Pinned beneath the titan’s massive five-inch star-bronze shoulder plate lay Guild Master Jin.
The disgraced tyrant of the Heavenly River was dying.
The moving collapse of the eighteen-ton iron-puppet had crushed the lower half of his body beneath a slab of solid star-bronze, pinning his pelvis and legs into the splintered marble floor. His luxurious sable fur robes were shredded, soaked in a mixture of dark high-pressure oil and his own bright red blood. His withered chest rose. Then he fell in shallow, ragged spasms as his broken ribs grated against his punctured lungs.
Yet his sunken eyes still held a flicker of conscious, poisonous life as Lin Tao and Tie Shan walked up the ruined steps of the dais.
“You...” Jin wheezed, dark blood bubbling from his cracked lips with every syllable. “You... Outer vermin... What... What art did you use? What ancient magic charm... Pierced my guardian’s shell?”
Lin Tao paused three paces from the pinned elder.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t gloat. He didn’t summon court wrath. He stood with his hands resting behind his back, his charcoal linen robe clean and straight, his test eye observing the elder’s failing vital tracking data with clean, steady care:
