The twin thirty-pound star-iron war hammers struck the black glass floor with the moving fury of a falling meteor.
BOOM!
The bone-shaking blast wave ripped through the central combat circle like a physical battering ram. Slabs of Precursor granite fractured under the world-ending crushing pressure. It blasted outward in a dense spray of razor-sharp stone shrapnel. Yellow ribbons of packed earth-aura spiraled into the air. It scorched the surrounding flat stone slabs. Then it left a smoking, jagged crater three feet deep where Lin Tao had stood only a split second before.
The massive striking force traveled straight down into the mountain anchors. It sent deep, shuddering groans through the seven huge star-iron mid-air chains holding the arena aloft over the three-thousand-league deep pit.
In the raised grandstands, ten thousand spectators roared in savage satisfaction, expecting to see the mangled, crimson remains of the unarmored mortal plastered across the crater floor. Spectators from the Iron Mountain Sect clapped each other on the shoulders, laughing uproariously at the easy slaughter.
“Flattened!” a drunken student from Roaring Thunder Valley cheered, spilling his flagons of rice wine down his leather tunic. “Crushed into red bean paste before he could even blink!”
Then the dust began to settle under the bright alpine sunlight.
