Dawn broke over Sunset Peak in clean bands of cold amber.
Austin sat on his new cedar porch bench, feet propped on the railing, nursing a steaming wooden cup of boiled pine-needle tea. The morning air was crisp, smelling of fresh pitch, crushed needles, and the faint, comforting warmth radiating off the basalt kiln.
Up on the eaves of the new cabin, three Golden Sun-Crows preened their feathers with metallic clicks that sounded like brass shears. Down in the courtyard, Li Xiaoyao had already started his morning shift. The kid paced across the obsidian flagstones with slow, rhythmic strides, dragging his split-bamboo broom in flat, deliberate sweeps that sent faint geometric ripples through the morning dew.
Austin took a slow sip, letting the hot, bitter tea warm the back of his throat.
"Base stability looks solid," Austin muttered, watching the horizon load in crisp polygons. "Terrain chunks are caching without any stutter. Clean rendering on the timber grain. If the audio team would just patch out the high-frequency bird squawking, I'd give this zone a nine out of ten."
Before he could take another swallow, the mountain shelf gave a deep, shuddering jolt.
*THUD-THUD-THUD.*
A heavy, synchronized pounding shook the cliffside, rattling the cup in Austin's fingers. Down in the pine forest, red clay dust billowed above the treetops as hundreds of iron-shod hooves churned the switchbacks into red mud.
Breaking through the tree line like a steel centipede came three hundred heavy cavalry in spiked black iron barding. Every rider wore heavy scale mail over boiled leather, bristling with barbed lances, iron-tipped polearms, and horn-backed recurve bows.
Leading the column was Patriarch Bai Tian, seated atop a massive, twin-horned Iron-Hoofed Rhinoceros that snorted plumes of sulfurous steam. Beside him rode Young Master Bai Chen on a nervous white stallion, clutching his reins with white-knuckled terror while his mouth twisted in ugly, venomous triumph.
The cavalry fanned out twenty paces before Austin's fence line, choking the narrow ridge in a wall of bristling spears and snorting mounts.
Austin lowered his tea, blinking through the morning sun.
He tapped his interface.
Austin sighed, rubbing the sleep from the corner of his eye.
"A scripted wave event?" he grumbled, shaking his head at the formation. "Look at that pathfinding nightmare. Three hundred mounted units jammed onto a twelve-foot single-lane cart trail with a two-hundred-foot cliff on one side and a boulder field on the other. Zero flank security. Zero skirmish screen. The enemy AI in this game couldn't route a wheelbarrow through a double doorway."
At the head of the armored column, Patriarch Bai Tian hauled his massive war-beast to a halt. His bronze face was carved into a sneer of cold contempt as his gaze swept over the pristine timber lodge, the mirrored courtyard, and Austin sitting casually in his ragged hemp smock.
"Chu Yuan!" Bai Tian’s roar shook the pine needles from the eaves, backed by the raw, suffocating pressure of a Peak Foundation Establishment warlord. "You crippled mongrel! Three days ago you were groveling in the mud, waiting to starve! Now you dare use ancestral illusion wards to cheat the sect, hoard the sacred Nine-Yang Sun-Gold, and humiliate the young master of my Bai Clan!"
Bai Tian reached behind his back, drawing the massive **Heaven-Iron Cleaving Sword** from its sharkskin sheath. Five bands of dark grey earth-qi flared along the spine of the black greatsword, vibrating so violently that loose quartz gravel began to hover in the air around his mount.
"Yield the ancestral immortal treasury beneath this peak!" Bai Tian bellowed, leveling the six-foot blade straight at Austin's forehead. "Drop to your knees, brand yourself with the slave rune of the Bai Clan, and I might leave you your breath! Refuse, and my three hundred iron riders will grind your timber shack into kindling and scatter your ashes over the cliff!"
Austin didn't budge. He took another deliberate sip of pine tea, grimacing at a stray needle floating in the cup.
"Man, the dialogue trees on these bandit captains are brutal," Austin said toward the yard, completely ignoring the warlord. "Is there no skip cutscene prompt? Why do all these aggro mobs have to deliver an eight-minute monologue before the hitboxes engage?"
Li Xiaoyao didn't look up from his work.
The teenager paused mid-sweep, resting both hands on the worn bamboo pole, his eyes quiet and unblinking as he stared through the row of leveled spears. To the boy, three hundred armored riders were just three hundred clods of dried mud tracked onto a clean jobsite.
Bai Tian’s bronze skin flushed dark purple with insulted fury.
"DEAF CRIPPLE! YOU DARE MOCK A PEAK FOUNDATION WARLORD?!" Bai Tian shrieked, slashing his blade through the air. "IRON CAVALRY, CHARGE! RAMP THROUGH THE POSTS! LEAVE NOTHING BREATHING!"
"KILL!"
Three hundred voices roared in unison. Spur met flank, and the front rank of fifty armored horses lunged forward in a ground-splitting charge.
The lead line crashed directly into the thin copper wire strung between Austin's rough-cut cedar fence posts.
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT-KABOOOOM!*
A blinding dome of violet plasma erupted along the boundary line.
The electrostatic discharge slapped the front twenty chargers right onto their haunches. Iron lance heads shattered into white-hot metal shrapnel, chainmail links melted into burning lead shot, and the stench of fried horsehair rolled across the grass as fifty cavalrymen were catapulted backward into their own ranks in a tangled heap of screaming men and flailing hooves.
Before the second line could brake their mounts, a shrill, piercing shriek tore the sky open.
