The roar of battle rose like a tide, hoofbeats crashing and rolling, howls of fury, the clash of killing, and the ring of steel against steel all boiling together across the vast battlefield.

Black and gray smoke drifted through the air, the atmosphere thick with a chilling stench. As the armored cavalry closed to short range and unleashed their full force, the spear formation surged forward to meet them; the grinding struggle between spear and warhorse came with a twisting screech of metal on metal, spearheads finding their way through gaps in the armor and driving into the flesh of the horses beneath, releasing great gouts of blood. Wounded horses veered in pain; men fell within the spear ranks; mounted riders swung their long halberds, slicing across faces, while heavy hammers swung down as well, crashing with a thunderous boom onto the skulls of horses, sending them collapsing to the ground amid spraying gore.

Amid the horn calls, a new round of even larger explosions began, stretching on and on, shaking nearly the entire plain. Great columns of smoke rose into the sky.

Then came the Black Banner Army’s infantry, surging forward in an encircling charge like a tidal wave.

From the moment the battle on the Dongzhi Plateau began, the Iron Kite Cavalry had never had much room to choose their course. The staggering power of the improved gunpowder shattered every previously viable strategy; only after the first two rounds of bombardment, having already suffered massive losses, did the heavy cavalry begin to react at all. In an ordinary battle, once losses among the engaged Iron Kite reached six to nine hundred without the enemy breaking, the Iron Kite themselves would have had to consider withdrawing. But this time, the front ranks had barely made contact before catastrophic losses left almost no room for choice; once Meile had roughly grasped the situation, he could only act on instinct, making his decision in that very instant.

He made his choice.

Throughout this period, no orders were issued at all—each unit of the Iron Kite could only continue charging forward.

At this point, though the heavy cavalry’s front ranks had suffered massive losses, an accurate awareness of the casualties had not yet truly settled into the mind of every individual rider. Before long, the Iron Kite surged forward like a raging tide toward the artillery position, and the more than a hundred cannons managed a hasty third volley. Less than the time it takes to drink a cup of tea since the battle began, the Iron Kite’s overwhelming charging power was on full display—it tore through the defenses of the artillery’s main position, the mounted figures sweeping straight through.

Across the field, cavalry surged forward everywhere; the light cavalry force approaching from the flank, led by Chang Da, had originally intended to charge as well, but seeing the heavy cavalry break through the center, they finally decided instead to circle and harass the Black Banner Army’s own cavalry from the side.

Then, before everyone’s eyes, the entire artillery position was swallowed beneath an unbroken wave of explosions, black smoke spreading, the earth shaking as if it might collapse.

From the moment the battle began, wave after wave of explosions and billowing smoke had turned the entire battlefield into something like a nightmare made real. Cavalry caught in the charge were struck down or caught in the blast radius one after another; horses, spooked and colliding with one another, lost their combat effectiveness in a continuous chain of incidents. Yet even so, as Western Xia’s most elite force, the Iron Kite still managed, through sheer strength of charge, to achieve one breakthrough—though only the one.

As the artillery crews dragged what few cannons remained in retreat under the cavalry’s pursuit to the edge of the battlefield, the more than two hundred wooden crates left behind in the center formation began detonating one after another, the spreading black smoke swallowing everyone’s field of vision like a surging flood. At that same moment, the low, droning horn calls rose sharper and clearer, and the Black Banner Army units that had already been repositioning to the flanks launched their full assault.

Amid the continuous explosions, the cavalry squads now scattered across the battlefield had, by this point, essentially lost all their momentum. Infantry surged in from every direction; some pushed forward with iron cavalry obstacles, hurling them into the mounted ranks, the clatter ringing out as charging heavy cavalry crashed against them again and again. Some of the Iron Kite riders attempted close-range breakout charges—they were, after all, the elite among Western Xia’s forces, and even scattered and isolated, they still retained considerable fighting strength and battlefield awareness. Only their morale had sunk to a bitter, icy low. And the Black Banner Army soldiers they now faced were, in their own right, an elite force capable of continuing to fight tenaciously even after their own formation had broken down.

In the cavalry’s last flickers of resistance, men were occasionally sent flying into pools of blood; spears, iron spikes, and cavalry obstacles brought down horse after horse, while heavy hammers crashed down onto thick iron armor with a terrifying sound, the flesh beneath nearly pulped by the impact. Each time a warhorse fell, thick blood came surging out from beneath it.

