The sun on the western horizon had only the faintest gleam of light left. The nearby hills and the land below had already begun to darken.
Horses whinnied; across the hills and marshland, spots of fire flickered here and there, and the sounds of routed troops carried across the land as night approached, near and far, hard to judge by distance alone.
An explosion rang out on the ridge, flame and smoke bursting outward for an instant, dazzling against the land now sinking into darkness. Chen Hai, half his body drenched in blood, walking across the battlefield, was nearly caught by the blast; he staggered a few steps, tripped over a Jin corpse, and fell to the ground, then pushed himself back up by gripping the corpse’s head, his hands smeared with sticky blood.
“Geng Changqing! Watch my cannons, count them properly—”
Chen Hai shouted loudly for his battalion commander, giving the order.
The fighting at what had been the Jin iron cannon battery was nearly over.
The iron cannons, developed and popularized by the Huaxia Army, were an epoch-defining weapon; against dense battlefield formations, their power was immense. But ever since the appearance of iron cannons, grenades, and similar arms, the Huaxia Army had, in effect, already been phasing out dense-formation frontal assaults. The Seventh Army did still drill in close-order marching and the like, but mainly to reinforce discipline and cohesion as a symbolic exercise; in actual combat, they relied on explosives to blow the enemy apart, while their own side advanced in scattered formations, coordinating in small groups wherever and whenever needed—that was the true core of the Seventh Army’s tactics.
Pucha’s ten-thousand-strong vanguard had brought over twenty iron cannons. Against a solid mass of charging troops, these could certainly inflict massive damage, and the thunderous blasts were, for most people, a source of terror. But against the veterans of the Huaxia Seventh Army, that terror had essentially no effect.
If time were to advance a bit further, on a relatively modern battlefield, it would often be said that green recruits fear cannon, veterans fear rifles. A battery of over twenty cannons could certainly kill a specific man with a concentrated volley, but no one would bother doing it that way. To a single soldier, twenty-odd cannons meant less, in practical terms, than twenty arrows—at least an arrow, once loosed, might have been aimed by an archer at some particular person. A cannon fires at no one in particular.
Chen Hai organized his men, moving lightly in squad-sized groups along the flanking mountainside, then launched wave after wave of attacks. The cannons did little to stop them. Both sides first exchanged grenades and fire-bombs, then fell into close combat amid the cannon emplacements. The Huaxia Army pressed a decapitation tactic, targeting commanders, while the Jin troops mounted a stubborn resistance.
As a force that had once dominated the world for thirty years, the Jin army, despite recent successive defeats and the loss of great generals, had not seen its morale collapse entirely like a landslide. Old pride layered atop present crisis—some men fled in fear, but not a few Jin soldiers were spurred instead into a desperate valor, and at least in small-scale skirmishes, still gave a respectable account of themselves.
So much so that it cost Chen Hai considerable effort to take this position, and even once the battle was all but decided, some Jurchen soldiers, torches in hand, launched suicidal attacks. The earlier explosion had, in fact, been caused by a Jurchen soldier igniting a barrel of gunpowder within the artillery position; the blast had also flung two nearby cannons aside, apparently rendering them useless.
“Treat the wounded!”
“Build the defensive line—”
“Test-fire the cannons—”
Chen Hai walked across the position, issuing orders one after another. Someone came from a distance, carrying a severed head: “Commander, killed a meng’an.”
“Toss it to feed the dogs!”
So he said, while below, the routed troops were still fleeing in disarray, and far off by the banks of the Jialing River, the fighting on the main battlefield continued. A commotion stirred on the eastern edge of his field of view. Chen Hai raised his spyglass; a stretch of firelight appeared at the far eastern edge of his vision—on the hills far across the Mudflat, a line of torches carried by cavalry stretched into view.
“Shaba’s here. Ready the cannons!” Chen Hai gave the order calmly. “Those with spears, and the engineering unit—go down and support Brigade Commander Hou.”
…
Wanyan Shaba did not commit his forces to the battle right away.
His reinforcement force numbered twenty thousand in total, of which over three thousand were cavalry. His army was not far from Pucha’s, and under normal circumstances, half a day would have been enough to enter the battle—the cavalry, of course, faster still. There should have been ample time—but no one had anticipated that the battlefield situation here at Lueyang would grow this fierce, this fast.
On his way over, he had received five field reports in total. The first two had seemed ordinary enough; each one after grew more urgent, and the last was delivered by soldiers who had themselves fled the battlefield in defeat. The ferocity of the Huaxia Army’s assault was enough to make one’s scalp crawl. When his cavalry, riding hard, brought the battlefield into view for the first time, he ordered the column to halt.
Ahead lay a scene of utter, chaotic rout. Spotting the torches on the hills here, some of the fleeing Jin soldiers made their way toward them. Shaba ordered his personal guard to gather up the routed men, while at the same time sending riders to question them on the situation. Before long, one piece of information after another began coming in.
