The midday sun over the Jiuzhou Borderlands was fully put out, swallowed by a screeching black blizzard of fifty thousand Flying Void Wasps.
From the castle walls five miles back, the aerial swarm looked like a swirling column of liquid tar dropping out of the storm clouds. Every beat of their glassy wings displaced sky ether with a metal whine that set the teeth of every soldier shaking. Beneath their segmented black glass back shells, three-foot hollow stingers glowed with rainbow-bright green venom.
A single stray droplet of venom detached from a scout wasp and struck a stone watchtower three miles away. With a violent hiss, the four-hundred-year-old granite castle walls dissolved into steaming green foam like limestone drenched in packed acid. The watchtower groaned, its load-bearing stonework melted into slurry. Then he collapsed into the dirt in less than five breaths.
“Acid-Spitting Void Wasps!” the Grandmaster of the Thousand-Rune Guild screamed from the rear castle walls. His ritual silk sleeve shook wildly. “Their stingers contain Abyssal Bile! It ignores spiritual barrier arrays and corrodes metal artifacts on contact! Sound the retreat! If that cloud strikes the refugee column, thirty thousand wagons will be reduced to bubbling green puddles!”
“No one retreats!” Commander Zhao shouted, drawing his command saber. “Archers, load fire-spirit arrows! Form defensive clusters!” Even as Zhao barked the order, he knew it was utterly pointless. A mortal bowman could loose twenty arrows a minute. Against fifty thousand aerial hunting beasts diving at two hundred miles per hour…
