The courtyard of Outpost Seven was littered with shattered layered-scale plates, cut limb segments, and crushed bone fragments that crunched like gravel beneath Tie Shan’s boots.
The giant leaned on his twelve-pound pry-bar, his heavy chest heaving with slow, rhythmic breaths. His dark bronze skin was coated in a thin sheen of sweat that steamed in the sub-zero air. But his expression remained as placid and unmoving as a mountain crag. Around him lay the broken remains of thirty-two corpses, their movements permanently ended by total clockwork destruction of their hip and spinal assemblies.
The leftover walking dead had fallen back into the dense mist, retreating toward the valley trail under the direction of that eerie, high-pitched sound whine that had now faded into the northern distance.
“Hold your ground, Tie Shan,” Lin Tao instructed softly. “The controller has broken contact. They’re conserving their leftover units after assessing the defensive threshold.”
“Good,” Tie Shan rumbled. He wiped a smudge of black grease from the flat of his iron bar with a strip of wool rag. “My hands were getting cold.”
Lin Tao walked across the frozen flat stone slabs to where an intact corpse lay pinned beneath a fallen dark rock top door beam near the well. The corpse’s lower legs were crushed under four hundred pounds of stone. But its upper torso and neck were fully unharmed. Its jaw clicked open and shut with a rhythmic, clockwork snap. Its milky eyes stared blankly at the overcast grey sky.
