The Princess Consort knew she had no choice left. Her army had already laid down its weapons. These men wanted only to live.

In the time before she had ever seen real war, hearing of Chu soldiers surrendering might have filled her with contempt.

But today she had seen what war truly was. When those men of fire charged into the Ning lines, she had been terrified to her core.

She had thought that after hearing so many descriptions of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, nothing could truly shake her. She had been wrong.

She had watched with her own eyes as two hundred thousand soldiers were ground down to fewer than three thousand. She had watched the open plains become fields of the dead.

Now, watching the soldiers lay down their arms, she felt not a trace of resentment. She understood.

“Fushen Guard — lay down your weapons.”

The Princess Consort spoke the order.

The Fushen Guard’s colonel was named Lingdian, formerly a personal guard officer under Prince Wu himself.

He heard the Princess Consort’s words. He turned and looked at her for a long moment. Then he bowed low to the ground.

“Forgive us, Princess Consort. Prince Wu once told us that the Princess Consort’s words carry the weight of his own. We are to obey her commands. But this once… we cannot. If you see Prince Wu again, please tell him — the Fushen Guard did not surrender.”

With those words, Lingdian turned and raised his saber to point forward. “Left Martial Guard — advance!”

Three hundred Fushen Guards let out a low roar. They locked into a sharp attacking wedge and flung themselves at the Ning forces ahead.

As they charged forward, they passed through the rows of soldiers crouching and waiting to surrender, past faces struck wide with shock.

They had no time to notice the uncomprehending stares. No thought to spare for what it might have been like to simply kneel.

The Fushen Guard — every last one of them — had come from the Left Martial Guard.

*”Born soldiers of the Left Martial Guard, dead soldiers of the Left Martial Guard — the Left Martial Guard never surrenders!”*

With Lingdian’s battle cry, three hundred men charged without a shred of hesitation toward death.

Their numbers were too few. Even as the finest of the finest, they could not work miracles.

Before them stood the dense Ning formations — countless archers, and the heavy crossbows and repeating crossbows that could punch through their armor.

“See the Left Martial Guard brothers off with honor!” Shen Shanhu’s voice rang out.

The arrows flew.

Three hundred men. Not one reached the Ning line. Every Fushen Guard was pierced by countless shafts — yet even the last man standing, watching every comrade fall before him, never slowed for an instant.

He followed in his brothers’ footsteps, each lunging stride a testament to the Left Martial Guard’s pride.

Fushen Guard was not who they were. Left Martial Guard was.

The field fell utterly silent. Not a voice. Even the wind seemed loud.

The Princess Consort looked upon that field of the unbowed dead. She stood motionless for a long time. Then she bowed — deeply, all the way to the ground.

Those crouching Chu soldiers and jianghu fighters, every face had gone pale. No one knew what they were thinking. Perhaps they had stopped thinking altogether. They simply stared.

Not long after, Shen Shanhu led the Princess Consort away from the battlefield, heading north.

“Will the Ning King truly spare Prince Wu?” the Princess Consort asked.

Shen Shanhu did not answer. Instead she replied with a question: “Will Prince Wu truly spare himself?”

The Princess Consort did not know how to answer.

“From the very beginning,” Shen Shanhu said, “the Ning King sought to persuade Prince Wu to surrender. But Princess Consort, you must know — the only person in this world who might reach him with a few words is you. Not the Ning King. Not our Grand General. Not anyone in the Ning army.”

The Princess Consort gave a small nod and said nothing more.

The column moved in silence, heading north. They had just come through a battle of hideous brutality.

But they sensed — further north, they would find a battlefield that made theirs look gentle by comparison.

—

Meanwhile, Chu General Zhao Chuanliu was still pushing his forces forward. Prince Wu had gone back to relieve Wu Suohai; his orders to Zhao were to continue the breakout.

Zhao Chuanliu desperately wanted to be the one going back. He knew better than anyone how dangerous it was behind them. Whoever went back — even Prince Wu — was walking into almost certain death.

