The arena repair crews had scrambled like kicked hornets, but nobody could erase the thirty-foot conical mound of pulverized black obsidian sand piled in the northwest corner. It sat there like an ominous, silent monument to industrial demolition, catching the afternoon glare and dusting the lower tiers whenever a hot mountain draft kicked over the lip.
High above the churned pit, perched on his stone judge's pulpit, Arbiter Tie adjusted his voice-amplifying brass horn. White linen bandages bound his bruised fingers, and his knuckles still trembled slightly against the cold metal. His armor felt three sizes too heavy after the eight-gravity compaction trial. He cleared his throat twice, forcing a stiff, martial cadence into the acoustic spires:
*"ROUND ONE, MATCH ONE OF THE CENTENNIAL ELIMINATION BRACKET!*
*"IN THE RED CORNER: THE FIRST HEIR OF THE BLAZING SUN SECT, MASTER OF THE NINE-PHOENIX BLADE... YOUNG MASTER HUO YUN!*
*"AND IN THE BLUE CORNER: THE FIRST-SEEDED QUALIFIER FROM THE PRELIMINARY TRIAL... CONTESTANT AUSTIN OF SUNSET PEAK FABRICATION & MAINTENANCE LLC!"*
The caldera exploded into partisan noise. Two hundred and fifty thousand spectators pounded their boots against the black granite tiers until the whole caldera hummed like an engine casing. Crimson silk banners emblazoned with golden sunbursts whipped in the hot updrafts along the southern grandstands. Up in the VIP boxes, graying elders of the Blazing Sun Sect raised horn goblets of warm spiced spirit wine, smirking behind their beards. To their minds, this wasn't a contest; it was an imperial pest-control operation designed to scrub away the embarrassment of the preliminary round.
Down from the competitor staging terrace, Young Master Huo Yun vaulted thirty feet out over the sunken pit.
A sharp sonic crack split the air as he dropped like a crimson bolt, striking the center of the ring with an explosion of red embers. The radiant heat seared a blackened ten-foot ring straight into the packed sandstone floor.
His earlier Earth-Grade sword had snapped into three scrap chunks under Austin's gravitational flare, but Huo Yun had come prepared with the crown jewel of his clan's subterranean vault.
From his spatial ring, he drew the **Nine-Phoenix Solar Cleaver**.
It was a brutal, five-foot broadsword cast from thousand-year Nether-Flame Copper, laced with ninety-nine micro-channeled spirit veins. The instant copper met air, howling tongues of white-hot alchemical flame ripped along the blade's spine, roasting the air until heat mirages turned the entire arena floor into a wavering, blurry furnace.
Huo Yun’s eyes had gone black as pitch, his pupils swallowed by dilated voids.
Ten minutes before taking the sand, he had cracked a forbidden **Berserk Dragon Marrow Pill** between his molars, forcing his Peak Foundation cultivation across the threshold into a blistering, quasi-Golden Core surge. Superheated red vapor hissed through the seams of his scarlet silk, filling the pit with the rank, biting reek of scorched marrow, sulfur, and burning copper.
"Peasant!" Huo Yun bellowed, the sound vibrating with a cracked, demonic fury that set the arena banners fluttering. "In the strength trial, you used some cowardly subterranean trick to shatter the sacred stone! But out here on the open sands, parlor tricks won't save you! Today, I'll carve those blue rags off your bones, take your head for my mantel, and consign your wretched soul to the Nether-Phoenix!"
Thirty paces away, on the other side of the chalk line, Austin stood planted in the sand.
He hadn't drawn his five-foot blue wrench. He hadn't taken an orthodox stance. He hadn't gathered a thimble of spiritual qi. Slung over his shoulder, the heavy tool remained idle against his denim bib.
Instead, he was holding a rigid birchwood clipboard in his left hand, slowly thumbing through the crinkled pages of a folded municipal booklet with his calloused thumb.
Austin peered over the wire rims of his work spectacles, his expression as flat as an iron plate.
