The charge of nearly three hundred war horses lifted a tremendous weight from the Ning Army. The Yongzhou forces that had nearly crested the wall were scattered.

But the reprieve had a limit. Once the horses were killed, the Yongzhou formation would recover quickly.

So in that very moment, Zhuang Wudi let out a roar.

“Follow me — kill!”

He seized his long blade and leapt from the wall. His personal guard did not hesitate — one after another, they went over with him.

Li Chi was at one side loosing arrows and didn’t see it happen. Zhuang Wudi was already off the wall, coming down like a tiger descending from the mountain.

Li Chi threw his bow aside, didn’t take his Minghong Blade — grabbed a standard sabre instead and jumped over after him.

Zhuang Wudi was slashing and killing, heard Li Chi’s voice, looked back — and his face immediately went tight.

“Get back — you’re the lord!”

Li Chi cut down a Yongzhou soldier in front of him and closed the distance to Zhuang Wudi with all speed.

“You’re my elder brother!”

Zhuang Wudi didn’t know what to say. He paused for just a beat, and nearly took a blade to the face for it.

“Kill the enemy!”

Li Chi shouted to him, then reached his side. The two stood shoulder to shoulder and charged together.

The Minghong Blade was too heavy — in a one-on-one, even one against dozens, it was clearly the superior choice. But in conditions like these, a weapon that heavy was a drain on endurance that was simply too great. Not suited to this kind of fighting.

Even so, against enemies in these numbers, the standard hundredfold-forged sabre began to chip after a stretch of killing — whether from bone or from enemy steel, it was hard to say.

This sudden counterattack by just two men tore the Yongzhou formation apart.

There is a saying in the jianghu: a hero of ten steps kills one man a step, leaving no trace for a thousand li.

In this moment, for Li Chi and Zhuang Wudi fighting side by side — it was one man killed per step, and more than that, because the enemy kept pressing forward.

The Yongzhou soldiers packed the ramp shoulder to shoulder, each pushing against the next.

Before Li Chi, it was a forest of blades. But his single blade in that forest was sovereign.

One blade against ten thousand blades — every blade brings death.

A Yongzhou soldier raised his sabre with both hands and brought it down hard. Li Chi drove his blade through the man’s chest — edge angled upward — then wrenched upward. The man’s torso split open from the inside, the upper half parting to either side.

The next stroke — Li Chi swept his blade in a horizontal arc. A Yongzhou soldier had no time to dodge; the blade entered at the temple and exited the other side. From above the eyes upward, half a skull was gone. What remained of the face was covered in brain matter and blood.

The next — Li Chi drove the blade straight down, slicing through a Yongzhou soldier’s neck and all the way into the abdominal cavity.

A kick to send the body aside. The same blade swept across at hip height through the next man.

And so that young Yongzhou soldier had spent his life for a single moment — a glimpse of Ning King Li Chi — and the receipt of a single stroke.

The sudden countercharge drove the Yongzhou Army back step by step, all the way to the base of the hill.

Then the Yongzhou archers came up. Dense arrows began to converge, and Li Chi and Zhuang Wudi had no choice but to pull back with the personal guard.

The Yongzhou Army had no intention of abandoning the assault — not with this many dead already, not for anything.

The war drums beat behind them, one wave after another: Han Feibao, in person, beating the drum to drive them on.

He could see victory within reach. He could see the death of Ning King Li Chi within reach. From the day he had first led troops into the heartland, he had never been this close to it.

The supervisory troops of the Yongzhou Army were brutal — those who fell back were forced back up the ramp, and those who hesitated were shot on the spot.

The forces Li Chi had just pushed back surged up again.

Half a *shichen* later, after countless lives had been spent, Yongzhou soldiers finally made it over the wall.

Both sides hacked at each other in a frenzy. The sound of blade on blade was rare; the dominant sound was blade on bone.

“Reserves!”

Li Chi called back.

The front rank of Ning soldiers was taking catastrophic casualties — men dying not just by the moment, but in numbers. The reserve Ning forces rushed forward, sabres swinging.

Along that boundary line — the edge where the wall met the ramp outside — bodies had piled so thick it made the skin crawl.

The sky had gone fully dark by now. Yet the Yongzhou assault showed no sign of stopping.

This time, they were going to push through in one continuous effort, day or night — it no longer mattered.

And yet — that line. That boundary between the top of the wall and the ramp beyond.

After more than two *shichen* of fighting, not a single Yongzhou foot had crossed it.

Han Feibao suddenly found himself thinking of a phrase the Ning soldiers were always saying: *every piece of ground beneath a Ning soldier’s foot is the nation’s soil*.

“Kuobialie!”

Han Feibao shouted downward, his voice already raw.

General Kuobialie ran up immediately. “My lord, I am here.”

“Lead your men up. If this little hill-city isn’t taken tonight — I’ll have your head.”

“Yes, sir!”

Kuobialie acknowledged and drove his men forward.

Down at the base of the wall, General Li Jin was directing the assault, his voice already reduced to a ragged croak.

“Stand down!” Kuobialie grabbed Li Jin’s arm.

