Beneath the night sky, the battlefield turned like some vast grinding wheel.

Hooves thundered, wheeling across the chaotic, sprawling battlefield; column after column of cavalry moved like interweaving torrents, splitting apart the once-dense formations of the Wuchao army. Amid scattered points of firelight, blood and corpses spread across the ground; the plain was filled with fleeing, routed soldiers, alongside pockets of organized units still locked in combat of varying scale. Wherever the Jurchen cavalry charged through, these groups were scattered to pieces — what unfolded before the eyes was, in essence, a massacre on a massive scale.

The Wusheng Army, originally garrisoned to guard Daming Prefecture, was torn cleanly in two by the very first Jurchen cavalry charge. The elite riders who struck head-on shattered the army’s frontal resistance, after which column after column of a thousand riders each launched attacks from every direction, crushing the resistance of this sixty-thousand-strong force at a terrifying speed.

For the Wuchao soldiers, what unfolded before them could only be called horrific. Across this vast battlefield packed with tens of thousands of men, people were everywhere, and the Jurchen assault drove straight through them without mercy. Whoever encountered this scene first felt bewildered disbelief, then an overwhelming, unstoppable terror; morale collapsed, panic spread, and all around came the frantic, hysterical shouting and screaming of the terrified. As the Jurchen cavalry charged through, those nearby scrambled to dodge, crushing into one another, only to have their bones shattered and bodies torn apart by the charging horses bearing down on them. Across this battlefield where people crowded every inch of ground, wherever these riders went, they left behind harrowing mountains of corpses and waves of blood.

Chen Yanshu, commander-in-chief of the Wusheng Army, was fleeing for his life without regard for anything else. Just moments before, a column of Jurchen cavalry had broken through the ring of his personal guards, nearly bringing their blades to his very face — two arrows had even struck his armor. This Jurchen unit had come with a specific target in mind: him, the commanding general, and the head on his shoulders.

When the Jurchen cavalry had first appeared before the main army, Chen Yanshu had still hoped to make a stand using sheer numbers; even as the linked cavalry, several or a dozen riders at a time, charged madly into the front ranks, he hadn’t yet thought of retreat. But everything had happened far, far too fast.

When infantry face cavalry in a real, grinding fight, what matters is a tightly packed, impenetrable formation. When thousands upon thousands are crammed together as one dense mass, with the front unable to flee and the rear pressing bravely forward, it forms a great human wall that even cavalry cannot break through. But that was easier said than done — once the threat of death appeared, the front ranks would instinctively want to dodge, to retreat. If one thought of the entire army as a single body, then the degree to which courage outweighed cowardice would determine whether that formation held firm.

The Jurchen charge shattered this sea of men with startling speed. The flying flesh and blood was enough to unsettle even battle-hardened commanders; one column of two thousand riders tore through the human sea, driving straight toward the Wusheng Army’s great banner. Chen Yanshu tried to hold this “spent force” of cavalry back with his army’s elite troops, but the bloodbath already unleashed seemed only to have stoked the Jurchens’ ferocity further — even as they fended off attacks from every direction, they simultaneously drove with frenzied force straight into the ranks of Chen Yanshu’s personal guard.

Or rather, they cut down everything within reach on all sides, all while continuing to press forward at breakneck speed.

Chen Yanshu’s guards held the line for a moment, but under the immense pressure they suffered heavy losses, and Chen Yanshu’s nerve broke completely. When someone in the chaos loosed an arrow at him, he began retreating rapidly, while simultaneously ordering other units within the army to converge on this position to shield him from the attack.

After this shift in deployment, the entire army began to fall apart. The Jurchen slaughter ground down everything beneath the night sky; control over the whole Wusheng Army had already collapsed, gradually devolving into isolated pockets of fighting. Units at the periphery had already begun fleeing in a wild panic; soldiers within the formation, under the command of mid-level officers, either fought on or tried to fall back in an orderly retreat. But slaughter had become the dominant theme across the entire battlefield — with so many people packed together, the killing was simply too easy.

Some ten-odd li from this spot, the Wuwei Army had likewise been scattered and crushed, its section of the battlefield commanded by the Jin general Saila. Column after column of Jurchen cavalry swept back and forth, cutting down every Wuchao soldier bearing a clear mark of rank they could find.

On a stretch of hills, a large group of men too slow to escape was caught by a cavalry column roughly a thousand strong and cut down from behind in pursuit. Huge numbers of routed soldiers fled into a nearby forest, but the Jurchen cavalry circled around its edges and began setting fires from all directions. It was already late autumn, edging into early winter, and the air was dry — before long, great open flames roared to life, lighting up the entire forest. Along a nearby river valley, close to three thousand Wuchao soldiers were driven, slaughtered, into the water. Before long the Jurchens began firing arrows into the river, staining the entire surface of the water red with blood.

