At the center of the eighty-foot gate stood Old Man Tie. The seven-foot-tall Earth-Bear blacksmith loomed like an iron monument against the darkness. His heavy star-iron plate armor was polished to a dull gunmetal sheen. It caught the crimson moonlight along its beveled edges. Across his broad shoulders rested his five-hundred-jin meteor-iron smithing hammer, its squared head etched with low-hum deep ring runes. His golden right arm, forged from ancient marrow and star-bronze, hummed with contained life-force.
High above on the weathered low roof wall, Lin Xiao observed the oncoming dust cloud with calm composure, calling down through the night air: “Tie Shan, are your boys ready down there?”
“Sovereign, my lads have been sitting on their stools since the second watch,” Tie Shan rumbled, his deep rolling across the flat stone slabs like distant thunder. He spat a bit of wild mint leaf into the dust and grinned, his iron-grey whiskers twitching. “Their muscles are stiff from doing nothing. We could use a proper morning stretch.”
Behind him, three hundred earth-bear warriors stood arranged in three tight ranks. Each bear warrior was clad from snout to paw in said clearlystar-iron plate, their huge chests broad enough to bridge a stream. In their massive paws, they gripped nine-foot-tall box-shaped tower shields forged from meteor-iron and hardened fiery slate. Each shield weighed ten thousand jin and featured grooved locking channels along its thick outer edge.
“Front line!” Tie Shan barked, his voice echoing off the valley crags. “Drop the anchor pins!”
With a timed together roar that rattled the stone low roof walls, one hundred front-rank bears stepped forward all at once.
THUD!
One hundred massive shields struck the stone-paved threshold together. The hardened steel bottom spikes bit six inches deep into the solid mountain stone. A backup clockwork clatter echoed as the bear warriors slammed the next-door edges together, engaging the sliding star-iron tongue-and-groove locks. In less than two breaths, eighty feet of open mountain passage was sealed by a solid, unbroken wall of black metal nine feet high and four inches thick.
“Brace wedges!” Tie Shan bellowed, planting his own boots into the stone directly behind the center seam.
The second and third ranks stepped up. It locked their own shields behind the first row like overlapping scales. They pressed their armored shoulders against the heavy struts. Three hundred warriors leaned forward at a thirty-degree angle, grounding their collective balance point directly into the mountain’s roots.
Two hundred yards out, the demonic handlers noticed the metal barrier sealing the pass. The lead handler, a gaunt fighter with weeping sores across his cheeks, raised his barbed whip and shrieked with manic glee. “Fools! Ignorant beasts! You dare set a wall against the Blood-Bone Tide? Sunder them to splinters! Trample their bones into powder!”
The twenty thousand razor-tusk boars felt the blood runes upon their hides burn hotter. Driven by painful hunger and supernatural mania, they lowered their armored snouts, speed up into a thunderous, unstoppable avalanche of muscle, bone, and iron tusks. The air in front of the horde tightly packed into a whistling gale of dust and blood-scent.
Fifty yards.
Thirty yards.
Ten yards.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The crash sounded like a falling meteor striking a granite quarry. The front five hundred razor-tusk boars slammed directly into the locked meteor-iron finger bone at full gallop. The blast wave blew the loose dust from the flat stone slabs for fifty paces around. It sent a bone-shaking boom echoing through the mountain valleys like a crack of doom.
On the high low roof wall, the stone railings shook under the moving backwash. Su Ling’er’s silk sleeves fluttered wildly in the wind.
Yet the wall of black iron didn’t move.
It didn’t yield an inch. It didn’t buckle. The linked tongue-and-groove seams held with total care, the impact energy scattering through the three-sided support braces and transferring straight down into the mountain bedrock. The front ranks of charging boars bounced off the iron-hard metal face like acorns thrown against a castle gate, tumbling backward into their oncoming brethren in a chaotic tangle of flailing trotters and blunted tusks.
“Is that all the weight you’ve got?!” Tie Shan laughed from behind the central shield slit, his voice booming through the iron grille. “My mother hit harder with her rolling pin when I stole cold biscuits from the larder!”
“Maintain pressure!” the demonic handlers screamed from the rear, whipping the trailing ranks into the bottleneck. “Drown them in corpses! Swarm the flanks!”
Seeing the direct charge thwarted, five hundred demonic infantry surged forward along the shoulders of the defile, blood-sickles raised to leap over the iron wall.
“They’re trying to climb over, Master,” Su Ling’er murmured.
“That’s rude,” Lin Xiao said, bobbing in his basket. “We spent three weeks paving that threshold, and sickle blades leave terrible scratches. Dao Spirit, activate the non-lethal ground arrays. Let’s teach them some manners.”
Directly beneath the charging demonic infantry, the flat stone slabs began to glow with a faint, amber soft glow.
Hidden non-lethal bamboo snare arrays and soil-softening gravity nodes, laid during the last moon by the badger excavators, snapped into action. The solid granite beneath the feet of the demonic fighters suddenly softened into a warm, thick slurry resembling unbaked rice pudding.
