At the very front of the circular chamber, Oswin had a small opening made beside the journeyman array experts working with him. It was narrow by design, just enough to feed the reinforced wooden rods out through the front of the structure while keeping the rest of the chamber sealed tight.
Not even a thread of the ghost fog was allowed inside. From where he sat within the spirit gathering array, Oswin could still guide the angle of every rod, adjusting their direction as the armored corridor was pushed forward piece by piece.
While that feverish work began below, the fighting along the city's eight-direction walls only grew worse.
The Flesh Titans were relentless. Worse, they were not the witless monsters many had hoped them to be. These things were cultivators in their own right, only stripped of proper techniques and skinned down to raw muscle and qi.
Beyond that, the difference was not as great as men would have liked.
Radimir's side took the harshest punishment.
The Flesh Titans had already studied the movement along his stretch of wall and changed tactics. Soon, stones, compacted earth, and broken rock came hurtling through the air in a ceaseless barrage.
None of it came slowly. Every projectile screamed in at terrifying speed, each throw fast enough to smash bone and splinter battlements, and the creatures hurled them in numbers that left no room to breathe.
Even that was not the worst of it.
The Flesh Titans over thirty meters tall began seizing the smaller ones, those over five meters in height, and hurling them against the base of the city wall. One after another, they piled up, clawing and heaving over each other, building a grotesque pyramid of flesh and force meant to scale the stone.
"We need support. Right now. Jenkii, come back!" Radimir roared, his voice driven out with qi so it could cut through the chaos.
Jenkii heard him and at once gave up the pursuit of the largest Flesh Titan she had been driving off. But the creature had not fled in panic. It had only widened the distance to make room.
The moment Jenkii turned away, it circled back, scooped up a mass of earth weighing several tons, and hurled it toward the opposite side of Radimir's position.
It wanted a foothold of its own.
Jenkii ran hard for Radimir's section of the wall, and when she got there, she finally saw what he had been shouting about.
The Flesh Titans had already built a siege ramp more than fifty meters high, more than halfway up the wall.
In Jenkii's hand was a pill Fay had given her earlier, a qi recovery pill.
She swallowed it at once. Warmth surged through her meridians almost instantly, and the hollowed drag in her body eased until her reserves swelled back to nearly ninety percent.
"Cover her. Move," Radimir barked.
Barriers of earth and ice sprang up around Jenkii in quick succession. The others thought she meant to pause, to recover a breath and gather herself before charging again.
She did not. The lotus mark flared on her forehead.
Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts.
Jenkii hurled herself at the base of the pyramid and brought her weapon crashing down on one of the Flesh Titans anchoring the whole formation.
The opening strike barely drew blood. Instead, a harsh clang rang out across the wall, metal against something tougher than flesh had any right to be.
These creatures were not built like men. Their skinless bodies looked raw, but their exposed flesh had the density of tempered steel.
She struck again. And again. Ten blows in, the flesh had begun to cave under the repeated impact.
It twitched and writhed even as it broke, the creature's regenerative force already trying to knit the damage shut.
Jenkii did not slow. By the thirtieth strike, she had battered the flesh apart enough to expose bone.
By the fiftieth lotus-petal blow, she was no longer breaking the thing down in chunks. She was reducing it limb by limb, smashing through its frame until the massive body lost all shape and collapsed into a ruined heap.
Then she drew in a breath.
What clung to the corpse was not death qi, but ghost qi tangled with the basic five elements qi.
The lotus on her forehead pulsed and drank both, taking in the scattered energies and feeding them back into her body.
That let her turn at once for another target without having to spend fifty more strikes grinding the first one into true uselessness.
The titan wall began to fail.
After the third Flesh Titan at the base was brought down without offering much resistance, the larger creatures finally showed a glimmer of instinct and broke.
They ran, not in panic exactly, but with the sharp selfishness of creatures that understood when a position had turned costly.
Jenkii did not waste the opening. She feigned pursuit of one of the retreating titans, driving after it with enough fury to sell the chase, then suddenly kicked off and sprang upward.
Her real target had never changed. It was the thirty-meter Flesh Titan in the rear, the one that had been hurling rocks and smaller titans like a piece of living artillery.
The creature reacted fast. Its battle awareness was unnervingly high.
The moment it sensed her shift, it snatched up a passing Flesh Titan barely eight meters tall and swung the smaller creature into her path like a shield made of meat and bone.
Jenkii cursed inwardly.
They were two separate enemies. That meant Blooming Lotus Consecutive Arts would not let her carry the momentum straight through to the larger one.
She had to finish what had been placed in front of her first. That was one of the art's ugliest weaknesses. Once it locked onto a target, it demanded completion before release.
So she struck. The smaller titan howled and flailed in her path, but it could not escape the chain of blows once the lotus rhythm took hold.
One strike led to the next, each hit dragging her deeper into the sequence. After eleven exchanges, the eight-meter creature had been beaten into a wet ruin in the larger titan's hand.
Jenkii drew in the scattered energy at once. That brief pause was enough.
By the time she lifted her head, the thirty-meter Flesh Titan was already retreating at full speed, choosing distance over pride, clearly unwilling to spend another moment testing itself against her.
"Hey, come back here, coward," Jenkii scowled.
But the thirty-meter Flesh Titan did not so much as glance back. It only fled harder, choosing distance over pride. Jenkii clicked her tongue and turned away, heading back toward the stretch of wall she was meant to hold.
Not far from her, Fay was already preparing something of her own.
Since their master had told them to be creative, Fay had taken that lesson to heart.
Fire gathered around her whip in coiling streams, then began to compress and lengthen, shaped again and again until it resembled a spear of flame rather than a lash.
Her target was the hundred-meter Flesh Titan in the distance, the one that had kept hurling great masses of dirt and stone toward her side of the wall.
Each impact struck the stone in a booming rhythm that made the battlements tremble underfoot. Still, Fay did not flinch.
She fed more and more flame into the shape, tightening it, condensing it, until she felt nearly ninety-five percent of her qi drain into the spear.
Then she launched it with a violent crack of her whip. The fire tore through the air with blistering speed.
For the first time, the giant reacted.
Its broken face split into something like a smirk. Then it dragged in a vast breath. Its already monstrous body swelled, ballooning to an absurd size as its chest and gut expanded grotesquely.
A moment later, it exhaled. A freezing blast roared out.
The fire spear met it head-on. At once, the flames began to stiffen, slow, and cling under the pressure of that impossible cold.
Breath by breath, the spear lost its hunger. Five breaths later, what should have been a killing strike dropped into the dirt with a hard clink, a spear of underworld fire entombed in jagged ice.
Fay felt horror seize her stomach.
She had made a fatal assumption. The creature's eye sockets were empty, its face ruined, and she had thought that meant blindness. She had believed it relied on touch, on instinct, on raw awareness alone.
Big mistake. A Flesh Titan did not need an eye where an eye ought to be.
If one looked closely enough, smaller eyes could already be seen budding elsewhere across its body, wet and half-formed, like organs preparing themselves for use.
That mangled face had never been true weakness. The creature had scraped and ruined it on purpose, wearing injury like bait, letting itself appear crippled and pitiful so enemies would think less of it and come closer.
Fay did not know all of that yet. She only knew, with sick certainty, that she had underestimated the behemoth. She swallowed a qi pill at once.
Down below the wall, Jenkii had already begun tearing into the soil with axe and qi, likely thinking the giant had finally ceased its bombardment.
Then Fay saw the truth. The titan had not stopped. Her eyes widened, and she pushed her movement technique to the limit.
"Jenkii, dodge!" she roared.
