Outworld Liberators

The four thousand three hundred cultivators split into three groups with startling speed.

The first group gathered beneath Oswin's command, the tower raiding force.

This time, he would not be the one stepping inside.

He sat atop a mobile qi array, the kind small sects used to feed power into their protective barriers. Now every thread of qi it drew was funneled into him.

Life Bane contract rustled in one hand. The other moved with cold, tireless precision, sorting men the way a counting machine sorted coin.

"Jalam. Marlou. Zuma. Gin."

He spoke the names one after another, never raising his voice, yet each call landed exactly where it needed to.

Lines shifted. Cultivators peeled away. Small clusters formed, then settled into teams with the ease of pieces falling into their rightful squares.

Once a group was set, Oswin flicked out a paper marker talisman with all their names written across it, and the strip slapped itself against the tower they were assigned to.

It was not mere convenience that guided his hand. Oswin had read more than strength and rank.

He measured grudges, loyalties, old habits, private friendships, the quiet frictions men carried without ever speaking of them.

He arranged them for closeness, for temper, for use. Those who could sharpen one another were bound together.

Those likely to clash were cut apart before the first step of the assault.

The second group fell under Fay, Radimir, Jackson, and Jenkii.

These were the elites, chosen for speed, reach, and the kind of violence that could answer a threat before it had fully taken shape. They split at once and moved for the city walls in four directions, each centurion assigned to hold two fronts at the same time.

Yet the moment they arrived, every face turned grave. Whatever ease they might have expected died there beneath the hundred-meter walls.

At least a thousand undead archers stood behind each direction, arrows in hand and bows half-raised, as if a single command would send a storm of shafts screaming into anything reckless enough to charge the city.

Another thousand manned the battlements themselves, swords already drawn, their empty eyes fixed on the dark forest as though they had long been expecting something to come out of it.

Sixteen thousand rotting soldiers in all, and every last one of them still clung to the same dead cause.

Radimir swallowed hard at the sight. In his mind, no sane commander packed that many bodies onto a wall unless danger was already on its way.

"How about a bet," Jackson said.

The words came easy from him, tossed out in the face of sixteen thousand undead as though he were inviting them to a drinking table instead of a killing ground.

"Whoever earns the most effort points takes the spirit stone value of all four teams."

"I'm in," Jenkii said at once, grinning sharp and bright.

This was closer to her nature. Not the creeping unease of hidden schemes, not the careful guessing that came with traps and secrets, but open violence, hard clashes, and the wild joy of battle laid bare.

Fay gave her agreement with far less noise, though no less certainty.

Radimir, after a brief pause, lifted a thumb as well.

"Since I'm such an honest man, let's put it in writing," Jackson said.

He reached into his robe and drew out a Life Bane Contract from his own stock, the thin sheet fluttering once in the cold air before settling in his hand.

The last group was made up of the remaining one thousand nine hundred cultivators.

Their path led not to the towers or the walls, but into the abyss at the city's heart, where the dark mouth below seemed to wait with all the patience of a grave.

Lifara oversaw that descent.

After healing a hundred men with a calm that made her seem less like a battlefield physician and more like some saintess of a healing sect, she had gathered a following of her own without ever asking for one.

Men listened when she spoke. They moved when she pointed. She was no diviner, but Radeon had drilled enough military sense into her that she understood what mattered here.

A push into the abyss would not be swift. It would be a slow grind, bloody and stubborn, with no room for pride and even less for disorder.

So she planned for endurance.

At her side stood a hundred of the fastest cultivators, young enough to still run hard under terror and disciplined enough to run back into it.

Their task was not glory. They would race up and down the abyss path, carrying out the wounded.

The first four hundred went down under her schedule.

Four teams would shift every two hours, one replacing another in a relentless grind, while the field hospital under Lifara's command crept as close to the fighting as safety allowed.

