The howling screech of five thousand blood-crazed shock beasts echoed off the granite cliffs like a collapsing landslide of iron and bone.
Down the narrow gravel throat of the southern defile, the vanguard surged forward at forty miles per hour. Two-headed gore-hounds, their jaws slathered in toxic crimson bile, snapped their iron-plated teeth in blind fury. Sanguine blood-panthers, their hides bristling with bone spurs and their tails tipped with barbed venom needles, leaped from boulder to boulder in long, hungry bounds. The demonic parasite needles embedded in their skulls flared with blinding crimson light, drowning their primal minds in an all-consuming frenzy to butcher every living soul within the volcano bowl.
High above the charging horde, three demonic handlers hovered upon floating disks of woven human rib-bones, cracking barbed leather whips that let loose crackling ribbons of red lightning.
“Tear them to shreds!” the lead handler shrieked, his voice filled with manic bloodlust. “Drown their new wall in blood! Leap the gate and gorge upon their flesh!”
Down at the base of Tie Shan’s newly raised iron-hard metal earth-wall, thirty paces in front of the locked meteor-iron gate, a small sapphire shape landed in the gravel with a soft, wet splat.
Lin Xiao took a single breath, letting his void dantian expand.
“Dao Spirit, deploy maximum surface area,” Lin Xiao commanded with calm amusement. “Engage non-Newtonian dynamic impact-hardening. Set spring recoil tension to four hundred percent.”
“Elastic castle wall settings locked, Host,” the Dao Spirit’s sweet-sounding voice responded smoothly. “Pulling strength tuned to high-pressure rubber threshold. Rebound flight path vectors mapped to the soft sandbanks eighty paces south.”
Lin Xiao drew upon his Primordial Chaos essence and simply let himself swell.
FWOOOOOOOOOOSH!
In less than two breaths, the two-foot blue ball swelled into a huge, semi-clear azure castle wall. He stretched thirty paces wide from one granite cliff face to the other, rising fifteen feet tall like a huge wall of shimmering sapphire jelly. His outer membrane gleamed in the crimson moonlight with crystal-clear perfection, perfectly blocking the narrow throat of the canyon.
Inside the azure jelly, two massive, curved white crescent eyes formed, blinking down at the oncoming avalanche of claws with cheerful, welcoming warmth.
The lead wave of three hundred blood-panthers and two-headed gore-hounds didn’t slow down. Driven by demonic mania, they leaped into the air at full sprint, extending three-inch iron claws and gaping jaws to shred the blue obstacle into ribbons.
BOING.
The first blood-panther struck the center of the slime castle wall at forty miles per hour.
It didn’t pierce the membrane. It didn’t tear a single drop of jelly.
Instead, the non-Newtonian impact-hardening fluid instantly stiffened into a firm, tough cushion. The panther’s forward driving force plunged three feet deep into the elastic azure mass, stretching the jelly inward like a giant rubber slingshot. And then, with an explosive, musical THWANG!, the stored striking force rebounded!
SQUEEEEAK!
The four-hundred-pound blood-panther was hurled backward through the air like a launched melon! It traced a high, graceful curved arc eighty feet above the canyon floor, sailing fully over the heads of its oncoming pack-mates. Then it landed with a soft FLUMP into a deep dune of loose river sand eighty paces to the rear.
BOING! BOING! SQUELCH! BOING!
What followed was the most absurd, chaotic spectacle in the history of training warfare.
Hundreds of frenzied blood-panthers, razor-wolves, and two-headed gore-hounds slammed into the azure castle wall in rapid row. Every single charging beast struck the elastic surface, sank into the jelly cushion, and was right away catapulted backward through the night sky.
The air above the defile was suddenly filled with dozens of airborne hunting beasts flailing their paws in mid-flight. They flew backward in timed together arcs, yelping in sheer, confused confusion, before splashing harmlessly into the soft sandbanks, mud flats, and gravel heaps flanking the outer riverbed.
Not a single bone was broken. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
The beasts scrambled out of the sand dunes, shaking their heads wildly. Their paws wobbled on the gravel. Their ears twitched in total sense overload. The sheer physical shock of being launched through the air at faster-than-sound speeds, combined with the soft, cushioned landing, had fully scrambled their inner ear balance. The blinding, homicidal rage in their crimson eyes flickered and dimmed, replaced by intense, staggering motion sickness.
Several two-headed hounds sat down in the sand, whining softly and blinking at the spinning red moons.
Up on their floating bone platforms, the demonic handlers nearly fell from the sky in numbed disbelief.
“What... What kind of sorcery is that?!” the lead handler wailed, clutching his hair with clawed hands. “A wall of jelly?! They’re bouncing! Our vanguard of five thousand blood beasts is bouncing like children’s balls!”
