The night lay calm and still. In Linzhou, Xu Chunyi led his men through streets occasionally patrolled by watching soldiers, making his way toward the city’s southwestern gate.

As a general once relied upon heavily by Tian Shi, Xu Chunyi, born into a prominent clan, carried a stern, upright temperament and fought with real courage — a comrade worth relying on in battle.

During the day’s Jurchen assault, though the bulk of the pressure had fallen on the Huaxia Army, the soldiers under Xu Chunyi’s command had still held off no small share of the attack. Particularly at several vulnerable points along the western and southern walls, where the Jurchens had once launched surprise assaults and scaled the wall, it was Xu Chunyi himself who had personally led elite troops to retake the position — his courage as he rushed along the wall had earned him considerable respect from many within the Huaxia Army.

Through the day’s repeated Jurchen assaults, the Huaxia Army, numbering little more than eight thousand men, had done what it could to preserve some reserve strength, but in truth, nearly every soldier had already taken at least one, if not two, turns atop the wall. By night, the more capable troops of Xu Chunyi’s own forces were better suited to standing watch, and so, though Huaxia Army sentries still held most of the critical sections of the wall, Xu Chunyi’s men had taken on responsibility for a number of sections as well.

This was, for everyone, the hour of deepest exhaustion, and it came as no surprise that Xu Chunyi would concern himself with the state of the city’s defenses, wary of the Jurchens finding any opening to exploit. Soldiers he passed along the way straightened up and offered salutes, most of them taking real pride in following a commander so conscientious.

As he drew near the gate, Xu Chunyi glanced once toward the gate tower, then turned aside with his trusted attendants into a nearby courtyard…

Yan Qing remained hidden in the darkness; behind him, more men had gradually gathered. After a while, at the side of the courtyard Xu Chunyi and the others had entered, a dark figure leaned out and gave a hand signal.

Beside Yan Qing, someone let out a quiet sigh…

…

Outside the city, the vast military encampment had already begun to settle into rest, yet in the Han army camp gathered at the rear flank, soldiers were quietly assembling in the darkness.

In the main camp, Shen Wenjin, dressed in full armor, took up his steel blade and laid out the entire plan before his trusted officers in the tent.

“…Wolves eat meat, dogs eat filth — though we’ve thrown in with the Jurchens, I think what everyone here truly wants is more than just staying alive. This chance at wealth and status before us — if we seize it, we eat meat; if we let it slip, even the Jurchens will look down on us!”

The men nodded. In an age like this, if survival alone had been the goal, none of them would have fought so hard through the day. The Wu Dynasty’s fortunes were spent, and there was nothing to be done about it — with their own people counting on them to stay alive, following the Jurchens and fighting for a piece of this realm was the only path left. Each man took up his weapon, and they filed out one after another.

In the deepest hour of the night, Shen Wenjin led his elite troops quietly out of the camp. Circling briefly around, they crossed a section of the battlefield shielded by a small rise, arriving at Linzhou’s southwestern gate.

A small advance party went ahead first; then the gate quietly opened. That small group went in to check the situation, then waved the remaining two thousand or so men forward into the city. Under cover of darkness, these soldiers filed in one by one, and with the cooperation of soldiers under Xu Chunyi’s command, quickly seized control of the gate before advancing further into the city.

At the main Jurchen camp, a messenger crossed the grounds to deliver word to Shuliesu that the raiding force had entered the city. Shuliesu read the message in silence, saying nothing.

The camp’s fires burned low; every soldier appeared to be asleep, save for the shapes of patrolling sentries passing through.

Every so often, a few silent figures slipped through the tents at the camp’s southwestern edge. They entered a particular tent, and after a moment, quietly withdrew again.

Inside that tent, a Jurchen soldier opened his eyes. Throughout the day and into the deep night of fierce assault, more than thirty thousand Jurchen elite troops had taken turns fighting in waves — but several thousand men, a reserve force of real fighting strength, had been held back the entire time. Now, they dressed in full armor, blades never leaving their sides. They lay with their weapons at the ready, waiting for dawn.

