The enormous hot-air balloon sailed high across the dusk sky. As the Black Banner Army advanced steadily and entered the line of engagement, a swarm of arrows still cut through the air, raining down in dense black clouds.
The Black Banner side answered in kind.
Formations of thousands upon thousands of men, thousands upon thousands of arrows, spreading across a front several miles long. Amid this sea of humanity, Zhuo Yongqing raised his shield, covering the comrade beside him who had just loosed an arrow, and then came the crackling patter of arrows striking and bouncing off his shield. All around, a droning unrest filled the air—men shouting, men crying out in pain. Zhuo Yongqing could clearly hear someone yelling: “I’m fine, I’m fine! Damn my luck…” A breath later, a shout rang out: “Charge—”
The comrade beside him tensed, and then Zhuo Yongqing shouted along with him: “Charge!”
In that instant, thousands of voices roared out together, and as they shouted, they raised their shields, gathered their strength, and surged forward all at once—the sound of footfalls rising in an instant like an angry tide, shaking the ground across a line stretching over a mile.
“Kill—”
The roar rolled forward like a collapsing mountain. Across the field stood a defensive line twenty thousand strong, arrayed in several successive ranks; the earlier arrows had done little more than stir faint ripples through that vast sea of men. Layer upon layer of officers shouted: “Hold the line—” and the front of their formation locked into a wall of shields and a forest of spears. The commander in charge here was named Fan Yu, who kept issuing orders for volley after volley of arrows—against the five thousand men charging toward them, his own force outnumbered them nearly five to one, and even after the first massed volley, arrows continued to loose in succeeding waves, though the second, more scattered volley did little real damage. He stared wide-eyed at the scene before him, his jaw clenching involuntarily, teeth aching from the strain.
This was no orthodox way of fighting—it didn’t even look like a Wu Dynasty army at all. A force of little more than ten thousand men had leapt out from the mountains and charged straight at the front line, splitting off five thousand to launch a direct assault against his own twenty thousand troops and the seventy-thousand-plus reserve force behind them. Such a reckless, suicidal show of force looked far more like something out of the Jin army. And yet the Jurchens’ invincibility across the realm was, after all, well-earned—this force, whatever its impressive record, surely couldn’t actually be a match for the Jurchens themselves.
That was what he had believed before. But at least in this moment, the astonishing display the enemy was putting on had begun to shake his confidence somewhat. “Hold them back—” he bellowed, at the same time ordering his men to see if they could bring down that “sorcery” in the sky with strong bows. The gap ahead of the front line, once the distance of a single arrow’s flight, had shrunk to nothing!
A thunderous roar, rolling on like a tidal wave, arose from shield crashing against shield, a chaos of shouting voices merging into one. In the instant before impact, the Black Banner Army’s vanguard did everything they could to dodge and avoid being skewered on the enemy’s thrusting spear points; the men across from them screamed with wild abandon, spear tips thrusting and withdrawing, and the second rank slammed into the first. Then came the third rank, and Zhuo Yongqing threw all his strength into shoving against the comrade in front of him!
“AAAAAAAAAAAH—”
Solid footing dug in, pushing back, pressing forward! The shield walls locked in a brief standstill. In the second rank, Luo Ye could almost feel, distinctly, the grinding friction of the enemy formation being forced backward—the defenders holding their ground simply couldn’t withstand this sudden burst of momentum. He drew a deep breath: “Everyone—ONE!”
All around, bodies pressed and shoved, but the response came back scattered: “TWO—”
By the third count, the voices of the men packed around him had fallen into unison, and together they roared: “THREE—”
Everyone put everything they had into that single instant!
Ahead, the shields and the enemies behind them were sent flying apart. Luo Ye and the soldiers beside him swung up their steel blades; with a single slashing stroke, a spear shaft made of white wax wood was cleaved in two, spinning through the air. Luo Ye had already caught sight of the eyes of the soldier before him—eyes just as fierce and savage as his own, bloodshot with rage, though within them lay a flicker of panic. That was enough.
