Outworld Liberators-Chapter 200: Climbing the Corpse Mountain

Names began to flash across the linen screens, each one paired with a bright highlight.

The participants who had readied arguments and retorts froze with them still in their throats.

Those glowing scenes were proof they had been watched the whole way through.

God Eldric might not kill them for a sharp tongue, but most of them still needed to do business in the Goldkeep Crownmarkets.

So they swallowed every complaint and shut up completely.

The stone floor opened into deep holes for those not destined to participate.

One by one, people dropped through. As they fell, a warm pulse washed over their bodies, mending bruises and knitting cuts.

It did not cure old diseases. It did not grant miracles.

It only returned them to the state they had been in before the tournament began, as if the whole ordeal had been a harsh dream that left no broken bones behind.

Then the arena spat them out.

Bodies launched a meter high, tumbling onto the ground outside in awkward heaps.

A few came up indignant, faces red, mouths already forming complaints. Most swallowed it.

They understood the rule without being told. Eldric would choose those who had truly toiled.

The chosen two thousand forty eight were lifted instead.

They rose as if invisible hands had hooked under their ribs, and then they flew out in a clean stream.

The screens caught their faces as they passed, flashes of fear, pride, hunger, and hard calm.

Eldric’s voice rolled over the crowd.

"Now. Let the betting begin."

The audience did not need instruction beyond that. Coins minted by Radeon Terraces appeared in hands as if conjured.

People pointed at the faces on the screen, shouting names, pressing money forward, eyes bright with greed and faith braided together.

Goldman clasped his hands and prayed, not for profit, only for his son’s safety.

Biscuit watched his granddaughter Tabulae with a wild grin that made his wrinkles look sharp.

He had not bet on her before. He had won by putting his coin on Ropefist instead.

This time he hesitated, because a single bet was all a person was allowed.

Challah, who had cut ties with the Ironbuck Miners, had no such hesitation.

She had sold her men through proper networks, stripped her resources down to spirit stones, and placed every last saving on Tabulae.

She had been watching the girl. She trusted Tabulae’s judgment more than the size of men who lacked cunning.

Then the world changed. The chosen participants appeared on a flat plain, arranged in a wide perfect circle, all of them standing.

The ground rumbled under their feet. Dirt cracked. Stone groaned.

Hands began to dig up from below. Zombies and skeletons alike.

All of them stone bound, flesh fused to rock, fingers like broken pillars forcing their way into moonlight.

Then mouths rose. Arms followed, each one massive, fifty meters of knotted bulk, also attached to stone like a curse given shape.

Eyeballs blinked open and shut. Tongues slid across dry rock as if wetting cracked lips. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

The thing kept rising. A tower of dead and horrors.

One kilometer. Two. Five. Ten.

The people watching went still. A shiver ran through the stands at the sight of that fleshy mountain.

Cultivators stared wide eyed, calculating in silence.

If Eldric threw that onto a city, would anything remain?

In truth, it was made from ghosts and tiyanak that longed for mischief, stitched into a form that could be seen and feared.

Calyx had been given the task of keeping the ghosts from craving flesh too eagerly.

He had devised many plans, and this was what he came up with.

He was the one conjuring it, while his master Radeon took the fame through Eldric’s name.

"Participants... There is but one simple rule. Climb."

"The first five hundred to reach the summit shall be the winners. May heaven guide your path."

Most mortals did not rush in blind. These were already the cream of the crop of Goldkeep Crownmarkets.

People watched first. Counted. Tested.

A fifty meter arm slammed down, its hand a full ten meters wide, patting the ground like a blind man searching for a dropped coin.

Each pat landed with a muffled boom that shook grit into the air and made teeth click together.

Tabulae stared at her crossbow and knew it was wrong for this.

Still, she fired. The bolt struck the hand.

The arm did not flinch. It stretched instead, lengthening like wet clay pulled by invisible fingers, reaching past seventy meters.

