioning.
Lin Ke’s eight-hundred-degree heat packet struck that packed chemical pool. Then, the reaction was instant and violent.
The toxic metal compounds didn’t just heat up.
They flash-boiled.
Beneath the mottled skin of Han’s forearm, the liquid lead and copper turned to high-pressure, white-hot gas in a fraction of a split second.
The mercenary’s arm swelled to twice its size, the black spirit-iron gauntlet glowing cherry-red from the internal chemical fire. Steam and boiled away sulfur hissed from the pores of his knuckles.
“AAAAAAGH!”
Han let loose a high-pitched, screeching shriek of unimaginable agony that echoed off the dark rock ceiling.
His entire right arm seized, the flash-boiling metals burning to ash his outward nerves and locking every muscle fiber into a permanent, violent tetanic burst. His fingers curled backward until the knuckles cracked, his gauntlet dropping uselessly to the floor.
Han collapsed to his knees. He grabbed his smoking, blackened arm, writhing on the shattered flat stone slabs. Vomit and blood poured from his open mouth.
Lin Ke stepped back, his breath coming in steady, measured sips through his nose, his right hand smoking faintly from the heat exhaust.
He looked down at the screaming mercenary, his eyes as cold and empty as a winter sky.
“Chemical spreading under heat,” Lin Ke said softly. “You should have checked your flashpoints.”