His second stroke came down. All around him, countless men pressed forward, cutting into the enemy ranks. His long blade struck a shield; with a crash, splinters flew everywhere. Luo Ye pressed forward and struck again, aiming at the now-enlarged face of the enemy before him. Under that all-out, unrestrained swing of his blade, he barely even felt the resistance of bone—the man’s body merely shuddered once, then blood and flesh sprayed outward!
This blade really is something…
The thought flickered through his mind for the briefest instant, thick red already spreading everywhere. Somewhere, someone let out a roar from the most savage depths of their being.
“KIIIIIILLLL—”
The front line of slaughter surged forward like an angry tide, spreading outward in every direction.
One of the hot-air balloons dropped an explosive charge, and a thunderous blast erupted near Fan Yu’s command banner. Several soldiers glanced back over their shoulders; Fan Yu himself was unharmed, and he bellowed orders for the men around him to push forward, commanding the front ranks not to retreat, ordering the military police squads to move up—yet at the front line of engagement, a rippling wave of flesh and blood, stretching for several miles, was surging outward with mounting fury.
Zhuo Yongqing kept pressing forward. Ahead, there seemed to be countless people—some resisting, some fleeing—and amid the crush of bodies, the pace was agonizingly hard to increase. Some were knocked to the ground and trampled, and the Black Banner spearmen thrust their weapons through one after another. Before long, Zhuo Yongqing swung his first strike—it landed on empty air, as the enemy before him, desperate to retreat, gritted his teeth and swung wildly at him instead. Zhuo Yongqing, exactly as he’d trained countless times before, swung with all his strength; the man collapsed backward, scrambling desperately to retreat, and a comrade rushed past Zhuo Yongqing, driving a spear into the man’s belly, while another comrade finished him off with a casual slash.
The tide kept pressing forward, spreading wider across the darkening fields. Some men dropped straight to their knees, screaming: “I surrender, I surrender!” Luo Ye led his men grinding forward, shouting as he advanced: “Turn and fight with us, and you’ll be spared!” Those who still hesitated were cut down without mercy.
The military police squads behind the enemy’s lines cut down a few fleeing soldiers, holding the edge of the battlefield for a time—but before long, more and more men began fleeing, and soldiers originally positioned in the center of the formation, now too late to escape to the sides, turned instead with bloodshot eyes and charged forward, blades swinging. Less than a quarter hour into the engagement, the twenty-thousand-strong force collapsed like a tidal wave rolling backward; the military police held their ground for a moment, but those unable to flee in time were swallowed by that same wave.
Fan Yu watched the scene unfold in slack-jawed disbelief. Glancing back toward the main camp of seventy thousand men, he imagined Yan Zhenguo and the others there were surely staring in equal disbelief—and beyond them, Zhong Lie atop the city walls, and, on the Jurchen side, Wanyan Loushi himself. He clenched his jaw, his eyes bloodshot, let out a ragged cry, and fled southward on horseback with his personal guard.
As Fan Yu fled, a detachment of cavalry burst out from Yan Zhenguo’s camp, giving chase after him. This was the result of Yan Zhenguo stamping his feet and screaming at his men: “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him! Send men after him now, drag him back to me! After this battle, I’ll kill his entire family, I’ll kill every last one of them—”
His bloodshot, hysterical screaming reflected exactly how he felt in that moment. Days into the siege, his forces had suffered relatively minor losses—yet in the blink of an eye, right before his very eyes, twenty thousand men had collapsed into total rout. Beyond the panic and disbelief in his heart, a faint chill had already begun to settle in.
How could twenty thousand men collapse so quickly? He simply couldn’t wrap his mind around it. The Jurchens excelled at cavalry warfare; though Wu Dynasty forces were weak, their infantry combat wasn’t actually so poor. Often, when Jurchen cavalry didn’t want to suffer heavy losses, they would harass with mounted archery for a while and then simply withdraw. But here, right in front of him, infantry had faced infantry—and in this brief span of time, the whole army had collapsed, with Fan Yu fleeing like a madman. Even seeing it with his own eyes, he could hardly bring himself to believe it was real.
But the rout wasn’t even the worst part.
Among the routing soldiers, half were fleeing to either side—the enemy, that devil-king’s army, obviously couldn’t chase them all down—but a great number of routed troops were still being swept along in the middle, surging straight toward his own position.
