Brock strode beside Serena, his aura was unleashed and the violence that always lingered beneath the surface no longer being concealed. Serena moved with the jerky motions that showed she was only not blazing forward at a sprint because she was holding herself back. The aura of the dragon hovered over her like a threat and promise both. Andrea walked behind, her spear gripped lightly as if ready to thrust at any moment, yet her face was serene as a pool of still water. William strode, hand on his sword, his caldron hovering behind him in the air, born on the chi that pooled about the champions as the approached the inner gates.

“Open the gates.” Brock ordered coldly.

“Your pardon heroes, but the Grand Master has ordered the gates closed for our security. The Outer Disciples have been told to hold the outer gates to the last man, you need not concern yourself.” The Gate Captain said, bowing and smiling his demurral.

Serena growled and the fire chi gathered about her, filling the spirit form of a hovering dragon that coiled behind her, a living spirit of destruction only waiting to be unleashed. A ball of fire grew in her hands, and as her fingers danced in strange patterns, the ball began to shift colours from scarlet, through golden, to a harsh blue white that seared the eyes and made his body quake with fear.

Brock’s voice came cold and hard as a sword sliding from its sheath. “Open the gates, while you still have them. We will not cower behind them when the demons come. If you don’t open them fast enough, you won’t have them to cower behind.”

The heroes laughed at the inner disciples as they gates opened, and they strode into the outer sect, where the sick scent of fear and despair hung like smoke over a burned building. As they passed the buildings, the outer sect disciples and servants whispered “The Heroes!” and word of their coming spread before them like the rumble of an oncoming storm. Marching to the main gates, they strode to the gatehouse and William set up his cauldron, the other heroes spacing themselves along the line of the battlements.

The Outer disciples, their cultivation and physical power no match for the Inner disciples hiding behind the heavily enchanted walls of the inner sect, gripped their weapons with trembling hands, and hid behind walls that had few to no enchantments or defensive formations. They knew they had been left to hold the defenses until death, or morning, whichever came first. They each and every one expected sunset had been their last sight of the sun, even as they prayed with every fiber of their being that it would be their sect brothers and sisters, not them, who died, and that somehow, some way, death would be thankful for the offerings it received before it got to them. There was no thought of victory, no hope of resistance. Then the Heroes came.

“Why are you here, sir Hero.” A sergeant asked, as William set his cauldron alight, and began to make fog that spread over the walls, and seemed to drain the fear away as it passed them.

“We are heroes. If we don’t stand with you, it is because we stand in front of you.” William said, his scholar’s voice making that proclamation not a boast or brag, but a teacher’s gentle instruction in law.

“You can’t be lost here. If you were lost, then what hope do we have against the demons?” The sect Adept clutching a sheaf of disposable drawn talisman in trembling hands protested.

Andrea slammed her spear into the ground, and let the stone of the battlements ring in tune, as she let air chi carry her voice like a trumpet to all who manned the walls.

“The army broke because it faced the demon’s chi alone. The powerful wasted their time hurling spells, or cutting down individual beasts like this was a dueling ground, and left the rest of the army to face a power they could not resist. Now we are here. Not behind your ranks, but among them. When the demons send their chi against you, we will sweep it aside. When they come against you with fang and claw, with sword and spear, will you fear to meet them blade to blade?”

The Adept still trembled, but the soldiers around him began to shout back, “No!”

Serena let her killing intent wash over them, the rage and hunger of the dragon was rich in fire chi as it washed over them in challenge. “I will not retreat from this wall, if a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand come against me. Will you leave me to face it alone?”

The soldiers on the wall had felt a little better as the chi filled fog, strong with water chi had leached the magical fear of the demonic chi from them, but now the dragon’s rage, the dragon’s fire called to the fire within their own warrior’s heart, and this time they roared back in a voice born of a thousand throats, and filled with the chi of angry cultivators “NO!”

Demon Sui had not expected the sect to fall in one night. If he had succeeded in implanting his demons in the ten strongest heroes as he had planned, then tonight he would be storming the Inner sect and feeding the rest of the hundred heroes to his horde. No matter that he lost half of them, with the heroes slain, or better yet corrupted, before they came into their power, the rest of the world would fall without issue. Those strong enough to oppose him now, ignored him as they cultivated in private, or hid behind their walls letting their lesser do the fighting. By the time they recognized his threat, they would be alone against a horde that had feasted on the blood of champions until it could threaten even the strongest earth bound cultivator.