But that was Prince Wu and his Left Martial Guard. Prince Wu had said it himself: for the sake of Great Chu, he had sent countless Left Martial Guard brothers to their deaths over the years — but for his own sake, he would never abandon a single one of them, general or common soldier.

Ahead, the Ning forces blocking their escape had been broken. All they had to do was run.

But Zhao Chuanliu was afraid — afraid that if he pushed too fast, he would leave Prince Wu behind.

Then he raised his eyes and saw it: the horizon ahead was thick with blood-red battle flags, rank upon rank.

Zhao Chuanliu’s heart seized.

The Ning army approaching wore gleaming armor and moved in tight, ordered formations — unmistakably a fresh unit that had seen no action tonight. And the men of the Left Martial Guard had been marching and fighting for an entire night.

“General — what do we do?!”

His cavalry colonel asked urgently.

Zhao Chuanliu looked back. A wall of eyes watched him, waiting for his order.

“Form a defensive line. Hold this ground and wait for the Ning attack. Now it is our turn to die defending — hold here and wait for Prince Wu’s return!”

“Yes, sir!”

The Left Martial Guard soldiers roared.

At his command, the Chu troops reshaped their formation with practiced speed, throwing up a defensive line in the open ground.

He had briefly considered attacking — but then he read the banner on the Ning formation. The character 罗. It hung there like the cold tip of an iron spear.

He had made the right call. Even throwing the full Left Martial Guard at Luo Jing’s forces would have accomplished nothing.

On the Ning side, Luo Jing raised his spyglass and observed. When he saw the Chu army forming a defensive line rather than charging, his eyes narrowed.

*Something is wrong. The one leading them isn’t Prince Wu.*

A flash of frustration passed through him.

The last time, at the banks of the Pan Xing River, he had held eight hundred Tiger-Leopard cavalry to block the Chu army’s retreat. Had he brought his full Tiger-Leopard force then, he would have charged, not held.

This time, every one of his Tiger-Leopard cavalry was here. From those first days of training back in You Prefecture, they had grown from three thousand to five thousand — modest expansion over so much time, but Luo Jing cared only for quality, never numbers.

*Is the old man already dead?*

Luo Jing muttered to himself.

If Prince Wu were leading in person, the Left Martial Guard would not stop to defend at this stage. They would charge for the breakthrough. But the center force — all still here, still substantial. After a night of fighting, the suicide squads and the reinforcing units Prince Wu had personally led were all but gone — yet the center still had over eighty thousand men.

A force of that size taking a defensive posture: no one could break it easily. Even with greater numbers, the attacker would pay a grievous price.

If the enemy charged, Luo Jing’s Tiger-Leopard cavalry would never flinch. But light cavalry charging prepared defensive positions? Nearly useless.

On the other flank, Li Chi, bringing his forces in from the side, also looked at the Chu defensive formation.

*Prince Wu isn’t here?*

He murmured it aloud, and then the answer came to him almost instantly — of course. The rear guard had been pinned down. Prince Wu would have taken the cavalry back to relieve them.

So the one commanding these troops was a subordinate. The encirclement was complete. But Prince Wu himself had somehow ended up outside it.

Tang Pidi, watching from his position, arrived at the same conclusion. He and Li Chi read it the same way.

Commanding a battle of this scale, with this many forces — even a small deviation in one detail could change the entire outcome. And the details were not his to control. They belonged to his subordinates in the field.

The Ning cavalry had moved to cut off the Chu rear just slightly too fast. That single miscalculation had sent Prince Wu back to relieve them himself.

Tang Pidi exhaled slowly. He didn’t blame anyone. He only felt the sting of what might have been.

Had the timing been calibrated as precisely as he himself would have done it, those now surrounded would be not just the Chu center — but the rear as well, with Prince Wu in the middle of it.

High Zhen was too young. Too aggressive. His cavalry had entered the battle too soon and pushed too hard.

But the battle had come to this moment regardless. Could he simply forgo completing the encirclement because Prince Wu was no longer inside it?

“Pass the order — pin down this Chu force where it stands. I will personally lead troops back to cut off Prince Wu.”

