Despite his increased understanding of the Stellar Flash Steps and deployment of qi to reinforce his limbs, the drop off the Starwall sufficed to spike pain through feet and knees upon landing. Had the demon plague washed over him them, Liao suspected he might well have collapsed to his knees, but as Itinay had said, it failed to touch him at all. Vast malice surrounded him, but it was without direction, unable to notice the little mouse dropped within its vast cavern.

  The grand elder's analysis passed its first and most important test.

  Though the plague, unable to identify Qing Liao as a target, ignored him, that did not leave him immune to its presence entirely. He might be immune to its touch, but the presence of the plague, its impact, that remained. The removal of the protective barrier of the Starwall unveiled the fullness of that monstrous cloud in all its hideous glory.

  He suppressed a new and powerful urge to vomit. The plague, everything he saw and felt, it was utterly disgusting. It was life, for there was qi so this must be true, but life stripped away of all that made it beautiful and wonderful. A pure, wholly consumptive construction, one derived not from the vast history of being that tied all things together, but born from the mind of the deranged betrayals of the ancient past.

  Contact. Connect. Consume. The plague did nothing else. It could only take, never create. Absent reproduction, it was reductive, a force that only lessened the world by tearing away everything it touched and leaving nothing but additional copies of itself in its wake.

  All this could be felt through the least contact with the disgusting ambient qi given off by the plague. It felt sticky, cloying, and wet. Entering the space where it reigned, Liao felt as if his whole body had been dipped in lard and then left to decay. The omnipresent reddish emanation imposed a barrier of effort on all actions. Movement, sensing, even thought, all of these were burdened by the plague's existence around them.

  He wanted nothing more than to turn around and race back to the blissfully untainted air behind the wall.

  But the three breaths allotted by Su Yi had already been used up.

  With a jolt, the disciple's shining spear shot ahead, and Liao could only follow that beacon.

  He was left gasping in seconds. Holding back though the awareness integration realm cultivator might be, she nevertheless roared forward with astonishing speed. A red-armored blur streaking across the landscape as an arrow in flight. Without pause she would pivot, dash, and blitz from one direction to the next, lightning carving its way not through the sky, but over the ground.

  Liao hauled on his reserves of qi and slammed from one position to the next. His heart and lungs screamed with effort, legs churned through stomping lunges, and his vision blurred as he desperately sought to hold to the cruel pace set by Su Yi. Had the land not been cleared of vegetation it would have been impossible, in seconds he would have lost her completely. Each obstruction, placed in complex defensive patterns to redirect and channel the horde away from straight lines, forced them to make a twisted, ever-shifting scramble across the raked and rippling landscape. As the red-tinged vise imposed by burning lungs and strained muscles took hold of Liao's senses and compressed his awareness down to little more than a single line, he was idly struck by the thought that the Killing Fields reminded him of the lines dictating the movement of pieces across a game board.

  They jumped palisades, skimmed across raised defensive platforms, sprinted through muddy ditches, and vaulted over heavy boulders, never stopping, never slowing. Guided by streaks of light discerned and copied through the power of channeled qi, they blasted forward at mind-shattering speed. Liao pulled out energy stores embedded in his dantian, burning it faster than ever before. He kept his eyes directed toward the shining spearpoint projected before the disciple's streaking form.

  A sole anchor and perfect guide, until the gold suddenly turned bloody and stained.

  Liao blinked. He had not even seen the ghoul before Su Yi deflected her path by a critical few degrees and thrust her qi-empowered weapon clean through the creature's chest. Impact made a great hole, then tore and ripped free, taking the chest apart through the force of motion. The core of the demon simply disintegrated, torn to pieces and thrown aside as the follow-through carried the cultivator onward without the least hesitation. Chunks of shattered red flesh slammed into the ground, unrecognizable, and immediately began sublimating back into the plague itself.

