“Three hundred dead along the far arm, and reinforcements from our sister city have yet to arrive. We’re looking at potential breaches in sectors six, five, and three, all of them in the next twenty minutes maximum.”
Garrison Commander Jun Jie snarls, his demeanor a long way from his usual calm. The halo of eye-like sigils surrounding him in a crown are whirling at maximum speed, some of them scraping against each other as they stutter-skip towards distant sights, trying to tell him everything he needs to know. And there is so much he needs to know.
He wipes a drop of blood from his face, not bothering to waste the Qi needed to heal so small a concern. He has more important things to worry about, like the death of all in his command.
“Redouble the calls for aid. I don’t know what’s happening, but we should not be alone now, not with the teleportation arrays-”
“The teleportation arrays are broken, my lord,” one of his aides dares to interrupt. “All but the individual-sized ones. There’s nothing left to receive major reinforcements through. The… the report came in nearly an hour past.”
“Right. Right, so it did. Redouble the calls anyways, we are not so far from civilization that our fellows should leave us so bereft of aid. Send out runners if you have to, damnit, whoever we can spare. The operators, where are they?”
“All operators above rank one are dealing with the the incursion into the main walls. All rank one operators themselves have been tasked with mass deployment to the front to hold the line.We’ve currently got six or seven times the standard limits on War Daemons out in the field, and it’s starting to become… messy.”
“Keep deploying. Where are my Captains?”
“We have two platoons dead already, both under the direction of Pan Bo, but his whereabouts are unknown. Captains Lai Min and Zhou Xun are both engaged on the front, but with the Divine Beast continuing to tear apart the backline-”
“What about our Rank Two and Three operators?”
“Rank Two Operator Wai Ji and Rank Three Operator Quan Fang are both fully committed to the backline, but Rank Two operator Zhou Bai is currently comatose.”
“...that’s all we have left?”
“Yes, honored one.”
“Where’s the Colonel?”
“Unknown, sir. We lost contact with his detachment on the front line, but he’s been operating for seven days straight. His life anchor remains but it’s flickering, sir.”
“How goes the evacuation?”
“Slow. honored one. Without the mass teleportation arrays-”
“I understand. …Very well. Join the evacuation. Ensure as many Formation realm cultivators and non-essential personnel make it out as possible.”
“But- sir! What about you?”
Garrison Commander Jun Jie, who has served at his post for nearly a hundred years, who has never once failed to repel an enemy from the borders of the fortress to which he has been assigned… smiles. For the first time in a long time. Freely and lightly.
“I suppose I shall perform my role, as gifted to me by the Emperor’s own will. Now go.”
He does not allow for dissent. He does not open the floor for discussion. The Qi of a Nascent Soul cultivator at the peak of his realm flares out like the light of a roaring flame. A world of searching eyes and perfect order, embraced by the Dao of Control and a hint of others, less deeply understood, washes over his surroundings. His subordinates move as if along rails, mechanized into motion out the door and towards the evacuation points.
[Domain Of Orderly Sights] echoes across what’s left of the command platform. Torn open, ripped apart by an explosive impact, flames both natural and not blaze across what were once desks, consoles, walls- and living beings.
Within his Domain, his Nascent Soul stirs.
Even now, so close to the peak, he has yet to finish its creation. A hundred years since he was deployed to this fortress, and oh how it has grown- but never to completion. Never to perfect reflection of who he is. Perhaps if he were stronger…
No. If he were stronger, they would assign him someplace else. Make him a colonel, perhaps. Someone else would get it wrong.
Within the [Domain Of Orderly Sights], his true self stirs. The avatar of his ontology rises up from within his Qi, deep in his Core, reaching out to the world.
It grabs him, connecting to his limbs, organizing his thoughts, arranging him as a puppet to himself. It clicks his very being into place, and tells him precisely what he knows he must do.
In the hands of the [Precise Puppeteer of Clay], he knows what he is, and who he is. He is a soldier. He is a commander. His role is to stand at the Wall, and kill all that tries to cross it.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He moves, and the world blurs before him. Perfect, precise changes make every movement economical, useful, and in his Domain, spanning several fields in size, there is nothing that escapes his gaze. He is no colonel, no warrior dedicated to true battle on the front lines, but then, he has nothing left to command. And his role is not to aid the evacuation- it is to kill the enemy. To always and forever hold the Wall.
He lands atop it, and lets the sight of war wash over him.
Behind him, the fortifications rise. Beyond the burning tower and the mountain-sized cityscape that is now half-hollowed, full of the screaming of the dying and of those still fighting, the landscape has been made into a vision of perfect defense. A towering maze of trenches-turned-towers, a labyrinth of choke points, walls, tunnels, and defensive arrays. He looks on in pride at what has been made of the world he stands upon, what lengths they will go to to secure the homeland of the Empire.
He looks ahead, and sees the opposite.
The ground is flat. Out so far that only distant peaks hold any shape at all, the world has been made flat. To a cultivator’s eyes, the horizon is miles further than a mortal’s, but even beneath Jun Jie’s gaze, all is a perfectly squared and motionless terrain, bereft of natural life, of hills, or of valleys. No rivers or mountains, no canyons or gorges, no lakes or seas- just flat, carved down through bedrock a few hundred feet deep.
