The sun still hung in the western sky, some way yet from fully setting, but already the sound of slaughter filled this stretch of the Lüliang range.

More than four hundred men surged forward against the retreating pack train, stretching the battle line across this stretch of mountain terrain thick with strange rocks and low trees. Blood ran thick, and the smell of it hung heavy in the restless air.

For Mount Lüliang, this sort of thing happened often enough to be unremarkable. Though Little Raider’s territory had begun to grow in strength, and rules had inevitably begun to take hold within it, toward outsiders, this kind of slaughter still remained the norm. There wasn’t much method to the clashes on Lüliang—sometimes a warning was given first, followed by a full-scale charge; more often, no warning was given at all, and the attackers simply charged straight in, relying on brute force until one side broke and the other began the slaughter. Today was much the same. After that brief exchange with Zhao Four, more than four hundred men came roaring out, surrounding the party across the hillside like a pack of starving wolves let loose from a gate—before a single blow had even landed, the killing intent already filled the sky.

“Kill—!”

“Leave the heads!”

“I’ll eat them, I’ll eat every one of them!”

“Waaaaaah—!”

The surging crowd pressed forward, carrying with it a frenzied roar almost enough to shake the heart with dread!

Mount Lüliang was different from other places—here, opportunists and cowards generally found little room to survive. Even someone who started out timid would, in the crucible of fierce survival struggle, eventually be driven to a kind of madness. That Little Raider Qiu Mengtang’s stronghold had built such a formidable reputation meant its underlings, too, were no mediocre hands. At the very least, in terms of raw ferocity, most of these men, transplanted elsewhere, would count as reckless men who cared nothing for their own lives—especially in a charge like this, bloodshot eyes wild with excitement, the whole crowd howling and screaming, a sight enough to strike terror straight into the hearts of those who’d only ever known peaceful times.

Merchants who took the gamble of traveling the Lüliang route, upon encountering an enemy like this, upon seeing that bloodthirsty look in their eyes, often couldn’t even summon the will to resist. In that frenzied atmosphere, men went mad—say they’d eat you, and they truly would. Even the more timid among them, swept up in that atmosphere, taking a cut or two from a blade barely registered, cost them nothing in fighting strength. Even a small detachment of regular troops would think twice before taking on an enemy like this head-on.

But this afternoon, they had run into a kind of tough resistance they hadn’t encountered in a long while.

What awaited them on the hillside was not a reef standing firm against crashing waves, but something more like a vast sponge—Little Raider’s men surged forward across the mountainside and, as if stuck fast the moment they made contact, began dying off in eerie fashion amid their own one-sided frenzy.

This time, Ning Yi had brought roughly one hundred seventy-odd men into Lüliang. Setting aside a few specialized technicians and craftsmen—plus two cooks who feared nothing—those actually capable of fighting numbered around a hundred twenty, divided into thirteen small squads. Upon spotting the enemy approaching, the group had already packed up the baggage they’d set down; part of them hurried the horses along to begin relocating, while the rest, split into their small squads, took up positions blocking the mountainside—roughly seventy or eighty men in all, each squad making use of the terrain to cluster together, able to support one another, though the distance between each group still spanned several zhang.

The bandits’ vanguard slammed straight into this riddled, porous defensive line. By the usual pattern, in the chaos of battle they should have poured through like quicksilver straight toward the core of the formation—but this time, strangely, hardly anyone made it through, as if they’d been stuck fast by the eight or nine small squads scattered across the hillside.

Blood bloomed and burst without pause; the shouting never stopped, yet figures kept falling all the same. Since the pack train itself was retreating, each squad was in fact also falling back even as they fought, so that in the very first instant of contact, the battle line across the hillside seemed to sway gently, like a wave. To Little Raider’s men, at first glance, it looked as though they were advancing steadily amid the killing and the shouting.

It was only after several breaths of combat that an eerie feeling began to take hold in the hearts of Qiu Mengtang and the others.

“Kill them! Push through, push through! Grab those two up top! Anyone blocking the way, tear their bodies apart! Hurry! Hurry!” Little Raider Qiu Mengtang, in his early thirties, had once had rather handsome features, but years of constant slaughter had transformed his face into something more sinister and vicious. In a situation like this, his roar alone was enough to strike fear into men—yet only a moment after shouting these words, his eyes lit up and he began to laugh. “Ha, so we’ve run into some real toughness after all… not bad.”

Across the field, from the other side, there came surprisingly little shouting at all.

In an ordinary duel between skilled fighters, loud shouting only wastes a person’s strength—even battle cries timed to one’s breathing are never meant to be loud enough to be genuinely frightening. But on a battlefield, or in a melee among many fighters, shouting matters a great deal—it can blur a person’s reason, drive them into a frenzy, make them forget pain and fear. Yet in this clash, although there was some shouting coming from the other side, there was strikingly no widespread roar of sound at all—which could only mean that the other side wasn’t under nearly as much pressure, and was handling everything in an orderly, methodical way.