Luo Ye led his men, pushing iron cavalry obstacles, charging madly toward the enemy’s command banner. The ground, freshly scorched by explosions, was thick with dust and smoke; the occasional cracked-armor rider still burst free from within it, and those who moved to meet them threw the obstacles down first, followed swiftly by hooked sickle-spears thrusting and hooking at the horses’ legs, hammer-wielding soldiers ready at any moment to swing their heavy hammers down. Now and then, a Black Banner Army soldier, unable to break through the enemy’s defenses, was cut down by an enemy spear or heavy halberd.

The final, true test of strength had now truly begun; the two sides crashed together like unyielding steel!

On one flank of the battlefield, Chang Da led his two thousand seven hundred light cavalry in a desperate, all-or-nothing charge toward this side. Before long, scattered explosions began sounding again; the Black Banner Army’s own two thousand light cavalry surged forward at equally high speed to meet them, and the two cavalry forces coiled and clashed like dueling dragons across the flanking plain, locked in fierce combat…

And the dragon battled in the wilds, its blood staining the earth black and yellow. Thick blood soaked the ground red.

Within half an hour, the battle that would decide the fate of the entire northwest was drawing to its close.

…

The long wind swept endlessly beneath the trailing clouds of the overcast sky; here and there, cavalry columns rode across the darkened plain. Across the land near Qingzhou in the northwest, scattered groups of Western Xia soldiers stood about, sensing the gathering storm on the horizon.

Some of these soldiers had originally been stationed locally, overseeing the grain collection; others, following the chaos at Yanzhou and the death of the Western Xia general Jila Saile, were now fleeing west. The cavalry moved fastest, with the infantry following behind, taken in whenever they encountered fellow soldiers along the way.

The routed soldiers spread word of the terror of that band of mountain bandits. Though word of actual engagement had not yet come in from most of the front, many already knew the news: a ruthless force was now racing in from the east, and its intentions were far from good.

The Ganzhou-Gansu Military Command under Jila Saile, stationed around Yanzhou and Qingjian, was not the most elite force in the Western Xia army, but it still counted as a solid core force. Farther west, the garrison at Qingzhou now consisted mostly of auxiliary troops and supply units—because the true main force had, not long before, already been pulled away to Yuanzhou and Huanzhou. Given how swiftly Yanzhou had collapsed, the Western Xia forces at Qingzhou stood little chance of putting up any real fight.

Yeli Jingji had already learned of all this two days earlier. He was one of the elite soldiers currently garrisoning Qingzhou—originally from a collateral branch of a great Western Xia clan, educated since childhood and trained in the martial arts, a member of the direct guard detail under the great general Haorong. When the first wave of news arrived, he had already grasped the full shape of what was unfolding.

Even though he refused to believe that any force besides the Zhe family would dare provoke Western Xia in the northwest at this time, and didn’t believe the enemy’s fighting strength could possibly be as formidable as the scouts claimed, the fact remained undeniable: Jila Saile was dead, and his entire army routed.

To deal with this sudden Black Banner Army, Haorong had dispatched a large number of trusted guard members and elite scouts eastward, strengthening the intelligence network to monitor the approaching army’s movements. Yeli Jingji himself had been sent out over twenty li to the east, stationed at Shihu Plain, tasked with closely watching the movements of the invading enemy. The night before, the Black Banner Army had not yet passed through Shihu Plain—but the Iron Kite Cavalry had arrived first.

Yeli Jingji finally felt at ease. The Iron Kite’s fame spanned the realm; every Western Xia soldier knew full well just how terrifying their charge could be. Yeli Jingji had acquaintances within the Iron Kite ranks as well, and that night he’d sought them out to talk—only then learning that His Majesty had flown into such a rage over this army that the entire main force had broken camp and turned back east, determined to stabilize the whole eastern front. With the Iron Kite’s six thousand cavalry riding out in full force, no matter how formidable the enemy might be, they would surely now be trapped within the mountains, unable to act recklessly.

The next day dawned overcast, and the Iron Kite broke camp and departed. Not long after, Yeli Jingji received word that the Black Banner Army had been spotted up ahead, and that the Iron Kite was about to launch its attack. Yeli Jingji sent men back to Qingzhou to relay the news, then took a handful of trusted subordinates and rode east himself—he wanted to be the first to confirm the Iron Kite’s great victory.