*SCREEEEEEECH!*
The three Golden Sun-Crows launched from the cabin eaves.
Their five-foot wings flared like molten brass, casting a searing wave of high-noon heat across the plateau. The largest crow snapped its razor beak wide and exhaled a wide cone of pure, white-hot solar flame straight across the front ranks.
*FWOOOOOOSH!*
Breastplates, greaves, and spear shafts liquefied on contact, dripping into the grass like burning candle wax. Armored riders threw themselves from their saddles, screaming and tearing at blistering scale mail, while fifty warhorses bolted in wild, blind panic, trampling their own reserve line in a desperate scramble away from the celestial fire.
"DIVINE SUN-CROWS?!" Bai Tian gasped, his jaw nearly unhinging as his two-horned rhinoceros mount skidded backward in sheer terror. "The cripple keeps ancient sun-crows as roof poultry?!"
"Father! I told you!" Bai Chen wailed from the rear, clutching his saddle pommel as his horse reared. "He's an ancient demon in human skin! Run! Turn the mounts around!"
"SHUT UP!" Bai Tian roared, his mind snapping under cornered, desperate greed. "Divine beasts or not, his own flesh is mortal trash! Kill the puppeteer, and the familiars disperse!"
Channeling eighty years of blood-soaked cultivation, Bai Tian launched himself straight off the back of his rhinoceros.
He soared forty feet into the morning air, his Peak Foundation aura exploding like a detonating powder magazine. The black Heaven-Iron Cleaving Sword blazed with thirty feet of jagged grey sword light as he dove out of the clouds like a falling meteor, aiming straight for Austin's skull!
**"DIE, SCUM! NINE HEAVEN SPLITTING DRAGON SLASH—!"**
The downward stroke carried enough kinetic force to shear a granite tower clean in half.
Austin didn't drop his cup. He didn't even shift his feet off the porch railing. He just leaned his left shoulder a fraction of an inch against the pine post to steady his posture.
*CLINK.*
Three inches from Austin's collarbone, the descending blade ran into the invisible thermal boundary layer of Austin's 11,500-Kelvin micro-fusion core.
The steel never rebounded. Never notched. At that temperature, molecular bonds surrendered on contact. The ten-foot blade flared blinding white, flashed into glowing metallic steam, and puffed away as a drifting red haze of iron oxide.
*Puff.*
Bai Tian slammed down onto the porch deck, landing in a deep combat crouch, arms cocked in an overhead strike.
His fists were empty.
Between his calloused, trembling knuckles sat three inches of charred sharkskin hilt, glowing dull red like a spent match.
The mountain plateau went dead, suffocatingly quiet.
Three hundred cavalrymen froze mid-shout.
Young Master Bai Chen lost all strength in his legs and slid out of his saddle, hitting the red clay like a sack of wet flour.
Austin slowly lowered his wooden cup. He squinted down at the tiny, smoking stub of metal between Bai Tian's fingers, then looked the terrifying warlord dead in the eye.
Austin's face was a stone wall of tired, blue-collar disgust.
"Look at that weapon durability," Austin said, clicking his tongue in sheer contempt. "One swing, and the whole tool shatters into slag. Who forged that piece of junk? You got scammed by your local blacksmith, buddy. Cheap pot metal, zero heat treatment, and probably held together with solder and prayer. A complete safety hazard."
Bai Tian stared down at the three inches of burnt charcoal in his hands.
Then he looked at Austin's chest—unmarked, smelling faintly of tea and pine pitch, radiating a gentle, radiant warmth like an old woodstove.
Seven generations of ancestral glory... five hundred years of clan heritage... gone like a dry moth in a lantern flame.
Inside Bai Tian's chest, something far more vital than bone snapped: eighty years of blood-forged Dao Heart giving out like an overloaded suspension bridge.
"My sword..." Bai Tian wheezed, black blood dribbling past his cracked lips as his pupils dilated into vacant circles. "My... my Seven-Generation Ancestral Blade... he called it... pot metal..."
A calm, respectful voice cut through the silence.
"Master," Li Xiaoyao said, stepping up to the porch with his worn bamboo broom held at the ready. "The courtyard perimeter is cluttered with loose iron, noisy beasts, and foreign garbage. Shall this disciple clear the cache?"
Austin waved a dismissive hand. "Yeah. Dump the cache. All these crowded hitboxes are dragging my frame rate down."
"Disciple obeys!"
Li Xiaoyao took a single forward stride, set his footing, drew a breath of clean morning air, and swept the bamboo broom in a broad, horizontal arc across the front yard.
*SWWWWWWWIIIISH—!*
A hundred-yard crescent of compressed, transparent sword gale exploded from the frayed bristles.
The compressed gale caught Patriarch Bai Tian, Young Master Bai Chen, and all three hundred cavalry square in the chest, scooping them clean off the plateau like dry autumn shavings before a shop blower. Men, horses, armor, and ballistas were lifted ten feet into the air in a massive, swirling avalanche of screaming riders, hurtling backward down the switchbacks in a tangled roar of flying saddles and bruised limbs!
*WHOOOOOOSH—CRASH!*
The racket of tumbling armor and terrified shrieks echoed down the canyon, fading into the valleys below.
The courtyard of Sunset Peak was back to baseline.
The flagstones lay bare, swept smooth down to the black glass. Empty air, clean stone, and dead silence.
Austin took another slow sip of tea, glanced at Li Xiaoyao, and nodded.
"Much better," Austin said. "Solid sixty FPS."