The Commander of the Guard's frenzied cry tore through the funereal silence of the street. Cornered by the river of viscera and Yù Méi's bestial provocation, the veteran's pride and absolute panic collided. The Qi of his Transcendental apex burst outward — dense and brown — fusing with his metallic armor.
"KILL THE ABERRATIONS!" the Commander roared, the vein in his neck pulsing like a rope about to snap. "ALL OF YOU, ADVANCE AT ONCE!"
The two hundred and eighty armored guards swallowed their own terror and took the first unified step. The sound of iron boots striking stone made the street tremble.
At the top of the courtyard staircase — a world away from that mud — Yù Qíng did not blink. The blue-robed priestess hovered in her invisible seiza, her dark, fathomless eyes assessing the energy emanating from the Commander. The man's Qi thickened his skin and muscles with a gray, opaque layer.
"Desperation made him condense earth into his own organs," Yù Qíng murmured, her melodious voice overflowing with a cruel analytical delight. "A granite shell at the Transcendental apex. What an excellent whetstone."
The blue goddess turned her face majestically toward the silver-gray woman at her side.
"Snow flower," Yù Qíng called, her soft tone dictating the fate of three hundred lives. "The filth at the bottom of the yard is too numerous and will kick up too much dust near my husband's door. Keep the insects on the ground. But leave the armored beetle intact for your sister to play with."
Mò Yán did not hesitate. The devout Yin in the diplomat's womb throbbed in absolute submission to the eldest's command.
"As the Lady commands, sister Qíng," the melodious voice flowed from beneath the matte golden veil.
Mò Yán took a single step to the edge of the stair. Her scarlet irises burned through the silk, fixing themselves on the mass of nearly three hundred men marching to their deaths. The newborn Sea of Laws at the bottom of her Dantian pulsed with a glacial gravity.
"All the dregs..." Mò Yán's voice rang out — monotone, cold, and irrevocable. "...sink."
The Law of Mandate distorted the very concept of reality in the street.
There was no gust of wind, no visible physical pressure. The order crushed the motor nerves and spinal columns of two hundred and eighty men simultaneously. Clang! Thud! The deafening sound of metal, bone, and flesh colliding against cobblestone echoed all at once. The entire troop crashed face-first into its own puddle of blood and mud. They were not dead — they were paralyzed, drooling and weeping in terror as their own muscles refused to obey any command other than to kiss the ground.
Only one man remained standing.
The Commander blinked, his broadsword trembling in his hands. He looked to either side, hearing the murmurs of despair from his crushed army, and realized he had been isolated in the stone arena.
"And now, little flower," Yù Qíng turned her black eyes toward the youngest already smiling in the street. The priestess's voice dropped to a rigorous and maternal whisper. "Do not drown his stone using our heaven's ocean of brute force. I forbid the use of Primordial Qi. Find the frequency of his earth and break it from within. Prove that your Rupture is a Law, and not merely the swinging of a club."
Yù Méi cracked her neck. The sound of grinding bone was sharp. Beneath the torn black veil, the Brutal Blade's smile widened until it showed her canines.
"No brute force. Only the Law," Yù Méi growled, her blood boiling. "Understood, sister."
The golden beast launched forward.
Yù Méi's bare feet struck the blood puddles with wet snaps (slap, slap), crossing the distance to the Commander in a blur. The veteran was no ordinary mercenary. With a war cry, he rotated his Earth Shell-coated torso, planted his iron boots against the stones, and delivered a lethal horizontal arc with the broadsword, aimed at splitting the girl in two.
Yù Méi did not retreat. She dove beneath the heavy blade, the steel tip scraping the fabric of her left shoulder. Riiip. The first layer of dark-gold silk gave way, and the left sleeve was torn from shoulder to elbow, exposing the warrior's pale and immaculate skin.
Ignoring the torn fabric, Yù Méi rotated her hip and delivered a direct and brutal punch against the center of the Commander's scale breastplate.
Thud! Crack.
