The first strike had not been a negotiation. It had been a declaration.
In the span of a single breath, the two thousand cavalrymen of the Swift Cavalry Battalion saw not a man, but a storm of red dust and iron—a hurricane given human shape, moving with the terrible, inexorable momentum of an avalanche. Gu Yao's white hair streamed behind him like a banner of defiance as he crossed the first hundred paces of the killing field, his broken right leg dragging a trench through the dust.
"LOOSE! LOOSE EVERYTHING!"
Wei Cheng's voice had gone shrill, stripped of its earlier arrogance. He stood atop the battlements, his face pale, his hands gripping the stone balustrade so hard that his knuckles had turned white. He had commanded men in battle before. He had faced bandits, rebels, even the occasional rogue cultivator. But he had never seen anything like this.
The heavy crossbow teams on the wall responded with trained precision. They released their triggers in a coordinated volley, sending hundreds of heavy, poison-tipped bolts screaming through the air. These were not ordinary arrows; they were God-Slayer Bolts, tipped with a corrosive compound designed to burn through spiritual shields and mortal flesh alike. Each bolt was three feet long, its shaft reinforced with spirit-iron, its tip glowing with a faint, sickly green light.
The bolts descended like a curtain of death, their trajectories overlapping in a pattern meant to leave no room for evasion.
Gu Yao did not evade.
He did not slow, did not dodge, did not raise a shield. With a single hand, he swung the six-hundred-pound Severed Head hammer in a wide, horizontal arc. The motion was not fast by any conventional measure, but it was absolute—a movement forged from fifty years of striking iron in a cold forge, a gesture of such brutal economy that it seemed to transcend speed altogether.
The hammer's head carved a perfect circle in the air, and within that circle, the air itself became a solid wall of compressed force. The God-Slayer Bolts, upon entering the hammer's radius, did not simply deflect—they shattered. The spirit-iron shafts snapped, the poison-tipped heads dissolved into fine green powder, and the fragments tumbled harmlessly to the dust.
A hundred paces. That was all the distance between Gu Yao and the gate, and he closed it in the span of a few heartbeats.
The cavalry at the gate saw him coming. They saw the madness in his eyes, the iron in his spine, and the weight of fifty years of suppressed fury concentrated into a single, terrible swing. They raised their shields and braced for impact, their formation tightening into a wall of overlapping steel.
Gu Yao did not break stride. He shifted his weight onto his good leg, pivoted on his heel, and drove the hammer forward in a brutal, straight-armed thrust.
"BOOM- !!"
The sound was not a sharp crack or a ring of steel—it was a low, tectonic groan, the sound of a mountain being hit by a falling star. The gate, a solid slab of black iron three feet thick, did not shatter. But the shockwave of the impact traveled through the metal and into the stone walls, spreading outward like ripples in a pond. The force was so immense that the massive iron hinges groaned in protest, and the stone around them began to crack.
From the battlements above, Wei Cheng felt the tremor through the soles of his boots. He staggered, grabbing the wall for support, his eyes wide with disbelief.
"He's trying to bring down the gate," he whispered, his voice cracking. "With a hammer. One man. With a hammer."
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Wei Wuming, standing a few feet away, did not respond. His face remained impassive, but his fingers were drumming against the pommel of his ceremonial sword—an unconscious gesture of anxiety that betrayed his inner turmoil. He had been watching Gu Yao since the moment he appeared on the horizon, and in that time, he had been recalculating his assessment. A broken tool. A dying cripple. That was what he had called Gu Yao. But the man below was moving like a force of nature, and Wei Wuming was beginning to realize that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation.
"Concentrate fire on his approach," Wei Wuming said, his voice cold and controlled. "Aim for his right side. The leg is compromised. If he loses his balance, the weight of the hammer will pull him to the ground."
Wei Cheng nodded, shouting the order to the crossbow teams. The bolts shifted their pattern, targeting the area around Gu Yao's broken leg. But Gu Yao did not stop. He planted his good foot, shifted the hammer to his other hand, and swung again.
The second strike hit the gate at the same point as the first. This time, the iron did more than groan—it buckled. A deep, concave dent appeared in the center of the gate, surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks spreading through the metal. The hinges were tearing loose from the stone, and the massive iron bars that held the gate in place were beginning to splinter.
Inside the gatehouse, the two hundred laborers tasked with bracing the gate against siege engines felt the impact through their shoulders. They had been stationed there as a precaution, a living counterweight to any battering ram. But this was no battering ram. This was something far worse. The impact traveled through the iron bars and into their arms, shattering bones and tearing muscles. Dozens of them collapsed, their screams muffled by the grinding groan of the iron.
"Keep him back!" Wei Cheng shouted, his voice desperate now. "Siege cannons! Fire the siege cannons!"
The massive crossbow-arms on the battlements shifted, releasing their tension in a single, devastating volley. Three projectiles, each as thick as a man's torso and tipped with explosive runes, launched toward Gu Yao with the sound of tearing thunder.
Gu Yao saw them coming. His grey eyes, burning with the dark-red light of his Injustice Qi, tracked their trajectories in a fraction of a second. He did not raise his hammer to block. Instead, he used the momentum of his swing to redirect his body, shifting his weight in a way that would have been impossible for a man with two good legs, let alone one that was turning to stone.
He rose into the air.
It was not a graceful leap—there was no spiritual energy to carry him higher, no cultivation technique to soften his ascent. It was pure, raw physical power, the explosive force of a man who had spent decades driving a heavy hammer against an anvil and learning to harness the recoil. He shot upward, his white hair trailing behind him like a comet's tail.
The first siege cannonball passed beneath him, slamming into the ground where he had been standing and detonating in a burst of violet flame. The second was closer, passing within inches of his chest and tearing a gash through his cloak. The third he caught with the flat of his hammer, redirecting it into the gate.
The impact of the redirected projectile was catastrophic. The gate, already weakened by two hammer strikes, shuddered violently as the explosive round detonated against its surface. The iron groaned, buckled, and then—with a sound like the sky tearing open—it began to collapse.
Wei Cheng screamed something, but the words were lost in the roar of collapsing iron and shattering stone. The gate fell inward, its massive weight crushing the laborers who had been bracing it from behind, and sending a shockwave of dust and debris through the courtyard beyond.
Through the ruins, Gu Yao walked.
He dragged his hammer behind him, its iron head leaving a deep furrow in the stone. Blood seeped from a dozen wounds—cuts from the shrapnel of the siege cannons, bruises from the impact of the redirected projectile, and the slow, steady ooze from the nail holes in his spine. But he was still standing. Still walking. Still moving forward.
Wei Cheng stumbled backward, his hand reaching for his sword, his face contorted with a mixture of terror and desperate anger.
"Form up! Form up and hold the line!" he shouted, his voice cracking. "He's one man! One man cannot break through an army!"
But as the dust began to settle, the soldiers in the courtyard saw that Wei Cheng was wrong.
Gu Yao was not one man. He was a force of nature given human shape, a storm of iron and fury that had been building for fifty years. And as he planted his hammer in the courtyard stone and raised his head to meet their eyes, the soldiers of the Swift Cavalry Battalion felt something they had never felt before:
They felt afraid.
And fear, as Wei Wuming knew better than anyone, was the most effective weapon of all.