Impact blew up along the ridge like a battering ram striking a sheet of thin bronze.
The two cold-iron giant crossbow bolts struck first. One glanced off the Corpse-Lord’s raised forearm with a violent shower of yellow sparks. It turned aside into the ravine. The second pierced two inches into its lower left ribs, the red stone-coated point hissing against rotting marrow.
The monster didn’t even break stride.
It crashed into the center of the Black Tortoise shield wall at full speed.
Three front-rank iron tower shields caved inward instantly, folding into V-shaped iron scraps. The three armored guards holding them suffered immediate, total trauma.
Their breastplates crushed flat against their chest spines. Ribs shattered into dozens of bone splinters that pierced lungs and hearts in a single, wet high-pressure blast.
The three men were thrown backward into the second rank, coughing mouthfuls of black, frothing blood before their boots touched the earth.
The formation dissolved into chaos.
“Hold the line!” Commander Tie screamed, his eyes bloodshot as he lunged forward. “Stab the joints and strike the throat!”
Six barbed pikes thrust forward in a desperate, wild volley.
The Eight-Armed Corpse-Lord didn’t block. It simply swelled its eight arms into a spinning mill of bronze and bone.
Its two lowest arms, thick as anvils, swept inward in a level arc. The iron-studded knuckles caught four spear shafts at the same time.
CRACK.
The three-inch ash-wood shafts snapped clean in two like dry twigs. The violent recoil snapped the wrists of two spearmen. It sent white bone fragments tearing through their leather sleeves.
Before the men could draw back, the middle pair of bronze arms shot forward.
Elongated, multi-jointed fingers clamped around the two spearmen’s throats.
The Corpse-Lord lifted the two hundred-pound armored soldiers into the air as easily as a man lifting dead sparrows. With a casual flick of its wrists, it slammed their heads together.
The iron helmets flattened against each other with a sickening metal clang. Brain matter, shattered bone, and blood squirted through the visors, showering the screaming guards below.
“Monster!” a squad lieutenant yelled, hacking with a heavy double-edged broadsword.
The steel blade struck the Corpse-Lord’s upper left bicep with full, two-handed force.
CLANG.
The blade rebounded with a high-pitched ring. It shook so wildly that the lieutenant’s fingers went numb. The green rust skin showed nothing more than a shallow, chalk-white scratch that didn’t even bleed.
The Corpse-Lord looked down at the lieutenant.
Its topmost left arm reached out, gripped the lieutenant by the crest of his helmet. Meanwhile, the second arm grabbed his iron belt.
With a brutal, tearing heave, the creature pulled in opposite directions.
Toughened iron scale armor, boiled leather straps, spinal column, and belly wall tore apart with the wet, stringy sound of ripped hemp canvas.
Hot intestines, steaming entrails, and dark red blood splashed across the snowdrifts. It hissed as they met the freezing shale.
The leftover guards broke.
These were hardened veterans who had carried out bandits, fought northern raiders, and stood fast against peasant rebellions. But facing an eight-armed engine of butcher-shop slaughter that ignored steel and cold-iron, their human minds shattered.
“Run! To the rocks—run!”
A dozen men threw down their tower shields and scrambled for the narrow mountain trail leading back to the post-station.
The Corpse-Lord didn’t pursue on foot.
Its middle right arm reached down to the five-foot giant crossbow bolt still embedded in its ribs. It gripped the iron shaft with two fingers and ripped it free with a wet squelch of black bile.
Without looking, it snapped the cold-iron bolt across its knee into two jagged halves.
It hurled the rear half back like a spear.
The two-foot jagged iron rod whistled through the air at faster-than-sound speed. It punched through the back of an armored runner, blew out through his chest bone. Then it impaled the man in front of him, pinning both soldiers to the limestone rock face in a writhing, pinned mass.
At the rear cart, the surviving giant crossbow gunner wildly reloaded the second siege engine.
“Die! You cursed thing, die!” the gunner cried, hammering the release trigger with an iron mallet.
The bowstring snapped.
The Corpse-Lord’s topmost right arm caught the iron bolt out of mid-air, four inches before it reached its throat.
The heavy impact skidded the creature back half an inch, but its grip was unbending. The green bronze claw squeezed.
The forged steel bolt bent into a ruined horseshoe.