The impact sounded like a battering ram against a castle gate. The steel cuirass caved in violently. The physical force yanked the man's organs, and he spat a thick pool of blood, being dragged three meters back with his heels carving furrows in the street stones. But he did not fall. The Earth Shell absorbed the kinetic lethality — his ribs cracked, but his lungs and heart, hardened by Qi, endured the blow.
Yù Méi furrowed her brow, licking her own lip.
"You're tough, you insect," the youngest laughed, the carnivorous excitement sparking in her eyes. "Let's see how long your stone holds."
She advanced again, turning the street into a raw and dirty fighting pit.
The Commander, desperate, retaliated with a barrage of short, heavy cuts — the Transcendental blade slicing the air. Yù Méi dodged at the last millimeter, fighting at close quarters. The cold steel scraped the right side of her ribs. Riiip. The golden dress suffered another long cut, and the loose fabric swung in the air.
The Brutal Blade growled, seized the man's weapon arm, and delivered a brutal headbutt — driving her own forehead directly into the iron visor of the veteran's helmet. The metal caved inward with a sick crack. The Commander's nose exploded beneath the visor, the cartilage and bone spraying thick blood that leaked through the helmet's breathing holes. The man squealed, blinded by his own pain, and kicked at her support leg, spinning the sword in a suicidal ascending arc.
Yù Méi spun to the side, but the broadsword's wide tip drove into the lateral slit of her skirt. With a violent yank from the veteran, the thick silk was stripped from thigh to groin. The torn fabric fell away, revealing the warrior's long, pale, and full leg in all its glory and power — swinging bare in the city's cold and dirty wind.
The Commander attempted to retreat, his face drenched in blood beneath the crumpled helmet. His exterior was already being obliterated. The cuirass was riddled with dents and his chest sunken. But the earth in his organs kept him fighting.
Yù Méi looked at the scraps of dark gold falling onto the stone floor. She looked at her own bare leg and exposed arm. The silk — the impeccable tunic Yù Qíng had forced her to wear to hide her own beauty in the Higher Realm — was ruined, shredded like an old rag.
The girl's almond-shaped irises ceased to glimmer with amusement and froze into a vivid and predatory gold. The vein in her neck leapt. The Sea of Gold in her lower abdomen roared — not merely from martial hunger, but fed by a primitive instinct for annihilation in the face of the insult of having her own clothing shredded.
"You tore my silk," Yù Méi whispered, her guttural voice vibrating on a frighteningly low note, the echo resonating through the blood-soaked stones.
The Commander, seeing the unprotected flesh and the scratches on the girl's arm, found a spark of hysterical arrogance. His body was ground down on the outside, but he still had the Qi of his Dantian intact.
"Your limit ends at my earth, bitch!" he roared, raising the broadsword with both hands, condensing all the Qi and force of his life into the steel blade to deliver a vertical guillotine cut — focused on decapitating her once and for all.
Yù Méi stopped moving.
She did not dodge. She did not attempt to punch his earth shell again. The bare-legged warrior raised her right hand, palm facing the sky, and waited.
The blade came down tearing the air with the weight of a mountain.
Clang.
The Transcendental apex sword collided directly against Yù Méi's pale, unprotected fingers and locked in place with a hollow, dry sound. Her hand did not yield a single millimeter beneath the guillotine's force. The Commander choked, his eyes flying wide beneath the shattered visor, the vibration of the impact traveling up his arms to his shoulders and paralyzing his muscles.
Yù Méi looked at the blade lodged against her fingers. Her murderous intention aligned itself perfectly with the metal's inert frequency.
"My Rupture never had a limit," the youngest hissed, her irises sparking.
She did not squeeze the steel with brute force. She merely injected the burning intention of her Sea of Laws. The spark of Rupture invaded the very concept of the sword.
The tempered steel released a sick and unnatural shriek. The broadsword — forged to withstand decades of war — began to crumble. Rust and rot advanced through the metal in the blink of an eye, and the entire weapon dissolved into brown dust and dull flakes of dead iron that trickled through Yù Méi's fingers and were carried off by the wind.
