The moment the tongues of fire licked the city wall, the dark red flesh hissed sharply. Its surface charred and curled, peeling away in large sheets that fell to the ground, giving off thick black smoke and a sickening stench.
Under the intense heat, the bronze surface glowed a dull, hot red. Far from deforming under the flames, the lines of the inscriptions actually seemed to show signs of recovery.
The Great Ascendant nodded in satisfaction as he watched the luster return to the inscriptions.
It seemed fire was indeed effective.
The thick nozzle slowly swept from side to side. The pillar of fire moved with it, roasting the wall from base to battlements.
Wherever the flames swept, the flesh was burned away completely, exposing the red-hot bronze beneath.
Yet as the Great Ascendant stared at the cleared section of the wall, his silver-grey pupils contracted slightly.
Before the wall could even cool, fresh flesh began to seep out from its base.
Though the oozing was slow, it was clearly visible to the naked eye.
Fine, dark red threads sprouted from the crevices of the inscriptions, spreading outward in creeping tendrils like a weed in overdrive.
The substance was constantly replenishing itself from deep underground. At this rate, no matter how much they burned away, they would never be able to eradicate the root cause.
The Great Ascendant did not shut off the flamethrower.
He knew that every second counted. The task Kraus had assigned him was merely to slow down the spread of this contamination.
If he could buy some time here, the teams at the other walls should theoretically be doing the same.
Dozens of paces away from the wall stood a temporary outpost.
On a simple folding iron table, several sealed glass containers sat, each holding a fist-sized chunk of flesh.
The dark red flesh had a wet, glistening sheen and writhed sluggishly against the glass walls.
These samples were pieces the Great Ascendant had severed from the special individual during their earlier clash underground.
Two Ascension Society researchers squatted by the table. One was probing inside a container with a long, thin needle through a small port, while the other held a stack of parchment, writing in fits and starts.
The Great Ascendant turned his head, his silver-grey eyes sweeping over them. “Any results?”
The researcher with the needle looked up, his lips trembling slightly. He looked pale.
“We don't have the preliminary results yet, but things don't look good. This stuff can even cling to this specialized glass. That means it can probably adhere to almost any metal.”
“Corrosion aside, its sheer mobility is terrifying. It can practically crawl anywhere.”
“The preservative fluids we use have almost no effect on it. Even when severed from the main body, it remains perfectly active. It isn't even afraid of water. If this stuff ever made its way into the ocean, I shudder to think of the consequences.”
The researcher was rambling, clearly anxious.
The Great Ascendant clicked his tongue. A rare trace of irritation flickered across his face as he looked away, turning his attention back to the wall.
He had to put those thoughts aside for now. He could only hope the situation would stabilize soon. The mission the Ascension Society had given him was far from over.
Right then, the flesh on the city wall suddenly surged.
The Great Ascendant's pupils contracted sharply.
The dark red threads, which had been seeping out in thin strands just moments ago, suddenly thickened several times over. They began to crawl across the wall with terrifying speed.
The section of bronze that had just been burned clean was covered in a fresh, glistening red film in the blink of an eye.
The flamethrower’s pillar of fire continued to lash the wall, but the blistering heat could no longer burn the flesh away faster than it could replicate.
This is impossible. Is this thing actually adapting?
The Great Ascendant looked around. In the distance, distress signals from other Descendants were flashing along the wall. The same crisis was unfolding elsewhere.
He turned back to the southern wall in front of him, his silver-grey eyes reflecting a roiling sea of dark red.
For the first time, a look of genuine dread appeared on the Great Ascendant’s face.
His silver-grey eyes widened, and the rigid metal plates of his mechanical face let out a faint, metallic click.
The flesh was spreading at a speed that defied all his calculations, displaying a terrifying level of adaptability.
This was no longer an entity he could contend with—at least, not now.
At this rate, the walls that were supposed to hold for three days would become a flesh-covered hell within twenty-four hours.
There would be only one end for everyone in the city.
The Great Ascendant did not hesitate for a second.
“All units, evacuate to the outer city. Pack up everything immediately and prepare to abandon the city at a moment’s notice,” he commanded, his voice rumbling from his mechanical chest cavity with far more gravity than before.
“Scholars, pay close attention. Evacuate now. Immediately.”
The Descendants, who had not received any order to retreat, continued to operate the flamethrowers. Pillars of fire swept over the walls repeatedly, filling the air with black smoke and the stench of burning meat.
The rest of the personnel quickly packed up their instruments and began their retreat toward the outer city.
Standing amidst the thick smoke, the Great Ascendant kept his silver-grey eyes fixed on the wall as it was slowly consumed by the flesh.