…

The stars overhead had grown faint. In a stand of scrub woodland several li from Linzhou, Zhu Biao chewed on rations nearly frozen solid in his hand as he moved past the soldiers crouched there for one final rest.

“Eat something. We won’t be stopping again after this… Eat something. We won’t be stopping again after this…”

He murmured this same line quietly to every soldier he passed. Among the men, several leather skins were passed hand to hand — strong liquor that scouts who had arrived ahead of the main force had warmed, as quietly as possible, without alerting anyone.

There wasn’t much of it; each man took two swallows.

Then, they began to move out…

…

Within Linzhou.

Moving in careful formation through the dim streets, Shen Wenjin caught sight of the commander ahead, waving carefully to signal them from the street corner.

Xu Chunyi.

A quiet sigh rose in Shen Wenjin’s chest. Before all this, the two men had crossed paths several times. If Tian Shi hadn’t died so suddenly, Xu Chunyi and the clan standing behind him would very likely never have surrendered to the Jurchens in the midst of this great war.

And within that sigh, what he truly felt, in the end, was the real strength of the Jurchens themselves — and, behind them, the formidable capability of men like Wanyan Zonghan and Wanyan Xiyin. The war in the latter half of the previous year had seemed, on the surface, unremarkable enough: even as the Jurchens pushed their front lines steadily southward, the Prince of Jin, Tian Shi, had genuinely built real standing and prestige for himself in the process.

Who could have known that a single assassination at the start of the new year would shatter that hard-won prestige in an instant, followed swiftly by the fracturing of the Jin region under a combined strategy of pressure and appeasement — Shuliesu marching south to take the Black Banner, thirty thousand Jurchens against ten thousand Black Banner troops, and on top of that, the defection of Xu Chunyi, already secretly arranged in advance by Lord Gushen. The whole affair, link after link, aimed to settle everything in a single decisive stroke.

Reckoning it all up, the entire resistance force across the Jin region — nearly a million strong, with close to ten million civilians behind it, and further protected by treacherous mountain roads difficult to traverse — would, under a genuine frontal assault, have been expected to hold out for six months to a year without any surprise. And yet here it was, resolved in barely half a month, and with the failure of this resistance in the Jin region now serving as a clear example for all to see, it seemed unlikely that the Central Plains would ever again see resistance mounted on this kind of scale.

As a Han man himself, what he was witnessing was the setting sun of what remained of Han glory.

And this was the only choice left for him to make.

Shen Wenjin proceeded with caution, sending the vanguard of his column ahead toward Xu Chunyi while he himself advanced more slowly at the rear. At one point, perhaps because of a loose paving stone in the road, his footing wavered; he took two more steps before he suddenly registered what had happened, and turned to look back.

In the darkness, the state of the ground was impossible to make out clearly, but the trusted officer walking beside him sensed his hesitation and began examining the road as well. After only a moment, that officer spoke. “Something’s wrong with the road surface… it’s been dug up…”

Shen Wenjin took a step back. From the darkness at the side of the street, a voice spoke.

“Don’t move!” the voice said. “Take one more step… and it’s going to get very loud…”

Ahead in the street, Xu Chunyi watched from a distance, a look of helplessness on his face. Behind him, and along the sides, cannon muzzles had been wheeled into position; movement stirred within the courtyards lining the street, and a figure climbed onto a rooftop, planting a banner there — a black one.

Shen Wenjin raised a hand and touched his helmet, understanding now that he had walked into a trap. But there was nothing to be done. If the Jurchens were the true sons of heaven, blessed by the mandate of the age to rule the realm, then this black banner was a demon of equal terror, one capable of bringing death upon anyone, whichever side they stood on.

For a moment, he had no idea what choice to make.

…

Atop the southwestern wall, Chen Qi stood in the cold wind, hand resting on the hilt of his sword, watching with a grim expression the line of soldiers huddled beneath the parapet nearby, warming themselves.