The sky churned with drifting clouds. From the mouth of Shihu Plain onward to the Dongzhi Plateau, the land stretched out flat and endless. Yeli Jingji and his men rode hard, and before long he began to hear what sounded like faint thunder rolling in from the east. He lay flat against the ground to listen, but the sounds carrying up from the earth were too chaotic to make sense of. Fortunately, there were still traces of the army’s passage to follow, and as he pressed on, tracking them, he suddenly spotted a fallen warhorse up ahead.

Blood lay bright red on the ground, scattered arrows jutting from the earth around it—the horse had been brought down by arrow fire, its owner lying dead not far off, marked with several wounds; clearly, he had fought a fierce battle before dying. This turned out to be one of the Iron Kite’s auxiliary cavalrymen. Looking further, more corpses lay scattered in the distance.

There, too, lay a fallen Iron Kite auxiliary soldier. Yeli Jingji dismounted and went over, finding the man’s chest pierced by several spear-thrusts, his face split open by a blade—the wounds brutal, savage, cut clean to the bone. The Iron Kite’s main force was renowned throughout the realm, but its auxiliary troops were handpicked from each noble clan and were often even fiercer fighters. This man had been tall and broad, his hands bearing several old scars, and judging by the decorations on his uniform, he had been a seasoned veteran of many battles—yet whatever enemy he’d encountered had cut him down like this.

And looking at the direction they’d been running and falling—it was exactly opposite the direction the main force had advanced. Were they fleeing?

The wind carried a faint, mournful moan. Yeli Jingji froze for a moment at the thought that had just crossed his mind, then looked back, unable to accept it. There must be some other explanation, he told himself.

Based on the timing of the earlier reports, even if the Iron Kite had already engaged the enemy, it couldn’t have been for long. Six thousand Iron Kite cavalry, three thousand of them heavy armored riders—they had never feared any enemy force, even one numbering in the tens of thousands. How could there possibly be any question of fleeing? It was far more likely that the enemy had been the ones routed and fleeing, with a few of them cut down by the pursuing light cavalry along the way.

Convinced this must be the explanation, he mounted up again, and before long, following the black dust drifting across the sky, he traced his way toward the site of the battle. The farther he went, the more terrible the truth became. Fallen cavalrymen grew more and more numerous along the way, the vast majority of them Iron Kite light auxiliary troops. In the distance, the outline of the battlefield had already come into view—smoke and dust swirling over it, countless figures still moving within.

There were no other living souls nearby. Yeli Jingji forced down the ominous feeling rising in his chest and pressed on. He had hoped to see the Iron Kite in the midst of mopping up the battlefield—but the scene across from him only grew clearer, and more terrible.

A mountain of corpses, a sea of blood; fallen heavy warhorses; eyes that would never close in death; that black banner tilting and fluttering in the wind; a steel war-helmet dangling from someone’s hand; thick blood dripping from bodies and blade-tips alike.

Farther off, it seemed there was a group of men removing their iron armor. Yeli Jingji could not comprehend the scene before him—across the vast plain, it was filled now with an army he had never seen before, men walking through the sea of blood, some of them turning to look this way.

The Iron Kite had made its charge here—and had fallen.

A small squad of light cavalry began riding toward him. Something seemed to hammer at the blood in his veins, or clamp down hard at the base of his skull. Yeli Jingji’s scalp prickled; he wrenched his horse’s head around. “Ride!”

He fled headlong, desperate to put as much distance as possible between himself and that hellish scene…

…

With a thud, someone shoved a dead warhorse’s corpse off to the side. The soldier pinned beneath it tried to rise, only to discover a long sword had already run him through the chest, nailing him to the ground.

“Damn it! Damn it—”

The Black Banner Army soldier cursed through gritted teeth, his body twitching weakly, both hands gripping the sword’s hilt. The man beside him grabbed the hilt too, while others held him down, someone shouting, “Where’s the medic!? Get the medic, quick—”

“Damn it—” Blood was already welling up from the fallen soldier’s mouth. All around, chaotic voices rose amid the smoke still climbing into the sky. Stretchers ran across the battlefield, weaving between piles of corpses, while the soldier on the ground stared up, his eyes gradually losing their color. Not far off, Luo Ye pulled the helmet off a fallen Iron Kite heavy cavalryman, only to find the rider could still move—he swung his blade suddenly, and Luo Ye drove his own blade straight into the man’s throat, twisted it, and blood sprayed across his body. Only once the overwhelming stench of blood had settled fully around him did he suddenly stand and yank the helmet from his own head.

