Depthless Hunger

Chapter 100: The Defense of Monskon City

There wasn't enough time.

As Kai desperately tried to push his Physique to the limit, he began to accept that he wouldn't make it to E-0. Occasionally he began to feel a strange twinging in his muscles, like when he had reached F-0, but it always felt wrong. The twinges were painful and, instead of developing his body to a new stage, he felt like he was crippling himself.

Eventually he let out a growl and slammed his fists into the flagstones of the training yard. The monster incursion would be arriving soon and trying any further would only leave him unprepared. Breaking through might restore his body to some degree, but it wasn't a magical balm for everything. He had to admit failure.

The flagstones trembled, but if he had reached E-rank, they would have shattered.

He reluctantly pulled himself back to his feet and looked across. There was basically no one else training at a time like this, of course. Everyone was thinking about violence and death, not power. Only Zae Zin Nim sat nearby, and she opened her eyes sadly.

"Don't despair, Kai. This continent failed us both." She smoothly rose beside him. "I have pushed to the very peak of the Body Refinement stage, but I lack the qi to reach Nascent Foundation."

"Even if you use the last qi pill you have?" he asked.

"It would grant me a significant amount, but if I tried to press through it would be insufficient, and it would be wasted. Better to use it in a moment of true desperation."

"Well, I'm afraid there will be plenty of those."

They left the training courtyard to join the main defense forces and he marveled to see the streets of Monskon City completely empty. Most of the civilians were staying in bunkers in the upper city and had already gone to ground. There were a few defensive positions, but no hunters waited at them, because if the monsters reached that point, the fight had become truly desperate.

The primary wall of the city was unlikely to be broken by any monsters, but the gates had been heavily fortified. In fact, it looked like two of the three gates had been entirely filled and the last was guarded. When they passed into the lower city they began to see more warriors and civilians preparing the defenses, as well as places to heal the wounded.

Of course, the primary defensive point for the city was its outer wall. The street leading to the gates, normally a thoroughfare, had been tightened to form a deadly pathway. Then the outer gates had been closed, with an Earthenshield and a Flameshield Class hunter waiting to reinforce it if necessary.

Enough time to fortify the city itself, but not enough time for its defenders...

Walkways led to the top of the wall, so Kai and Zae Zin Nim followed the paths to talk to the leaders of the defense. Once at the top, Kai realized he could already see monsters approaching from the north. Not the carpet of legs and claws that had poured from the abyssal hole, but still enough to destroy the city.

To his surprise, he found that he actually recognized the main leader of the defenses. He hadn't seen Rallia Orgoron since the Hunters Trials, when she had seen his awakening. She stood with several other hunters and elders around a table bearing a map of the city. When he walked up she gave him a strange glance, but didn't comment on his soul.

"They'll be here soon," she said. "The horde will hit the northern wall first, but the hills and wall are too sheer for them to climb and there aren't many flying ones this year. So they'll move around the exterior, defenders raining projectiles down on them the entire way. Those who make it to the southern gate will try to break through."

"You're not sending out early forces?" Kai frowned as he examined the thoroughly barred gates. "If you fought a defensive action, you could thin them out further."

"And get some of our bravest hunters injured before the true battle begins? Stupid."

"Better for them to face their first injuries before the slower and stronger monsters arrive. Then they'd have time to recover and they can join the true battle strengthened."

Stolen story; please report.

Rallia snorted. "Maybe that works for the insane, but many of our hunters will be broken by this battle. We don't want to start wearing them down with melee combat until absolutely necessary."

Kai disliked the strategy, but he had to admit that she was a veteran and knew the limits of average hunters better than he did. If he convinced a bunch of weaker hunters to follow him, they might end up dead instead of strengthened.

Meanwhile, Zae Zin Nim had been examining the map and now spoke. "So you'll place your strongest cultivators on the northern and southern walls?"

"Why would we waste them on the north?" One of the elders brought a fist down on the lines representing the wall. "We already told you, they'll never break the northern wall."

