Lin Tao rotated the knurled brass fine-scale dial on the side of the Precursor Relic, initiating a high-speed hum sweep across the fourteen point eight kilohertz band.
In his test left eye, the canyon below transformed into an interactive topological network graph. Every walking corpse in the defile appeared as an indexed node, its map points mapped in three-space-folding space against the narrow dark rock walls.
The numbers were staggering.
In less than ten minutes of sustained giant crossbow fire from the castle walls, seven frontline deacons had been removed and another four had fled backward in panic, abandoning their control threads in the snow.
One thousand two hundred and fifty walking corpses had lost their handlers.
In the narrow throat of the defile, those twelve hundred and fifty automatons stood fully motionless. He formed a solid, impassable wall of dead meat and royal iron. Behind them, nearly four thousand active corpses—still being driven forward by the five Ghost Sect Elders on their floating bone palanquins—were pressing into their backs with crushing force.
The pressure inside the bottleneck was reaching total levels.
Lin Tao watched through his test eye as the lead ranks of the active corpse army slammed into the frozen bodies. Bones cracked under crushing torque. Iron breastplates buckled as heavy body-refiner corpses were trampled into the shale by three-ton battering rams that had no local braking routines. The stone-hard cedar rams continued to roll forward on their iron-shod wheels. It crushed legs and spines into crushed fragments…
