The horn calls came in waves, like a summons to death, and the soldiers of the Tianming Army answered with their lives.
The bodies piling up along the sandy riverbank grew so numerous that those who came after had no choice but to charge forward by stepping over the corpses of their own comrades.
Xiahou Zuo had once told Li Chi that on a battlefield fighting foreign enemies, he would certainly be no match for Pei Fanglun.
But in today’s battle, Pei Fanglun would surely lose.
Because in his days with the frontier army, Pei Fanglun had never been the kind of man who stood behind his soldiers, simply shouting and sending them to die for him.
Back then, the moment the horns sounded, Pei Fanglun would be the first to charge into the ranks of the Bohai men.
The heavy crossbows unleashed volley after volley, cutting men down layer by layer.
What happened before the close-quarters fighting began was not called war—it was called slaughter.
The Tianming Army had paid an extraordinarily brutal price, yet they had also found the pattern of the crossbow carriages’ firing rhythm. When a volley was about to strike, the men in the front ranks would quickly drop flat—but those behind who couldn’t drop in time would be cut down as a whole.
From two hundred paces to one hundred paces, within that short distance, the number of men who had fallen was beyond counting.
And that hundred-pace advance was not the end—it was the beginning of another kind of slaughter, for the Tianming Army had entered the range of the archers.
A canopy of arrows blotted out the sky.
Pei Fanglun’s eyes had already turned red, yet he knew he could not stop. If he stopped, every man who had already died ahead of him would have fallen for nothing.
The reinforcing troops kept pouring ashore without pause. His only hope lay in the army’s numbers continuing to swell, so as to form a suppressive advantage in manpower.
Yet the troops trying to cross by the pontoon bridges had no chance of success whatsoever. The Ning Army’s catapults smashed the bridges apart again and again, and the Tianming Army’s auxiliary soldiers patched them again and again—leaving the reinforcing troops jammed up at the far end of the bridges.
Xiahou Zuo turned to look at the eight thousand Youzhou elites he had brought with him, and shouted loudly: “Do you still remember what I said yesterday?”
Every man roared back: “We remember!”
Xiahou Zuo called out: “Let the enemy remember that the men who gave them a beating were the warriors from Youzhou.”
When he finished shouting, he looked toward the young horn-blower: “Sound the horn—let the enemy’s arrows fire three more volleys, then stop.”
The horns wailed out their mournful cry. Zhuo Qinglin, commanding from the rear formation, understood Xiahou Zuo’s intent at once.
His heart surged with emotion in that moment, for he knew what General Xiahou was about to do.
The three volleys of arrows passed quickly, and the crossbow carriages fell silent.
“Kill!”
Xiahou Zuo did not take up his long lance. Instead, he seized a heavy dao in his hand.
Eight thousand Youzhou men—charging forward in a counter-assault!
This was something Pei Fanglun had never anticipated in the slightest. He had assumed Xiahou Zuo would keep holding firm, relying on those supremely powerful weapons and equipment to pin the Tianming Army outside his battle lines.
Xiahou Zuo was a composed man, and this counter-charge of his was not impulsive.
After being suppressed for so long, the Tianming Army’s rate of reinforcement could not keep pace with the Ning Army’s rate of killing. So the number of Tianming soldiers now on the riverbank was absolutely less than ten thousand—roughly seven or eight thousand—comparable in number to Xiahou Zuo’s Youzhou elites.
A one-to-one battle—when had the Ning Army ever feared such odds?
The moment Pei Fanglun saw the Ning Army actually charging back at him, he immediately bellowed: “Form up! Sound the horns to form up!”
The Tianming Army soldiers sprinted across the sandy ground, shifting from their scattered formation into a dense square defensive array.
In that instant, the Ning Army’s flood crashed violently against the square formation.
The heavy dao fell, splitting a shield in two—and splitting the Tianming soldier behind the shield along with it.
Another horizontal sweep, and two heads flew into the air as blood sprayed outward.
These eight thousand Youzhou elites, fierce as wolves and tigers, slammed ferociously into the Tianming Army’s defensive array.
