The crash between the hijacked vanguard and the Ghost Sect’s main army was not a battle of mortal men. It was a heavy-duty disaster of colliding iron and crushed bone.
Twelve hundred and fifty heavy body-refiner corpses charged north at eight paces per second, their six-foot barbed glaives leveled in a bristling, iron-hard hedge of blackened steel. They didn’t scream war cries, they didn’t beat their chests. They didn’t slow their stride as they closed the distance. Guided by the picosecond clock of the Precursor Relic, their ranks kept flawless sharp-angled posture, advancing like a huge iron rake through the narrow defile.
The oncoming Ghost Sect light infantry—two thousand conscripts armed with cleavers and wicker shields—had no time to halt.
CRACK-SHATTER-CRUNCH!
The front ranks collided with bone-shaking violence.
The twelve-hundred-pound hardwood shields of the hijacked vanguard plowed into the light infantry like the prow of an icebreaker smashing through frozen river slush. The six-foot barbed glaives drove forward with forty thousand Newtons of collective high-pressure force, skewering through wicker shields, piercing rusted breastplates, and shearing through stone-hardened ribcages like dry kindling.
Corpses were trampled under corpses. The light infantry, whose deacons were still struggling to understand the inversion, tried to hack at their attackers with their cleavers.