The Corpse-Lord took two thunderous strides, reached the support cart. Then he brought both of its lowest anvil-fists downward in an overhead hammer blow.
BOOM.
The heavy hardwood cart, the iron winch, and the screaming gunner beneath were tightly packed into a two-foot-thick pancake of crushed wood, twisted metal, and red organic paste.
One minute and forty seconds had passed since the first chain broke.
Twenty-nine royal soldiers lay dead.
The narrow shelf of Dead Man’s Ridge was slick with bright red blood, shattered shields, cut limbs, and crushed helmets. The steam from thirty freshly opened bodies rose into the sub-zero sky like red fog.
Only one royal fighter remained standing.
Commander Tie dropped into a low, desperate fighting stance, his breath ragged, blood dripping from his split lip.
His body surged with the full force of a Peak Bone Forging fighter. His skin flushed dark purple as his Blood Qi ignited, a faint crimson aura wrapping his heavy dragon-headed broadsword.
“Imperial Decree—” Tie spat through gritted teeth, his eyes burning with suicidal defiance. “Suppress the Uncanny!”
He lunged forward with the signed name move of his military career: The Mountain-Cleaving Dragon Slash.
The broadsword dropped in a blinding arc of red light, concentrating thirty years of martial marrow into the razor edge.
The blade struck true.
It caught the Corpse-Lord right at the collarbone seam. There, the uppermost grafted arm joined the ribs.
CRACK-CLANG.
A shower of orange and white sparks lit the dark gorge.
The edge bit through the green rust crust. It cut the copper wire binding and cut three inches into the desiccated, gray muscle beneath. It struck the black dragon-tendon core.
Black, acid-burning fluid sprayed across Tie’s breastplate, dissolving the iron rings with a wild hiss.
Tie’s eyes flared with hope.
It vanished an instant later.
The blade was stuck. The gray, rotting muscle fibers clamped down around the forged steel with the grip of an iron vice.
The Corpse-Lord didn’t even grimace.
It looked down at Tie with its dead golden double-pupils.
Its fourth and fifth arms shot out from its flanks. One hand seized Tie’s right wrist. The other seized his elbow.
A simple, horrific twist.
CRUNCH.
Tie’s forearm twisted one hundred and eighty degrees. The radius and forearm bone bones shattered into jagged splinters that burst through his skin and mail coat.
Tie screamed—a raw, agonized shriek that echoed off the cliffs.
The Corpse-Lord’s topmost hand clamped around Tie’s iron throat. He lifted the heavy officer off his feet until his dangling boots kicked feebly at the air.
Its split, four-petal jaw opened wide.
Rows of semi-clear needle-teeth gleamed in the twilight.
The creature plunged two six-inch bronze claws into Tie’s exposed neck, puncturing both main neck blood vessels.
GULP. GULP. GULP.
The Corpse-Lord began to drink.
It sucked the boiling, Peak Bone-Forging bright red blood straight from the royal commander’s living heart with the sound of a bilge pump draining a flooded hold.
Tie’s body convulsed. His limbs twitched, his skin withering and graying as every drop of vital essence and martial marrow was siphoned into the monster’s maw.
In less than ten breaths, Commander Tie was nothing more than a dry, shriveled husk of gray skin and hollow bone.
The Corpse-Lord tossed the empty corpse aside like a discarded sack of chaff.
The changes began right away.
The green rust on its bronze skin deepened to an oily, shiny emerald sheen.
The black dragon-tendons binding its eight arms swelled, pulsing with stolen blood life-force. Hairline cracks across its chest and ribs sealed shut, welded together by freshly secreted rotting black bile.
The creature straightened its massive spine.
It now stood nine feet and three inches tall. Its broad shoulders cast a dark shadow across the blood-slicked stone shelf.
It lowered its head. It wiped a smear of Tie’s blood from its needle-teeth with a long, blackened tongue.
Then, its twin golden pupils rotated. It locked through the swirling red steam onto the limestone outcropping thirty paces away.
There, standing quietly in the freezing mist, was the only living man left on Dead Man’s Ridge.
Lu Chen.
The mountain wind howled, whipping the shredded leftovers of royal banners against the rocks.
The monster bent all eight bronze fists, expelled an oily plume of green mist. Then it mounted the shattered wagon.