The steel saber sliced through the air with a faster-than-sound shriek. That left a glowing white wake of condensed spiritual energy that scorched the oak desktop in half.
Lin Tao didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink his left eye.
Because in the brutal calculus of physical mass and driving force, an engineer who knows where the foundation stands doesn’t need to block a falling roof.
CLANG-CRUNCH!
Tie Shan’s twelve-pound cold-drawn iron pry-bar met the glowing saber in mid-air.
The impact was not a clash of swords. It was the moving crash of an iron battering ram shattering a fragile glass ornament. Zhao’s high-grade steel saber crumbled into sixteen jagged shards of spinning shrapnel that embedded themselves deep into the ceiling beams. The blast wave of displaced air snuffed out the oil lanterns on the side tables. It plunged the room into the flickering red glow of the dying hearth. The bone-shaking blast wave traveled straight down the cut blade into Zhao’s arms, shattering both of his radius bones with sickening, wet cracks.
“Aargh!”
Zhao screamed in painful shock as the impact threw him backward over the shattered desk, his heavy bronze breastplate caving inward against his chest bone before he slammed into the dark rock hearth with a bone-jarring thud.