The inner city walls were three meters thick. If the flesh completely saturated them from the inside out, how could they hope to destroy it? How could they possibly fight back?
Even their specialized alchemical fire could now barely keep pace with its expansion.
The Great Ascendant could already foresee the doom of the Bronze City.
Inside the Polymath Tower, the air at the base of the main tower suddenly grew heavy.
Seated upon his stone chair, the Guardian’s cloudy eyes suddenly snapped open.
A pitch-black aura erupted from below his waist. The few remaining black eyeballs on his lower half turned in unison, staring straight down into the earth.
The malice seeping from the abyss had suddenly intensified several times over. The Bronze City's walls were being consumed at a speed that far exceeded their worst-case projections.
What had begun as a slow, insidious creep had transformed into a violent, raging assault.
The entity sealed deep underground had been angered by something. It was about to break free.
In the air before him, a spectral head slowly materialized.
It was the face conjured by the Man on the Wall, hovering in mid-air with an eerie, dark light gleaming in its empty, pitch-black eye sockets.
It stared at the Guardian, remaining silent for several heartbeats before speaking in a voice tight with a strange urgency.
“Join forces with me. Otherwise, neither of us will leave this place alive.”
The Guardian did not answer.
The aura radiating from him continued to climb. The pitch-black energy crept up from his waist, reaching his chest as more black eyeballs manifested one after another, more than doubling their previous number.
The old man’s spine straightened, his white hair whipping about in the turbulent currents of his own power.
He was already preparing to strike.
The west wall was the first to fall.
Because the Great Ascendant had concentrated all his firepower on the southern section, the western wall was left with insufficient suppression, causing it to collapse first.
By the time the Great Ascendant received the report, the entire western wall had already been fully converted into flesh.
The structure of bronze and stone had vanished entirely, replaced by a massive, living wall of meat.
A mass of blood and tissue twisted and churned together across the writhing, dark red surface. Hideous, pupil-less fleshy eyes bulged from the meat, rolling sluggishly within the mass as they wept a constant stream of foul-smelling mucus.
The Descendants and Nightwatchers guarding the western wall had already been completely wiped out.
The moment the wall fully transformed into flesh, everyone in the vicinity froze.
Long, spindly arms of flesh erupted from the wall, reaching out to drag the paralyzed Descendants and Nightwatchers into the meat.
They were still alive as they were absorbed, yet they could not utter a single sound.
Their bodies mutated rapidly before the eyes of the survivors. The wall's flesh bored into their bones, tore through their skin, and thoroughly saturated their bodies.
Still fully conscious, their faces twisted in agonizing torment as they suffered through inhuman pain, dying slowly as they were integrated into the wall.
Eventually, their physical forms vanished entirely, leaving only a horror-filled gallery of agonizing, distorted faces embedded in the meat.
They seemed to still be alive, slowly being converted into greater ghouls.
New entities took shape within the wall, but instead of breaking free, they slowly dissolved deeper into the structure, merging into the collective mass of flesh.
At the other sections of the wall, the remaining Descendants continued to operate their machinery mechanically, desperately burning the sections that had not yet succumbed.
Yet their movements had grown visibly frantic, their hands shaking with a desperate, barely contained panic.
Right then, a new development occurred on the wall of flesh.
Inside the fully flesh-converted western wall, something was pushing its way out from deep within.
The surface bulged, forming one lump, then another, until several protrusions deformed the wall.
As the bulges swelled, the overlying flesh stretched paper-thin, revealing the distinct outlines of humanoid figures beneath.
The first bulge ruptured. A figure slid out from the wet meat, dripping with thick mucus, and landed at the foot of the wall with a soft, wet hiss.
The entity stood upright, roughly the height of a human with fully formed limbs. However, its face was entirely devoid of features, save for a single thin line that ran horizontally from ear to ear—a horizontal-slit.
Soon, a second, third, and fourth crawled out from the wall of flesh.
Covered in slime and bearing the exact same horizontal slit across their faces, they stood silently at the base of the wall.
They did not move toward the outer city.
Instead, the horizontal-slit-faced creatures turned their featureless heads toward the depths of the inner city, their invisible gazes locking onto the distant high tower.
The Polymath Tower loomed silently in the dark, the remaining inscriptions on its walls flickering with the last vestiges of their light.
Their gaze then swept over the estates and townhouses lining the street before the tower.
In the next instant, the figures vanished from the spot simultaneously.
Nothing remained at the foot of the wall except for the writhing meat and a few puddles of sizzling, acidic mucus.
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