"Hey, pal," Austin called out, his voice cutting through the heat haze with dry, deadpan boredom. "Did you bother to read subsection four of the Tournament Competitor Safety Guidelines before firing up that oversized barbecue lighter?"
Huo Yun froze, his broadsword trembling mid-flourish. His left eyebrow jumped in genuine, twitching disbelief. "What did you just utter, you miserable ditch-digger?!"
Austin tapped the clipboard with his yellow lumber grease pencil: *Click, click.*
"Subsection four: **Hazardous Combustibles, Thermal Radiation, and Open-Flame Protocols**," Austin recited in a level, bureaucratic monotone that belonged in a municipal zoning office on a rainy Tuesday. "All open-flame spiritual implements, thermal catalysts, and high-temperature cutting arrays must maintain a minimum clear buffer zone of thirty meters from untreated flammable stock. You're waving an unshielded five-foot copper torch directly downwind of dry oat straw in the beast pens along the outer wall. That makes this an active Class-B fire hazard."
A strange, paralyzed quiet drifted across the arena bowl.
The silence grew so thick that the hiss of Huo Yun’s flame cleaver sounded like pork chops sizzling on an ungreased iron skillet.
Two hundred and fifty thousand people looked down at the pit, eyes glazed in pure bewilderment.
*Class-B fire hazard? Untreated flammable stock?! What kind of primeval First Epoch curse was this lunatic chanting off a piece of birchwood?!*
"On top of that," Austin added, checking a box on his paper with a firm wax stroke, "you don't have a certified ten-pound ABC-rated dry chemical extinguisher within ten paces of your work envelope. And your robes are untreated raw silk—flashpoint of barely two hundred and fifty Celsius. Under standard job-site safety code, I can't sign off on this duel until you install proper suppression infrastructure."
Huo Yun’s face turned an ugly, apoplectic purple. The veins on his forehead swelled like nightcrawlers under hot pavement.
To be lectured on municipal fire code while holding an ancestral divine relic broke the final scrap of restraint his pill-addled mind possessed.
"DIE, YOU INSOLENT CLOWN!" Huo Yun shrieked, his vocal cords tearing on a spray of bloody spit.
*BOOOOOOOOOOM!*
His crimson aura erupted like a ruptured blast furnace.
A fifty-meter phantom of a shrieking, nine-headed flame phoenix burst into being behind his shoulders, radiating thousands of degrees of searing alchemical fire. Pushing off the arena floor at twice the speed of sound, Huo Yun turned into a blinding spear of white-hot kinetic fury!
The Nine-Phoenix Cleaver whipped through the air in a titanic overhead arc, screaming straight for Austin’s left collarbone:
*"NINE-PHOENIX HEAVEN-MELTING PURGATORY SLASH——!"*
The thermal shockwave was so brutal that the sand beneath Huo Yun’s boots turned instantly into a slick trough of green vitrified glass. Spectators in the front rows threw their arms up, crying out as the radiant blast blistered their skin and singed the tassels on their robes.
Austin didn't unhook his blue pipe wrench. He didn't sidestep. He didn't drop his clipboard.
He just let out a heavy, bone-tired superintendent sigh.
"Zero job-site safety discipline," Austin muttered, shaking his head. "Every greenhorn hot-rodder thinks basic clearance specs don't apply to him."
When the roaring flame blade was barely twelve inches from his ear...
Austin took a calm, unhurried half-step forward with his left boot.
*Clomp.*
Austin’s steel-toed work boot—forged from Tier 4 Stellar-Steel and anchored by sixty-eight quintillion kilograms of degenerate stellar inertia locked inside his White Dwarf Seed—settled onto the fused sandstone.
More specifically...
The hardened steel toe cap came down directly on top of the descending tip of Huo Yun’s flaming broadsword.
*THUD.*
No thunderous explosion. No heroic clash of elements.
Just the dull, heavy thud of a carpenter’s boot stepping on an offcut two-by-four.
The razor edge of the ancient Nine-Phoenix Cleaver met the stone floor directly under Austin’s steel toe cap.