“Mao Yishan! Where are you! Liao Duoting, Liao Duoting—”

All around, shouts of every kind filled the air; officers, in the midst of sweeping the battlefield, kept searching for their own men. Few cheered outright—even though the danger and killing had passed, leaving a relief too profound for words, in this moment everyone was simply searching for whatever task they could do, and through that work, feeling some emotion finally settle and take root within them.

In this moment, they truly felt the weight of their own strength, and the weight of victory.

That weight came from the strength of every man beside them.

The battle against the Iron Kite Cavalry had carried far too much anticipation beforehand; once it actually happened, the whole thing unfolded far too quickly. For the Iron Kite, the sudden, mountain-collapsing rout amid those massive explosions had defied every expectation. But for the soldiers of the Black Banner Army, the clash that followed had been anything but flashy or clever. Had they not truly been strong enough, even having thrown the Iron Kite’s formation into disarray, they never could have swallowed down such a hard bone. Yet in that final, brutal engagement, they had forced the Iron Kite down their own throats through sheer, unyielding strength.

The victory at Yanzhou had come so quickly that it hadn’t quite felt real to them. But this time, what everyone felt was genuine strength honed on the edge of a blade.

It had come at a cost, too—the last desperate resistance of some of the heavy cavalry had inflicted no small number of casualties on the Black Banner Army. On one flank of the battlefield, in an effort to rescue the Iron Kite main force now bogged down in the mire, Chang Da had led his light cavalry in a ferocious assault against the center of the battlefield. Several cannons that had been withdrawn earlier inflicted considerable losses on his light cavalry, but couldn’t halt their charge. Liu Chengzong led two thousand light cavalry to cut off their advance, and nearly five thousand riders on both sides fought a white-hot battle on the flank, until finally, after a small number of heavy cavalry broke through the encirclement and part of the Iron Kite surrendered, this Western Xia auxiliary force finally broke and scattered.

For these retainers of great noble households, should their masters die, living on was often worse than death itself—which was why their will to resist had proven even more stubborn than that of the Iron Kite’s own main force.

But by any measure, in this battle, the Black Banner Army had overpowered the Iron Kite head-on—whether in the chaotic melee at the main battlefield or the frenzied cavalry clash on the flank, the Black Banner Army’s soldiers, under their exceptional discipline and organization, had displayed a combat capability and aggression that surpassed even this legendary heavy cavalry upon which Western Xia’s fame had been built.

Swaying unsteadily, Mao Yishan pulled himself up out of a pool of blood, his chest aching. In the chaos of battle, he and Hou Wu and the others had formed ranks and fought the heavy cavalry directly; when an isolated rider had charged in from the side, Mao Yishan had grabbed his shield and slammed into him from the flank, and had been sent flying himself—only now was he coming back to his senses.

Beside him lay fallen comrades; his head buzzed faintly, and it took a good while before the ringing finally faded. He got to his feet and, seeing familiar faces walking beside him, asked: “What happened?”

“What do you mean, what happened?”

At the question thrown back at him, Mao Yishan slowly began to smile. He already knew, in his heart, exactly what had happened.

We beat the Iron Kite.

…

Amid a clattering, clanging din, piles of steel armor and helmets lay heaped like small hills.

The captured heavy cavalrymen had been gathered here—some four or five hundred of them. They had already been forced to discard their weapons and strip off their armor. Surrounded by soldiers, watching the black banner flutter in the wind, the silent one-eyed general stood off to one side, gazing into the distance.

A troop of light cavalry was returning from that direction, bringing back captured warhorses laden with heavy armor, along with some men bound with rope, running along behind.

These prisoners were dragged forward. Among them was one man, tall and imposing, carrying an air of nobility—though now his hair and beard hung in disheveled disarray, giving him a pitiful, wretched look. The more than five hundred surrendered men looked at him; he in turn swept his gaze over them, then turned to look at the one-eyed general approaching.