Something like a battle formation isn’t like a game from some later age—once several hundred men are gathered together, telling one person from another is, in truth, no easy task at all. Little Raider had fought through enough years of slaughter to have some judgment of his own, but all he could really see was his own men charging forward, only to be blocked and stuck fast. Had he looked more closely, he would have noticed that along the line where his men had charged in, there was only obstruction, no rebound at all—an orderly slaughter carried out from the very first instant. His men surged forward, howling with frenzy, yet the very first wave to make contact had already fallen, some wounded, some killed outright. Their screams, mixed in with the general roar, only drove the men behind them to charge forward all the more wildly, even as the pack train immediately began retreating, the entire battle line pulling back with it, leaving behind bodies and blood that the men rushing in from behind simply trampled through.

In the gaps between the squads, few dared push forward, because they would suddenly find that the comrade beside them had already fallen. Even the rare bandit who set aside his bloodlust and charged into the gaps was swiftly dealt with by crossbow bolts flying in from somewhere unseen.

This was the state of things in the first moments of contact. Watching this unfold, Little Raider’s eyes had already begun to shine with excitement; the warhorse beneath him grew restless, and he himself seemed rather thrilled. But it wouldn’t be long before he came to understand a certain truth: that trouble in this world, indeed, so often comes from women—a realization he would only truly feel once his regret had set in.

Because, at this end of the battle line, besides the excited Qiu Mengtang, there were several other figures behind him, watching the battle from horseback. Lou Shuwan’s figure was wrapped in a cloak, her expression betraying little visible emotion—yet her hands, tucked inside her sleeves, were in fact trembling slightly, a blood-red heat churning beneath her eyes.

Her throat moved faintly. Though she had already done a fair amount of work under Tian Hu’s command, when it came to genuine battlefield combat, there was still much she couldn’t fully make sense of. At this moment, she found herself simply enveloped by some restless emotion, infected by the bloodthirsty howls of the bandits, her gaze fixed on that distant figure. Suppressing her feelings, she asked softly: “How is it going?”

She felt her own voice didn’t sound quite steady, but no one else seemed to notice anything amiss. Beside her, Yu Yulin sat tall and upright in the saddle, brow slightly furrowed. Tian Shi’s warhorse shifted restlessly a few steps before he reined it in and brought it to a stop.

“Ha!” This young man, addressed as the Third Prince, gave a laugh. “These fellows have some real skill—doesn’t look like they’ll be easy to beat.”

“Is… is that so.” Lou Shuwan answered as calmly and casually as she could manage.

A little farther ahead, Qiu Mengtang had already finished giving instructions to the men beside him, sending them back to continue rallying more men, then raised both blades with a flourish. “Boys, follow me and kill!” His warhorse charged forward toward the battle line ahead.

…

The battle lines crashed together. Compared to the frenzy on the other side, Ning Yi’s group seemed, by contrast, eerily calm.

It wasn’t that no one made a sound—in a melee that demanded this kind of ferocity, it was practically impossible for no one to shout at all. But what rang out, again and again, was mostly the kind of controlled grunt timed to one’s breath, or a burst of exertion at the moment of striking down an opponent. There were even a few who let out a “hahaha,” laughing and showing off after cutting down a few men. But drowned out beneath the enemy’s frenzied howling, this side truly seemed far too composed by comparison.

“…Move!”

“Hold! Cover the seventh squad!”

“Nie Shan, hurry up—”

“Don’t—get over here—”

“Get lost—”

Zhao Four, brandishing his steel blade, had originally wanted to charge in and fight to the death himself, but Ning Yi and the others held him back: “Sir Zhao Four, we still need you to guide us through here.” And so he was left standing at the rear, watching this remarkably composed fighting retreat unfold before him. In truth, the men in this party were, without exception, either Liangshan repentants like Nie Shan, or established underworld masters like Tian Donghan. Even the weakest fighter among them was, in reality, far from weak.

As for men like Nie Shan, after what they’d been through at Dulong Ridge, their killing instincts remained intact, but the pleasure they once took in killing had genuinely disappeared. Having endured that kind of concentration-camp-style reconditioning, the very core of their personalities had been warped—their worldviews forcibly shattered and rebuilt, pushed toward an entirely different extreme. A good number of them had taken to reading Buddhist scriptures, spending their ordinary days helping others and doing good deeds, and even much of their martial training now took the form of self-inflicted hardship. When men like this killed, they did so simply, without ever shouting anything.

Ning Yi, for his part, was no great saint himself, and certainly had no wish to train up a band of monks. And so, in their everyday ideological training, the discussions among the group placed heavy emphasis on genuine reasoning—what it is we value, what it is we’re trying to protect, why we kill, why we fight. This kind of reflection was the true core of it. It was precisely because of this that most of the men had retained their fighting capability.

As for men like Tian Donghan, they were already established masters within the martial world. Faced with a truly massive battlefield, with men as numerous as ants, they might well find it hard to keep their emotions in check—but here, the actual problem was that this battlefield was simply too small.

