Itinay thrust her sword with a flick of the wrist and twist of the arm. Qi, released from the burning heart of her dantian, flashed down the perfectly aligned channels of her immortal body and wrapped in spiral formulation around the pale blue steel of the straight blade. Released in time with her motion, this energy burst outward, a bar of manifest power; sharp as a sword cut and fast as light. Extraordinary power and will, driven by centuries of refined study and profound grasp of the dao, propelled the attack forward with grim force.

Ten meters distant, the blue light impacted against its first target and removed a head from its supporting shoulders.

The newly dead thing resembled a human, in gross form. A person seen from far away, or perhaps abstracted in petroglyph representation. Any closer examination, whether through physical senses or the all important extension of awareness that came from the ability to sense qi – a far greater perceptive capacity than sight or hearing to one of Itinay's cultivation – revealed that all similarity ended there.

Once, the foe fallen before her had been human. It had perished as something immeasurably worse.

Red skin, thickened to leathery consistency and pulled so tight that every muscle and bone stood out beneath it on a body wholly devoid of fat, formed the surface. A starving man dipped in crimson wax at the moment of expiration. Other aspects of the transformation told at a far deeper level than surface color.

Though it wore no clothes, this mattered not at all. The genitals had fallen away completely, eliminated alongside every last strand of hair. Elsewhere new features grew and metamorphosed from the old. Horns and spines erupted from the skull and shoulder blades. Foot and hand bones elongated and thickened, terrible tearing claws took the place of nails. The jawbones bent and distended, revealed a wide, cheek-less mouth without teeth. Plates of razor sharp bone erupted from the gums instead.

A demon, the size of a large man. Those who fought these monsters called them ghouls, an application lamentable in the frightful accuracy it possessed.

The blast of sword-formed qi took the head from the first ghoul and barely slowed. Continuing on, it angled downward slightly and pierced the neck of a second. Then it cored the chest of a third, fourth, and fifth. Five more demons were ripped through the torso before the bolt of power dipped too low to deliver killing strikes to central mass. It clipped ten more, carving away thighs, knees, and one left foot before striking the earth and finally dissipating.

Nine in one strike. Not enough, not nearly enough. Itinay pivoted, barely shifting her stance at all, and swung her sword again. This time an elongated slash cleaved through nearly fifteen ghouls at chest height. Still not enough.

The demons, churning forth en masse, ran up the slope of the great hill by the tens of thousands. Neither an army nor a mob, they properly functioned as an endless red tide. Like anyone who had played at making a fortress on a beach, Itinay knew the tide could not be stopped no matter how high one built the walls.

Not that this knowledge held her back or slowed her strikes.

Qi flooded down the sword. Blow after blow lanced out, blue essence ripped across the slope multiple times per second. Demons fell by the dozens, the hundreds, as Itinay carved a broad path across the top of the ridge. Three strikes tied to every step: out, across, and back. The most basic of sword patterns.

Every step she took was a flashing leap, a bolt of motion that carried her forward ten meters or more. Ghouls fell like grain before the scythe as blue light reaped its way across their ranks.

In less than a minute, Itinay eliminated enemies in a number equal to the population of a good-sized town.

It made no difference. The red wave surged ahead without heed for any losses. Ghouls crawled forward, never stopping even as limbs were obliterated by near-misses. Not even the bodies of their fallen served to impede them, for within moments of death the rust-red flesh disintegrated, sublimated away back into the perverse presence of the plague that spawned these monsters out of the men, women, and children they had once been.

Propelled not by any impulse remaining to them, the ghouls moved driven only by the plague. Its drive to seek out and consume all human qi was all they knew. They could not be driven back in fear, nor would losses turn their horde aside. They would simply keep going until nothing remained before their hunger.

Back and forth Itinay went, plunging again and again against the tide that sought to swamp the ridge. She fought on as the world blurred around her. The sick oily-sweet feel of the plague, its qi surrounding everything and fogging her senses, forced her to push a layer of her own reserves across her skin to prevent crippling nausea. That feeling, the very idea of sickness, ought to be banished from her immortal body, but a disease born of qi itself struck at more than flesh.

That burden made everything harder, tiring.

Fatigue, another trait that she ought to have largely left behind much earlier on her cultivation journey, began building throughout her limbs. The tissues of her form grew sluggish, exhausted on a fundamental level from constantly pushing qi back and forth. Weariness settled over her, a feeling that would have been unfamiliar if not for all the terrible years of war. The world blurred and meaning began to drain from her thoughts.

Yet she dared not stop. There could be no pause nor rest. No one stood behind her.

The whole line of hills, from horizon to horizon, was filled with the enemy. The defenders, all too few, were scattered along a thin line of peaks, ridges, and valleys, from north to south. There were no reserves, everyone had been committed long since, and the idea of reinforcements was a poor joke indeed. The enemy horde, streaming westward toward the interior of the continent, threatened every position at once. Only high peaks and raging rivers offered any break against their overwhelming numbers.

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Should Itinay fall back, thousands would pour through in moments.

Beyond her position, but fearfully close indeed, lay one of the last remaining refuges of mortal humans in the whole world. Perhaps, she feared, it was the very last. There had been no word from any other stronghold for far too long. Couriers had not been able to operate for ages, torn apart through a systematic campaign of murder. Half a million human lives, crammed together between two rivers and protected from destruction only by improvised formations manifested beneath worn and ragged flags, sheltered there.

All that remained of the over one billion souls that had filled the earth with life before the war began.