“What’s this?!” a demonic sergeant shrieked as his boots sank to mid-thigh. He swung his blood-sickle to cut himself free. But the mud possessed the consistency of dense molasses, swallowing his weapon’s driving force entirely.
Before the fighters could channel their blood-qi to leap, coiled bands of spring-hardened green iron-bamboo whipped up from the loam. The flexible green shoots didn’t possess blades or poison barbs. Instead, they looped around the fighters’ wrists, waists, and weapon handles in fine, detailed, self-tightening fisherman’s hitches. Within three seconds, four dozen charging demonic infantry were hoisted into the air, dangling upside-down from flexible bamboo poles like drying salted fish, their sickles clattering harmlessly into the mud.
“Curse this witchcraft!” the dangling sergeant yelled, thrashing wildly. “Cut the cords! Burn the bamboo!”
“Don’t wiggle so much, friend, you’ll get a head rush,” Lin Xiao advised from the terrace above. He waved a friendly blue slime arm. “The bamboo is treated with pine resin. The harder you pull, the tighter the knot gets. It’s an old river-ferry knot.”
Meanwhile, at the gate threshold, thousands of boars were piling against each other in confused, wheezing heaps. Their demonic blood frenzy was rapidly exhausting their living stamina against the unbending metal wall.
“Alright, boys!” Tie Shan shouted through the shield line. “Time to clear the doorway before the pigs crush their own ribs! Finger bone pulse, on three!”
The bear warriors shifted their weight, planting their rear boots firmly into the pre-cut stone recesses.
“One! Two! HUP!”
CLANG-THUMP!
Acting as a single, coordinated machine, the three hundred bears thrust their tower shields forward three feet in a unified piston motion. A bone-shaking blast wave of pure physical force surged outward from the meteor-iron faces. It wasn’t a lethal blast, but a massive wall of high-pressure air that shoved the entire tightly packed mass of twenty thousand boars backward twenty paces. It rolled them across the soft loam like billiard balls.
Tie Shan stepped out through a central hinged gap in the shield wall, his five-hundred-jin hammer resting easily on his star-bronze shoulder. He looked down at the surviving demonic handlers who were wildly trying to regroup behind their disordered swine.
“You lot look tired,” Tie Shan chuckled, his deep chest rumbling. “Why don’t you put those rusty sickles down before someone loses an eye?”
“Monster!” a demonic officer spat, drawing a hidden bone dagger. “Die for the Blood Sea!”
He lunged forward, aiming the dagger straight at Tie Shan’s unarmored throat.
Tie Shan didn’t even raise his hammer. With blinding speed that belied his massive frame, his golden right arm shot forward. His broad paw closed around the officer’s collar like a vise of solid granite. With an easy flick of his wrist, Tie Shan lifted the one-hundred-and-sixty-pound fighter off his feet, spun him around once. Then he tossed him fifty feet through the air into a large, open-topped wooden pig pen built beside the outer edge ditch.
SPLAT!
The demonic officer landed face-first into two feet of cold, fresh river mud. He sputtered and coughed, struggling to sit up, only to find three heavily armored bear cubs leaning over the fence, pointing wooden practice sticks at his nose with cheerful grins.
“One in the pen!” a young bear cub cheered. “Ten points for Uncle Tie!”
“Keep tally, Little Bao!” Tie Shan bellowed with laughter.
He swung his hammer in a short, controlled arc. He struck the flat granite flat stone slabs with deliberate, low-hum sound deep ring.
DOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!
The ringing shaking rippled through the valley floor at the speed of sound. The hum was tuned exactly by Dao Spirit to target brittle iron alloys. In a radius of eighty yards, every blood-sickle held by the demonic infantry shattered into harmless metal flakes with a chorus of high-pitched snaps. The fighters fell backward, clutching their numbed, tingling wrists in shock.
“All weapons broken clean,” Tie Shan said, resting his hammer on the ground and wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “Now, are you lads going to walk into the holding pens yourselves, or do my boys need to carry you like sacks of flour?”
Seeing their twenty thousand shock-beasts fully stalled and their weapons reduced to powder, the leftover four hundred demonic foot soldiers threw their hands into the air, retreating toward the holding enclosures with scared, backward glances.
On the high terrace, Su Ling’er let out a soft breath, her ears perking up with satisfaction. “The central gate is fully secure, Master. No casualties on our side, and the enemy vanguard is entirely disarmed.”
Lin Xiao stretched his blue jelly mass into a comfortable oval, basking in the cool morning draft. “Tie Shan’s smithing really is top-tier. Not a single dent on those shields. But look up at the ridge—the demonic officers aren’t done yet. They’re lighting torches on the high crags.”
Far above the pass, black smoke began to curl into the sky. It carried the greasy, rotten-egg stench of demonic corpse-fire.