  The only thing in the trapper's mind that contextualized this image was the impact of a full-sized broadhead arrow on the body of a tiny sparrow. Nothing recognizable was left behind in the scattered remains. Within seconds there was nothing at all, for the demon's body was taken back by the plague, all vestiges of its being absorbed to empower its true master even further.

  “Keep moving!” Su Yi screamed, turning her head for a single look back.

  Liao discovered he'd frozen in place. Even as he lurched back into motion, his perception spiked with dozens of additional presences. All crystallized the endless consumptive qi of the plague, the unmistakable mark of demons. Eyes shifting as he moved, he glimpsed one, scrambling up out of a trench on his right. Claws out, it charged towards him. The thing moved in a loping, long-limbed run that could match the pace of a galloping horse.

  Fear provided the impetus for speed. Liao clenched, and then pushed his legs through the essential footwork. Luminous pathways appeared in his mind's eye, and he blasted down them, streaking forward in an attempt to follow Su Yi's rapidly receding form. Stumbling and careening across the ground, he lurched towards her as fast as he could move without falling flat.

  Almost fast enough. “Go!” The disciple pointed northward, and then, in a maneuver that left Liao slack-jawed, took a single flash step that carried her through the nearest demon, complete with simultaneous spear-tip slash ripping the through half the thing's neck to leave it dissipating away on the earth. Without even slowing, she pivoted and bolted back, ignoring the momentum shift that would have torn any bird that attempted such a rapid reversal in half.

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  The stroke had been perfectly smooth, a mechanical marvel of precision and timing.

  It was equally unrestrained. Black blood had burst from the demon's severed arteries and coated the beautiful cultivator beneath a violent spray of gore. She ignored this completely, plowed through the horrid liquid without wasting the time and energy necessary to shield her skin using qi. Instead, she pushed everything down to maximize her speed.

  Doing his very best, mind reeling and eyes twitching, Liao followed the directions pointed by the blood-soaked spearhead. Despite this desperate scramble, his best effort bought him only a few meters before the blinding streak of motion that was the disciple once again dashed out ahead. “We do not stop!” She called as the wake of her passage scrambled his footing even as it pulled him forward. “Run on!”

  Lacking the air to offer even a grunt in reply, and without any bright shining alloy to follow visually, Liao focused instead on the sharp white light of Su Yi's exerted stellar qi and hurled his body after it. All around them the full nightmare of the Killing Fields made itself known as demons thrashed and converged upon the interlopers among them. Reddish shapes gathered and surged, only to be driven to the earth in vain as the elders on overwatch riddled them with arrows, and experienced disciples moved to the forward platforms to slaughter those who advanced too early.

  Already the loose vanguard of overly curious demons had taken losses numbering in the hundreds. Crimson stains marked the spots where their bodies fell, steaming away to feed the unseen film that impelled them forward. Arrows, chakrams, and javelins filled the sky, sending more and more monsters back to that melding by the minute. Despite this, the horde's numbers were only increasing. In less than a full day a terrible battle would rage across the scarred terrain and human blood would join with the black liquid given off by the monsters.

  A battle Qing Liao would miss, but he no longer felt this was any form of cowardice. His ability to contribute was minimal when compared even to disciples, never mind elders. This other scheme, if it delivered anything at all, was surely a far more important task than shooting his bow until he could raise his arm no more. He began to believe in the plan Itinay described. Instead of the one life he might save wielding his bow, he started to dream that he could spare dozens.

  Such thoughts, such dreams, provided the necessary resolve to keep up as the energy in his dantian flagged and his muscles burned. Duty drove him onward, clinging to the beacon that was Su Yi. Nothing spared for deviation.

  Six times Su Yi led them through ghouls, crashing devastation without pause. Each of the demons was left shattered upon the ground in a single blow. Overwhelming swift thrusts slammed through demon flesh with fury and precision. She barely broke stride as she devastated each enemy, revealed her mastery of the full power of an awareness integration realm cultivator.

