Three inches of solid pig iron tore like a cow’s breastbone splitting under a dull cleaver.
The clawed hand protruding through the coffin lid twisted.
Muscles corded beneath green rust-crusted skin, thick as hemp thick ship rope cables used to moor river barges. With a violent outward wrench, the creature peeled the cast iron plate apart as if it were dried birch bark.
SNAP. SNAP. CRACK.
The final three binding chains gave way at the same time.
The iron links shattered under explosive internal crushing pressure, peppering the granite cliff face with high-speed iron shrapnel. A two-foot jagged fragment spun through the air, shearing through a royal shieldman’s shoulder and burying itself into the rock behind him with a dull thud.
The two-thousand-pound coffin lid lifted into the air.
It didn’t fall away. It was hurled.
The massive iron slab tumbled through the mountain mist, shearing an ancient alpine pine tree clean in two before slamming edge-first into the cliff face, embedding itself six feet deep into the solid granite.
The canyon fell dead quiet, save for the hiss of boiling salt water.
Inside the shattered sarcophagus, pools of preservation liquid silver and black pickled bile sizzled against the frozen ground. It sent up thick, rotten-egg steam that reeked of copper filings and ancient tombs.
From the steaming wreckage, the entity rose.
It didn’t climb out. It unfolded itself.
Nine feet tall.
The creature stood upright on two massive legs, thick as temple pillars. He ended in three-toed talons that sank into the solid shale like iron chisels.
Its skin was not mortal flesh. It was a heavy, rainbow-bright green bronze, crusted with hundreds of years of stone green rust and deep rusting pits. Across its chest and belly, hundreds of tiny Taoist crushing weight magic charms had been branded directly into the dead meat with red-hot iron stamps, the charred Sanskrit characters leaking black oil.
And it wasn’t built like a man.
Sprouting from its widened, barrel-like ribs were eight distinct arms.
Four on the left, four on the right.
Each limb was a horrific masterwork of forbidden corpse-grafting. Thick black dragon-tendons and sinew salvaged from deep-mountain demons bound the shoulders together, stitched into the bronze flesh with braided copper wire and cold-forged iron rivets.
The topmost pair of arms ended in heavy, four-fingered bronze claws.
The middle pairs possessed elongated, multi-jointed fingers tipped with six-inch black glass talons.
The lowest pair hung low, thick and heavy like sledgehammers, their knuckles capped in jagged iron studs.
Atop this monstrous torso rested the face of Prince Rui.
The high-born features of the royal line were frozen in an unending snarl of rotting fury. The jaw was split down the center into four barbed segments. It showed rows of semi-clear needle-teeth arranged in nested rings.
Its eyes were not clouded like ordinary walking corpses.
Two burning, golden orbs stared out from sunken sockets, each containing twin slit-pupils that revolved in opposite directions like the gears of a clock.
A blast of sub-zero corpse frost radiated outward from the titan in a visible blast wave.
The moisture in the mountain air crystal-hardened instantly. Green, needle-like frost flakes swirled through the gale, dusting the rocks and coats of the royal soldiers in an icy shroud.
Twenty-five paces back, Lu Chen stood with his ox-bone cleaver held at his thigh.
Three thousand units.
The amber text burned into Lu Chen’s eye, throbbing with an intense, warning soft glow he had never witnessed in Black Water County.
This was not a wandering specter or a wild ghoul born of ditch rot.
This was a sovereign weapon crafted by the royal court’s finest necromancers and demonic artisans, fed on royal blood and royal treasury elixirs before it had turned upon its makers.
Its physical presence alone altered the surrounding air pressure.
The air grew heavy, thick with the weight of stale hundreds of years.
“Gods above,” a young guardsman stammered, his iron gauntlet rattling against the shaft of his spear. “That’s not his Highness—that’s a demon!”
“Silence!” Commander Tie bellowed.
Tie stood his ground. His face was pale beneath his iron visor, veins bulging across his weathered forehead. His dragon-headed broadsword flared with a dull, crimson light as he channeled his third-tier Peak Bone Forging blood Qi.
“Black Tortoise Demon-Suppressing Formation!” Tie’s roar cut through the blizzard. “Lock shields, cock the giant crossbows, and take its head—or we die on this ridge!”
The surviving twenty-five royal guards were veterans of northern border wars.
Despite the primal terror freezing their veins, royal drill took over.
Iron tower shields slammed into the rocky dirt with a timed together crash, overlapping into an unbroken iron wall three paces deep. Behind the front line, six spearmen thrust their eight-foot barbed pikes through the shield slits. That created a bristling thicket of cold steel.
At the rear, four guards cranked the heavy iron winches of two cart-mounted dragon-lock giant crossbows.
The giant crossbow bolts were five feet long, forged from solid cold-iron and dipped in consecrated dog blood, red stone, and molten copper.
The Eight-Armed Bronze Corpse-Lord didn’t move.
It slowly turned its massive, green rust-crusted skull, the double golden pupils shifting independently.
One pupil tracked the trembling spear points. The other swept past the shield wall, through the swirling green frost. Then it locked onto Lu Chen standing alone on the limestone outcropping.
Lu Chen met the golden gaze without blinking.
His cold and exact gaze evaluated the creature’s physical stonework.
Muscle thickness: cold-forged bronze lattice, five times denser than mortal muscle.
Weight: about two thousand four hundred pounds.
Tendon stretch: heavy by grafted demon sinew, capable of explosive high-pressure recoil.
Thermal core: fully inverted. Total rotting chill streaming from the third chest vertebra.
A thin wisp of steam rose from Lu Chen’s collar as his sixty-five-degree blood fire pushed back the advancing frost.
“Don’t bunch the shield ranks,” Lu Chen muttered under his breath. His words carried neither pity nor panic. “The leverage is wrong.”
Nobody heard him over the howling wind.
The Corpse-Lord tilted its head back.
Its split jaw opened wide, the four jagged segments expanding outward like the petals of a carnivorous flower.
SKRRRRREEEEEEEEEECH.
A high-hum sonic shriek ripped from its throat.
It wasn’t a roar of anger. It was a wave of pure sound and spirit devastation.
The blast wave blasted down the narrow canyon like an artillery barrage. Loose scree and fist-sized boulders shattered into gray powder along the cliff face.
Three unarmored baggage mules in the rear collapsed instantly, blood pouring from their ears and nostrils as their internal organs burst from the deep ring.
Two royal shieldmen dropped their weapons, clutching their helmets and screaming in agony as their ears burst behind their iron ear-flaps.
The shield wall shuddered. Gaps opened in the overlapping plates.
The Corpse-Lord lowered its head.
All eight bronze arms tightened all at once. The heavy dragon-tendons along its shoulders swelled. That turned black as rotting ichor surged into its hands and feet.
The stone under its taloned feet crushed into fine white dust under three thousand pounds of high-pressure tension.
“Fire the giant crossbows!” Commander Tie screamed, his voice strained to its total limit. “Loose!”
THWACK.
The heavy hemp bowstrings snapped forward with the sound of cracking thunderbolts.
Two five-foot cold-iron bolts whistled through the green mist. That left red trails of boiled away red stone in their wake.
At that exact heartbeat, the Eight-Armed Corpse-Lord moved.
It didn’t dodge. It didn’t take cover.
The nine-foot bronze titan launched itself forward. That left a crater of shattered shale where it had stood.
It transformed into a blur of greenish-black metal and tearing wind. It closed the twenty-pace distance in less than the beat of a dying man’s heart.
The ridge trembled beneath the thunder of its stride as bronze talons slammed into the shield wall.
And the slaughter broke open.