The charge of twenty armed men through a six-pace defile is not a tactical maneuver. It’s an exercise in tightly packed moving mass.
Overseer Meng charged in the second rank, his heavy bronze war mace raised high above his head, screaming curses that sprayed bloody foam over his polished breastplate. In the front rank, eight pavilion guards surged forward with their heavy iron-tipped poleaxes leveled, their iron-shod boots slamming into the fiery gravel with thunderous, timed together driving force.
The defile of Pit Seven was a natural slaughterhouse. Thirty feet of sheer dark rock rose on either side, narrowing into a throat so tight that four men could barely run abreast.
Standing at the total narrowest point of the gap, Tie Shan didn’t retreat an inch.
The young giant dropped his hips, lowering his balance point until his bare feet seemed rooted into the deep fiery bedrock. He held his twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar in a two-handed slanted guard, his massive chest expanding as he drew a long, steady breath of freezing morning air. The keloid scars that had once marked his back were gone, replaced by a smooth, gleaming bronze sheen that radiated the dense, heavy presence of an Iron-Bone master.
Behind him on the raised slate ledge, Lin Tao knelt beside the ancient drainage pylon. His left eye glowed with razor-sharp glowing-green vectors.
Through Lin Tao’s test tracking data, the charging guards were not an unbeatable tide of soldiers. They were a cluster of speeding up physics objects moving along a fixed, non-maneuverable vector, fully dependent on the static friction between their iron-plated boot soles and the loose fiery shale.
Frame twenty-three.
Just as the lead guard planted his right boot to swing his heavy poleaxe, Lin Tao tapped the four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen against the bedrock seam.
The surface friction across a ten-foot section of the rocky defile dropped instantly to zero.
The lead guard’s right foot shot forward as if he had stepped onto wet ice. His forward driving force carried him wildly forward. His hips swung wildly out of posture, his weapon clattering harmlessly against the stone wall. Behind him, three more guards, unable to find traction on the zero-drag stone, tumbled directly into his back in a violent, tangled pile of thrashing limbs and clattering armor.
Tie Shan struck.
He didn’t swing for their heads. He moved with brutal, machine-like smooth speed tuned to stop striking force. The twelve-pound iron pry-bar swept forward in a low, level sweep. It caught the tangle of fallen guards across their iron shin guards and shields.
CLANG-CRACK!
The bone-shaking blow shattered two oak poleaxe shafts and battered four iron shields flat against their chests. The blast wave threw the entire front rank backward into the following guards. That turned Meng’s disciplined charge into a chaotic, screaming bottleneck.
“Up! Get up, you useless dogs!” Meng shrieked, swinging his bronze mace in blind fury. He struck one of his own guards in the shoulder to force him forward.
Two guards scrambled to their feet, thrusting their spears toward Tie Shan’s bare ribs.
Tie Shan didn’t dodge.
CLANG! CLANG!
The iron spear-tips struck Tie Shan’s chest with the sound of chisels striking a solid anvil. The iron tips bent, failing to penetrate the dense, bronze-hard deep skin of his Peak Iron-Bone refinement. Tie Shan reached out with his left hand, clamped his thick fingers around both spear shafts. Then it wrenched them wildly to the right.
The two guards were ripped cleanly off their feet, their bodies hurled headfirst into the dark rock wall, slumping unconscious into the ash.
Within ninety seconds, fourteen of Meng’s sixteen guards lay tangled on the stone, groaning with out-of-joint shoulders, broken ribs, and shattered weapons.
None of them were dead. Tie Shan had tuned every blow to disarm and incapacitate. That turned an armed assault into a humiliating rout. The forty scavengers watching from the shadows of Pit Seven stared in utter, paralyzing awe. They had never imagined that a mortal coolie could dismantle an armed squad of sect guards with a single mining tool.
At the rear of the defile, Overseer Meng stood trembling. His bronze mace shook in his sweaty grip. His face was pale as tombstone chalk as he stared at the unmoving titan blocking the path.
Beside Meng, Viper Chen narrowed his slit pupils, his reptilian tongue flicking across his lips as he uncoiled his six-foot steel chain-scythe.
“A mortal with dragon bones,” Chen hissed softly, stepping over the groaning guards. “Impressive. But dragon bones still bleed when the blade is poisoned.”
Around them in the narrow defile, everyone could feel the sharp tang of bruised flesh, crushed iron, and ozone. The fourteen fallen guards groaned in the fiery dirt, their iron poleaxes shattered like dry twigs across the flat stone slabs. None of them made any move to rise. They lay in the ash, clutching their fractured ribs and shattered shin guards, staring up at Tie Shan with the horrified realization that this mortal coolie possessed the physical thickness of an ancient beast.
He stood behind Tie Shan on the raised dark rock ledge. Lin Tao calmly wiped a speck of soot from his four-inch steel land-mapper metal pen.
His eyes were fully cold, locked onto Viper Chen’s sinuous stance. Lin Tao had watched the mercenary’s footwork through his left eye, analyzing the clockwork tension in the coiled steel chain. Chen was not a brute who relied on raw muscle. He was a care killer who channeled his late Foundation Establishment Qi through the steel links to generate faster-than-sound whipping strikes. But every whip had a focal pivot. Every pivot was bound by the laws of angular driving force.
“Tie Shan,” Lin Tao whispered, his voice cutting through the groans of the wounded guards.
“Here,” the giant rumbled, not taking his eyes off Chen’s blade.
“The chain has twenty-four links,” Lin Tao said, his voice flat, test, and devoid of fear. “He strikes on the third back-and-forth swing. Catch the third link.”