Surrounded on all sides by tens of thousands of Skeleton Race warriors, the fierce-tiger construct Yue Yang piloted tore through the encirclement, unstoppable. Every foe it struck was hurled a hundred meters away. For a moment, none in the world could match it. The construct stood proud amid the enemy host, glancing about as if to demand: in all creation, who could rival it?

And yet from every direction, powerful enemies surged in like a tidal flood. No matter what kind of being you were, beneath this torrent of steel-boned skeletons you would be ground to powder and dust. One against ten thousand was, in the end, an impossible battle to win.

Right now Yue Yang’s gaze was sharp as a blade, and across his face lay a rare, seldom-seen gravity. Only an overwhelmingly strong opponent could force the time-crosser to throw himself into a fight body and soul.

Piloting the fierce-tiger construct, he stamped down with both feet and cratered the ground.

Boom — it leapt.

A full-force spring carried it a hundred meters straight up. Looking down at the flood of steel skeletons below — dense and packed, sea upon sea — he saw that the enemy host had already drowned the earth. Vast as the Western Peak was, there wasn’t a single inch of ground left to stand on.

Hundreds, thousands of Skeleton warriors formed ladders of bone for their fellows to scramble madly up, meaning to intercept the fierce-tiger construct in midair as it fell back down, helpless to resist. And those sixty terrifyingly powerful White-Bone Generals each snatched up the skeletons around them and hurled them skyward with all their strength, trying to batter Yue Yang out of the air.

Yue Yang steered the construct clear of the flying bodies, nimble beyond belief — light as a dragonfly skimming water as it touched down on the spines of the Skeleton warriors. A few bounds and it had already vaulted past three hundred meters. Then, just as the White-Bone Generals loosed their bone spears, it kicked the spears aside even as it kept climbing, and once the spears no longer posed any threat, the fierce-tiger construct had borrowed their momentum to reach five, six hundred meters up. The Skeleton warriors that had meant to give chase were left utterly without hope. At this height, even if tens of thousands of them stacked bone-ladders together, they couldn’t reach it — and besides, a handful of stray attacks meant nothing to a construct this horrifyingly agile.

Of course, taking to the air to escape the swarm wasn’t without its weakness.

The Skeleton warriors swiftly cleared the landing zone, scattering wide into a great ring. They waited for Yue Yang and the fierce-tiger construct to lose their upward momentum and plummet. The instant the construct touched down, tens of thousands of skeletons would grind it to powder. And now, from five or six hundred meters up, a safe landing was surely all but impossible. If it fell from that height and shattered its legs, what power on earth could turn the tide then?

“Jumping high?” Wanmo sneered. “Bounce as high as you like — you’re still just an ant about to die. You think you can hide up there for the rest of your life?”

“This is bad!” The watching students felt their hearts sink and sink.

Below, the Skeleton warriors backed off as far as they could, forming a wide ring, baring fangs and flexing claws, waiting for this pitiful enemy to break its legs on landing so they could pounce and tear it to shreds.

But their hopes came to nothing. The airborne fierce-tiger construct did not fall. Instead its cockpit sprang open and flung Yue Yang out from inside. Before ten thousand staring eyes, it transformed at blinding speed into a most peculiar glide-wing construct — nothing like a tiger at all now, looking rather more like a war-hawk. From the war-hawk’s talons, four jets of flame erupted, carrying Yue Yang higher still at an incredible speed, all the way to a thousand meters.

Staring up at that impossible little black speck in the sky, the students were struck dumb.

Impossible! Little Titan’s construct could fly?

Could a flying construct truly exist?

It was one thing for this gold fierce-tiger to turn into a humanoid construct — but into a war-hawk too? And turning into a war-hawk was one thing, but it could actually fly? Soaring across the heavens like a real bird of prey?