Some ten-odd li south of this place, the battlefield of the Wurui Battalion was equally horrific beyond words. Its collapse came more slowly than that of the Wusheng and Wuwei armies, but the linked cavalry likewise shattered the infantry’s resistance, cutting the entire battlefield into several large sections. Both within and beyond the formation, morale was collapsing all the same, and nearly half the troops had already begun to scatter and flee.

A Jurchen cavalry unit roughly a thousand strong swept along the edge of the battlefield, cutting down the scattering crowds as it went.

Across this vast battlefield, Ning Yi could no longer find Qin Shaoqian’s position — not long after the great battle began, Qin Shaoqian had led the Wurui Battalion’s most prized two thousand cavalry charging straight at the Jurchens. But no matter how precious this unit was to the Wurui Battalion, Wuchao’s warhorses were inferior to those of the Jurchens to begin with, and the caliber of Wuchao’s cavalrymen fell considerably short of the Jurchen riders before them as well. This clash of cavalry was brutal beyond description, and the casualties on both sides were correspondingly heavy.

Watching the battle collapse ahead of him, with several more Jurchen cavalry units now charging in from different directions, Ning Yi, to be honest, badly wanted to leave. The area around him was all farmland — there was no elevated position anywhere he could hold. And with troops of every kind packed all around him, if his convoy tried to make any major move here, it would set off a stampede of panic among everyone nearby.

Back during his time in Qi County, Ning Yi had discussed with Qin Shaoqian how the elm-wood cannons might be used — with the support of a large army, choosing a narrow stretch of terrain to meet the enemy head-on could inflict considerable damage on Jurchen cavalry columns. Even without ideal terrain, positioning the cannon formation at the front on elevated ground could still prove quite useful, though coordination with the main army was essential. But right now, even if he set up the cannon formation out in the open, he had no idea which direction to aim them.

Their original plan for this operation had been to fight the Jurchens near Moutuo Ridge — either Yao Pingzhong’s raid would succeed, and the more than a hundred thousand troops would encircle the main Jurchen force and finish them off in one stroke, or Yao Pingzhong would fail, and the hundred-thousand-plus troops would mass together and face the Jurchens in open, formal battle. But before they’d even arrived, the Jurchens had come to them — the scouts’ intelligence hadn’t given them much advance warning at all.

Qin Shaoqian had recognized this, and had also realized that Ning Yi’s elm-wood cannons would likely be of little use here — which was why he’d sent word for Ning Yi to use his own judgment, and to flee quickly if the situation proved hopeless. But Ning Yi had no wish to be the first to break and run, either.

Yue Fei’s more than three hundred men had already assembled; under this young officer’s training, their formation held together well, though they remained tense and uneasy, fear plain on every face. Ning Yi’s side likewise had a contingent of more than three hundred — the elite of the Bamboo Registry, all of them men who had followed Ning Yi to Mount Lüliang. Though the formation they held wasn’t the kind of dense mass typically arrayed against cavalry, most of their eyes showed no trace of fear.

Of course, some of the technical staff among them were still afraid.

Standing atop the roof of the cart, watching the slaughter’s front line gradually creep closer, Ning Yi himself, in truth, was afraid too. The Jurchen linked cavalry — and later, the heavy cavalry known as the “Iron Pagoda Corps” — would, in later legend, be countered by Yue Fei’s method of cutting the horses’ legs out from under them. But after spending some time learning about it during this period, Ning Yi understood that the real key had nothing to do with cutting horses’ legs at all.

That when a warhorse charged in, cutting its legs out was common knowledge to anyone who’d been through real combat. It only became a “secret technique” in legend. Because the real difficulty was never in something so simple — the real difficulty lay in how, when a dozen-plus warhorses swept in like tanks from a later age, the front-line soldiers could remain calm, efficient, and precise enough to thrust their blades and spears at the horses’ legs at all.

And even if they struck true, nine times out of ten, those soldiers would still be trampled to death.

It would likely take countless hours of simple, monotonous training, an extremely strict discipline, and the tempering of actual warfare to produce soldiers capable of this. And once you had such soldiers, what you’d be asking of them was to trade their lives for the horses’ — only then could infantry stand any real chance against cavalry. And right now, the more than three hundred men the young officer nearby had trained were still far, far from that standard. As little more than militia, the most that could be said of them was that they hadn’t broken and fled.

