As the giant reared, it launched an ear-splitting roar. The body pivoted on the stumpy limbs, anchoring weight over the back legs. This freed the great and terrible pillar-arms to whip about with stony speed, extruding fingers like roofing poles to gouge through the earth and smash flat all they touched. Rippling ridges of iron-hard skin laced those appendages, forming edged gauntlets threatening to rip and tear human flesh if even the least glancing blow landed. In the aftermath of each furious impact the air crackled and the ground split.

  “Pits,” Su Yi hissed as the giant charged towards them. She raised her spear to guard even as the immense bulk of the demon rose up and towered above her petite frame. Her entire body tensed, and qi flushed to the surface of her skin, as she truly committed to full battle for the first time in Liao's presence. “I'll kill it!” She shouted hurriedly. There was no time for any sort of elaborate plan. “Keep the ghouls back! Go for the legs!”

  Even as these words reached his ears, Liao discovered his bow was already in his hands. A swift glance revealed that while the giant had lurched forward into melee range through the gap alone, the ghouls scattered about nearby had heard the sound and caught the qi traces of battle. They converged now, largely ignoring him to charge at Su Yi.

  A single claw swipe, interrupting her motions, would be enough to allow the giant to land a blow that even the senior disciple could not withstand. Liao understood the command he'd been given. An arrow moved to his bowstring and he joined a true cultivator's battle for the first time.

  Su Yi began a flying leap and launched herself upward at the monster trying to pound her flat.

  Tearing his eyes away from that tableau, Liao turned instead to locate the nearest of the blood-shaded and gaunt smaller demons. Gathering strength in his muscles and qi in his core, he let fly.

  The ghoul jumped over the first arrow. The terrible feral cunning that made the plague's altered minions so deadly was on full display. As it landed, clawed feet dug into the ground with cat-like grace. The monster spun about and careened forward, instantly adopting a rapid, serpentine motion pattern.

  Liao blinked, stunned by this deviation, and his fingers twitched against the shaft of his next arrow.

  “Focus!” Sayaana's voice echoed through the bones of his skull. The remnant's words carried a cold fury he'd never heard her unleash before. “It's a dead thing! A wrath puppet! Nothing more! You are one who has touched the dao. Gather the light and strike it down!”

  For a single, infinitesimal and yet endless instant, Liao snapped his eyes closed. Awareness dipped down, drawn entirely into his dantian. Down, and through. Beyond the bottom, on the opposite side of the world, the other side of himself, the stars waited, and in their endless power they burned across all distances. He felt it there, always, power older than humanity, older than the world itself, the primordial energy of the first reaction to bring forth light.

  Power granted as his to wield through the incredible brilliance and endless kindness of the Celestial Mother.

  “Nine Spheres Arsenal Bow Arts,” he did not speak the words aloud, but loosed them through his dao. Pure star-born qi spiraled out from his dantian, danced sluggishly across still quiescent meridians, and wrapped about the muscles of his arm, back, and shoulders. “First Form: Starlight Barb.” Gathered by will, the power wrapped about his bow.

  Then it burst free.

  The arrow released from the snapping string was not made merely of wood, steel, and feather, but also light itself. A furious channeled pulsation invigorating every particle of the projectile with energy. Heat saw it glow and smolder, until demon eyes burned to look up at it. Momentum gave it air-snapping speed that seared a scarring line across its tracery through the sky and scattered dust-grain shrapnel along its trajectory. Force stretched its structure, causing energy to crash forward and through, end to end.

  When the arrow struck it neither embedded nor deflected. It pierced. Then it burst.

  A yellow streak, red-shifted in the air, slashed through the ghoul's head and then blew it apart, leaving behind nothing but a rain of pulpy mist.

  Liao exhaled. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. His nerves tingled and stung as the feedback of this attack, never fully invoked before, not even in practice, rebounded through his flesh.