No immortals would bother lowering themselves to save the mortal realm. Who ascends to immortality only to return to risk eternity for mere peasants and disciples?

Tonight, he would send his best, his Oni, the great male oger magi, able to match the cultivation of human adepts, for nothing more would be wasted on the outer walls. He would send his fear demons, physically weak, but spirtual poison. The walls were the worst place to face them, for they could be just within range to cast their soul attacking fear, but beyond striking range of sword and spear. Concealed within the Oni illusions, and not moving, they would be hard to find inside the horde. The goblins would storm the walls, corrupted forest spirits controlled by the Oni and lesser demons, they would throw themselves upon the defenders, soaking up arrows and spears to close to claw and fang range, their own darts and blades poisoned so that the merest scratch brought screaming death to anyone below body like iron, and would render even body like stone level cultivators weak to other attacks.

He would take the outer walls, that was a given. While the Masters, the high level adepts and strongest cultivators of every craft hid behind the walls of the inner sect, the roots of the sect would be harvested by Demon Sui this night. The Outer-sect would fall. Most would be tomorrow if the fools were weak enough to keep behind their walls during the day, and leave the bodies for him to harvest tomorrow.

Tonight, tonight the war was won. Fifty thousand men had fought against him, between thirty and forty thousand fell dead upon the field. Dead and unshriven. No rites were performed, no burial, no purification. Their power lay within them, their cultivation fading as their soul had been cut free but it was not yet gone. Tonight, with the vampiric talismen, they could be harvested by the master vampires and turned into lesser vampires if their spines were still intact and their limbs at least attached.

His ghouls would feast on the rest, growing in strength, taking the power of the chi turned into precious life filled mana within the bodies, and corrupting it with their own demonic essence to allow them to advance. His lesser ghouls would feast enough to become full ghouls, his full ghouls would grow stronger, the strong ones advancing into masters able to control a full pack.

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Of the forty thousand of the dead that fell, at least ten thousand would rise this night as his new troops. It would have been more, but the master vampires left at Fort Defiance, and the two forces sent after them had not returned. Demon Sui feared the Earth Dragon –iaolongma may have intervened. He had ordered his subordinates to only prey on the humans, to avoid the spiritual beasts in her domain, as he could not afford to face the wrath of the Earth Dragon and the armies of the human cultivators at the same time.

She would fall to his minions in time, but had stood aside from the humans when they turned away from her path. If the fools angered her, the best thing for him was to deny them, to not claim them as his, and thus distance himself from her wrath. Still, the loss of those masters and their newly created vampires meant that so many of the dead would not be harvested by dawn, and be lost.

He could have raised twice as many if he had more masters, but the ten thousand this night, and perhaps as many tomorrow night when the outer sect fell, and he would have enough to soak up the losses required to bring down the lesser masters and inner sect adepts. The Grand Master would flee, as would the greatest of the masters, leaving their disciples and the nascent heroes to die buying time. What was walking the path of the immortal cultivator if not a retreat from death? What was the purpose of the lesser but to empower the rise of the greater? What were every lesser being to those would ascend the steps to true immortality but tools and resources to be used or expended as needed?

No. Demon Sui knew the outer sect would fall tonight, the inner tomorrow, and the conjured hundred heroes would be captured or killed, the former corrupted into true demons, the latter corrupted into lesser but still useful undead. A hundred years of planning came to fruition this night. There would be a hundred battles still to come, but tonight the war was won.

He heard shouting from the walls above, and listened with the hearing of his kind and the precision of a Yin stage cultivator, eager to drink in the wails of despair, and the weeping of the broken. What he heard instead were the roars of a roused dragon, the shouts of warriors ready to fight to the last drop of blood, ready to write their names in pain and glory upon the roles of their sacred ancestors.

“What madness is this?” He hissed, and cast his domain wide, reaching through all of his bound undead until his will lapped upon the walls of the Outer Sect, and were repelled.

