The silence that blanketed the Frost Valley was so total that the sharp hiss of the burning rotting fuses on the high ridge sounded like spitting vipers in an empty crypt.
Across five leagues of open plain, two hundred thousand royal soldiers sat motionless on their pine benches, their birchwood bowls resting in their laps, their eyes wide with frozen, choking terror. They looked up at the high knoll where thirty massive. It screamed skull muzzles were glowing with sickly purple-red fire. They knew the lethality of those forbidden weapons. They knew that within four seconds, a curtain of rotting soul-rot would go down upon them, dissolving their flesh and melting their bones into boiling marrow.
In the ranks of the Seventh Cohort, nineteen-year-old Ah Ming clutched his warm birch bowl against his breastplate with white knuckles. His newly restored pink cheeks drained of color once more.
“He’s going to die...” Ah Ming whimpered, tears spilling over his eyelashes. “The scholar who gave us the sweet rice... He’s walking straight into the cursed cannons...”
Beside him, veteran sergeant Chen clenched his scarred fists, his breath catching in his throat. “Don’t look, boy... No mortal armor in the world can survive the rotting breath of the Nine Nethers...”