  “Not bad,” Sayaana's remnant voice offered two scant words of praise before she pulled him back to the needs of the moment. “But try that again and you'll collapse. Just shoot!”

  Another arrow. A second ghoul. This one approached from the west.

  Somehow, this time it was easy. The teachings of ancient manuals, the corrections by disciples in the archery hall, Sayaana's masterful guidance; all these things melded together to unleash smooth, repeated movements guided by the least infusion of qi and dedicated to the objective given by his beautiful and brave senior.

  Not victory, no, that was not the need this day. Merely delay, the restriction of the ghouls to prevent flanking maneuvers. Just enough to allow Su Yi to fight her battle unhindered. For this field, this moment, that was enough.

  A task he was equal to.

  Thirty-five arrows shot. Sixteen ghouls driven to the ground. Only the first truly slain, but though the remaining demons crawled and thrashed they would play no part in this fight. With his last arrow in hand, Liao dared to turn his aim to the true threat before him.

  The giant's form was no less towering and terrifying than before.

  Shaded as if ocher and obsidian were mashed together and then dipped in a pool of blood, the horned demon dripped black ichor from two dozen wounds. Puddles made from sloughed skin and sliced muscle churned the mud amid the craters formed by its relentless pummeling strikes. Collapsed trench works lay in its wake and gouges scourged by the absurd horns laced the ground. Wounded, furious, and pained, its terrible plague-born strength remained undiminished.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It would not stop until rent asunder.

  Su Yi stood before the monster unharmed. She had not been struck, though her armor bore slight streaks from the flying impact of wood splinters and stone shards that had blasted past. Never stopping, she danced before the monster as it whirled its arms in looping circular attack patterns. Pillar-like limbs swung back and forth, spinning and warding, preventing the shining spear from reaching past to strike the vitals.

  If the cultivator danced back into the space needed for a piercing strike through that wall of flesh and bone, the giant, driven by bestial cunning and endless hunger, charged forward. The hulking form heedlessly crashed through palisades and easily surmounted ditches. Any obstacle Su Yi might have utilized was thereby rendered utterly useless.

  Nor did she dare any strike that would leave her vulnerable in the aftermath, not with the ghouls swarming about.

  Glimpsing this balance, Liao came to understand the full measure of the horde's deadly power for the first time. One against one, Su Yi would eventually triumph. Even if it took one thousand cuts, she would ultimately bleed the giant out, always one step ahead of the monster.

  The surrounding demons made this impossible. Time and space compressed against her through the means of red flesh and left her combat potential terribly constrained. The mindless mass restrained her simply by existing, a burden caused by shear quantity.

  At the same time, Liao realized that he could, by opening a gap, flip the scale. One single arrow remained. The mass of downed ghouls bought a moment to act.

  He did so.

  A simple shot, nothing complicated, launched from the bow and aimed at the giant's right eye. Though protected by the heavy brows anchoring the curving horns, the orb was swollen by the immense bulk of the monster to almost the size of a dinner plate. An easy target for an archer with qi pulsing through his veins.

  The giant's oversize orb took in this move, and it deflected the barb dispatched by the little human before it by the simple means of shaking its head. The arrow clattered uselessly against the base of the right horn and failed to penetrate any more than it would have a stone wall. The steel broadhead knocked loose a finger-sized chunk of hardened keratin, but no more. In the flow of a great battle it would have passed totally unnoticed.

  But, for the interval of a single step, just long enough to bend its neck, the giant stopped moving forward.

  And one step was more than sufficient space for Su Yi.

  She pushed her right foot back to anchor her body, gathered strength across bone and sinew, and leveled the spear for and upward rising lunge at the same instant as qi burst out from every speck of surface across her small form. The motion that followed unfolded too fast for Liao to follow, even with his cultivator's enhanced senses. He could only feel it, the surge of power, concentrated over and over to a single point as the disciple released her strike. “Nine Spheres Arsenal Spear Arts; First Form: Impact Thrust.”