The fog, burned. Water chi filled the air, and salt rings of water and earth chi took the fire and demonic chi and bled it from the air. His great army destroying fear working which should have made the defenders no more than straw targets for his troops to demonstrate their ferocity upon, was dissolving in the mists rolling off the walls like a sugar crystal dropped into morning tea.

Demon Sui snarled, the painless destruction of the Imperial Army had made him think his conquest would be nearly free, and now the outer sect would bleed him. Fine. He would spend the troops this night to take the Outer Sect in one blow. If the fools had dared to spend their true cultivators on the outer walls where there were not centuries worth of imbuements and formations built into every stone, where the elements themselves had not bound the least pebble into the strength of enchanted iron, then he would break both their numbers, and their power at the outer wall.

He could afford the cost. The reason he fought this night was to buy time for his undead to harvest yesterdays bounty of cultivator dead. No matter how many he lost tonight, tomorrow night he would be twice as strong, and with the dead of tonght’s victory? Even stronger!

Meanwhile, I was demonstrating why pack drill is indeed relevant to success in any era, because if you don’t have permanent marks from overloaded packs and serious joint issues, were you even in the army?

The great thing about being a body cultivator is that self abuse becomes possible to a degree that belongs in my old world’s cartoons and comic books, and actually has real world benefits. I was humping a pack that contained two times my own three hundred pounds of salt, and Astrella, who was both somewhat larger and to an embarassing degree, much better balanced that I was, had a pack half again as large.

Our happy dual cultivation couple was sporting a pack carrying about three hundred pounds apiece, while the common soldiers and the poor wee single corporal were carrying a modest two hundred pounds of salt.

You may ask yourself, why are we marching through the night carrying over a ton of salt, when we are supposed to be vampire hunting? The answer of course is bees.

What have bees to do with vampire hunting? Well, that should be obvious. Bees are very hard to hunt in the daytime because they could be anywhere, flying anywhere they find something to feed on, but they must return to the nest at night. Now the nest, well, that is rather larger than a bee, and it is unable to move. Finding the nest is the easiest thing in the world. Now approaching the nest when it is full of bees is rather dangerous, bees being bees.

Your average vampire is in many ways a bee written large and somewhat gothic. Think of the vampire as combining the objectionable aspects of both wasp and mosquito and you have essentially defined the critical parts of vampire ecology from the hunter’s point of view.

You simply can’t take a platoon of twenty men and expect to approach a hive of bees and not get stung. You cannot simply disturb a nest of vampires with twenty men and not get eaten. If you go inside when they are sleeping, it is dark enough inside for them to wake.

Vampires are like bees written large and gothic in more than one respect; they are bound to return to their nest, dangerous to approach in their nest, but while bees are not able to function well outside the nest in the dark and cold, they don’t actually die from it.

Vampires do.

Only an idiot approaches a mountain that overflows with the energy of the undead, that has been sanctified to darkness and corruption, that has been made the focus of demonic energies of corruption and decay that would twist any normal living thing or disembodied elemental spirit into a nightmare of darkness and evil.

Luckily, I am such an idiot, and I brought friends!

You see, the only safe time to actually approach a bee’s nest in when the bees are busy elsewhere. The only safe time to assault a vampire’s nest at night is when the vampires are busy elsewhere, like when they are busy harvesting forty thousand dead soldiers to raise legions of shiny new undead to destroy the world and cut off the roots of the very tree of heaven itself.

Safe in this case being a military term. Military safe is like civilian suicidal, but with an expectation that anyone who actually dies is not performing up to acceptable standard and will receive a very stern note in their yearly assessment.

Most of the thousand plus vampires were out doing vampiry things. Most of the demons were out doing demon things. None of the guards were really believing anyone would be stupid enough to approach, let alone attack, the great shiny mountain of evil in the dark of a night that already screamed on the very winds with the sounds of thousands of souls in torment, and the bitter iron taste of newly shed blood.

I had twenty newbies, two actual prodigies who were one demon away from being true demon hunters, a seven foot ogress who thought my plan was stupid but decided I couldn’t be left unsupervised or I might actually die on her, and myself against whatever it is an actual Demon Lord left at home when he went away to crush the strongest sect in the Empire.

What could go wrong? How about we find out?