For days after the Ning army arrived outside Tiger Wall Pass, they did nothing but produce earthen sacks — working tirelessly to make them as uniform in weight as possible. Day by day, the heap rose at a visible rate, and the unease among the Shu garrison inside the pass grew with it.

Finally, on the sixth day after Ning’s arrival, the stockpile was, by size and volume, sufficient for an assault on the defenses. Li Chi came to the front himself and ordered the trebuchets assembled.

They had deliberately not assembled them earlier — to prevent the garrison from spotting them and preparing countermeasures in advance. Not that there were many good countermeasures available against this kind of attack.

The Ning support battalion had ample experience from battle after battle, and assembling trebuchets was something they’d done many times over. With thousands of men working in coordination, they could erect one with startling speed — fast enough to leave the Shu soldiers slack-jawed.

By the eighth day, over two hundred trebuchets of various sizes stood assembled outside Tiger Wall Pass. It was only fair to thank Han Feibao for a substantial portion of them: at least a hundred and fifty of those two hundred or more had been graciously donated by Han Feibao’s Yong army.

And not only were the donated numbers generous — the quality was better than what the Ning army had carried in themselves.

It was rather like walking down the street, being attacked by a stranger, and beating that stranger until he was a swollen, tear-streaked mess. When you finally stop hitting him, he says: *Brother, you worked so hard beating me, I feel bad about it — let me pay you back a little.* He hands you some money, you count it, and it’s more than the value of everything you own.

Is that bullying? Of course not — that’s self-defense, followed by reasonable reparations.

Is what he gave you a reasonable reparation? Of course not — he gave it to you voluntarily before you could even make a claim. In other words, it was a gift.

And then you go to his house to claim reparations. Is there anything wrong with that? Of course not.

He shuts the door in your face. Can you force your way in? Of course you can. You’re stronger.

And so the Ning army used these captured trebuchets, amassed in great number, to begin raising the height of Tiger Wall Pass’s walls for its defenders.

Every trebuchet was test-fired once, then adjusted for angle and tension. By the second volley, a third of the sacks landed inside the wall-walk. The rest fell short outside or overshot inside. By the third, the variance had narrowed considerably.

The Ning army’s luck held — the weather was windless, completely clear. Fewer outside variables than one could hope for.

The goal wasn’t to kill; it was simply to pile things up on their walls.

Li Chi and his officers stood on the high ground watching through their spyglasses, trading jokes.

Because this style of fighting was genuinely delightful to watch.

A heavy sack flew up and landed on the wall-walk. The soldiers scattered — but the heavy crossbow emplacements could not dodge. With a crash, the sack came down directly on a heavy crossbow, shattering several components. It wasn’t reduced to fine dust, exactly — just broken into pieces.

On and on the projectiles came, until the Shu soldiers had no way to stand upright on the wall-walk; most were reduced to huddling behind the battlements.

After a day, Li Chi and his officers observed that the wall height had already been raised somewhat, and ordered the trebuchets to shift direction slightly. No point in piling everything in one spot while the other sections remained untouched — that would be uneven.

In Li Chi’s view, no matter how valuable the equipment, if it was useful and could significantly reduce casualties among his soldiers, no cost was too great. Besides, those two hundred-plus trebuchets weren’t even the full inventory — Han Feibao had brought far more than that originally. And when Xiahou Zhuo had taken Lean Mountain Pass, he’d found a large cache of trebuchets there too. The Shu army had originally planned to use them against the Ning rear column as it attacked Lean Mountain Pass — but they’d never gotten the chance to use them, and all of it fell into Ning hands.

The walls kept rising. The trebuchets started breaking down, but broken ones were simply replaced with spares. The Ning army, in their obscenely well-funded and well-supplied fashion, made a fine display of it.

Li Chi and his officers retired to the camp to rest, rotating shifts of Ning soldiers to operate the machines. After a day and a night of sustained bombardment, when Li Chi and the others came out to the front at dawn, the sacks piled atop the wall-walk were already an impressive sight.

