Chapter 16-414: A Walk near the Great Wall (1/2)

Flensing claws splattered against his Sun and faded to nothingness. Well, it looked like they burned away as the Qi hit the pure proto-magic of his Sun and broke apart at the contact, but the effect was basically exactly the same as hitting a Null, just a little more overbearing.

They just disappeared when they hit a strong Null, which was more frustrating.

The Daoist who’d just launched the attack at him made a rather sickened face and turned to run, confident he could dodge something as big and heavy as a hammer.

A Hammer coming in faster than an arrow in a One Throw, not so much.

Bone shattered with a sickening crack, and the pulped body of the guy in black went flying limply as he failed to dodge in time. Even his vented Qi couldn’t soak the entire hit.

Just one more nail to be Hammered...

His other hand lashed backwards.

The Cultivator leaping out of the shadows at his upper back, two hooked knives out, ran right into the edge of Drum, and was clotheslined instantly, like he’d slammed his face into a steel I-beam. Dark Qi vented to take the slamming hit as the assassin was caught haplessly in mid-strike.

Briggs turned the Shield before the assassin could fall, and drove it and him down into the stony ground with a crunch and a splatter. Caught between adamantine Shield and the ground, the Daoist killer’s skull gave way and went splat.

Fire hissed along the edge of his Shield, searing the wound shut. Those coming behind would bleed the corpse dry, then vivisize it.

Drum beat happily as Endure tumbled back to Briggs’ hand. Every bone in his back shattered, the paralyzed Daoist lay unconscious as Briggs walked past him, covering more distance with every stride than it looked like, rooted as a mountain with every step, his armor making him a juggernaut striding across this field.

The Daoists had tried setting up avalanches here for ambushes, and his group had simply set them off ahead of time, filling the valley with rubble and dust that lightfooters had no problem moving over... and if the Daoists could fly, that only made them targets for multiple shooters totally willing to pick them off up there.

The teams were leapfrogging one another, always under arcs of cover fire, moving with the discipline of seasoned professionals under his watching eye, keeping their lines and fire control right on point. It looked slow, but it wasn’t, as these men were all Sixes and higher, with enhanced movement options ranging from lightfoot to flight. The crawl across the valley floor was moving at the pace a normal man could trot, and they were missing nothing.

There was some low Singing going on, too, as the Minstrels hummed along to Sama’s Singing in the distance, and his own Warlord Presence loomed over them all with dire focus, tracking, charting, nudging this way and that... and alerting people to threats around them through their own senses and positions that they hadn’t even noticed themselves.

Camouflaged ambush points, stealth attackers, snipers... the Daoists had been forced to urgently learn some tactics as they were slowly forced back, back, and back yet again.

The Chinese were very intent on clearing and destroying the Great Wall, whose Shroudzone was one of the anchorpoints of the Daoist defenses. There had been a major assault on the Shanhai Pass endpoint of the Great Wall, which had been defended by millions of slaughtered civilians from the lands about, as well as all those who died in the making of it. It had taken weeks to burn them all down... entirely by design, of course. Thousands of Chinese made Six before the first of them set foot onto the ancient configuration of the fortress there, and the Glory Award of victory swept over them with a headiness that had reduced many of them to tears.

Now they were opening up the Great Wall here in the east, and peeling open the defenses of the Sects relying on those to secure their flanks.

He looked over to where teams of Chinese and largely foreign Powered were cooperating to reduce the stone of the Great Wall to white powder that could not be rebuilt. The teams that had fought during the night would swap out for the demolition teams during the day, rotating on a continual basis.

Stopping Cultivators from coming in was the job of everyone else.

The Daoists had been pushed off of and away from Korea entirely. Great populations of civilians had been evacuated from their land, and from them more men and women had risen to fight.

The push to kill all the Cultivators had slowed. Perhaps the Daoists thought their will was weakening, because there had been many losses here, healing or no.

No, the losses weren’t keeping pace with the recruits coming in; they were just buying time for Shroudzones to be destroyed.

There was an alert from Notting, whose Commune with Nature was sweeping past them and alerting them of the position of the Qi-spewing Daoists. It was nothing like Traveler’s huge range, merely a ten-mile circle... but that was enough to alert them to many traps and line positions, Formations put in place, and the like, all painted into The Map and exploited.

A slender dark form fell out of the shadow of a tumbled boulder ten yards away, ridden to the ground by another dark figure whose Helices swirled around him. Gluttons behind them were notified and hurrying this way as the Void Brother rose to his feet from the fresh corpse, the rainbow colors of his Helices playing over his Sword.

“Brother,” Briggs rumbled, not breaking stride. “What’s a Firesword doing off the Plateau?”

Technically, the Void Brothers could be anywhere, but so many Powered around here made them superfluous to some extent, while they were appreciated and lauded up on the Plateau, where they were basically the strike leaders of hundreds of Forsaken each.

Also, the Phasma sucked, but it wasn’t nearly as revolting as the Qi-miasma around Cultivators.

“A bunch of Wayfists and us had the urge to come down here and take a look at things,” the young Chinese man replied. Like many of the Forsaken here, he was a Human Main, with nothing exceptional about him physically. Naturally, being a Void Brother meant he’d had no problem Leveling, even with an average starting Stat Line, and he’d put the work into getting as good as he could be, given the circumstances. Like most of the newest Brothers, he’d also been Awakened at Seven, so there was no going back and redoing things with Class Levels.