The entity that stood upon the central stone base didn’t possess the form of a living man.
It was eight arm-lengths tall, a towering humanoid dark shape forged from linked plates of mirror-polished silver alloy that reflected neither the purple sky nor the jagged dark rock crags. Its surface was fully empty of dust, scratches, or wear. It shone with the unnatural, flawless perfection of an exact formula rendered in physical space. Between the segmented plates of its chest back shell, veins of deep amethyst soft glow pulsed with the steady, chilling rhythm of a high-voltage transformer.
It had no face.
Where a mortal fighter would possess features—eyes, nose, mouth, and brow—the Seventh-Rank Patch Daemon had only an oblique facet of dark black glass, flat and mirror-smooth, angled downward at forty-five degrees. Behind that dark glass, a level sliver of pale silver light swept back and forth with rhythmic, clockwork regularity.
Around the entity’s broad shoulders hovered six sharp-angled plates—flat octagons of semi-clear starlight, each two feet across—slowly rotating in a counter-clockwise world-size orbit. With each rotation, the plates emitted a soft, glassy chime that shook in Lin Tao’s teeth.
Lin Tao stood forty paces away, his feet planted firmly upon the hardened rubber heat padding pads he had laid across the granite. His heart was beating at ninety beats per minute, steady and controlled. Even so, the hair on his arms stood straight out from the huge static-electric field.