  Despite this, Liao's mind somehow watched and categorized the conflict, discovering to his terror that it was far less one-sided than it seemed. The demons were fast, strong, and durable. Precision timing was essential to guide the shining spear past each pair of grasping claws. Similarly, only the incredible power of devastating blows unleashed through tremendous explosions of tightly controlled qi allowed them to pierce through with the force necessary to slay in one strike. Had it been his hands on the spear, the ghouls would be staggered at best, and then reach forward and rip him apart in counterstroke.

  Power combined with experience. Veteran capabilities and the unerring skill necessary to perform such swift strikes. One in the body refining realm could not fight this way. For Liao a battle with a ghoul would be a complex struggle, thrust and riposte, one he was not eager to conduct dagger to claw at all. Without the wall for protection, the conclusion was far from certain.

  As they closed on the target point, the sounds of battle grew louder across the Killing Fields. Su Yi slowed slightly at this auditory signal, reduced to the swiftest sprint of a mortal. They had been told to anticipate this move.

  All along the Starwall, the sect made it's first true move to open the battle.

  Skirmishers leapt off the wall, slaughtering their way forward with spear and halberd. Charging forward, they cleared ground of demons en masse. A wave of cultivators followed them, moving up to take forward positions on platforms and towers. The advance vanguard of the horde was slaughtered, thousands falling as the sect pushed the defensive line from the Starwall to the very edge of Mother's Gift and the shimmering access point to the Ruined Wastes beyond.

  It was a simple tactic, and standard, but this burst of activity, and the qi release accompanying it, drew the eyes of the demons. They surged in the direction of the sect's fighters, offering a critical opportunity to hide Liao away unseen. Su Yi, amazingly, had maintained awareness to time this with near perfection. Even as the gongs rang out to signal the assault, the labyrinth of detritus scattered out and securing the buried hatch to the prepared hole they targeted came into view.

  However, no amount of precision could overcome the randomness inherent in mass conflict. In this hour, those fluctuations turned against them.

  While the gongs still resounded in their ears, another sound penetrated the pair. It was felt not simply across their eardrums, but through their feet and bones as well. A deep, rumbling thump, heavy weights slamming down, one after another, in steady cadence.

  Strides. The sound of something truly immense in motion. Liao knew the pattern, a four-legged gait, but not its weight. This was not the swift clop of a hoofed beast or the soft and swift padded lope of a stalking predator. It was the furious, thrashing ramble of something heavy, angry, and able to make the terrain yield to its motions rather than the reverse.

  A ridiculous, monstrous thing, one revealed by the concentration of its qi before that ground-shaking amble carried its immense body into view. Smashing free of dust and glare it crashed out before them astride the very point of their objective.

  A giant.

  Throughout their sprinted charge Su Yi had diverted around every one of the three-meter tall ogres she sensed, not daring to pause to engage such brutes. This thing was many times larger, a living creature the size of a building. It's shear immensity overawed the mind in a primal manner that left Liao shaking, animal instincts telling him to run, to escape before it crushed him without thought.

  The giant had arms far longer than the stubby legs, but all four limbs were immense pillars of flesh and bone, necessary to hold up the thing's gargantuan bulk. The body was short, with the flesh pulled tight over the bones. Ridiculously thick skin cloaked it, giving the creature the impression of a skeletal beast wrapped in vines and plates made of fish scale. Five meters high at the shoulder, with a bestial face, tearing double sets of fangs, and horns that swept back from its brow like a bull's for a full two meter length, it's true nature was betrayed by its eyes. Though enlarged, bloodshot, and twisted to red by the plague, they revealed the introspective gaze no animal possessed.

  This thing had once been human.

  Some bizarre, barely detectable, variation in qi composition had, when confronted with the demon plague, twisted a once mortal existence into that of a bestial monster so overburdened it required four points of contact to walk. The sight made Liao sick, an abomination against the living world, a thing that obviously belonged nowhere and served no purpose save death. Full of pain, the giant's eyes suggested it knew its perverse nature well, and in the cultivators before it had discovered a way to share its agony if only for a moment.

  Rearing upright, this most powerful of demon forms hurled its enlarged body into the assault.