The Heavenly Pride Chairman and the other senior elders had long known Yue Yang had developed a flying battle construct — some had even seen one in the flesh before. But never in their wildest dreams had they imagined a flying construct would make its debut in a manner this stunning. Never mind them — even the Principal and the instructors of Silver Maple City were astonished. Because the war-hawk flying construct Yue Yang rode now was far, far superior to the one that had been entered in the Assessment. And in that same instant they understood their student’s plight: if not for Wanmo and his tens of thousands of Skeleton warriors backing him, why would Yue Yang ever have shown off so extraordinary, so otherworldly a flying construct in public? In an ordinary duel, the lowest grade of flying construct would have been enough to sweep the field.

Now, Little Titan revealing this last trump was purely the grim situation forcing his hand. No one would begrudge him the reserve and concealment he’d kept until now.

“You kept me in the dark something cruel!” The Heavenly Pride Chairman clapped the Principal on the shoulder, nodding with an old man’s deep contentment. On the surface it was a scolding, but anyone could see how delighted he was by this “surprise.”

“We only wanted to protect the little one.” The Principal’s words were modest, but his face was flushed with color, as though he’d shed decades in a single breath. Before his many old friends he stood tall, chest out, that proud smile tugging at his lips, showing off to them all without meaning to: Look — that’s my student. My true and direct disciple.

“Extraordinary! Simply extraordinary!” His many old friends were beside themselves with envy, shaking their heads and sighing one after another.

“You flatter him. The little one has some talent, true, but he still needs tempering. On no account should you praise him, lest it breed arrogance.” The Principal said it with his beard fairly cocked up to the sky.

Only now did the students burst into a frenzy of cheering. Unable to contain the excitement in their hearts, they applauded wave after wave, bursting like rain, going on and on and on.

Young Lord Mingzhu gave a soft hmph, outwardly indifferent, though inwardly he was thrilled through and through. As for Chimu, he was weeping for sheer joy, howling “So magnificent!” with the fanatical air of a man ready to offer up his own backside in tribute. Ren Tiange and the Silver-Eyed Great Sage bumped fists and roared with laughter, while nearby stood Mige, the Tall Tower War Wolf, and Young Lord Yangquan — jaws on the floor, still frozen in expressions of pure disbelief, a thoroughly comical sight.

The handful of students who’d backed Wanmo looked as crestfallen as if their own fathers had just died — a far cry from the smug delight of moments before.

And Wanmo, standing down on the battlefield and gazing up at Yue Yang, wore the look of a man who’d swallowed a fly, cursing through gritted teeth: “Damn flying construct — this is bullshit! How could a flying construct possibly exist in Human Valley? Damn it all… If you’ve got the guts, come down and fight — otherwise you can just cower up there forever. Let’s see how long you can stay in the air!”

Wanmo had sixty thousand Skeleton warriors for nothing. All he could do now was watch, helpless, as Yue Yang soared free across the sky. What use were ground forces, however many? On any battlefield, whoever controls the sky stands forever undefeated — and the one who controlled the sky now was Yue Yang, gliding freely above his head, a peerless genius far, far beyond anything Wanmo could reach or chase down.

“You little fly of a bug, what good does flying high do you? You have one flying construct — and I have sixty thousand skeletons. What are you going to beat me with? I’ll just wait down here, wait for your flying construct to burn through every last drop of energy, and then I’ll tear your corpse into ten thousand pieces!” Wanmo was furious, but he hadn’t quite lost his reason. True, without a flying construct of his own he couldn’t lay a finger on Yue Yang — but with sixty thousand Skeleton warriors packed thick across the whole Western Peak, so what if the enemy’s construct could fly? Wanmo was certain that no matter what, he could not lose. Victory was only a matter of time.

“A big army’s worth jack shit!”

Yue Yang sneered again and again. He looked down in contempt at Wanmo and those sixty thousand Skeleton warriors, standing proud as he spoke.

