The iron heavy club carved through the stale chimney pipe air with a hollow, whistling howl.
Lin Ke saw the flight path clearly. In his starved, starved state, his physical muscles were slow. But his newly hardened glass spirit veins conducted sense data with near-instant speed.
Every grain of soot hanging in the shaft was sharp, frozen in crisp detail against Fang’s bloodshot eyes.
No branching, Lin Ke’s instincts warned him instantly.
A mental test model needed twenty to forty split seconds to fork and evaluate. At a striking distance of four feet, with an iron-banded heavy club moving at fifteen meters per second, twenty split seconds was the exact difference between having a skull and having a smear of grey porridge on the wall.
He had to execute pre-compiled machine instructions. Direct bare-metal deploy.
Fang put every ounce of his two-hundred-pound frame into the downward swing, aiming squarely for Lin Ke’s left collarbone. The overseer’s Qi Gathering Stage 1 aura surged. A muddy, raw brown glow coating the heavy club’s iron rings.
Lin Ke didn’t dive. He didn’t flinch.
He stepped forward into the strike, cutting the weapon’s angular gaining speed before it reached maximum speed. Then he drove his right hand upward with an open palm.
Fang’s grin broadened into sheer contempt. A starving slave trying to block eighty pounds of iron with an empty hand was the funniest joke he had seen all season.
“Die, trash!” Fang roared.
Lin Ke’s thumb nudged the internal bypass latch.
Inside his forearm, the high-hum ruby current flashed down the newly glazed glassy channel. It didn’t meander through flesh. It blasted straight to the center of his right hand like a laser pulse through fiber optics.
Release blow-off valve.
The Laogong end-post gate snapped wide open.
CRACK!
The sound was not an impact of wood on bone. It was the bone-shaking, ear-splitting roar of a boiler breach.
A blinding flare of blazing bright white-crimson gas exploded from Lin Ke’s palm. The high-pressure heat waste, held at critical head-pressure across thirty-six hours of nonstop training, swelled wildly into the cold sky air.
The heat-powered blast wave struck the dropping heavy club dead-center.
The heavy oak core of the weapon didn’t merely break—it shattered into a cloud of smoking splinters. The forged iron bands warped red-hot in a heartbeat, snapped into jagged shrapnel. Then he peppered the heat-proof bricks behind Fang.
The backing-up pressure hit Fang like a battering ram of solid lead.
His right shoulder out-of-joint with a sickening, wet pop. The muddy brown Qi coating his arm collapsed instantly, overwhelmed by the pure, uninhibited heat moving vector.
Fang’s two-hundred-pound bulk lifted clean off the soot floor.
He flew backward through the chimney pipe opening, tumbling end over end across the cold flat stone slabs of the hall outside, before crashing heavily into the base of Kiln Two’s blast wall. The impact knocked the breath from his chest in a spray of bright red blood foam.
His head bounced off the granite stonework, and his eyes rolled back into his skull.
Total system halt.
* * *
Lin Ke stood in the soot, his right arm extended, breathing through clenched teeth.
The recoil was brutal.
His physical meat was still human flesh. The bone-shaking explosion had peeled the skin across his right palm down to the under-skin layer. That left a weeping, blackened circle where the Laogong port had vented.
Serous fluid and blood dripped from his fingertips. It hissed as they struck the hot brick dust beneath his feet.
A sharp, stabbing ache radiated along the forearm bone of his forearm. The non-elastic glass channel had held. But the surrounding muscle fibers were torn and bruised from the violent moving kick.
Recoil fading away: poor, Lin Ke noted clinically, forcing down the burning nausea in his throat. The channel handled the voltage, but the chassis needs load-bearing bracing. In real combat, two more discharges like that and the forearm snaps.
He reached into his waistband with his left hand, drew the iron metal pen. Then he pricked the callous on his left thumb.
A bead of fresh blood welled up.
“Branch checked: main.”
The pain grounded him, burning away the ringing in his ears and the shock of his first lethal live deployment.
He stepped out of the disused chimney pipe into the cold hall, his grey clerk-like gaze resting on the crumpled form of Overseer Fang. The man was breathing in shallow, rattling gasps, alive but fully concussed, his right arm twisted at an unnatural forty-five-degree angle.
Then, down the vaulted dark rock hall, the sharp clatter of iron-shod boots echoed against the walls.
“Over here! The blast came from the old chimney pipe line!”
“Draw weapons! An secret Qi blast!”
Three figures rounded the arched hall corner, clad in dark blue robes trimmed with silver thread. Outer sect Punishment Guards—each wielding a broad-bladed steel sword. Their Qi gathered Stage 2 auras flaring with disciplined aggression.
The lead guard skidded to a halt, sword leveled, eyes widening as he took in the scene.
A crumpled, unconscious overseer bleeding against the blast wall.
And standing over him, a starved, soot-stained fire slave with bleeding palms and empty, deadpan eyes.
“Halt!” the lead guard barked, the edge of his steel blade catching the lantern light. “Drop to your knees! Willful assault on an overseer is summary execution!”