The Black Wu soldiers surging up the ramps at that moment no longer looked entirely human. They looked like something halfway between man and beast — feral creatures that had shed their humanity.
Every face wore a savagery cold enough to stop the blood, a savagery so extreme that it gave the impression their next breath might sprout tusks and drive spines through their backs like a porcupine.
One Black Wu soldier took a spear through the abdomen — and seemed to feel no pain at all. He kept swinging his curved blade.
It was a sight that shook something deep in the chest, a sight that made every pore go wide.
The man had been run through the gut. He hacked the spear shaft in two and came forward anyway. One step — and another spear drove into his heart.
Even then, he didn’t die immediately. He looked down at the shaft through his chest, watching his own blood slide along the wood.
In that moment of pause, four or five more spears found him. The man finally went down.
“They’re over the top!”
Somewhere else, a voice screamed the words, the voice itself trembling.
Li Chi looked toward the sound and saw several Black Wu soldiers launching themselves off the ramp in a high leap, throwing themselves bodily at the Ning Army troops on the wall.
They never landed. Ning Army soldiers reacted instinctively — spears leveled — and the Black Wu soldiers were killed mid-flight.
Their bodies hung impaled on the spears, held in the air.
Long spears like a forest. The Ning soldiers staring upward were splattered head to face with the blood raining down.
Yet in that very instant, the next wave of Black Wu troops exploited the opening and crested the wall.
Heaven seemed to have given the Black Wu people something in their favor — they stood taller and more powerfully built than most, running on average about half a head above a Central Plains man. Larger frames. Greater weight. Superior raw strength. Natural advantages across the board.
But the army holding this frontier pass was the finest of the frontier troops — the finest of the Ning Army.
The Black Wu soldiers who forced their way up were pushed back with flesh and blood.
Shoulder pressed to shoulder. Knives driving forward without pause. Men who fell collapsed in blood and were stomped underfoot by the man behind.
The next rank surged in, shoulder to shoulder again, blades stabbing forward in the same frenzied rush.
Bodies tumbled from the highest point of the ramps, crashing down. When they hit the ground below, the sound was muffled — because the layers of corpses already piled beneath had grown thick.
Li Chi grabbed the Black Blade and charged forward, driving a kick into the foremost Black Wu soldier — a force that sent the entire mass of men pressing forward staggering back.
The next instant, the Black Blade swept across. Three, four heads flew simultaneously.
“Get fire oil up here!”
Li Chi shouted, then leapt.
In everyone’s field of vision, Prince Ning launched himself like a hawk spreading its wings — directly onto the ramp.
The Black Blade swept left and right. At every place the blade’s edge passed, no one escaped the reaper’s claim.
The bodies rolling down the sides came faster now, tumbling from both flanks in a constant stream.
Blood sprayed onto Li Chi’s iron armor and ran down from there, flowing until what fell from the bottom of his armor dripped in a curtain — the way heavy rain pools at a door and cascades down like beads of water.
By now the Black Wu forces too had lit their torches. They had no more love for darkness than anyone else.
In the place where the firelight was brightest, Li Chi was the blood-soaked god of killing.
From outside the wall, Black Wu Blue Tribunal Deputy Divine Seat Zhimoran raised his spyglass and trained it on the assault.
He immediately picked out the Ning Army commander fighting alone on the ramp — surrounded by a mist of blood from the killing.
“That man,” Zhimoran murmured to himself, “must be Prince Ning, Li Chi.”
At the very first battle, Grand General Chizhu Liuli had personally come before the walls of Beishan Pass and loosed an arrow that reached the wall from over two li away.
And the Ning Army had responded immediately — a soldier had hurled a heavy bolt back with one hand, nearly killing Chizhu Liuli’s warhorse.
After hearing Chizhu Liuli’s account of that moment, Zhimoran had burned the name Li Chi into his memory.
“Send in the strongmen!”
Zhimoran turned and issued the command.
Not far behind him stood a force of at least a thousand large men — bare-chested, each standing at least half a head taller than the average Black Wu male.
Compared to the Ning Army soldiers, these Black Wu strongmen looked like a pack of savage beasts.
And the weapons in the beast-pack’s hands were not the curved blades the Black Wu usually favored. They carried wolf-tooth clubs, each roughly four feet long and as thick around as a grown man’s arm.
At Zhimoran’s command, the thousand-odd Black Wu strongmen bellowed and charged forward, their mass movement like a stampede of bulls — the kind where you half-convinced yourself the ground was shaking beneath their feet.
The group split into five columns, charging toward the five siege ramps still braced against the wall.
On one ramp, the Black Wu soldiers pushing forward were suddenly slammed from behind by a surging force too great to resist. They were caught between forward resistance and a rear push they couldn’t withstand — and many of those caught in the middle were driven off the sides.
Over two hundred Black Wu strongmen charged up the ramp, swinging their heavy wolf-tooth clubs in crashing blows against the Ning Army troops.
The Ning soldiers’ long spears kept driving forward. Nearly every strongman in the first rank was riddled with wounds.
But when the second rank of strongmen came up, the balance shifted immediately.
A sweep of wolf-tooth clubs shattered the spears, smashed the spear formation apart, and sent countless defending soldiers to the ground. One more instant and these beasts might batter a gap through the defense by sheer brute force.
A Dachu frontier army general saw it and his eyes went wide. “My turn!”
Both hands gripping an executioner’s blade, he shouted: “Lift me!”