  Spear leading, she launched her body upwards in an arc that would have brushed treetops had there been any at hand. At the apex of her flight, she channeled her body through the motions of the Stellar Flash Steps to reorient completely in midair and pushed off the sky itself to descend with double the power and speed. Coiled energy, wrapped around her long spear, channeled every bit of gathered momentum down the weapon to the singular point of contact.

  The demon tried to block, but its massive form was too slow. It could not raise a great arm high enough in time.

  Su Yi slammed down, and the tip of her spear pierced the giant's shoulder just behind the collarbone. There, her technique detonated. Every last newton of force, physical and qi-derived in tandem, transferred from the golden spearhead to the demon's flesh.

  All aspects of her motion completely ceased, all ongoing forces nullified. She was left, for the briefest of instants, suspended in the air.

  Energy, channeled successfully, passed through flesh and then found its own way free. Light, sound, heat, pressure and other exotic forms of discharge all exerted themselves against demon tissue from within. More power, far more, than any living form, no matter how large or strong, could ever possibly withstand.

  The left arm of the giant blew clean off. Its twisted flesh rolled across the bloodstained earth, a mangled ruin. Black ruin poured out of the creatures neck and head from a thousand cavities. It was already dead, but the immense body slowly crumpled to the ground as veins emptied their contents to drench the soil and grass beneath. It slammed down horns first, giving no final cry, and settled into a motionless lump.

  Su Yi rolled free of the giant's death throes covered in gore but unharmed. A flick of her spear, enough to knock loose the demon's blood, was all the time she spared for sentiment. “I'll kill the ghouls,” she ordered. “Hide yourself now, this pause won't last.”

  These calm commands, directed by a battle goddess descended, snapped Liao free of post-combat shock. With a lurch, he stumbled forward and then, gathering his body behind his thoughts, broke into a run. Following the sign of the single slender flag used to mark the hidden hatch door that was their target, he made his final push.

  Even as he came upon the buried access point and wrenched it free of dirt and sod, the disciple darted about behind him. The ghouls he'd pinned were slaughtered in seconds, and others that began to converge lasted little longer. All perished in silence, unable to resist this relentless reaping.

  After opening the hatch Liao pulled out the marker flag and dragged with him the netting used to conceal this buried door. He took the bright blue symbol with him down below, but tossed the mat so it would land atop the gap as he pulled the hatch closed above his head. Dropping into darkness, he passed into the chamber below.

  Not far, the first platform was barely a meter below the surface, not enough room for him to stand. A second shaft, invisible from the point of the first opening, yawned in the darkness and offered passage further down.

  Before taking that step, he drew on his lungs and called out to Su Yi. “I'm in!” Even barely beneath the surface the thick soil swallow up most of the sound. “Go!”

  She did not shout back. The sharp-edged footfalls characteristic of the Stellar Flash Steps were the only sign that she had managed to retreat alive. That and the dissipation of her qi signature from the range of Liao's senses.

  “She's a professional, that one,” Sayaana's voice whispered through his skull. “I do hope she survives.”

  Liao merely grunted, unwilling to express how much that mattered to him as well. He focused instead on descending a series of three further ladders and platforms in order to reach the tiny black space where he was to wait and watch. He was over twenty meters below the surface, the very limit of his qi sense with such thick earth above. The demon qi, however, remained present everywhere. Detecting enemy cultivators would not be difficult.

  The dark space was almost totally empty, though someone had kindly supplied a cushion. Seated, Liao stared at the pipe lodged into the wall, and the taught string it contained. That signal, a transmission engineered to work without any use of qi, made this whole half-burial worthwhile.

  He did not intend to miss the mark.

  Laying out his supplies, he settled in to wait. Demon qi seethed all around him, but compared to Uzay's flames, it was nothing, easily submerged beneath the mountainous importance of the duty laid upon him now.

  When the moment came, he intended to be ready.