Qi Wu surveyed his surroundings.
The city gates stood wide open, one gate panel lying crookedly to the side. Five deep fingerprints marked its surface, as though someone had torn it bodily from its frame.
Over twenty meters of the city wall had collapsed, the rubble forming a slope. Demon corpses were tangled with those of the Imperial Guard, indistinguishable from one another.
Several Spiritual Energy Cannons lay overturned on the battlements, their barrels still hot and trailing wisps of smoke. No one knew where the gunners had been flung; only a few pools of blood remained.
Claw marks covered the wall in sets of five, gouged deep into the masonry. The deepest could swallow an entire arm.
The claw marks stretched from the outside of the wall to the inside, as though someone had scratched their way into the city, using the wall as a scratching post.
Xiao Tiance's God-Slaying Halberd was embedded at the foot of the wall. Three claw marks scored its shaft, nearly snapping the Special Grade Cursed Tool. The halberd trembled faintly in the moonlight; it had clearly suffered severe damage too.
More embarrassing still-
Xiao Tiance himself, the highest-ranking commander present, was stuck in the wall a little over a person's height above the ground, his entire body embedded in the masonry.
He could not have looked more pathetic.
Three great tears ran from the chest to the abdomen of his black combat outfit. His clothes hung from him in strips, exposing the shattered inner armor beneath. Blood seeped from his wounds and dripped down his arms onto the bricks, staining the section of wall around him red.
He struggled twice, then fell from the wall and landed on one knee. One hand braced against his knee while the other clutched his chest as