A roar, and he planted his feet on several spear shafts. Soldiers heaved the spears upward with all their strength, and the general flew into the air.
Midair, the executioner’s blade swept horizontal — three or four of the Black Wu strongmen’s heads fell simultaneously with a single stroke.
The general landed on the ramp, and the blade drove straight down. One strongman who hadn’t pulled his wolf-tooth club back in time took the blow from crown to groin — the blade came out the bottom, and the man split apart, both halves falling to separate sides.
The strongmen surged up from behind. The general crouched low, swinging the executioner’s blade horizontal at knee height — an entire rank of Black Wu strongmen lost their legs.
Another swing, and one of the fallen strongmen had his skull cleft open. With a dull, wet sound, the top of his head split apart, and blood and brain matter burst outward.
*Crack.*
A wolf-tooth club struck the general’s iron helmet. The general’s body went rigid for an instant.
A moment later, blood began pouring from the helmet like a waterfall.
The next instant, a second wolf-tooth club came across horizontal — sweeping into the general’s face. The general was struck and sent flying, tumbling off the side of the ramp to the ground below.
On either side of the ramp, Black Wu soldiers standing on piles of their own dead saw a Dachu frontier man fall. They gave no thought to whether he was dead or alive — they closed in and hacked at him all at once.
The general’s personal guards witnessed this. Every one of them lost their minds.
A group of those fierce and loyal guards went mad and charged up the ramp, cutting down among the Black Wu strongmen in a killing exchange — one Ning soldier’s life for every strongman they could take. They traded lives for lives until they had taken down every one of the two hundred strongmen who had crested that ramp, at the cost of more than three hundred of their own.
The blood on the ramp was deep enough to numb the mind with dread. When a foot lifted from the ramp’s surface, the sound it made — something between a peel and a pull, as though threads of something viscous were stretching away from the sole — sent images stabbing through the brain.
In the distance below the wall, watching this scene, Zhimoran’s face had changed.
This was his first time seeing war at such close quarters. Three months of slaughter had passed, and he had told himself he had grown used to the brutality.
But watching that nameless Dachu frontier general, and watching his personal guards fight and die in that relentless exchange of life for life — he was frightened. And shaken to the core.
“Central Plains people…”
Zhimoran murmured, three words, and felt an inexplicable unease rising in his chest.
The people he had just witnessed — were these the Central Plains people that Black Wu nobles had mocked as two-legged sheep, countless times in the courts of the empire?
A general fell in battle. Every one of his personal guards refused to outlive him.
*This* was the wall. *This* was the Central Plains. *These* were its frontier troops. *These* were its men.
Zhimoran drew a slow, steadying breath, trying to calm himself.
“Send more men up!”
A moment later, Zhimoran bellowed: “Every warrior who reaches the top of the wall — dead or alive — will be richly rewarded!”
The Black Wu forces kept pressing forward like ocean waves crashing against a seawall, and those Central Plains men held every inch of ground without yielding a single step.
On the ramp where Li Chi stood, the Black Wu strongmen came charging up as well.
Li Chi raised his eyes to look at them. The killing intent in his gaze only deepened.
The foremost Black Wu strongman swung his club down at Li Chi’s head — but before it landed, Li Chi had already driven a kick into his chest.
The force of that kick was violence at its absolute limit.
That towering, powerfully-built Black Wu strongman was launched backward by Li Chi’s kick, his body bending forward as he flew, smashing hard into the man behind him — clearing a straight corridor of empty space through the press.
The next strongman came up just the same — a club swinging down.
Li Chi stepped aside. The wolf-tooth club struck the ramp’s surface and shattered the infantry shield plated into it.
Li Chi drove the Black Blade upward from below — and the strongman was cut in two. The blade entered at the ribcage and emerged from the opposite shoulder. The upper half of the body slid free, and blood gushed from the severed chest cavity in rhythmic pulses.
Li Chi bent down, picked up the wolf-tooth club from the ground, and held it in his left hand with the Black Blade in his right. Anyone who came near — died.
Black Wu general Jingluo Fu had already brought his personal guard to the base of the wall. He looked up and saw the terrifying way Li Chi killed.
Those Black Wu strongmen — big enough to physically contain Li Chi inside them, powerful as charging bulls — were reduced in Li Chi’s hands to something soft as clay.
“Kill that man! That man is Prince Ning Li Chi! Kill him!”
Jingluo Fu thrust a finger at Li Chi and screamed, his voice so loud it seemed for an instant to cut through every other sound on the battlefield.
Li Chi hacked down a Black Wu strongman in front of him. Heard someone shouting below the ramp. Didn’t think about it at all — simply hurled the wolf-tooth club in his left hand in that direction, then turned back to the killing without a second glance.
The wolf-tooth club tumbled through the night, spinning as it flew — crossing the darkness, as though punching through empty space.
And then it arrived at Jingluo Fu.
By the time Jingluo Fu saw it, there was no chance left at all.
*Crack.*
The spinning wolf-tooth club came to a dead stop.
Jingluo Fu’s head was caved in. The club lodged in his skull.
Jingluo Fu’s body swayed several times, then toppled backward. The moment he hit the ground, the wolf-tooth club tilted with him — and when the club came loose from his head, the red and white matter inside came pouring out all at once.
Every one of Jingluo Fu’s personal guards stood frozen in shock.
From his vantage point in the distance, Zhimoran — watching this unfold — felt his eyes snap open wide.