“Shoot it!” another handler screamed, drawing a bone wand. “Corrode it with Corpse-Blood Fire!”
Before the handler could ignite his wand, the shadows on his bone platform detached from the surface.
Xiao Hei stepped from the pitch-black air behind the cultist, his twelve-foot frame streaming sub-zero eclipse chill. With a single, easy swipe of his shadow-sheathed paw, the wolf king shattered the bone wand into splinters and slapped the handler across the neck with the flat of his claws. He knocked him unconscious instantly.
The leftover handlers shrieked as fifty Shadow Gale Wolves leaped from the surrounding pine cliffs. Moving with sub-sonic stealth, the wolves disarmed the handlers, snapped their bone whips. Then they pinned them to the earth in less than sixty seconds.
Down on the canyon floor, the last few confused hounds bounced off the azure castle wall, tumbling into the sand with soft thuds.
“Moving engagement finished, Host,” the Dao Spirit reported with calm satisfaction. “All five thousand swift vanguard shock-beasts safely deflected into non-lethal terrain zones. Ninety-two percent of forward handlers incapacitated. Friendly damage: zero.”
Lin Xiao let out a long, contented mental sigh, slowly contracting his thirty-pace castle wall back inward.
The vast wall of jelly tightly packed like a folding accordion, collapsing down until a neat, two-foot-wide sapphire sphere rested upon the gravel path once more. Lin Xiao gave a gentle shake, dislodging a few stray grains of sand from his smooth surface.
“Ah, that was wonderfully refreshing,” Lin Xiao chuckled, his curved white eyes crinkling happily. “Like jumping on a trampoline for twenty minutes. And the sand dunes did a splendid job catching everyone. No blood to clean up tomorrow morning.”
Lin Xiao turned around and hopped up the granite stairs of the newly forged castle wall, landing with a soft plop upon the low roof wall beside Tie Shan.
The giant Earth-Bear blacksmith was leaning over the castle walls, his jaw hanging open as he stared at five thousand ferocious blood-beasts sitting dazed and confused in the sand dunes eighty paces away. He looked down at the little blue slime, then back at the dunes. It shook his massive, furry head in sheer, respectful disbelief.
“Sovereign...” Tie Shan muttered, his deep trembling with awe. “In two hundred years of living across the southern mountains, I’ve never seen an army of starving fiends stopped by a rubber bounce. You turned five thousand killers into dizzy pups.”
“Master!” Su Ling’er called out, stepping onto the low roof wall with graceful footsteps.
Her three snowy fox tails swished behind her. He carried a comfortable green bamboo basket lined with warm silk. In her delicate hand, she held a bamboo skewer threaded with five plump, bright red mountain hawthorn berries, each coated in a gleaming, semi-clear shell of hardened sugar syrup.
“The kitchens prepared these before the bells tolled,” Su Ling’er smiled warmly. She set the basket beside the low roof wall stone railing and handing him the skewer. “You must be hungry after holding the canyon, Master.”
“Oh, candied hawthorns!” Lin Xiao exclaimed with delighted squeaks. “Thank you, Ling’er! The sugar glaze on these looks so crisp!”
Lin Xiao settled comfortably into the padded bamboo basket. He extended a small slime arm to pop the first sugar-crusted hawthorn berry into his core. The sweet, tangy juice burst across his void palate. That brought pure, pure happiness to his transmigrator soul.
Beside him, Su Ling’er adjusted the silken sash of her robes. Her amber eyes turned toward the southern gloom beyond the outer edge wards. She tracked the rising dust with sharp, tactical focus.
Down below, the southern hall leading into the volcano bowl began to tremble once more.
It wasn’t the light, skittering shaking of leaping panthers and hounds. It was a deep, ground-shaking pulse that rang from the very mantle of the earth, as if an earthquake had taken root beneath the soil. Through the narrow mouth of the valley. There, the steep granite bluffs narrowed into the eighty-foot gateway, the crimson light of the eclipsed moons painted the churned earth the color of dried liver.
From the gloom beyond the outer edge wards came a sound like grinding millstones mixed with the rhythmic, wild pounding of thousands of heavy hooves.
The true demonic vanguard had arrived.
Twenty thousand razor-tusk boars, their thick bristled hides heavy by jagged plates of hardened bone grown under demonic blood-stimulation, were charging in a dense, crushing wedge toward the gateway. Behind them marched five hundred blood-sickle infantry of the Blood Sea Sect, clad in crimson leather. It whipped the frenzied beasts forward with barbed leather thongs dipped in stimulant venom.
Sitting comfortably in his padded bamboo basket on the high stone low roof wall, Lin Xiao swallowed his second candied hawthorn berry. That let out a calm, satisfied hum.
The first wave had bounced. Now, it was time for Tie Shan’s bears to show the realm the true meaning of an unmoving mountain.