He was one of Shen Wenjin’s trusted men, formidable in martial skill and utterly ruthless. Originally serving under the Prince of Jin, where interests and factions ran deep and tangled, he had never managed to rise above the pack. But after surrendering to the Jurchens, with Shen Wenjin eager to carve out real merit before his new masters, the culture within the army had shifted entirely, and a man as ruthless as Chen Qi had suddenly found himself valued and promoted.

Under the Prince of Jin, this particular unit under Shen Wenjin had carried low morale and little reputation. But after surrendering to the Jurchens, with everyone eager to prove themselves through performance, they had, in this stretch of time, actually achieved a number of impressive results. Believing themselves now a genuinely strong fighting force, men like Chen Qi — self-styled “heroes” — had even begun, almost unconsciously, to look down on the more sluggish, lackluster soldiers around them.

The several soldiers huddled nearby, shivering against the wind and cold, were, of course, men under Xu Chunyi’s command. When Shen Wenjin’s force had entered the city, nearly half his men had been left behind at the gate to help with its defense, and Xu Chunyi’s own men there had not been withdrawn either — mainly out of fear that such a redeployment might alert the Black Banner Army within the city. And so, for the time being, the two groups had ended up mingled together at the gate and along the wall, each keeping a wary eye on the other, while both waited for word that the moment to strike, inside and outside the city, had arrived.

The officer responsible for the wall’s defense under Xu Chunyi’s command came over, and the huddled soldiers rose, still curling in on themselves. The officer exchanged a glance with Chen Qi. “Get ready. It’s almost time.” Chen Qi glanced at him and didn’t bother responding. Finding no interest, the officer moved off, and the several soldiers, breath steaming in the cold, seemed to exchange some words among themselves before drifting over toward Chen Qi.

Chen Qi kept his hand on his sword hilt; the men approaching hesitated slightly, all but one — a man at the front, his manner slick as a street tough, who lifted his chin. “What’s your name, brother? Quite the nerve you’ve got.”

“What do you want?” Chen Qi’s expression darkened.

“No offense meant.” Seeing Chen Qi’s hostility, the man took a step back. “Just wanted to give you a heads-up — our boss holds grudges.”

“Hmph!”

“Figured you weren’t scared.” This group of grizzled soldiers seemed to be looking to make friends; seeing Chen Qi’s unfriendly manner, the man at the front leaned against the parapet instead, gazing out at the view, muttering to himself. “Damn it, standing here all day, not even daring to poke your head up, and now it’s finally quiet… well, fine, once the Jurchens take the realm, it’ll all be over one way or another… anyway, we’re all brothers here, once the Jurchens have the realm, we Han folk will need to stick together. I can tell you’re a real fighter, killed plenty of men — didn’t I used to study under a master at the Imperial Boxing Hall myself…”

Only then did Chen Qi turn his head to look properly at this slick-tongued soldier — for all his glib manner, his build did look like someone who’d trained in martial arts. “Oh? The Imperial Boxing Hall? Whose student were you?”

“Who are you, exactly?” the man shot back.

“Hmph. Name’s Chen — Chen Qi,” he said. “Now you.”

“I—” The man had barely begun to speak when everything erupted at once!

At the edge of his vision, from within the city, an explosion of light burst upward, smoke rising into the night sky—

…

At the Jurchen camp, Shuliesu lowered his telescope.

…

The earth began to shake.

…

Somewhere in the dim streets, Shen Wenjin shouted something and broke into a run — and behind him, flames burst upward from the ground itself!

…

Chen Qi spun toward the source of the disturbance within the city. He had taken only a single step when he suddenly realized the several soldiers under Xu Chunyi standing nearby were far too close; his companions reached for their swords, and blades came down before them.

Warm, thick blood splashed across Chen Qi’s face.

He let out a sudden, savage roar, his blade rising against the wind before crashing down.

A metallic clang — his blade had been caught and blocked, the impact numbing his grip.

Ahead of him, the slick-tongued soldier’s manner had vanished without a trace in an instant, as though, in the blink of an eye, an entirely different man now stood before him — a pair of eyes holding nothing but the bitter cold of deep winter.

Two shields slammed toward his face; Chen Qi’s arm was pinned above him, his footing stumbling backward. From the side, someone charged in, a long blade slashing at his legs, while a short spear, thrown through the air, whistled past his cheek and buried itself in the throat of a comrade behind him.