“First, let me correct your mistaken little assumption. My flying construct isn’t just energy-efficient — it draws power from Divine Stones, an endless source. It could fly for a hundred years and never come down. Or, to put it another way: my flying construct is more than enough to keep you craning your neck at it for the rest of your natural life! Second, if you think sixty thousand Skeleton warriors count for anything, you are dead wrong. I only wanted to deal you the heaviest, most agonizing blow at the very height of your smugness. You reckon your sixty thousand skeletons are invincible, reckon there’s no counter to them — what a joke. For someone of your wits, naturally you’d think so. But someone of higher wits than you — me, for instance — looks at this trap you’ve laid and sees nothing but holes. And you still fancy you can break the restrictions with the evil god’s power, summon sixty thousand skeletons, and beat me? A profoundly stupid move. Ever since the Death Arena, the undying power of the Skeleton Race has been, in my eyes, the trash of all trash!”

At last, in a tone of absolute certainty, Yue Yang thundered: “The hardest power in all the world is the power of life. You don’t even grasp that much — at best you’re a dumbass pretending to know what he doesn’t!”

Wanmo was livid. If not for Human Valley’s ban on the use of force, he’d have flown up long ago to fight Yue Yang to the death.

Yue Yang swept both hands, scattering dozens of tiny black dots like a farmer sowing beans, each no bigger than a marble. The marble-sized specks shot off, fast as lightning, falling from a thousand meters up and tracing clear, distinct trails through the air. Because the targets were so minute and so lightning-quick, the Skeleton warriors struck out at them again and again to no effect whatsoever, dissolving instead into utter confusion.

A bad feeling struck Wanmo. He leapt into the air, took one look, and his narrow, glinting eyes went wide as an ox’s. He beheld a terrible sight: through the flight of those tiny marble-shaped constructs, the trails they wove across the low sky formed a rune array — one he did not recognize in the slightest. He didn’t yet know what was about to happen, but he knew that whatever it was, it would be nothing good.

Retreat!

He gave the order at once, commanding the Skeleton warriors to pull out of this vast rune array. But it was already too late — and the array was still expanding, spreading until it blanketed the entire Western Peak. Wanmo’s sixty thousand skeletons were as thick as a flood tide; there was simply nowhere left to retreat, no way to escape.

Yue Yang pressed down with his right hand.

The marble-sized little constructs transformed one after another, beams of light shooting from their tiny bodies, linking together, setting the great rune array in motion. And from within it, a life-force of heaven and earth — natural, pure — welled up brimming and overflowing. Any living thing that so much as brushed against this force would feel its spirit refreshed and its whole body eased; even a patient long bedridden with illness would forget his pain for a while and let a smile of contentment cross his face. But this life-energy — carrying no killing power, only the pure spiritual essence of heaven and earth — became, the instant it touched a Skeleton warrior, the greatest punishment in all the world. Even a god’s own heavenly judgment, one suspects, could be no worse.

Tens of thousands of Skeleton warriors burned as though in the raging flames of hell, writhing, rolling, wailing in agony. To them, life-energy was more excruciating than strong acid eating away at human skin — and worse still, skeletons could not do as humans do and black out once pain reached its limit. Having no life-force and no flesh and blood, they were untouched by hunger, exhaustion, sleep, or fainting; they stayed forever conscious, and though they bore the greatest agony in the world, not one shred of it was ever dulled by a merciful loss of awareness. Even if a Skeleton warrior forcibly tore off the very bones the life-energy had touched, it did no good — because every last one of them was bathed in the great Wellspring-of-Life rune array. And that bathing scoured not only the surface of their bones, but their very souls along with them.

Watching from beyond the array, the students trembled from head to toe. Never once in all their lives had they witnessed a torment more horrifying, more relentless, more agonizing than skeletons steeped in a Wellspring-of-Life rune array.

No escape in life.

No release in death.

That old saying described the plight of the sixty thousand Skeleton warriors to the letter.

“Now then — are you still confident enough to call your sixty thousand skeletons mighty? Wanmo, let this merciful soul share a famous saying with you: those who outsmart themselves tend to die the ugliest deaths! Commit it to memory — because that saying, in fact, is all about you!” Yue Yang had it in his power to annihilate all sixty thousand skeletons in a single instant with the Wellspring-of-Life rune array. But he pointedly chose not to. Instead he watched at his leisure, using this agonizing spectacle to mock, without a shred of mercy, the Wanmo who’d fancied that a scrap of the evil god’s power had put him above all law.

(End of Chapter)