On a true battlefield, in a formation of several thousand men, in a single charge, one would be surrounded on every side, front and back, left and right; aside from pressing forward, there would be no room to maneuver at all. Whether one’s stance held firm, whether a single strike would prove fatal—these would be the only things that mattered. To survive, aside from a few subtler survival techniques, one would simply have to leave it to Heaven’s will. But here and now, a charge of four hundred-odd men, though it looked as though it blanketed the entire hillside, was in reality nothing more than a large-scale brawl. As long as there was room to maneuver, and one wasn’t caught in that tidal wave of blade-light that left no room to respond, a true master remained a true master.

With no coordination of different troop types, no flanking maneuvers, no covering volleys of arrows, the enemy’s hysterical howling amounted, to this side, to little more than a foolish waste of energy. Raw courage and bravado were commendable enough, but when it truly came down to a fight for survival, facing this kind of scattered charge, this side genuinely felt very little pressure at all.

“No method to it at all.” Ning Yi shaded his eyes with one hand. “This is just the first wave, isn’t it?”

“If this really is all they’ve got, we could just finish them off right here.” Zhu Biao craned his neck, watching as well.

“A strong dragon can’t crush a local snake. Sir Zhao Four already told us—Little Raider’s stronghold has a good one or two thousand men. Kill enough of them to scare them off, and try to withdraw as best we can… What puzzles me is why this Raider fellow suddenly decided to come after me. Whose feathers have I ruffled, exactly?”

“Uh, given everything you’re always up to, it’s genuinely hard to guess…” Zhu Biao thought it over, looking somewhat troubled, then simply waved a hand with bravado. “Well, however many of them show up, we’ll just take care of them. Weren’t you the one who said this trip north would be good training for everyone, Brother Ning?”

“Tch. There’s bound to be some reason behind whatever fool notion set this off, but… ha, forget it, I really can’t imagine who it might be…”

While the fighting raged furiously on that side, the attitude of these two on this side was, frankly, rather bizarre. Zhao Four, listening to their exchange and then looking back at the killing field, found his gaze filled with bafflement. Across the field, Little Raider came charging in, his twin blades flashing like lightning, driving straight at one of the squads ahead and clashing into combat. Zhu Biao watched this, pointing over that way: “That’s Little Raider?”

Zhao Four nodded. “That’s him. His swift blades are formidable—these past two years…”

He was still in the middle of his introduction when the squad that had engaged Little Raider was already scattered, pulling back several zhang before regrouping, with some men wounded. Even Qiu Mengtang, for the moment, didn’t dare charge straight into that breach. Meanwhile, Zhu Biao mounted his horse, spear in hand, rolling his neck. “Fine then, I’ll go kill him myself.”

He leaned low over his horse, and with hooves thundering, charged into the flank of the battle line. The first bandit to block his path was sent flying high into the air; the warhorse’s speed didn’t slacken in the slightest, carving a path of blood clean through one side of the hillside like a ship splitting the waves, driving straight toward Qiu Mengtang.

Zhao Four watched this, dumbfounded. Though he himself had taken part in Green Wood Stronghold’s own clashes before, and Lu Hongti’s martial skill was a full tier above Zhu Biao’s, when it came to sheer presence in a mounted charge across a battlefield, Hongti was, after all, a woman—there was no way she could compare to a young hothead like Zhu Biao, utterly shameless in his swagger at this moment.

“Qiu Mengtang!” Zhu Biao roared with laughter, like a child at play. “Give me your head—”

Qiu Mengtang answered: “Go to hell!”

Watching this unfold, Ning Yi clapped Zhao Four on the shoulder. “Sir Zhao Four, this is your home turf—I’d like you to think for a moment, is there any terrain nearby like…”

At the other end of the battlefield, Yu Yulin, watching the shifting tide of the fight, felt his expression turn grave. With far more command experience than the others, he could better read the state of the whole engagement, and now said in a low voice: “This fight isn’t as simple as it looked. Third Prince, Miss Lou, I think we need to call in our own men.”

The three hundred-plus men they’d brought into these mountains were Tian Hu’s own elite troops—that was where their true strength lay. Lou Shuwan glanced at him, her expression uncertain. Tian Shi, ever fond of showing off, seeing Qiu Mengtang apparently struggling, looked rather pleased. “Good—time these raiders got a taste of our real strength.”

Lou Shuwan couldn’t quite make sense of the state of the battlefield. After a moment’s thought, she finally said: “If it’s really this thorny, shouldn’t we… just let it go?”

Yu Yulin glanced at her, then gave a proud smile. “It’s thorny enough, sure, but giving up halfway is hardly what a hero would do. Miss Lou needn’t worry so much—now that we’ve decided to act, the Third Prince and I will handle matters on the battlefield ourselves.”

Tian Shi laughed heartily. “That’s right. Besides, it’s important that this Qiu Mengtang gets a taste of our real strength—if the target’s this tough, that’s a pleasant surprise, if anything. Miss Lou, whatever grudge you might have with this man, that’s a matter for before the fighting starts. Once the fighting begins, it’s a matter for us men. Just sit back and watch, and don’t worry about a thing!”

Once they’d said as much, Lou Shuwan found it hard to say anything more. Only, listening to their words, and then looking again at the fighting unfolding before her, the feelings churning inside her grew more complicated still…