It hurt, so much, to remember that. The horrible failure of it all, the betrayal and devastation that had been unable to prevent, to stop, to contain. Time and again they had tried, but success ever slipped from their grasp. The grief of those losses ran deep, it had shattered daos and left otherwise hale cultivators unable to fight on. Black-eyed beings devoid of will, they became nothing more than new fodder for the plague.

Though far from overcome by grief, Itinay could not allow distractions any purchase on her psyche, not now, in the worst moments. Battle consumed all things. It demanded every last scrap of fuel.

Especially when ogres began to push toward the front amid the unending ranks of the ghoul horde.

The name came from old folktales, brutish monsters that consumed the unwary on forlorn trails at night. An appropriate appellation for such monstrosities. Unlike ghouls, which were merely people remade by the touch of the plague's demonic qi, these creatures were something more, something worse. Unlucky individuals with a fragmentary ability to draw qi into their mortal bodies – a trait useless in practical terms – the plague took those additional reserves and spun them out into masses of new muscle and bone.

Hulking and oversize, an ogre stood head and shoulders above even the tallest man, and their extended arms hung down past their knees after the fashion of great jungle apes. Horns like those of water buffalo extended from their scalps as a sort of natural helmet. Their clenched fists slammed down as heavy mauls with every blow. Though outnumbered by the ghouls at least one hundred to one, these demons represented far greater challenge to Itinay's sword. She could not swat them aside indiscriminately as gnats. Each required an instant of focused effort.

At a time when no spare moments existed.

Drawing qi through feet, hips, and shoulders, Itinay drew her sword back cloaked in power. Then, she snapped her right foot forward. A flash, and she appeared before the first ogre, movement so swift no unaided eye could ever follow. Thrusting with this burst, she pressed her blade through the monster's right eye, pierced the brain, and pushed out once again through the rear of the skull. Her arm, cloaked in qi, followed this motion, tearing a ragged channel through severed flesh.

The ogre plummeted to the ground, half its head torn away. Lifeless, its body was already beginning to dissipate.

A second step, and she decapitated the next. The third step pulled inward, a rising cut, and ripped the broad torso open from navel to neck. Three fatal blows, three ogres in barely a full second. A proper application of power and skill vastly in excess of anything these crude plague-born monsters could ever manifest.

Not enough. Not nearly enough. Even in that single long second the demon tide advanced. Itinay returned to the ridge in another immense lightning-streak stride. Her sword carved a path back and forth, lancing out with absolute lethality, but the short gap, brief though it had been, sufficed to let a score of demons slip over the ridge and charge down the lee slope.

Nothing but open wilderness, a few precious kilometers of ragged early autumn brush, stood before them and the valley below where the surviving mortals huddled in desperation.

Twenty-one ghouls. The startlingly advanced senses of one of her cultivation made it trivial to count exactly how many demons made it through even as she struck and thrust in the midst of endless battle.

Knowing what would happen next barely required any imagination at all.

Beneath the protection of their wind-scoured flags, fraying steadily even now, the surviving healthy mortal stood at arms. They formed a wall of spears and shields, ready to meet any ghouls that slipped past the cultivators on the hills. Thousands of soldiers, from veterans of many years to recruits facing their first battle, all prepared to throw themselves at the ultimate enemy.

It was not, Itinay knew, entirely hopeless. Shielded from the plague, mortals could kill ghouls. If the shield wall stood fast, and if those who made it through remained strung out, taken one at a time, then ten human lives might suffice to claim that of one demon. The piteous remnant that remained of all humanity might survive a handful of intermittent failures on the part of the cultivators sworn to protect them, at great cost.

Might. Could. Possibly.

Too many variables. Itinay trusted none of it.

Her cold calculation was simple and brutal. Every ghoul she let slip past represented one hundred lives lost. With so few survivors remaining, every single demon that passed over the ridge cut away a measurable sliver of humanity's total.

Yet she could not fail to embrace those shivering numbers. Every ogre that appeared, she diverted without hesitation to kill it. Broadhead spears and whole quivers of arrows would eventually take down a ghoul, though at the pitiable strength mortal bodies could summon it would take dozens of blows.

No blow by mortal hands would fell an ogre. The strongest man with the sharpest spear could not even pierce the eyeball, the weakest point. Some gaps could not be overcome.

That left nothing but the brutal trade-off, lives for each missed sword stroke. And the wish that her power, mighty though it was, could somehow grow further.

All along the hills, cultivators fought. They numbered nearly one thousand strong. The last remainder of the once-great Orthodox Alliance. The only force capable of resisting the demon hordes left in the world. Bearers of a trust that must never be betrayed.

For nearly three hours Itinay and her allies fought across those hills. Over ten million demons, fully one in every hundred humans who had once called the world home, perished beneath their blows. Behind them over one hundred thousand people, one fifth of all that remained of free humanity, died as fangs and claws tore them apart. Only potent but slowly collapsing formations prevented these newly dead from being added to the horde in turn.

The demon horde thinned, its limits reached through shear geography. Less than one in ten of the initial red bodies sent upon the attack now remained. The horde now stood barely a million strong. It would take a week or more for the plague to draw in additional numbers from more distant regions.

Yet, as the sun set beneath a smoke-filled sky, trees and brush burning beneath the explosive power unleashed by desperate cultivators using their best combat techniques, the defenders took no solace. Their qi senses, ground down to near insensibility beneath the fog of crimson-oil vileness, perked up again as they encountered sharp and potent crystallizations of horrific power.

It was the sign that the first wave had ended. The softening-up phase was over. Now the true battle would begin.

The demonic cultivators had arrived.