The Commander was left holding nothing but a hollow and useless hilt.
The veteran froze, his brain incapable of processing the physics of annihilation.
The lesson was over. Yù Méi had found the perfect frequency of matter.
She plunged deep beneath the man's open guard. Her bare leg — slick with sweat — planted itself against the stones with absolute firmness. Her right fist, wrapped in a dense and lethal silence, fired in a short, clean, and absurdly precise punch — striking the exact center of the soldier's dented scale breastplate.
Puff.
There was no sound of breaking bone or exploding armor. The blow seemed to carry the force of a feather striking water.
The Commander blinked. He looked at his own chest. The already-dented armor did not cave another centimeter. The skin of his torso seemed static. He opened his blood-stained mouth to laugh at the weakness of the blow — but the sound that came out was a foamy, repulsive gurgle.
On the outside, the Earth Shell had held the impact. But on the inside, the Law of Rupture had traveled like a seismic wave projected exclusively to liquidate the biological concept.
The Commander's lungs disintegrated into slime in a fraction of a second. His liver and spleen exploded like balloons filled with dirty water. His stone heart liquefied instantly, and his proud Dantian was transformed into a boiling soup of dead flesh and thick fluids.
The pain didn't even have time to reach the man's brain. The Commander's body folded forward like an empty sack, his legs giving way at once. He fell to his knees on the stones, his eyes bulging from their sockets, and a torrential cascade of dark clots, necrotic tissue, and liquefied viscera poured from his mouth and nose in a disgusting, steaming, and unending vomit. He was dead long before the crumpled helmet struck his own blood.
Yù Méi panted heavily. Sweat plastered her golden strands to her jade skin. The tunic torn at the shoulder and thigh gave her a profane and barbaric aspect in the street's cold breeze. She turned her blood-coated face toward the courtyard staircase, breaking into the most insane and triumphant smile of her life.
"I understood, elder sister!" Yù Méi shouted, euphoric, her almond-shaped eyes overflowing with bestial pride. "I felt his stone breaking deep inside! The Law doesn't need to strike to crush — it only needs to demand that the matter within gives up!"
The girl's lethal excitement was uncontrollable. The adrenaline of evolution demanded an immediate kinetic and grotesque release.
To celebrate the macabre expansion of her own Dantian, the bare-legged warrior leapt high into the air. With the grace of a divinity and the crushing weight of a meteor, the girl came down and stomped with both bare feet directly onto the Commander's ruined back and chest.
SQUELCH! SPLAT!
The brutal impact of her heels flattened the man's thoracic cavity against the stone floor. The internal pressure was overwhelming and immediate. With nowhere to escape, the hot soup of liquefied organs and boiling blood exploded violently from within the corpse. A thick, red, and nauseating geyser of viscera sprayed through the holes of the neck, the mouth, and the joints of the armor — flying meters into the air.
The warm, slippery, and fetid slime rained back down (splat, splat). The dark blood — mixed with bile and smoke — soaked Yù Méi's bare calves, streaming down her immaculate knees and bathing the full thighs that the torn silk no longer shielded. The smell of bowels loosened by death, cold sweat, and heavy iron poisoned the suffocated street.
Yù Méi licked the drop of blood that had splashed onto her own lip. Her bare little toes wiggled, sinking with childlike glee into the warm and disgusting puddle of ground flesh leaking from the soldier's carcass.
The golden goddess — her bare arm and leg now painted in dark, steaming red — rubbed the back of her sweaty neck. The psychopathic smile stretched from ear to ear. She turned her predatory face toward the audience of two hundred and eighty armored guards who remained paralyzed, weeping and urinating in their own trousers beneath Mò Yán's Mandate — completely horrified before that human slaughterhouse.
"Good warm-up," Yù Méi muttered, cracking her blood-soaked neck with a satisfied sigh. Her irises locked onto the sea of terror-trembling men. "So then. Which one of you is next?"