Chapter 79: Building an army
The corpses packed inside the trench eventually formed several uneven crossings and beasts began climbing over their own dead while enemy fighters followed behind them.
Before they could secure the fortress side, counterassault platforms opened beneath the battlements and hundreds of defenders descended through flares of mana.
Any stable battle line vanished beneath the first collision, ancient warriors separated into small squads around larger creatures, while stronger contestants moved between them and intercepted enemy officers whose abilities could tear through ordinary soldiers.
Most of the beasts were Tier 2, yet even the smaller ones could break reinforced stone.
Several Tier-3 creatures moved among them more carefully, allowing the lower tiers to exhaust the defenders before attacking whichever section appeared weakest.
A plated beast rushed beneath a descending squad, but glowing chains erupted from the captain’s spear and wrapped around its limbs.
Formation seals ignited beneath it, swallowing the creature inside golden fire before a winged serpent swept through the flames.
Poison spilled between the serpent’s scales and corroded the soldiers’ armour, while three contestants attacked from separate directions.
Sword light opened the scales beneath its neck, a wind spear widened the wound and its tail threw the third fighter into the trench before his lightning-covered blade could land.
Su Lan and Ruan Mei remained upon the ramparts with the fortress soldiers, where they fought the winged beasts and climbers that reached the upper wall.
The position was safer than the ground below, although shattered barriers and falling creatures left them little room to rest.
Xingluo had descended with another counterassault group, giving Wuxia access to the corpses surrounding the trench.
She crippled a horned beast with a compressed arc of mana, then moved aside as an ancient warrior’s manifested hammer crushed its skull.
Grey energy escaped the dead creature and entered the black staff held within Wuxia’s soul-like hands.
Similar currents were arriving from every direction as beasts fell beneath defensive formations, artillery fire, and the few dozen shadows already fighting under his control.
[Death Points: 18,430/100,000]
[Staff Upgrade Requirement: 100,000 Death Points]
Thirty-six shadow soldiers poured from the staff through separate pools and divided without surrounding Xingluo.
Some retained weapons and combat abilities, while the beasts moved with the instincts and physical strengths they had possessed before death.
A shadow hound crossed the ground through black lightning and tore out a fighter’s throat before his defensive technique finished forming.
Two armoured summons struck a formation-breaking pillar from opposite sides, then shadow archers transformed their arrows into chains and dragged the engineers away from its core.
The pillar discharged before they could withdraw, consuming its crew and six shadows in a sphere of distorted light.
Their damaged souls returned to the staff, but Wuxia still had no method of restoring them and shifted his attention towards the surrounding dead.
Extract every usable remnant within range.
The crystal answered his command, pulling spectral bodies from dozens of corpses at once. Many fragments collapsed before reaching him, although the stronger remnants became streams of darkness that entered the staff one after another.
[Shadow Army: 83/3,000]
An enemy swordsman released six burning copies of his blade around Xingluo, forcing her through the space between the first pair before she severed their mana threads.
He appeared behind her in a flash of red light, but a newly extracted beast emerged from the staff and received the strike before Xingluo shattered his chest armour.
A bone-plated predator landed beside them and opened the ridges along its spine. Dozens of white spikes pierced soldiers from both armies, tearing apart three shadows before an ancient warrior raised a bronze barrier over the nearest fighters.
Xingluo slid beneath the next volley and drove a crescent of mana through the creature’s rear tendon.
Two shadow wolves fastened onto its throat, while an armoured summon struck its exposed side with enough force to push broken ribs into its organs.
Experience and Soul Point notifications spread across Wuxia’s awareness as the predator collapsed.
He suppressed the repeated messages, leaving only the counters he needed while another wave of death energy entered the staff.
[Death Points: 23,760/100,000]
[Shadow Army: 216/3,000]
Every sweep of the staff pulled several dozen remnants from the battlefield, Wuxia returned the successful extractions through its crystal, widening their pressure without gathering them into a single army that would reveal their origin.
Dark beasts crashed into their living counterparts, shadow soldiers released familiar techniques against the soldiers they had served moments earlier and black-winged creatures rose above the trench to intercept the next aerial wave.
Near the western crossing, Han Zhen collided with a Tier-3 officer whose halberd multiplied the gravity around every strike.
The ground sank beneath them until Han Zhen split the pressure with crimson mana, allowing an ancient spear master to manifest nine golden weapons around the officer.
Farther east, the wounded Tier-3 serpent tore itself from the soldiers surrounding it and gathered poison inside its throat.
Three mana cannons rotated together, their linked formations brightening before the creature could release the attack.
The first beam shattered its remaining wing, the second opened its chest, and the third carried it across the trench.
Two other Tier-3 beasts died within the same artillery sweep, sending denser currents of death energy towards Wuxia’s staff.
