Alexandra and Kenny spent the next few hours debating about food management as they prepared the harvestable crops for consumption.

  They both frowned at the setting sun. The two of them quickly went to the living room and sat on the couch. Alexandra had wrapped an arm around Kenny’s shoulders. On her lap was a small crystal ball that showed the farm outside.

  Howling echoed across the fields as the sun set and darkness blanketed the landscape as the moon rose.

  Thousands of the chickens were seen in the fields, hundreds of the canines that snorted fire, and dozens of strange bovines that had four pinkish yellow tendrils that extended from their backs, and there was a massive house sized boar that had a copper colored hide.

  Kenny bit his tongue to prevent him from yelling at the ball’s surveillance. Alexandra covered her mouth with her left hand.

  She glanced around to make sure that the candles had enough fuel to burn all night; Alexandra then hovered her sword at the front door and windows.

  Thankfully for the house’s structural integrity, the horde had moved towards the town, freeing up space for even more monsters to spawn.

  “Where’s tumbleweeds or kudzu for campfire fuel?” Kenny asked.

  Again, the horde had been drawn to the city and mostly ignored the farmer and his guard. The few stragglers were always the chickens. The number of the chickens had gone up from the daytime, but their strength thankfully had not increased.

  “Should you go back and defend Seven Jewel-Crop Haven?” Kenny asked.

  Alexandra shook her head, “I don’t have a Golden Core yet so my output will be too low to fight through the entire horde to reach the town.”

  “That’s the penultimate stage of the Body Realm, correct?” Kenny asked.

  She nodded. “It’s right below the Body Temple Stage.”

  Before she could open her mouth to speak, they both heard a loud bang from the town’s direction.

  Kenny wrapped his arms around her torso as they heard more explosions and reverberating roaring from the star spawn.

  “I don’t think the other towns will survive this night.” He said as he glanced over to the sister town of Eleven Guided Arrows, assuming the walls and hills were not in the way.

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  “I don’t think we will last the week.” Alexandra said, “My clan’s matriarch still needs to rest to recuperate her Qi for this level of combat. Unless we sleep in shifts and save our stronger fighters for the night, then we will lose this war of attrition.”

  Kenny nodded, “Alright, so we need a lot more wax for candles, rely upon old food preserver methods for food, and now we need a lot of new sleep aids.”

  Now that she had determined that the Star Spawn were not going to attack the farm in mass, Alexandra had moved the crystal ball’s view to the town.

  Instantly the source of the reverberations were apparent, the large boars were using their roars to vibrate the innards of anyone who had gotten too close. Their hides were equally effective at dispersing the weapons and Qi of the cultivatiors around them.

  The strange bovine had used their tendrils to smack into the physical attacks of the town defenders and knock them off course. One unlucky lightning-slinger man had been grabbed by a set of tendrils and ripped apart as a set of cyan threads emerged from the corpse as it was dragged out by a tendril.

  The tendril wrapped the Qi Veins around itself as it was sucked into the main body of the bovine. The other three tendrils had clad themselves in lightning bolts when the fourth tendril entered the body of the Starspawn.

  “We’re definitely fucked.” Alexandra said as she tightened her grip on Kenny.

  “I don’t think these ones will let us be breeding stock,” Kenny said as he ignored the pain of her grip.

  The sound of guitars and drums echoed through the town and visibly shook against the Boars’ dire sounds in a clash of distorted air that occasionally sparked red and black. The rest of the town defense forces focused on the bovines and in particular the one that had already claimed a victim.

  The Boars charged into the path of the directed attacks and only had cuts on their fur to show the futility of the defense.

  The canines breathed in deep and spewed out a wall of flames as the chickens began leaping through the fire and then landed on buildings to spread the flames from their own burning bodies.

  A large glow of light lilac rose from a man who had the appearance of a thirty year old man, his face clean shaven and his hair and eyes was the same as his aura. A massive eruption of energy spilled from his body and annihilated the fire that was consuming the town.

  The wave didn’t harm anyone or the buildings but vanquished the chickens and canines. Though the effort visibly drained him as he resorted to smaller blasts that hammered away at the boars.

  “If first son Anthony is on the field, where are the other Branch Leaders?” Alexandra asked herself.

  “My question is whether he can do that again for the fresh spawns?” Kenny asked.

  As if Anthony had heard him, the man breathed in as a small golden dot in his stomach flared into existence as its light shone through all barriers. He looked visibly refreshed by the light of his mastery of his body.

  He was joined by several others who were fending off the other hordes that had come from different directions.

  “Ah,” Kenny said. “Golden Cores are generators of Oi aren’t they?”

  Alexandra nodded. “We also use them as capacitors.”

  As the next wave of Starspawn reached the city, waves of Qi blossomed from the Branch Leaders.