When the fourth month of fighting began, not long after darkness had swallowed the land, the soldiers on watch began to hear a strange sound.

Something impossibly heavy and vast seemed to be moving through the night, drawing steadily closer to Beishan Pass.

“Something’s wrong.”

Xiahou Zuo looked at Li Chi. A rare unease had entered his eyes.

The unknown is a source of dread that no one can fully banish.

“For the first three months, the Black Wu attacks were fierce but predictable — nothing that posed a true threat. I’ve been wondering the whole time what they were waiting for.”

Li Chi heard Xiahou Zuo’s words and raised his eyes to the sky.

He understood at once: “They were waiting for cloud cover.”

As ill luck would have it for the Black Wu forces, the northern frontier had enjoyed consistently clear weather for all three months — not a single day of snow or rain.

But eventually their wait paid off. Midsummer had arrived, and though the climate here lacked the oppressive humidity of the south, the rainy season came all the same.

Tonight, the sky was overcast.

The clouds smothered the moon and every star. Not a trace of light. The entire world seemed to exist in an absolute, impenetrable darkness — the kind where you could not see your hand in front of your face.

And into this darkness where it was impossible to see what the enemy was doing, the enemy came.

What was more, the Black Wu forces had lit no torches. There were none of the thunderous battle cries of their previous attacks. They advanced in silence through the dark, without a sound.

“Prepare the fire arrows — on my command!”

Li Chi shouted.

Soldiers immediately readied their fire arrows, every man gripping his longbow, waiting for the order.

“Change the bolt-thrower ammunition first — load the fire-oil bolts.”

Li Chi gave another order.

Soldiers moved at once, fitting the heavy fire-oil-wrapped bolts into the bolt-throwers.

Using such ammunition carried risks — a mistake could set the equipment itself ablaze.

After months of continuous use, the bolt-throwers were showing wear. But Li Chi had prepared generous reserves; damaged machines were swapped out quickly.

“Release the fire-oil bolts!”

At Li Chi’s command, the row of bolt-throwers on the wall loosed a thunderous collective roar. Over a hundred heavy, burning bolts streaked into the night sky.

Every eye followed those streaks of light — like countless meteors falling close to the earth, descending in broken trails outside the wall.

“Enemy advance!”

In the instant before the fire-bolts struck ground, those on the wall finally caught a glimpse of the Black Wu forces — and among them, something that could not fail to inspire dread: massive shapes in the darkness.

Impossible to say what they were. The intermittent light of the fire-bolts could not fully illuminate the enormity of those shapes.

“Whatever those things are — all bolt-throwers, adjust and concentrate fire on the big ones!”

Li Chi shouted again.

The heavy bolt-throwers began shifting direction and angle. They hadn’t fully illuminated the shapes, but what they had glimpsed made one thing clear: those things were enormous.

Bolt-throwers and row-shooters poured fire into the dark, dense salvos of heavy bolts hammering outward. Even a creature of legendary ferocity should have been reduced to a bloodied ruin.

Dull, crashing sounds echoed back. Human screams of agony followed.

Yet the low, dread-inducing rumble continued. Those massive shapes kept moving toward the wall.

“Archers — loose!”

At the command, every archer on the wall let fly simultaneously, sending arrows arcing upward in a mass volley.

If the fire-bolts had been one blazing meteor streak after another, what fell now was a sky full of falling fire — a downpour from above.

In that moment, Li Chi and the others finally saw clearly what those colossal shapes were.

They were siege ramps unlike anything anyone had seen before. Not the tower wagons the Black Wu forces had used previously. The shape was entirely different.

“They’ve built ramp bridges!”

Xiahou Zuo cried out.

For three months, the Black Wu forces had kept up their regular attacks without a single day’s pause — and in doing so, they had kept the full attention of the Ning Army occupied. Meanwhile, they had raised the walls of their own encampment to prevent observation from above. They had even positioned their old siege tower wagons along the front of the camp to block the Ning Army’s line of sight.

In those three months, they had built six enormous siege ramps.

Each one was at least fifty zhang in length — possibly as many as seventy. At the high end, they matched the height of Beishan Pass’s walls; at the low end, they nearly brushed the ground. Their width could accommodate twenty men standing shoulder to shoulder. Structures of such scale inspired a dread that was difficult to resist.

To build such things, the Black Wu forces had relied on a national advantage in resources and manpower that few could match.

They had eight hundred thousand soldiers. And they had deep coffers.

Three months ago, the Blue Tribunal’s Deputy Divine Seat, Zhimoran, had announced that he was assuming command of the southern expeditionary force and that all personnel were to obey him unconditionally.

He ordered Jingluo Fu to remain as the primary assault commander. Of the six hundred thousand troops of the Southern Court barracks, Jingluo Fu was free to rotate and deploy them as needed.

From those six hundred thousand, Zhimoran divided out one hundred thousand between Anshina Yi and the Seven Divisions of Heaven, deploying them to flank the central army on left and right.

Then Zhimoran sent for the steppe general Gosh, who had come at the head of the Iron Crane tribal cavalry.

Zhimoran had told Gosh: steppe cavalry are unrivaled in open battle — but this siege is no place for cavalry. So he was assigning Gosh and his men a different task: travel to more distant territories, fell timber, and haul it back.

The cavalry became a transport corps. Iron Crane’s riders used their warhorses to drag back logs, which were then fashioned into siege ramps inside the encampment.