Zae Zin Nim frowned and stepped back. Someone else might have mistaken her expression as accepting correction, but he knew that she was simply frustrated and not inclined to keep arguing. He suspected he knew what she was thinking and decided to pick up her argument.

"That might be true for a normal incursion," he explained, "but the horde has been disrupted. There might be monsters who could climb or even damage the northern wall. If they managed to break through there, the entire defensive strategy would crumble."

"Absurd! You can see the monsters for yourself, there are no abominations among them. The Frontier has done its job as it always has."

"Could we move ranged fighters?" Rallia looked over the horde more thoughtfully than the others. "There's no sense in some of our strongest simply waiting in the south while the monsters push their way around the city."

"You think skipping all around the city wall during the middle of a pitched battle is easy?"

They continued arguing and it seemed like leadership was split on the subject. As the argument became less productive, Rallia stepped away from the table to face Kai.

"If you want to help," she said, "go north yourself. If they do start to break through, call to me. Even if I can't convince them, I can follow myself."

"We'll do what we can." Kai started to leave, then turned back to Rallia for one last question. "Tell me the truth: what are our chances of getting reinforcement from the clans? Can any of them get back from Irun in time?"

"The strongest took a flying vessel." Rallia glanced northeast, then shook her head. "I don't know how far away they are, or how much help they'll offer if they arrive."

"Irunians?"

"They were supposed to join the Trials and never arrived. Someone sent a message saying they have their own problems. Assume no reinforcements."

He'd been afraid of that, but better to face the truth. Kai left the leaders to their squabbling and began making his way around the wall of the city. As the monsters drew ever closer, the urge to run rose, but that would probably disrupt the defenders or even knock them off the wall. He saw a lot of terrified faces watching the horde approach. Many were just civilians carrying heavy rocks: they might not have any mana-fueled strength, but a rock dropped from that high would be lethal to most monsters.

That had been him, seven years ago. Back then, he'd thought his fate was to become a hunter. Even though Monskon City had rejected him, Kai realized that he wanted to save these people. He didn't want to rejoin the city, but he needed to prove that he wasn't who he had been.

When Kai reached the northern point of the wall, he had to admit that it seemed like the elders were right. The front of the horde was composed of familiar local monsters, such as twisted dogs and boars. There were also a strange deer-like beast with razor horns that ran ahead of the others, but when the horde hit the northern face of the city, it had no choice but to go around.

Then he saw what he'd feared: an enormous furry spider reached the rocky outcropping of the city and began crawling up the side. It didn't slow when it reached the wall, its claws able to find purchase even on the smooth stone. Some of the defenders noticed and panicked, beginning to throw rocks down toward it. The spider skittered from side to side and even when a few rocks struck it, they bounced off its fur. As two more spiders began to climb the base of the wall, the defenders began screaming.

Bolts of qi tore through each of the spiders, sending them tumbling down into the monster horde. Many of the defenders cheered, but Zae Zin Nim simply lowered her hand and watched the river of monsters as it parted around the base of the city.

The occasional spider might be handled by her, but Kai spotted two more beasts that worried him because they didn't resemble anything local to the area. One looked more like a clam shell than a normal monster, traveling on a hundred small legs that took it over rocks. The other was like an anvil on legs, its body simply rising into a massive wedge of stone. When it reached the city wall it didn't climb, it began ramming its head into the stone.

"Kai..." Zae Zin Nim caught his attention and he looked over to see that the clam-like monster was actually the bigger problem. When she sent out a qi attack, it deflected off the shell harmlessly and the beast kept climbing. "That one is tainted, like the others at the Frontier. I don't think my qi will ever get through."

Then it was time for what he had known was coming from the beginning. If they didn't stop the monster horde from breaching the northern wall, the entire defense would collapse and Monskon City was doomed. With no strong defenders at the north, he was their only hope.

So Kai jumped over the edge and plummeted toward the climbing monsters.