The astronomical degenerate mass of Austin’s center of gravity anchored the copper blade tip to the bedrock with absolute, unyielding, cosmic finality.
Huo Yun was barreling forward at Mach 2.
The tip of his blade was dead stationary.
The physical universe, completely uninterested in dragon bloodlines or sword intent, executed the basic conservation of momentum.
*CRACK-SNAP!*
The five-foot blade of thousand-year Nether-Flame Copper snapped cleanly in half like dry kindling.
The lower eighteen inches of the broadsword stayed pinned flat under Austin’s boot.
The heavy cast-bronze guard and the jagged three-foot upper blade, propelled by Huo Yun’s unchecked forward inertia, whipped violently backward into Huo Yun’s solar plexus.
*WHAM!*
"OOF!"
The air was blasted out of Huo Yun’s lungs in a high, squeaky wheeze that echoed off the stone walls.
The fifty-meter flaming phoenix phantom vanished in a sad, sputtering puff of grey soot.
Huo Yun’s eyes rolled back into his skull. His legs turned to boiled noodles, and he folded over his own shattered hilt like an empty potato sack, tumbling head-over-heels into the sand right at Austin’s boots.
*Twitch. Twitch.*
The prodigy of the Blazing Sun Sect lay facedown in the dirt, completely out cold. His charred phoenix robes smoked faintly in the breeze, a thin line of red drool puddling in the black dust near his chin.
The entire match had lasted precisely one point four seconds.
Austin lifted his left boot, inspecting the toe cap.
There was a smudge of burnt copper scale on the scuffed leather. Austin gave it a quick, abrasive scrape against his right heel: *Scuff.* Clean enough.
He reached down with his calloused hand, scooped up the broken eighteen-inch blade remnant, and held it up to the afternoon light, squinting over his spectacles at the jagged fracture point.
"Look at that grain boundary tear-out," Austin muttered, clicking his tongue in disgust. "Pour temperature was way too high. Trapped slag inclusions along the spine. Zero grain refinement, and they probably quenched the whole ingot in a bucket of stagnant pond water. Typical ornamental bazaar junk held together with gold lacquer, spit, and prayer. One sharp shock load, and the whole crystalline matrix shears right down the cleavage plane."
He dropped the broken slab of copper back into the dirt with a hollow clatter.
Austin flipped his clipboard around, pulled a pink carbon-copy slip from the rear sleeve, laid it flat over the backing board, and scribbled rapidly with his yellow grease pencil.
He tore the slip along its perforated edge with a sharp *zip*, leaned down, and tucked the paper securely into the unconscious young master’s charred silk belt.
"Open-flame ordinance violation and failure to utilize approved thermal PPE," Austin announced, his voice carrying clearly to the front rows. "Fifty silver fine, payable at the municipal clerk's office within thirty business days. Failure to remit payment will result in a Class-Two administrative lien placed against your sect’s regional transport wagons."
Austin clicked his grease pencil shut, tucked it behind his ear, and looked up at Arbiter Tie in the judge's pulpit.
"Workplace hazard secured and properly cited," Austin said, deadpan. "Who's next on the bracket rotation?"
Arbiter Tie stood frozen in his stone pulpit, the brass horn dangling limp from his fingers. His scarred throat worked silently, but no sound emerged. Across the grandstands, bookmakers dropped their betting ledgers into the dirt, their faces as white as chalk. In the VIP boxes, three Blazing Sun elders had dropped their horn cups, dark spiced wine soaking into their embroidered silk knees.
Up in the Supreme Imperial Royal Gallery, Provincial Governor Zhao’s hands were trembling so hard that the dragon carvings on his throne armrests were rattling against his jade rings.
Beside the Governor, Grandmaster Ouyang leaned in, his voice cracking in dry, soul-deep dread:
*"My Lord... did you see that? He didn't even draw the blue spanner. He stepped on a mid-tier Earth-Grade ancestral broadsword... and snapped it like a dry pine twig."*