Three months. At an immense cost in labor and material, those siege ramps were at last ready for use.

In truth, Zhimoran had nearly run out of patience when the second ramp was completed. Even for the Black Wu Empire’s deep resources, eight hundred thousand men in the field consumed a staggering amount of supplies with every passing day.

But their luck had been against them. The sky refused to cooperate.

If they had pushed the assault in daylight, the ramps would have been seen the moment they appeared, and the Ning Army would have had time to devise countermeasures.

Zhimoran was confident in his plan — but he refused to leave anything to chance.

For the Black Wu forces, the darkest night had finally come.

And this attack had to succeed in a single stroke.

By the time the Ning Army heard the rumble and realized something was wrong, the siege ramps had already moved to within roughly two li of the walls.

The ramps were staggeringly large — moved in the same manner as their previous tower wagons. Rolling logs placed beneath them, countless men straining to push them forward.

Zhimoran had come to the field in full armor.

“Warriors of the Black Wu Empire — three months! We have spent three full months here. The special envoy sent by His Imperial Majesty to censure us has surely already departed and is somewhere on the road!”

Zhimoran’s voice rang out: “If the envoy arrives and we still haven’t broken Beishan Pass — we cannot explain ourselves. That is our failure. But if the envoy arrives and we have already brought Beishan Pass to ruin, then the envoy sent to condemn us will become an envoy sent to congratulate us!”

He thrust a hand toward the pass: “We have built our heaven-ladders for breaking the city. Warriors — mount the ladders! Take Beishan Pass! Trample every last enemy underfoot!”

“Charge!”

The Black Wu forces roared forward.

Atop the wall.

Xiahou Zuo’s voice had gone slightly hoarse from shouting: “Aim for those big structures!”

Burning arrows and heavy fire-bolts flew toward the siege ramps in dense, overlapping waves — thick as a river of stars pouring down from above.

But the Black Wu siege ramps had infantry shields laid across their topmost surface — heavy shields with outer iron plating.

Nearly every fire arrow that struck the ramps had no effect whatsoever. They clanged and sparked across the iron, a sound like hammers on anvil, constant and relentless.

The Black Wu soldiers pushing the ramps forward went down in layers — and each fallen layer was replaced by another.

They all knew: this was the battle to break Beishan Pass. Three months of grinding agony — and tonight it might finally end.

Black Wu troops fighting with this kind of desperate fury were enough to make any man afraid.

Around each siege ramp, the ground was blanketed with the bodies of fallen Black Wu soldiers.

And those who came after outnumbered the dead. They bit down hard and pushed forward, every face twisted with savage determination.

“We can’t destroy them!”

Xiahou Zuo turned to Li Chi, beginning to feel the edge of panic. Six ramps. Even if only two made it to the wall, the Black Wu forces would throw everything they had forward without hesitation.

The Black Wu had hundreds of thousands in the field. They could charge wave after wave — and once they gained the wall, driving them back down again would be nearly impossible. As long as those ramps were braced against the wall, the Black Wu would pour forward without end.

“Get the long-spear infantry up here!”

Li Chi shouted. “Mark the positions where those ramps are going to hit — archers, clear space for the spearmen!”

On his orders, Ning Army soldiers with long spears began moving up to the wall in columns, taking the positions the archers cleared for them.

The bolt-throwers and row-shooters had been firing for nearly two full hours, burning through an enormous quantity of heavy bolts.

In the end, only one of the six siege ramps had been damaged badly enough to halt its advance. The remaining five kept moving — and reached the wall.

“Brace for contact!”

Xiahou Zuo snatched up a long lance and took position with his personal guards where one of the ramps was about to hit.

A thunderous crash as the massive ramp struck the wall. From the Black Wu side, a wave of roaring cheers erupted like the sea.

“Kill!”

Black Wu general Jingluo Fu — three months of pent-up despair and fury finally unleashing themselves — bellowed the command, ordering his infantry to press forward.

Several of his fierce subordinate generals each led their men charging up one of the ramps.

Xiahou Zuo watched the Black Wu troops pour up the ramps. The corners of his mouth tightened — the look of a man steeling himself toward something vicious.

“Kill them as they come! Every inch of this wall belongs to us — it will not be given up, not a step!”

Xiahou Zuo looked at his men and bellowed.

The archers on the wall sent concentrated fire into the ramps. The Black Wu soldiers who made it up the ramp fell in layer after layer.

But not all of the archers could target the ramps — because elsewhere, wave upon wave of Black Wu soldiers were advancing with scaling ladders.

On one ramp, a group of shield-bearing Black Wu soldiers came howling forward, their shields bristling with arrows.

To avoid slowing their advance, wounded Black Wu soldiers on the ramps were kicked off by their own comrades without a second thought.

The bodies piling up on either side of the ramps accumulated with a speed that made the scalp crawl.

When the Black Wu forces came within striking distance, Xiahou Zuo let out a thunderous roar.

“Kill!”

At that single explosive cry, his personal guards thrust their spears forward in a dense, simultaneous rush.

Black Wu soldiers went down impaled. Those who fell — whether they died instantly or not — had no hope of rising again. The surge of those coming behind would trample the fallen alive underfoot.

On either side of the ramps, the rolling bodies continued to pile up without pause. The sound of corpses striking corpses sent a chill through anyone who heard it.

On this starless, moonless night, Black Wu forces had gained the walls of Beishan Pass.

On this starless, moonless night, blood ran across the walls like a waterfall.

—