Shields, flashing blades, spears… the mere handful of men before him seemed, in an instant, to have transformed into an advancing wall. Chen Qi and his men fell one after another as they stumbled backward; Chen Qi fought fiercely, but several furious slashes only struck against raised shields. Finally the shield before him pulled abruptly away, revealing once more the slick-tongued soldier he’d spoken with earlier. Their eyes met for an instant, and the man’s blade was already coming down. Chen Qi raised his arm to block — and lost half of it below the elbow. Another soldier’s blade opened his throat.

As blood sprayed outward, Chen Qi seemed, for one final moment, still puzzled by the fact that his own hand was gone — and by then, the city above and below had already dissolved into a churning sea of slaughter.

…

Through the darkness, the tremor in the earth reached them faintly, a signal flare bursting overhead. Shuliesu’s face showed not the slightest expression. He rose to his feet, already surrounded by gathering Jurchen generals.

“Shen Wenjin’s three thousand men have fallen into the city. To survive, they will have no choice but to fight to the death,” he said. “How can we let an opportunity like this slip by!”

From the very beginning, the entire strategy of thirty thousand Jurchen elite troops against eight thousand Black Banner soldiers had rested on a single goal: swift victory. The full day of ferocious assault had, in truth, already drawn on the entirety of Shuliesu’s offensive capacity — if the city could be broken outright, all the better; if not, there remained the option of a night raid.

And if the raid itself failed, there was still Xu Chunyi’s promised support to fall back on.

Even if Xu Chunyi’s forces inside the city turned out to be nothing more than a trap set by the Black Banner, Shen Wenjin’s men, fighting now purely for their own survival, would inevitably inflict serious damage on the city’s defenses regardless.

“Relay my orders. The entire army will launch a full assault.”

Shuliesu donned his helmet, took up his blade, and mounted his horse.

“Linzhou falls today!”

…

The night had reached its deepest point, dawn not yet come. At Linzhou’s northern gate tower, the staff officer Li Nian raised his telescope, watching the explosions erupting within the city. Not long before, confirmation had come through that Xu Chunyi had indeed defected to the Jurchens, and the entire general staff had already set their prepared plan into motion — the placement of cannons, land mines, and stores of gunpowder throughout the city had originally fallen under his own responsibility.

So, they’d finally managed to get one over on this Wanyan Xiyin after all…

He drew a breath, turning his telescope toward the other side of the wall. At that same moment, countless points of fire were beginning to blaze up across the Jurchen encampment.

Fireballs launched from catapults streaked across the deepest part of the night like an early false dawn. The city wall shook with tremendous force. Jurchen troops, bearing scaling ladders, surged toward the wall with roaring, howling cries — this was the reserve strength the Jurchens had held back from the very start, now thrown into battle for the first time.

Atop the wall, cannon fire rang out.

War horns sounded one after another, echoing along the vast length of the wall in both directions.

On the eastern side of the city, unexpected fighting seemed to have broken out as well — perhaps others who had been preparing to defect to the Jurchens could no longer hold back, and had begun their own desperate gambit.

At this point, only a little past the third quarter of the hour of Yin, at the deepest point of the night, all of Linzhou had suddenly been jolted awake. The commotion of this sudden awakening seemed to surpass even the clamor of the daytime fighting.

Huaxia Army soldiers, Jurchens, those resisting the Jurchens, those surrendering to them — under ordinary circumstances, a siege battle, unless the disparity in strength was truly overwhelming, would typically drag on for a long time. And yet this battle for Linzhou, only two days old, had already brought every participant, every last ounce of strength on both sides, pouring into this single night before dawn. Fighting raged within the city, while outside, more and more forces stirred awake and gathered, hurling themselves fiercely against the exhausted defenses.

On open ground still patched with snow, Zhu Biao advanced swiftly, spear in hand; behind him, the shapes of three thousand Huaxia Army soldiers spread out through the dark, freezing night. Ahead of them, the flickering firelight of Linzhou had already come faintly into view…