The Blade-Armed Corpse General

"Demon Vine — Bind!"

Shi Shaoju's hands moved with fluid grace. As she gestured, soft vines erupted from her sides, twisting under her command into tough, rope-like coils that rapidly wound themselves around the massive corpse creature's legs ahead.

The enormous beast had the bulk of a giant bull. Chunks of rotting flesh peeled from its body and hit the ground, where they writhed and became maggots that crawled steadily toward the officers, carrying pestilence in their wake.

Shi Shaoju's Demon Vine pulled tight around the creature's feet, holding it in place — but its arms, hard and sharp as blades, slammed down with force enough to crack the earth.

A curved wall of brown stone rose like a mountain rampart, sheltering the officers within. The situation was anything but reassuring: beyond the barrier, hordes of rotting corpses were gnawing and clawing at it from every side.

Their claws were razor-sharp, cutting through stone as easily as mud. The thick Stone Wall was being steadily scraped away. These creatures felt no pain whatsoever — they threw their heads against the barrier, skulls splitting, brains spattering, their hands still tearing and pulling without pause.

Sweat dripped down Zhang Xiaohou's forehead. He'd encountered plenty of Demon-Beasts in his time — savage ones, cunning ones, cold-blooded ones — but he had never seen anything as utterly deranged as these.

They had no awareness, no mind, no pain, no fear. All they possessed was a blind, instinctive drive to chase and devour anything living. The only thing that could drive them back was sunlight — but night had only just fallen. By the time the sun rose again, the group would have become one of them.

"What do we do?!" Wang Tong cried. "If these things chew through the defense, that big one will stomp us all into paste!"

Like Demon-Beasts, the Undead were divided into tiers: Servant-class, Battle-General-class, Commander-class, Sovereign...

The creatures they faced now were the most common type of Undead — putrid corpse revenants. Most had been dead for fewer than ten years, their bodies buried in death-saturated soil, decayed but never fully destroyed.

Among the Undead, these rotting corpses ranked at the very bottom: Servant-class. Yet they came in overwhelming numbers, swarming in packs, and encountering a horde of them in the wilderness was extraordinarily dangerous.

Within a rotting horde, those buried longer — having absorbed far more death energy — would sometimes give rise to a Corpse General.

The creature before them now, built like a bull but with a tiny head and four arms like paired blades and axes, was exactly the kind of Corpse General that made hunters go pale with dread. It ranked at Battle Commander level, yet was several times more ferocious than an ordinary Battle-General-class Demon-Beast.

Normal Demon-Beasts could be worn down through targeted strikes — damage the legs and their speed suffered; damage the torso and their offense faltered; hit a vital point and they weakened, their will to fight crumbling. But corpse creatures had no concept of injury. You could blast their stomachs open, shatter their limbs with magic — the rest of the body kept going at full strength. A severed arm lying on the ground might even twitch back to life on its own and latch onto someone, refusing to let go.

A single Corpse General was often worth three Battle-General-class Demon-Beasts.

And what they faced now was an elite Corpse General that had been feeding on this land for over ten years.

Fighting was suicide. Even if they pooled their strength and managed to kill it, the hundred-odd rotting corpses would strip them to the bone afterward.

They had to run. Yangyang Village was barely a kilometer away — just over this small hill, they'd see the wooden palisade around the village. Somehow they had to shake these horrors loose.

"Down, all of you!"

"Flowing Marsh — Earth Wave!!"

A brownish halo surged between Zhang Xiaohou's hands. He had been building up for some time, layering several Earth Element spells on top of one another, and now he drove the full combined force of that earth-shaping energy into the ground with a thunderous strike.

All nine of them stood within a small central area. Around the perimeter, the loose soil abruptly turned viscous — the earth liquefying into mud, swirling into spiraling vortexes...

Mud naturally pulled things downward, and combined with the quicksand-like rotation and depression, the entire surrounding ring of rotting corpses sank halfway into the earth in an instant.

After returning to the Ancient Capital, Zhang Xiaohou had sold the Molten Crystal Diamond and traded it for an Earth Element Magic Weapon. This weapon allowed basic-tier Earth Element spells to be stacked to a certain degree — and once released at that threshold, the power of Earth Wave was significantly amplified.

The casting time was considerably longer, but a single devastating technique was often far more practical than several weaker ones scattered across a fight.

The Earth Wave from his Flowing Marsh Spirit Seed produced a staggering effect, swallowing swaths of rotting corpses into the mud. To stop them from clawing their way out elsewhere, Zhang Xiaohou solidified the ground the moment they sank halfway in.

Now half their bodies were above the surface, half below — the hardened earth clamped around them like a vice, preventing them from burrowing deeper or pulling themselves up.

The sight drew a surge of relief from everyone, and they were just about to cheer when Shi Shaoju screamed: "Fall back! NOW!!"

The Corpse General had already cleaved through the last barrier. Given its size, the Flowing Marsh mud barely reached its ankles — even hardened into concrete, it was never going to hold something like that.

Its blade-arms came crashing down, and blood sprayed through the chaos. There was no telling in the confusion who had been struck, who was wounded — the only option was to seize this brief window and bolt down the hillside.

**GRAAAAHH—!!!**

The Corpse General's enraged roar erupted behind them, and waves of dark, freezing wind lashed against the fleeing officers' backs, raising ice along their spines.

But no one could spare a thought for that. They ran with everything they had. In the cold moonlight, dark shapes were visible converging from all directions — charging fast, their cries a ravenous, starving howl.

Whether Corpse General or rotting corpse, as long as they had two working legs, they were nothing like the shambling creatures from the old stories. Without movement magic or Footwear Enchanted Gear, even a Mage sprinting at full speed could easily be overtaken.

And their leaping ability was extraordinary — a single bound could cover ten meters. Even Servant-class rotting corpses could manage that. The Undead bearing down on them weren't shuffling forward with twisted ankles and dragging feet. They were sprinting like wild animals, hurling themselves forward in great bounding lunges.

"Ahhh!! AHHH!!"

A scream ripped through the air from behind. Someone in the fleeing group had been caught — their desperate cries cutting through the dark.

"Leave them!" Qin Hu, their captain, said through clenched teeth. "Or we all die."

No one dared look back. They could only pray the one taken wasn't someone dear to them.

"She's not dead." Zhang Xiaohou turned — and saw it was Jia Xi, one of the other female officers.

The Corpse General's long tongue had coiled around Jia Xi's waist, lifting her off the ground. She was an Ice Element Mage, and had barely managed to halt the creature's advance with Ice Lock — otherwise the Corpse General would have already reeled her in along that tongue and swallowed her whole.