She kept it moving between the four active forces, always near enough that a wounded man might still believe treatment was possible before Eldric take them out of the Preta Lurienna Labyrinth.

Everyone went to their tasks.

Not long after, the ground began to shake.

The tremor rolled under the city like something huge turning in its sleep, but not one of them stopped to stare or waste breath guessing at the cause.

There was too much to do, too much waiting on the edge of motion. Then the source showed itself.

Out beyond the northwest wall, a Flesh Titan came lumbering from the dark, more than a hundred meters tall. Its face looked butchered rather than born, the flesh shaved away to bare a wet portion of brain and half of a man's ruined features beneath.

Even at a distance, the sight of it was enough to sour the stomach. Fay gulped when she saw the thing coming.

"I want to switch with Jenkii," she said.

Jenkii, dressed in brown, changed at once into the second form of her new clothes, a sleeveless turtleneck fitted close to the body, leather boots strapped tight for movement and impact.

She stepped forward with her axe in hand and pointed its edge at the lumbering behemoth.

"Man the rest of the wall while I take down that creature."

Then she activated Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts on her forehead.

The giant creature seemed to sense the danger at once. Despite its size, it did not charge. It let out a strange, wavering wail and turned as if to flee.

A moment later, the forest answered.

Flesh Titans poured from the dark in a massive wave, some only five meters tall, others twenty, all of them malformed and rushing with a dreadful urgency.

They did not march in ranks. They did not form lines. They simply ran, as if driven by pain, fear, or hunger too fierce for order.

The undead archers reacted the instant the first of them came into range. Ghost qi flooded their bows. Then a rain of ghostfire-lit arrows hissed through the air and crashed into the charging giants.

Where the shafts struck, flesh sizzled and smoked. Instead of slowing them, it only made them madder. Their eyes went wide and wild, feverish with pain.

The first Flesh Titan to reach the wall shoved qi into its shoulders and hurled itself straight at the stone. The impact boomed like a siege ram.

Some skeletons manning the wall were thrown from their feet, some sent tumbling back across the battlements.

Jackson did not hesitate.

During their talk, Jekyll had passed him a small martial technique called the Heavy Blood Marbles Art, a fragment of his signature path, given more to enlighten than to arm.

Jackson had looked at it and found a different use.

He leaped from the hundred-meter wall.

As he dropped, his Neutral Blood broke apart into marbles, then smaller still, until they became grains as fine as sand. He let them scatter with purpose, driving them toward the coin-sized ear holes hidden in the Flesh Titan's head, the strange defects each of the creatures seemed to carry from birth.

The moment the blood-sand entered, Jackson felt the resistance.

Something inside the creature pressed back, trying to spit the grains out.

He refused to yield. Inside that narrow channel, he forced his weapon's shape to change, stretching it into something like a great trumpet.

Then he blew.

The Flesh Titan roared with a thunderous blast that shook the air around it. Its rage turned at once, sharp and blind.

"I'm over here, big guy!" Jackson shouted.

The creature wheeled around and charged back the way it had come, smashing a path through the lesser flesh golems in its frenzy, tearing open its own side's advance with every step.

The descent toward the door to the third stage went on in a hush that felt wrong from the start.

It was not true silence. Far above and far behind them, the battle still muttered through stone, a deep and distant rumbling like some caged beast throwing itself against iron.

Yet down here, along the narrowing path, that faint thunder only made the quiet worse.

"You think everyone's fine back at the wall?" one cultivator asked, keeping his voice low as if he feared waking something.

"Sounds like they're fighting a big boy out there, eh, eh," another said, trying for lightness and failing.

The joke fell flat the moment it left his mouth.

No one laughed. Then they heard it.

A child crying.

It came thin and small through the passage, the miserable sob of a toddler lost in the dark.

"Mommy. I miss my mommy. Please help me find my mommy."

Every cultivator there felt his skin crawl.

This was no day care center. No child should have been anywhere near the third stage.