The outer gate fell and soon after the inner gate.
Now the city burned, littered with ash and destruction.
Not just from flames but from the pressure of corrupted Qi bleeding through the streets causing rot and decay. It cracked stone and warped air. Even the trees near the courtyard withered rapidly, their bark blackening as the beasts passed.
The battleline formed in the southern district where wide plazas and fortified archways created choke points. The Flame Guard met the onslaught with formations of shields and tight precision battle tactics, training pressed into muscle over decades of tradition worked but how long would it hold.
But these weren't bandits. They weren't even beasts, and they kept coming.
Oliver Phoenix moved like fire incarnate.
Wherever General Oliver Phoenix moved, death followed in arcs of gold. His long, curved blade sang through the air, cleaving a three-horned beast in half, its bloated body erupting in a wave of scorched black ichor. Flame surged from the blade's etched grooves as ancestral Qi awakened in violent bursts, his every motion honed from decades of war. He didn't shout orders. He didn't boast. He burned, his aura expanding like a furnace let loose from restraint.
Ryu flanked him, blade flickering between defence and destruction. One beast, an amalgamation of deer and snake with bone-scales lacing its back, lunged for him. Ryu spun low, cutting its limbs out from under it, then snapped his palm forward. Space twisted. The creature crumpled inward, bones snapping audibly as compressed Qi crushed its core into a collapsing knot. It exploded in a geyser of pulped rot and mist. Ryu staggered slightly from the drain, compressing with spatial Qi demanded too much, but he had enough to continue. He had to.
Another rotting hound-beast came bounding toward him on three legs, jaws wreathed in dripping, black Qi. Ryu sidestepped the first lunge, drove his sword upward through its jaw, then flared the Qi inside its skull. The beast lit from within, head bursting like an overripe fruit.
Yan moved like a storm given form, phoenix-fire coiling around her arms and blade. She kicked off the wall of a crumbling archway and came down hard on a horned brute, her sword driving through its back. Flame surged through the impact point, and the beast screamed as fire ruptured its insides. She turned as another pounced from the side, too fast, too close. Instead of parrying, she dropped low and spun, her foot snapping into its knee, shattering the joint with martial precision. It fell, and her blade met its throat in one clean, upward sweep. A flash of fire. No remains.
They cut their way through the line, not with desperation but with conviction. The air was thick with smoke and Qi residue, fouled and caustic. Bones cracked beneath their boots. Arrows still fell from above, but the closer they came to the centre of the swarm, the more the corrupted Qi grew dense, pressing against their lungs, warping sound and light.
Ahead, one twisted beast, twice the size of a horse, with a skull-faced body and hands made of writhing spines, barrelled toward Yan. She dashed forward, slipped beneath its reaching claws, and drove her palm into its chest. Fire exploded from the impact point, bursting outward in a phoenix-shaped flare that incinerated the creature mid-roar.
Ryu was surrounded, five grotesque forms closed in. One drooled black flame from between too many jaws, another's torso split open to reveal insectoid mandibles.
"Enough," he growled.
He pressed his hands together, and space around them buckled.
A pulse of void energy expanded outward. Reality tightened.
And in a single blink, all five imploded, crushed beneath the unbearable weight of their own twisted forms. The ground beneath them cracked. Blood mist filled the air.
He dropped to a knee, breath shaking, but stood again before anyone could reach him.
Yan's voice rang out nearby. "Keep moving! We hold!"
They were holding the line but just barely.
Then the masked cultivator stepped forward clad in powerful Qi.
The monstrous horde parted for him like smoke.
He walked calmly into the ash-choked plaza, his presence alone distorting the Qi around him. Cracked tiles beneath his feet sizzled with every step.
He raised his hand.
From behind him four beasts emerged, larger, fused from multiple forms, dripping with unstable Qi. Their eyes burned with anger and hate.
And behind them…
a shape wrapped in chains.
Not beast. Not human.
Something different, disgusting and mutated.
Yan narrowed her eyes. "That's not just a puppet."
Oliver lowered his blade slightly, his voice colder than steel. "It's an abomination, how could somebody do this."
The masked cultivator spoke.
"How poetic. The Phoenix line, reunited, the heir, the blade and the withered flame."
Oliver's eyes sharpened. "Who are you?"
The man pulled down his hood.
He was young.
Or had recently once been.
His face bore the marks of long exposure to unstable Qi, flesh drawn taut in places and dipped in rot and decay from the Qi that danced around his skin, eyes glowing faintly green with strain. A deep scar ran diagonally from his collarbone to behind one ear and on his chest.
Where a Phoenix crest once proudly rested, now lay a twisted version, burned with and reshaped into a mockery of the original, with black flamed scorch marks etched across it.
"You don't remember me, old man but I remember everything. I was born in the outer flame hall. My mother served under your families command.
I trained, I bled, I waited but the my ability never came soon enough."
His voice turned bitter and his face twisted manically.
"When the gifts didn't awaken fast enough, I was forgotten. Cast aside. No ceremony. No farewell. Just silence as we were neglected, thrown away as if we didn't matter."
Yan's brows furrowed. "You were one of the dormant lineages, a branch family…"
"One of many," he snapped. "Promised the flame, told to train for it but when but when my skills didn't manifest on time, we were labelled weak. Left behind while others were chosen."
He looked at her, eyes burning, not with madness, but with grief.
"You rose. I rotted and now the world has changed. The Qi has returned. And it remembered me, when you wouldn't."
His smile was slow. Twisted unnaturally.
"When the veins reopened, I felt it first. The flow didn't come like fire, like how you preached it did in the old times. It came like a whisper, through bone, through breath, It showed me what I could be."
The chained creature behind him snarled as if in response.
"I followed it into the hollow places, into the places your family turned away from. I gave up what I had left, my name, my face, my existence."
He raised a hand, and dark Qi coiled around his fingers like smoke dragged from a pyre.
"And in return… it gave me this. The power to be remembered. The power to burn down everything you all hold dear and giving me the power to do it all from the darkness."
Yan's gaze was steady but her voice was low. "You gave up everything just to destroy us?"
His expression didn't falter. "No. I gave up everything because I realized your fire was all lies! It doesn't know how to give life or rebirth, it only knows how to consume!"
He pointed toward the palace.
"Now I bring the flame back... as ash."