“What sorcery… did you people use.” The man was none other than Meile, commander of the Iron Kite, speaking now through gritted teeth. “You’ve enraged Western Xia—sooner or later, you’ll all be destroyed. If you want to live, release us at once, and come with me to beg forgiveness before His Majesty!”

The one-eyed general stopped before him. After a moment, he spread his hand toward the surrounding field. “Take a look at these men on the battlefield.”

All across the battlefield around them, soldiers were stripping suits of steel armor from the corpses of the Iron Kite. The smoke of battle had cleared; these men bore blood and wounds upon their bodies, and yet they carried themselves with a resolve and strength that filled the air as well. Meile turned his head—the sound of a longsword being drawn had already rung out. Qin Shaoqian swung the blade across his neck; blood sprayed out like a length of unfurled white silk, and the great Tangut chieftain’s head went flying.

…

Beneath the overcast sky, men were fitting armor onto horses once more; the air still carried a faint trace of blood. The armored cavalry appeared again, one after another, their riders likewise clad in armor, someone lifting a helmet and setting it upon his own head.

“From this day forward… there is no more Iron Kite Cavalry.”

On the Dongzhi Plateau, the collision of these two armies had struck like thunder, and the tremors it produced would, before long, spread and rage outward just as thunder does.

By this point, the Black Banner Army’s remaining combat-ready strength had fallen to seven thousand men; nearly all of the elm-wood cannons had been expended in this battle, and their ammunition was nearly gone as well. Only the armored heavy cavalry, after this crushing defeat of the Iron Kite, had grown to over fifteen hundred strong. From Xia Village, through the regicide and rebellion, through a year of training at the Little Cang River, this army’s fighting strength, having first shown its edge, had at last, for the very first time, truly taken shape and settled into something stable and enduring.

And before them now, the Western Xia king’s seventy-thousand-strong army was advancing. Upon receiving word that the Iron Kite had been all but annihilated, the upper echelons of the Western Xia court had come close to total collapse—yet at the same time, they had gathered together every soldier they could possibly muster, including the garrisons and grain-guarding units from both Yuanzhou and Qingzhou, all converging toward Li Qianshun’s main force. By the twenty-seventh of the sixth month, this entire army—light cavalry, infantry, crossbowmen, capture troops, catapult units, every branch included—had swelled to over a hundred thousand men, and now, like some colossal, unstoppable behemoth, it was advancing eastward in full force toward this army now resting and regrouping.

At the Little Cang River, Ning Yi sat on the hillside outside the courtyard, enjoying the cool air. The old man came walking over—for the first time in days, he did not open with an argument about Confucianism. The morning before, he had confirmed that the Black Banner Army had defeated the Iron Kite head-on in open battle; today, he had confirmed something else as well.

“After crushing the Iron Kite so decisively… you still won’t withdraw?”

“That’s right,” Ning Yi said, pinching his fingers together, gazing off into the distance as he answered.

“…Ah.” The old man hesitated for a long while before finally letting out a sigh. No one knew exactly what he was sighing over.

In Qingzhou city, few Western Xia soldiers remained. Lou Shuwan stood by the window of her inn, gazing east toward the darkening sky.

A hundred thousand men had already advanced—yet the other side still hadn’t made a move.

Everything that had happened these past few days had filled her with a chill and a tremor that reached down to the very depths of her being. Ever since the regicide, that man who’d hidden himself away in the mountains had, in the midst of this crisis, revealed something in himself that left her with a sense of madness she could neither fully grasp nor even properly imagine—that all-consuming savagery and beastlike ferocity. Years ago, there had been an army that once relied on exactly that same force to sweep across the realm.

She could understand Li Qianshun’s predicament well enough. If that army made even the slightest move—retreating, evading—the Western Xia’s great host would have more options open to it. But the enemy made none at all. The battle reports claimed they numbered ten thousand, though the true figure was likely even lower. With the enemy showing no movement whatsoever, the hundred-thousand-strong army had no choice but to keep advancing.

Western Xia’s predicament mattered little to her. What mattered was that, in her dream last night, she had seen him again. Just as it had been that first time in Hangzhou—that gentle, courteous, cultured young scholar… She had woken and, even now, still felt a faint chill running through her body. She didn’t know whether what she’d dreamed should fill her with excitement or dread—but either way, even the summer sunlight seemed to have lost all its warmth…

Heaven above, please… let someone kill him…

Over Qingzhou, the clouds of war were gathering.