And all along that plain, there is a Wall.
It stands five hundred feet high over the ground. The world, razed flat and smooth so that none may approach without first being seen, ends at their Wall, at the behemoth construct of perfect steel and of flawless, shining marble. At its base, beneath the curved ramparts, there are ten thousand-thousand mouths, bunker doors forever open and forever spewing mindless hordes of bio-constructs into the fray. Cannons scream out in the Dao of the Gun as their lead and arcane arrays and flames and lightning burn the world in waves, as automated gunfire tears the world into thunder and gunsmoke, as bio-engineered soldiers are born and killed and reborn against the endless foe. Arrays flash as sappers divert their Qi into forming spikes, barriers, razor wire, caltrops, explosives and more out of the terrain, making a mulched mess of blood and bodies down at the base of the wall, troughs feeding the remains down into the dungeons of each and every fortress.
And oh, are there remains.
The flatland has been blessed by the bodies of the dead and the dying. Spirit beasts, insectile and in hordes, mammalian and in herds, avian and in flocks, and stranger still beside all lie dead alongside soldiers of every race, color and creed, their bodies feasted on by battlefield beasts that grow fat and powerful- until they too are found by the detachments sent out amongst the mountains of the dead, and are put down. Far along the northern curve of the wall, almost a day’s journey away, Jun Jie’s many eyes see a fresh horde of the never-dead crashing high against the Wall, climbing over and fusing their bodies together as some beast or rebel with necromantic techniques wields an undying army against the holy lands of the Empire. They are stitched together by Qi and wraiths, death feeding upon death, bashing themselves against the Wall, and destroyed by cannons, arrays and brave cultivators. To his southern side, he sees the same beast tide crashing against his own wall reflected on another fortress- but their tide holds some sort of aquatic beast, a Spirit of water that has become an oozing, acid sea spanning miles, trying to eat its way through the Wall directly. Spirit beasts swim within it and throw themselves in schools and packs and murders at the brave defenders who kill, and kill, and kill, and die, and he sees a Divine Beast, something made entirely of flowing softness and reaching, grasping legs, flowing like a color through a sunrise through the Spirit.
There have been worse days. Worse beast tides, worse enemy assaults, worse powers and unique combinations which have tried to scale or break the Wall. Jun Jie himself has seen worse. Back in his third decade, he faced a beast with seven furry tails and a humanoid face, and by the time it arrived, its Qi and techniques had driven no less than half his city, numbering in the tens of thousands, entirely mad or catatonic. In his seventh decade, he sent forces to relieve Fortress City #190, a few north of his own post, and the two men out of seven-thousand he sent which returned spoke of a thing of stone and saliva and carnal fluids, and which made one fall into it as if the ground itself had moved from beneath you.
But then… that damn Tribulation.
A pillar from the heavens, a concentrated instant of the attention of the Gods. “To cultivate is to rebel against the Heavens” is a phrase that many say, but few experience, especially in the Empire’s age. A column of air so superheated and charged that it ignites like a laser, that it spits out lightning hot enough to evaporate metal, focused on a single being which it allows to survive- long enough to be judged.
The Heavens wish for all those who seek to embody or surpass them to die, it is said. They impose Dao upon the world, but make the experience of it to a natural-born mortal cruel. They gift hunger and pain to existence just as they do life.
Just as they have done to his home.
So be it. The fortress is broken. There are miles of fortifications that the beasts will have to get through before they reach the third ring, and there’s no way that reinforcements won’t arrive in that time. This wave will be pushed back. The tide will be resisted yet again.
And if he must pay with his life to ensure the time needed for that to happen, so be it.
[Domain Of Orderly Sights] radiates from him, the world bowing to his ontology as he manifest an area of shifting clay, shaped into right-angled cubes, and floating eyes, and [Precise Puppeteer of Clay] wields his body like an instrument. His sword, untouched by blood in nearly fifty years, carves its way through a snake made of tongues made of thorns, severs into pieces a beetle made of glass and hateful dreams, kills a song made of hammers and shells. He sees a trio of War Daemons, metallic and chitinous bodies wrapped around each other in a parody of an embrace, consume each other, forming a paradox that turns the world around them to glass and void, and then collapsing into metal and chitin again. He sees his Captains, bloodied and desperate, wielding domains which alter all of reality into new forms with new rules.
He sees what’s left of his Colonel, worn by something with too many chittering faces and too many glistening spines, and the [Precise Puppeteer of Clay] sacrifices his arm, his legs, and one eye to put him to rest.
He dies watching a orb of wings, with seven heads like quicksilver heron-beaks, pluck out a beating, squirming Heart from within his fortress city, cracked open like an egg.
And before they too are gone, among ever so many sights, [Precise Puppeteer of Clay] and its [Domain Of Orderly Sights] see a dog-sized thing of impossible weight and depth, skittering by on six legs, nearly invisible.
And then that, too, is gone, out into the fourth ring.
And everything is gone.