Like a beast with sharp fangs and vicious claws that had leapt upon another beast of equal size but clothed in thick scales—
The attacking beast’s claws hooked into the scales of the defending beast, digging the tips of its claws into the gaps, prying the scales apart. When the scales lifted away, they dragged strands of sticky blood with them; in the next instant the claws dug in, and blood began to gush outward.
The defending behemoth’s scales were thick and heavy, yet they were torn away piece by piece, and that massive body began to look thoroughly blood-soaked.
The most ferocious of all was Xiahou Zuo, charging at the very front—he was the great fang of this attacking beast.
One bite sank straight into the throat of the defending beast. Teeth ground against scales and struck sparks; moments later the scales buckled and caved under those teeth, then shattered through.
The fangs drove into the throat, and blood trickled downward through the gaps in the scales.
“Do not fall back!”
Pei Fanglun screamed, glancing back again at the long lance in his personal guard’s hands—his weapon.
Yet even so, after a moment’s hesitation, Pei Fanglun still did not reach out to take his weapon. He only kept issuing orders, kept screaming hoarsely.
More Tianming soldiers were still landing, but the formation ahead was already being pressed with no room to spare, and could only retreat backward. The entire formation shifting back blocked those who had just reached the bank, leaving them unable to come ashore.
Soldiers in the rear ranks had already stumbled into the river.
Xiahou Zuo’s composure did not mean he only knew how to defend and lacked the ability to attack. The true essence of that composure lay in this: so long as he seized the right moment, he would steadily and surely bring his enemies down.
Composure meant—never giving the enemy any chance to win.
These men who had come all the way from Youzhou carried a killing intent far heavier than anything the Tianming Army bore.
Men who had fought the Black Martial people—the ferocity that lived in them was something even wild beasts would instinctively shrink from.
A man who has slaughtered dogs for years will seem unremarkable to an ordinary person passing by, yet dogs who encounter such a man will feel instinctive fear, will flee—even the ones that bare their teeth will tuck their tails between their legs.
Both were veteran soldiers, yet the moment they made contact, it became clear: the Ning Army surpassed the Tianming Army in offensive power, in the art of killing, and in the coordination between soldiers.
And at this moment, the forces on both sides of the bank were roughly equal in number.
It did not take long to break the enemy. Large numbers of Tianming soldiers were already being pushed and crushed into the river channel.
Reinforcements could not come ashore, which meant Pei Fanglun had lost the numerical advantage he had counted on having.
From the very beginning, Xiahou Zuo had already planned out his method of fighting, had thought through every possibility—everything unfolding before his eyes had already been calculated countless times in his mind.
“My lance!”
Pei Fanglun let out a hoarse cry.
He knew the final moment had come.
An advantage ten times greater than the enemy’s—and yet the enemy had pressed it down by sheer force. That was the truest display of a commanding general’s ability.
If he could not hold now, every man on this bank would die.
If he could not push the Ning Army back now, the advantage in numbers would shift to the Ning Army’s side.
The moment the long lance was in his hands, Pei Fanglun felt as though he had returned to his days in the Yanzhou frontier army.
He led his personal guard battalion to the very front, and that long lance began to show its true power.
Xiahou Zuo saw him coming, and went to meet him.
A figure came slashing from an angle, appearing suddenly, and then the heavy dao fell like a mountain being cleft apart.
Pei Fanglun immediately raised his long lance to block the blow. Had it been an ordinary wooden-shafted weapon, the blade would have chopped straight through—but Pei Fanglun’s martial skill was sufficient for him to gauge the precise timing and position of the block, using the shaft of the lance to deflect the shaft of the dao.
Even so, his lance was costly and crafted with a composite shaft—trying to hold against a heavy dao was genuinely not very practical.
With a ringing clash, the moment their weapons met, the two men entered a contest of pure strength.
“General!”
Xiahou Zuo pressed the heavy dao downward and roared: “You should surrender!”
Pei Fanglun strained to hold his lance up: “You cannot defeat me! It is you who should surrender!”
Xiahou Zuo increased his force, and had already pressed Pei Fanglun’s arms to the point where they began to bend.