Li Jin rounded on him in fury. “On what authority?! My men have bled and died their way to this point — and you’re telling me to step aside?!”

“Not me — the lord’s order. If you can’t do it, make room for someone who can.”

Kuobialie waved his hand. “My men — forward!”

Li Jin watched this, stamped his foot, and swore viciously under his breath.

Kuobialie was the most fearsomely capable of Han Feibao’s generals. When Han Feibao had last led his forces through the heartland, he had left Kuobialie behind to hold Yongzhou — a measure of how much he trusted the man. A person you could entrust your home base to while away on campaign was necessarily both loyal and supremely capable.

Kuobialie’s weapon was a strange one — a blade, but nothing like anything seen in the heartland.

In silhouette it resembled a steppe curved sabre, but over twice the size.

The blade was wide — a full chi, and perhaps more. The length exceeded four and a half chi.

One look was enough to know it had to weigh an enormous amount.

When Kuobialie first finished having it forged, he had tested it on a yak.

A single stroke. The yak was split into two pieces.

Now, Kuobialie’s eyes swept the wall’s edge and locked immediately on that single Ning general — the one who had been fighting so long he had become a man made of blood. Who stood there like an iron sluice gate, through which not a single Yongzhou soldier had passed.

Kuobialie fixed that man as his target and drove straight toward him.

Zhuang Wudi, in the midst of cutting enemies down, suddenly felt the light ahead of him darken — as if a wall had appeared from nowhere.

Then a colossal weapon came pressing down from above, with a force that could level mountains.

Zhuang Wudi immediately raised his sabre to block.

*Clang!*

The stroke landed on Zhuang Wudi’s sabre — and cleaved it in two.

Kuobialie let out a roar. “My blade weighs as a mountain. Can you block it?!”

Even as the words left his mouth, the blade landed on Zhuang Wudi’s shoulder. Had the sabre not caught it first and absorbed most of the force, the shoulder might have been cut open entirely.

It wasn’t that Zhuang Wudi was outclassed as a warrior — the gap was in the weapons themselves, and in the raw physical power behind the blow.

And Zhuang Wudi had been fighting for how long — his strength was almost spent.

Yet Kuobialie took himself for invincible. Seeing the Ning general left with no power to resist, a savage grin began to spread across his face.

He gripped the hilt with both hands and pressed down, meaning to cut Zhuang Wudi clean through.

The armor at Zhuang Wudi’s shoulder was already deforming under the weight…

“Don’t be afraid, Elder Brother — I’m here!”

Li Chi hacked down a Yongzhou soldier in his path, and hurled the sabre in his hand at Kuobialie.

Kuobialie raised his left arm to block the throw, covering his face. Li Chi’s sabre struck the arm armor.

The arm armor, it turned out, was wrapped in layer after layer of iron plate — enormously thick and heavy.

The sabre glanced off the armor with a shower of sparks and spun away.

“Blade!”

Li Chi shouted as he charged.

His personal guard, clutching the Minghong Blade, threw it out ahead of Li Chi. In mid-sprint, Li Chi reached out and caught it, spun half a revolution, and swept the blade from low to high — a cut like a crescent moon — and drove it at Kuobialie.

Kuobialie’s eyes flew wide. He instantly snapped his massive curved blade back to guard in front of him.

*Clang!*

The Minghong Blade struck the curved blade full force.

“My blade — can you take it?!”

With Li Chi’s battle cry, the Minghong Blade sheared through the massive curved sword — and through Kuobialie’s chest plate.

The chest plate was more than twice the thickness of an ordinary general’s iron armor. It still was not enough.

The blade edge cut through the armor, through sparks and blood. When the tip came out of the chest cavity, it passed up through Kuobialie’s chin.

One stroke — split chest, split face.

The massive body swayed several times. Then Kuobialie fell backward.

Li Chi grabbed Zhuang Wudi and pulled him behind himself, then brought the Minghong Blade down and severed Kuobialie’s head from his neck.

The next instant, Li Chi seized Kuobialie’s head and hurled it into the faces of the Yongzhou soldiers before him.

Those soldiers had watched their strongest warrior die like that. The ones who saw it were shocked rigid.

Li Chi turned and shouted: “How much fire oil is left? Pour it all down!”

Soldiers from the reserve behind him rushed up with iron pots, upending them onto the Yongzhou soldiers below.

Torches were thrown. Men became flame. The burning soldiers screamed and rolled — and those behind them scrambled frantically sideways, desperate not to catch fire themselves.

Under this, the Yongzhou Army finally broke. They fell back like a tide.

Han Feibao, still at the drum, heard that Kuobialie was dead. His drumsticks stopped mid-stroke. He stood there as if turned to stone — clearly unwilling to believe what he had been told.

Kuobialie — a warrior peerless in the three armies — had not survived a single stroke from Ning King Li Chi?

Yuan Zhen let out a quiet sigh at his side. “The morale is broken. Sound the retreat. Any more fighting tonight is pointless…”

A great general killed — the psychological shock to the soldiers would be severe.

And across the wall, the Ning Army — because of that one stroke — would have their morale soar.

And the one who had struck the blow was the Ning King himself.