Dust burst from its stone skin in a choking cloud, and beneath the scuffed rock she saw dried flesh clinging in strips.

Her hair rose on her scalp. Her breath caught. She fell back on her butt hard enough to sting.

Plans raced through her mind and tripped over each other.

Then she forced herself to look again. Not at the horror.

At the ground. At what the hands touched. At what they missed.

She reached down and started gathering small stones, fingers quick, eyes sharper than her fear.

On the other side of the circle, Raj had been dealt a worse place.

He had only touch to guide him, because he had asked for it. He wanted the challenge.

Still, he moved like a bee in a storm, treating those hands like flowers that wanted to crush him.

When the air shifted, when the ground trembled just before impact, Raj sprang away.

His clothes snapped in the wind as a massive hand clapped down where he had been. The shock rolled over him like a wave.

He did not stop. He climbed the arm while it was still rising, feet finding purchase on stone ridges and patches of rough flesh.

He ran up it like it was a road. Pressure changed on his left.

Raj sprinted again and grabbed the arm’s edge as another hand smashed down nearby.

He used the impact, rode the tremor, and leapt to the next arm while it was still settling.

Another arm struck from the right.

For a heartbeat, three arms chased him at once, slapping and grabbing in frantic sweeps.

Then they tangled, stone joints grinding against each other as they tried to catch what they could not see.

Raj used the knot they made. He slipped through the gap and ran straight toward the tower’s rock face, toward the place where flesh and bone and stone all met.

Those who meant to group up started running for each other, boots pounding, breath tearing.

Then a thin whistling cut down from above, and heads snapped up in the same instant.

Spectators in the stands leaned forward, fists at mouths, watching the sky.

From the top of the towering mountain flesh, more of those massive hands, ten meters wide, began to throw steel balls.

Armored skeleton flesh golems came raining down, each wrapped in a steel shell like a coffin turned inside out.

They hit the ground and splattered, metal crumpling, wet mass bursting out in ugly ribbons. For a heartbeat it looked finished.

Then each heap wriggled. Flesh pulled itself back into shape with obscene patience.

Flattened steel peeled and folded until it became a towering shield, a slab wide enough to hide a cart.

Behind it, the naked body rose again, still over five meters tall, all bone ridges and muscle knots stitched wrong.

They charged. Not hunting clean kills, but driving. They shoved participants away from one another and toward the reaching hands, turning every attempt at teamwork into a stampede.

"Every man for his own for now."

"Grouping up is a bad idea. Really bad."

"Just run."

More whistling. More impacts. The plain began to look like the end of a world, steel and meat falling from the heavens while stone hands searched for anything moving.

Whiteblade planted his feet and raised his hand cannon. The shot cracked like thunder.

It punched through one behemoth, tearing steel and flesh alike, and split the thing clean through the torso.

Booing rose from the crowd at once. It sounded like accusation. Like fear wearing a mask of fairness.

The golem did not stay dead. Its severed halves writhed, dragged themselves together, and joined like wet clay.

It stood again, smaller now, three and a half meters, but still a monster with a strength and shield.

Whiteblade’s face drained.

"How? How is that possible?"

A few in the stands began to understand what they were being shown. Not a weakness in the cannon. A boundary.

A lesson wrapped in spectacle. The weapon could do terrible things, but it was not a god’s promise.

And a promise that sounds perfect makes sane men suspicious. This was the opposite. This was proof of its limits.

A man ran because he had been cornered by the naked flesh golems, boots skidding, breath tearing in his throat.

He chose a gap and lunged for it. A hand descended right above him.

Before it could crush him, a teal shield snapped into place around his body, hard as glass and bright as sea water.

The ground opened under his feet in the same heartbeat, and the land took him, swallowing him clean.

To everyone watching, it looked like elimination on the spot.

Radeon did not want these men dead. They could still be used later.

The man thought he had died anyway. Then his vision cleared, and he found himself seated on a special bench by the arena, alive, shaking, and very aware that he had been spared.