Earlier, when the Jurchens had first launched their charge, Ning Yi had watched from atop the cart. The Jurchens’ charge of several thousand riders had been a spectacle of terrifying scale, and the Wurui Battalion’s front line had put up a stubborn resistance. And yet, of those several thousand riders, the actual losses were probably no more than a hundred, perhaps two hundred at most. The three unified shouts Qin Shaoqian had arranged had lifted morale, but for the men on the front line, morale alone could only make them hack wildly with their blades — many of them probably didn’t even know what they’d struck. Once the Jurchen charge first broke through the formation, their casualties dropped off sharply.

The roar of battle spread closer, the Jurchen tide of slaughter extending across the field in every direction visible; orders demanding that nearby units advance were also coming down rapidly. Most of the men near Ning Yi were scattered garrison troops and militia gathered from all directions; some of them still had fighting spirit left and, under the officers beside them, began charging forward, while others started to flee. A Jurchen cavalry unit, numbering somewhere in the hundreds to a thousand, was already bearing down toward them, and panic and unrest grew all the more visible around them. Then, more and more routed soldiers began flooding through the area like a tide, and many started to run.

Ahead, Yue Fei stood holding his steel spear, watching all of this coldly.

Zhu Biao, having returned, climbed up onto the back of the cart and looked around as well. “Should we step in and enforce military discipline?”

Among the Bamboo Registry’s guards, more than a few were glaring at the scene with furrowed brows. Martial artists tended to run hot-blooded, and seeing a battle of this scale, they wouldn’t hesitate to throw themselves into the fight — nor did they think much of those fleeing before they’d even fought. Still, Ning Yi shook his head. “We’ll need to leave soon too. This defeat is happening too fast — a few hundred of us stopping them wouldn’t mean anything.”

Zhu Biao fell silent for a moment. “We can’t deploy the cannon formation.”

In a place this crowded and chaotic, even if they did manage to set it up, a single volley would only kill their own people.

The night sky was in uproar, points of fire spreading everywhere, cavalry sweeping across the battlefield, kicking up waves of blood. Scenes of death and grievous injury stretched out before them in every direction — an indescribable sight. Standing atop the cart, Ning Yi clenched his fists. This was the first time since arriving in Wuchao that he had witnessed a battle, and a defeat, of such enormous scale. He had lived through many things in his life, but experiencing something like this firsthand was another matter entirely. In this moment, he badly wanted to lead men charging forward, badly wanted to deploy the elm-wood cannon formation and strike the Jurchens a crushing blow — but no matter how he racked his brain to calculate a way, it amounted to nothing. Ahead, Qin Shaoqian and the others were still fighting on, because they had no choice — to stop fighting now would mean losing even the last sliver of a chance to escape.

Another cavalry unit, roughly a thousand strong, swung around from the flank, drawing near the battlefield.

The Jurchen general leading this cavalry unit was named Sukena. His column slowed slightly as he surveyed the state of the battlefield.

“Time to go,” Ning Yi said, raising a hand toward the Bamboo Registry members nearby. “I know you all want to charge in, but while we still have the chance, we need to… retreat back to Qi County. Head to the flank first, no need to rush…”

Though the cart moved only slowly as it shifted position, it still caused some crowding — fortunately, the route Ning Yi had chosen wasn’t a path of open flight, so it hadn’t yet triggered a stampede. Not far off, the Jurchen general Sukena pointed a finger. “There — a Wuchao supply convoy, bound to be carrying all sorts of provisions and equipment. Follow me! That’s ours now!”

“Waaah—” A wave of shouting surged through the Jurchen cavalry, and then the riders came charging forward, driving straight into the now-panicking crowd.

The cavalry tore into the formation, kicking up a tide of blood, followed by yet another wave of collapse and flight. Two hundred-some meters away, through the thick crowd, Ning Yi looked in that direction.

“They’re coming for us,” Zhu Biao said, wheeling his horse around and gesturing to those nearby.

“Trouble…” Ning Yi frowned, muttering under his breath. “Keep moving. Get ready to fight.”

Not far off, Yue Fei, having also noticed what was happening, began repositioning his own unit. Here, the cart convoy continued shifting to the side, while the Bamboo Registry’s finest fighters had already all gathered together. Farther off, the battlefield raged on in brutal, grinding combat, the Jurchen cavalry columns surging forward like a flood. Not long after the entire plain descended into a hell of slaughter, Ning Yi and the others found themselves swept into this vast battle, becoming part of it.

In the capital, a grim, uncanny atmosphere was building. News of the Yao family army’s catastrophic defeat had already arrived first…