The raised stone road between the entrance archway and the central pipe hub dais was barely three paces wide. It was flanked on both sides by deep, churning drainage trenches four feet deep.
It was an ideal military choke point. A terrain where numbers meant nothing and raw, unbending physical mass meant everything.
The air above the raised stone road shrieked as the foremost swordsman sped up, his boots kicking up twin roostertails of sparkling sapphire spray. In the narrow hall between the drainage deck drains, there was no room for lateral retreat, no space for evasive acrobatics. The man’s Foundation Establishment sword-art was designed for rapid, close-quarters assassination, sharpening all his spiritual qi into a razor-sharp crescent of green acid-burning energy capable of severing a horse at the shoulders.
The foremost swordsman lunged.
He was a veteran of twenty border skirmishes, an Early Foundation Establishment killer whose Wind-Cleaving Step allowed him to cross ten paces in the fraction of a heartbeat. His poisoned scimitar moved in a blinding, level sweep aimed directly at Tie Shan’s unprotected throat, the green acid-burning qi shrieking through the air like a hunting hawk.
Tie Shan didn’t retreat half an inch.
The giant didn’t try to match the swordsman’s supernatural speed. He expected the flight path with the cold, unmoving spatial judgment of an ironworker catching a swinging crane hook.