With those instructions given, Tang Pidi took his personal guard and departed. The remaining Ning forces began pressing forward, tightening the encirclement around the Chu center.

Then, at that very moment, a scout came riding hard from the distance.

“Report!”

He was clearly desperate, his voice cracking with it.

“Grand General — urgent news from the south!”

He reached them, his voice hoarse: “An enormous force has been sighted fifty li to the south. Not a Chu relief army — their banners are ones we have never seen before.”

Tang Pidi asked at once: “Can you estimate their numbers?”

“Advancing on a broad front — no fewer than several tens of thousands.”

*Several tens of thousands?!*

Tang Pidi’s expression shifted fractionally. At this moment, an unknown force of that size, not Chu, appearing from the south — where had they come from?

A moment later, it came to him. He turned to his subordinates: “You — go to the Ning King’s position and report. Ask him to divide half his forces southward, keep the other half holding the Chu encirclement.”

Then to his own guards: “Fetch General Shen Shanhu to take command here. I am leaving.”

“Send word to Luo Jing: he is not to leave his position. If he splits his force, the Left Martial Guard breaks out. Tell him to hold at all costs and leave everything else to others.”

With those orders given, he pulled a large portion of his forces from the line and swept them southward.

At Li Chi’s position, the scouts had already brought the same warning. Without waiting for word from Tang Pidi, Li Chi ordered Xiahou Zhuo to hold the line and led half his forces on a swift southern march.

Before any reckoning with the Left Martial Guard, a defensive line in the south had to be established immediately.

At this moment, who else could it possibly be?

Li Chi and Tang Pidi’s forces curved around from both sides, rapidly deploying a defensive line south of Luo Jing’s position.

The Ning forces worked in frantic haste, setting up their equipment and armaments. The formation hadn’t even stabilized when the enemy appeared to the south — a dark, rolling tide sweeping across the earth.

“Han Feibao…”

Li Chi said the name quietly.

Tang Pidi gave a single sound of agreement.

No one else could have appeared here at this moment. It had to be Han Feibao’s Yong Prefecture army.

The man who had marched a thousand li out of his way — who had heard that Prince Wu was encircled by the Ning forces, heard that the imperial court had dispatched two hundred thousand in relief — how could he have resisted?

This was the perfect moment to be the mantis’s predator while the mantis hunted the cicada. Why bother with Daxing City? If he could crush the Ning army in one decisive blow, it would be worth more than taking the capital.

In the Yong army’s vanguard, Han Feibao had just passed through the battlefield where Shen Shanhu and the Princess Consort’s forces had fought — the dead still lay where they had fallen, no one had had time to clear them.

The sight of that carpet of corpses filled Han Feibao with savage elation.

“I made it. I finally made it.”

He muttered it to himself, his face twisting with the intensity of his excitement.

“Pass the order — all units, prepare to attack immediately!”

Back in Jing Prefecture he had fought Li Chi and come off badly, blocked on the south bank of the river, forced to circle a thousand li around. He had swallowed that humiliation ever since, nursing a burning need to meet the Ning army in open battle.

But the moment he reached Jing Prefecture, he learned that Princess Consort Wu had personally led two hundred thousand troops north.

Further scouting revealed that Prince Wu’s Left Martial Guard had been encircled by the Ning forces at Mangdang Mountain. He could not hold back the urge for revenge.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he had made his decision: the Yong army would not stop. They would sustain themselves by raiding and plundering along the way, and reach Mangdang Mountain as fast as possible.

He had never met Prince Wu or crossed blades with him — but he knew how formidable the man was.

A decisive battle between Ning and Chu could not be an easy Ning victory.

All he had to do was arrive in time and enter at the perfect moment to harvest everything.

And his luck had been extraordinary. The march north had come just as the summer grain harvest was ripe.

The Ning army had had no time to secure it. The Chu army had had no means to secure it. So his forces had looted their way north, granaries replenished at every step.

*”This time… let me see how you fight your way out of this one.”*

Han Feibao’s voice trembled with exhilaration, eyes alight with savage anticipation.

—