Xiahou Zuo shouted urgently: “General, look around you—your men cannot hold. If you are willing to surrender, I will speak on your behalf before the Prince of Ning!”
Pei Fanglun let out a furious roar. His eyes seemed to turn wholly crimson in an instant, as though blood might overflow from them in the very next moment.
This burst of force flung Xiahou Zuo’s heavy dao aside, and then he drove a kick straight into Xiahou Zuo’s chest.
Xiahou Zuo laid the shaft of the dao across his front, and the kick landed on the blade instead.
Using the force to step back, Pei Fanglun swept his long lance horizontally at Xiahou Zuo’s throat.
Xiahou Zuo leaned back, and the tip of the lance swept past just in front of him.
“General—if you will not surrender, your men will soon be wiped out to the last.”
Xiahou Zuo brought the dao down.
Pei Fanglun parried as he shouted back: “Your generalship is no more than this—you have relied only on better equipment, more crossbow carriages, more arrows—”
Xiahou Zuo threw his full strength into both arms, muscles tensing in an instant. One horizontal sweep sent Pei Fanglun’s lance swinging wide, and immediately following, he struck the lance shaft again—the long lance shuddered and flew from Pei Fanglun’s grip.
In the next instant, Xiahou Zuo drove his foot into Pei Fanglun’s chest, and Pei Fanglun was sent crashing to the ground.
“We rely on more crossbow carriages, more equipment—we rely on them because we have them. If you have them, you use them.”
Xiahou Zuo brought the dao down; Pei Fanglun rolled aside to evade.
Xiahou Zuo advanced another step: “The other reason we can win is that you are already outdated. The Dachu府兵—the Dachu garrison soldiers—are no longer the greatest force in the world. The Ning Army’s fighting strength surpassed your men long ago!”
He swept out with his foot and knocked Pei Fanglun onto the ground.
“The Ning Army is not only better equipped than you—we are better than you in every way!”
Roaring the words, the heavy dao fell—with a resounding thud, it struck Pei Fanglun’s shoulder…yet Xiahou Zuo had used the back of the blade.
This strike drove Pei Fanglun’s knees to buckle and collapse beneath him.
The heavy dao rested across his shoulder, its edge pressed against Pei Fanglun’s throat.
“General!”
Xiahou Zuo bellowed: “Do you surrender or not?”
Pei Fanglun looked up at Xiahou Zuo. The bloodshot crimson was still in his eyes, but the ferocity—and the once-invincible, arrogant dominance—had both vanished.
“You are right…even without those crossbow carriages, even without those machines that hurl great stones, the Dachu garrison soldiers are no longer a match for the Ning Army. The world has changed. It changed long ago.”
Pei Fanglun looked into Xiahou Zuo’s eyes: “You chose a right path. What I chose cannot be called wrong either—only that when the world came to this kind of situation, these were the choices we each had to make.”
He turned his head to look to one side. The Tianming Army he had trained with his own hands had been utterly suppressed—before those ferociously tiger-like Ning soldiers, his men had been defeated so thoroughly, and so quickly.
As Great General of the Right Sentinel Guard of the Dachu garrison army, he knew: the myth of the garrison soldiers’ invincibility had long since passed into memory.
The supreme glory that had once rested upon the garrison soldiers’ shoulders had long since faded. What remained were the scraps of a pride held onto by the dying few.
“After I left the frontier army and was promoted to Great General of the Right Sentinel Guard, I learned to be tactful, learned to be worldly-wise, learned many, many things that one never needs to learn in the frontier army.”
Pei Fanglun raised his head and looked at Xiahou Zuo: “But there was one thing—the blood in my bones would not allow me to learn.”
He let out a great shout: “The Right Sentinel Guard—does not surrender!”
Then he lunged his hand up and seized the blade of the heavy dao. He thrust his neck forward, dragging his throat hard across the edge of the blade.
The blood on the heavy dao flowed quickly—yet not quickly enough to outrun the speed at which life departed.
Xiahou Zuo stood frozen, his face filled with shock and grief.
Pei Fanglun’s body fell, and his blood quickly seeped down into the sand—the same earth he had once guarded with his life.
—