Gao Guangxiao ordered his men to clear them away. But the sacks were heavy, and the spot where soldiers went to move them was also the exact spot the next sack would land — so the psychological pressure on those soldiers was immense. Sometimes a man hadn’t even finished dragging one sack away before the next one came down on top of him.

Earthen sacks, unlike boulders, couldn’t reduce a man to a bloody smear — but anyone who took a direct hit would still be in a very bad way.

The Ning army piled; the Shu army cleared. After a day and a night of this back-and-forth, Ning had gained a slight upper hand.

Li Chi raised his spyglass, studied the situation, then turned and said: “Send men to the villages and towns in the surrounding area — buy up every sack they own at high prices. If they don’t have any ready, have them make them. Offer more if needed.”

“Understood!” Yu Jiuling answered immediately.

Xiahou Zhuo asked Li Chi, “When do we attack?”

Li Chi looked through the spyglass once more, then said, “Not yet. Two more days.”

This was likely the first large-scale siege by trebuchet in the history of Central Plains warfare. If the Ning army won this battle, it would give future generations a new tactical doctrine. Fight strength against weakness; fight wealth against poverty. That was the essence.

As Li Chi put it: even if every last trebuchet was destroyed, it was worth it. Even if each machine only killed one defender, it was a net gain.

Of course, no single trebuchet was only going to account for one man.

Two days. Three days.

After three consecutive days of sustained bombardment, in many places along the wall-walk, the piled sacks had risen visibly above the height of the battlements. When that happened, the battlements no longer offered the garrison any protection. The battlements’ embrasures — wide on the outside, narrow on the inside — normally let defenders shoot from cover while remaining shielded. But when the sacks rose above the battlements, the defenders were fully exposed, with nowhere to hide from incoming arrows.

On the morning of the fourth day, Li Chi observed the situation and turned to Xiahou Zhuo. “You can take troops forward for a probe.”

“Understood!”

Xiahou Zhuo had been barely containing himself. Had Li Chi not been present, he would very likely have launched the assault after just the first day and night.

The Ning formation began to advance. From the walls, horns sounded — and they sounded forlorn.

Atop the wall, Gao Guangxiao seized a longbow and called out in a great voice: “We are all soldiers of Shu. Behind us is our homeland. As long as we stand here, we will not allow the enemy to set foot upon it!”

He looked left and right and roared: “I am here!”

With those words, the old marshal drew his bow and loosed the first arrow at the advancing Ning forces.

Three days and three nights had destroyed every heavy crossbow emplacement on the wall. Without their heavy weapons, they could only answer with handbows. But they faced the Ning army — superior in spirit and skill, superior in equipment, far superior in all things.

For years, Li Chi had done everything in his power — including the price of alienating every great family in the realm — to scrape together the funds to equip his army. Ning bows were better, they shot farther. Ning shields were stronger, they held against more.

When Gao Guangxiao saw a large number of objects being carried forward at the rear of the Ning formation — each carried by five or six men — his expression darkened further.

Those were siege crossbows, the four-man type. Everyone knew how effective they were. But they were expensive to build, heavy, and costly to maintain. When there had been no major wars after the founding of the realm, even the Chu army had abandoned them. Men of Gao Guangxiao’s age hadn’t seen one in years — the last time had been years ago, on a visit to the arsenal in Daxing City on ministry business, where he’d caught a glimpse of several broken, decommissioned ones.

These crossbows had to be anchored to the ground, their elevation adjusted, requiring two men to fix them in place and two more to draw the string. Their range exceeded that of a standard bow by more than double. Their power needed no elaboration.

The Ning army quickly formed an arrow screen. The great siege crossbows adjusted their angle.

Just as Gao Guangxiao instinctively raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his brow, he heard a deep, resonant thrum.

He looked up.

And saw a curtain of black sweep down toward the wall — blotting out the sky.

—