These routed soldiers had no wish to turn back and serve as the front line against the main formation, but by now it was already too late to flee to either side. The charging Black Banner Army showed no sign of pausing to regroup—if anything, its forward momentum had grown even more ferocious, its rear guard briefly becoming its vanguard, driving Fan Yu’s routed army forward in a crescent-shaped pincer, cutting them down all the way.
The two sides were now no more than two or three miles apart, the sun already beginning to dim in the sky, and those three massive flying orbs were still drawing nearer. To Yan Zhenguo, it felt as though he had run headlong into yet another savage Jurchen army—these savages simply could not be reasoned with by ordinary standards.
He had heard some things about Xiaocang River, about that devil-king before—but he had always assumed that, however impressive their defeat of Western Xia had been, they still couldn’t possibly compare to the Jurchens. Yet in this very moment, the same crushing pressure that Western Xia had once faced was now bearing down squarely upon his own head.
This enemy’s advance was clearly aimed at the Jurchen war god Wanyan Loushi himself—to the north, that force of twelve thousand men was still locked in an aggressive standoff against the Jurchen western army. And his own side, quite plainly, was simply being cleared away first as an obstacle. Five thousand men sweeping aside a hundred thousand—thinking about it now filled him with indignation and helpless fury, yet the enemy hadn’t shown the slightest hesitation in doing it.
And if he measured things by how the enemy was so openly willing to go toe-to-toe with the Jurchens themselves, then given how swiftly his own twenty thousand men had just collapsed, he genuinely had no confidence at all that his remaining tens of thousands of troops could stand against them either.
It was like watching immortals fight, with the mortals caught helplessly in the crossfire.
Of course, whatever he felt inside, there was nothing to do but grit his teeth and push forward. He sent men to request reinforcements from the Jurchens, while simultaneously redeploying his forces to defend the rear of the siege camp.
At that moment, Luo Ye and the others, driving nearly six or seven thousand routed soldiers before them, were surging in full force toward Yan Zhenguo’s main camp. He shouted as he ran alongside his comrades: “The Huaxia Army is here! Turn and fight with us, and you’ll live! All others, no mercy—”
On either flank of the human tide, Second Regiment Commander Pang Liu’an dispatched what few cavalry he had to hunt down and cut off soldiers trying to flee to the sides. Ahead, the defensive fortifications of the siege camp—originally home to some ninety thousand men—had been thrown together with alarming carelessness, and now they were about to be put to the test.
On the Jurchen side, Wanyan Loushi dispatched a force of a thousand men southward to oversee the battle; the Black Banner Army facing them showed no restraint whatsoever, pressing forward straight into the gap between the Jurchen main force and Yan Zhenguo’s army. Wanyan Loushi then sent out a further two thousand cavalry, beginning to harass them with mounted archery. At Yan Prefecture itself, the Zhong family army was mustering; Zhong Lie, armored and spear in hand, was making preparations to throw open the city gates.
He had once tried to win the Black Banner Army over, hoping the two sides might fight shoulder to shoulder—and been refused, which hadn’t surprised him much. But never had he imagined that, the moment the Black Banner Army leapt from the mountains, their posture would be so ferocious, so merciless—that they would actually go toe-to-toe with Wanyan Loushi himself, head-on.
Just thinking about it made his blood boil and burn.
The household physician came to plead with him about his wounds, urging him to let someone else lead the troops instead. Zhong Lie only laughed.
“If we lose today, there will be no mercy left for anyone in all of Yan Prefecture. To rescue the endangered and steady the realm, to die with one’s body wrapped in horsehide on the battlefield—a real man should welcome such a day.” He raised his long halberd. “Men of the Zhong family—who will ride with me!?”
A chorus of voices rose in answer all around him.
Night fell. To the north, the two armies continued their probing skirmishes, any moment threatening to erupt into full-scale conflict.
And below the walls of Yan Prefecture, the human tide crashed together, surging and roiling, as things dropped from the balloons overhead. Yan Zhenguo had abandoned his command banner and was still shouting orders without pause: “Hold the line—hold the line, damn you—”
The opening of this battle—a hundred thousand men crashing together in slaughter—had already descended into chaos beyond description…