Crack!
A crisp sound of bones shattering, enough to make one's scalp tingle.
Wang Yuan loosened his hand, and Chen Xuanli's body crumpled limply to the ground.
His head hung crookedly to one side at an unnatural angle, his eyes wide open.
The expression on Chen Xuanli's face froze somewhere between terror and disbelief.
The clearing before the cliff suddenly fell deathly silent.
In the distance, the Imperial Court cavalry who had been surrounding the Kaoshan Sect remnants froze with their weapons raised. Every one of them turned to look this way.
They watched with their own eyes as their commander, Chen Xuanli, the vanguard general of late Viscera Refining Realm, had his throat crushed one-handed by that golden giant and was tossed to the ground like a frog being pinched to death.
No one gave the order to retreat.
Yet everyone simultaneously yanked tight on their reins.
"Monster! Run!"
Then the first cavalryman turned his horse around.
Then came the second, the third, the tenth, the hundredth. No one spoke, no one shouted "Retreat," but that unspoken understanding came faster than any military order.
In less than ten breaths, two thousand cavalrymen transformed from besiegers into a routed army.
Hooves shattered the rocks strewn across the ground as they fled madly back the way they had come, kicking up dust that veiled most of the mountains.
Some threw away their long lances just to make their horses run faster. Others flattened themselves against their mounts, not daring to look back.
Some were even struck by their companions' horses and sent rolling down the slope, yet did not dare stop to climb back up.
Two thousand men had simply run.
They ran so thoroughly that not even a single banner remained.
The clearing before the cliff became empty.
Imperial Court