He reached for all three remnants together, the serpent resisted until cracks spread across its spectral body, while the other beasts fought the pull hard enough to make the staff tremble inside his hands.
Wuxia forced the extraction to continue, drawing the three souls into the crystal among hundreds of lesser remnants, each received the same classification when he examined them.
[Soul Classification: Top-tier Soul Soldier]
That result only deepened his confusion, Varkheriel had only been Tier 1 at Level 99, yet the system classified him as a Mid-tier Soul Sentinel, placing him above creatures whose living strength had reached Tier 3.
Physical tier clearly did not decide a shadow’s position within the army, although Wuxia lacked enough information to determine what did. He accepted the advantage and released the three new soldiers into different sections of the battle.
The shadow serpent poured black poison across an aerial squad, while one of the other beasts raised stone lances beneath a siege crew.
The third released a roar that disrupted several enemy techniques and allowed the ancient defenders to cut through their owners.
Even with the Saintess’s blessing, the defenders were merely killing faster while their bodies and mana continued wearing down.
Its small increase could not replace the dead, restore the damaged formations, or prevent the trench from becoming a road beneath enough corpses.
The fortress needed something capable of altering the structure of the siege rather than delaying its defeat. Wuxia looked across the growing shadow force, then raised the staff as another artillery volley tore through the beasts beyond the trench.
Hundreds of remnants responded, and his control expanded with every group that accepted the staff’s pull. As his connection to the army crossed an unseen boundary, a different notification appeared before him.
The change revealed every damaged soul stored inside the staff, could be reconstructed with soul points
Wuxia restored several of his original soldiers as a test, watching their broken forms rebuild before he summoned them again.
The function had nothing to do with upgrading the staff; it came from the first advancement of his Authority over the souls bound to him.
The staff remained far from its requirement, serving as the vessel through which he extracted, stored, and deployed them.
Repairing experienced or valuable soldiers would be useful later, but the battlefield currently offered thousands of fresh replacements.
Wuxia stopped after restoring those he intended to keep and refused to waste Soul Points rebuilding common shadows that had been almost completely destroyed.
[Death Points: 29,480/100,000]
[Shadow Army: 914/3,000]
He redirected his attention towards extraction, and spectral bodies began rising in waves from beasts, soldiers, and winged creatures killed across the walls.
The staff swallowed them by the hundreds before releasing new groups wherever the defenders were losing ground.
Shadow beasts used their charges, venom, lightning, and armoured bodies against the enemy front, while humanoid soldiers attacked siege crews or supported nearby fighters.
Burrowing creatures surfaced beneath a formation pillar and shattered its foundation before its engineers could redirect the surrounding barrier.
Above the eastern tower, a four-eyed drake compressed lightning between its jaws until the air around its head turned white.
Fortress archers linked their arrows through a single formation and pierced one eye, destabilizing the attack before it reached the wall.
Lightning exploded inside the drake’s throat and opened its chest, yet its body continued falling towards the battlements.
A shadow serpent caught the broken wing in its coils and dragged the creature away from Su Lan, Ruan Mei, and the soldiers before both crashed into the horde below.
Across another crossing, Xingluo met a fighter surrounded by rotating rings of ice.
Each ring released blades whenever she approached, forcing her to use the bodies around them as cover while Wuxia sent two shadow birds above his formation.
The birds released sonic cries that fractured the outer ring, and Xingluo passed through the opening before it closed.
Her mana struck through the fighter’s chest and scattered the remaining ice into the soldiers rushing behind him.
By the time the first crossings were completely buried, thousands of soldiers and beasts had died.
Broken siege engines burned throughout the plains, yet fresh columns continued extending beneath the distant tree line and filled every opening created by the fortress weapons.
Wuxia kept extracting until the pressure inside the staff distorted the darkness around its crystal. A final group of armoured beasts entered its storage and pushed the army beyond eighteen hundred.
[Shadow Army: 1,803/3,000]
[Death Points: 36,000/100,000]
Upon the central battlement, the fortress commander watched a shadow serpent tear through the aerial horde while dark soldiers destroyed another formation pillar.
Their coordination could not belong to unrelated summoners, yet none of his officers could identify their master.
"Whose army is that?" he asked, following the scattered shadows towards the crowded battlefield without finding anyone who appeared to command them.
No one answered and the commander grew intrigued before he turned towards the plains again, where the invading host still appeared almost infinite despite the mountain of bodies surrounding the fortress.
Across that distance, the enemy leader remained seated upon his enormous dragon, apparently unconcerned by the dead.
The fortress commander settled his spear across his knees, and their gazes met while the battle between them continued escalating.
Neither leader entered the battlefield, although the restraint on both sides appeared unlikely to survive much longer.