Pucha’s ten-thousand-strong vanguard was on the verge of collapse; a great many soldiers had been scattered by the Huaxia Army. He himself, with his personal guard, had fallen back to the banks of the Jialing River, trying to make a last stand with his back to the water—a desperate move born of a mind resolved to fight to the death.
According to the soldiers, Pucha was waiting for rescue by the Jialing River ahead—yet in his field of view, the artillery position had already fallen to the Huaxia Army. The Jin troops in this night were scattering in disorderly rout, while the Huaxia Army’s combat formations had clearly coalesced into stream after stream. In the midst of such chaotic fighting, they instinctively converged, banding together—these clusters were not large, but to the routed Jin soldiers, each one was like a ravenous beast, devouring every wave of resistance still able to fight back within its field of view.
The largest of these clusters had clearly already noticed their approach, forming into a long line at the foot of the hill where the artillery position stood, spears massing into a forest, with a line of soldiers in front seemingly digging into the ground with frantic urgency.
This infantry unit numbered no more than two or three thousand men, but they were already prepared, at the first sign of contact, to fight a positional battle against cavalry, blocking the route Shaba intended to take to rescue his comrades by the Jialing River. Shaba understood well enough, though, that a force capable of acting this swiftly and decisively was truly frightening.
There was something more frightening still—information hinting at the reason behind the swift collapse of Pucha’s forces had already been roughly pieced together, and it left even the roots of his teeth aching with dread.
Had this been ten years earlier, he would not have hesitated for an instant to throw his cavalry straight into the fight.
Of course, the time left for him to hesitate and wait was not much either.
He swiftly issued several orders. First, he had his personal guard gather and reorganize the scattered soldiers to restore their fighting strength. Second, he sent riders racing toward the Jialing River to deliver word, telling Pucha he must no longer hesitate, but break out toward the east at maximum speed to link up with his own forces. At the same time, he called his most trusted personal guard and had him ride back to the rear camp at once, to report the situation and findings of this battlefield to Zonghan.
“Go quickly. There’s no more time to lose.”
So he said.
Looking back, across the mountainsides, the woods, the low ground, the marshland, the battlefield was dotted here and there with scattered points of fire. The sun had fully set—for cavalry, this was hardly the ideal time to charge. But there was no choice but to charge, no choice but to search for the enemy’s weak point on the move.
This was the only way out—
…
Night had fallen.
Zonghan’s camp had pitched its tents among the hills; warhorses galloped in and out, filling the night with clamor.
The war had begun, in an unexpectedly smooth fashion, all things considered. The flames of battle had first been lit that afternoon, breaking out first in the hills around Yangba, where scout skirmishes were still escalating—though neither side had yet clearly pinpointed the other’s main force. Not long after, word came from the banks of the Jialing River west of Lueyang County, and Shaba had begun moving forward in support.
The main force Wanyan Zonghan could deploy this time numbered roughly ninety thousand—essentially the last reserves of the Western Route Army. The ninety thousand were divided into five clusters: Pucha led ten thousand, Shaba twenty thousand, Gao Qingyi twenty thousand, Sheyema ten thousand, and the remaining twenty-thousand-odd were led personally by Zonghan as the central reserve, holding the rear.
The forces of Pucha and Shaba advanced from the north; those somewhat further south were mainly under Gao Qingyi’s command; Sheyema’s troops came from the direction of Zhaohua, both to support Gao Qingyi and to block the road by which the Huaxia Seventh Army might push south toward Jiange. All five armies were currently maneuvering within a hundred li of one another, spaced tens of li apart—close enough that mutual support could, in fact, arrive quite swiftly.
The Huaxia Army numbered twenty thousand in total. Its fighting strength was formidable, to be sure, but on the Jurchen side, the generals holding position were, for the most part, capable of commanding independently, skilled in both offense and defense. As long as no one grew too careless, they should not be caught off guard and swallowed whole by the Huaxia Army finding some gap.
Zonghan, Han Qixian, and the others naturally thought along these lines, and from the standpoint of military strategy, there was, indeed, nothing especially wrong with this reasoning.
After nightfall, intelligence reports arrived continuously. In the Yangba direction, there had still been no major breakthrough; Gao Qingyi’s use of troops remained cautious as his guiding principle, expanding his search on one hand while guarding against ambush on the other—or perhaps against a sudden Huaxia dash for Jiange. Meanwhile, on the Jialing River front, the fighting had already begun in earnest.
“…If my estimate is correct, Pucha should be fighting cautiously by the Jialing River, and by now should already have pinned down this branch of the Huaxia Army. Shaba, too, should have arrived by now. What remains unclear is whether, with Yangba not yet truly engaged, the Huaxia Seventh Army’s main force is entirely concentrated at Lueyang, hoping to use superior numbers to crush this branch of ours to the north.”
Around nightfall, Han Qixian had discussed this possibility with Zonghan in the main tent, and Zonghan had agreed.
“What the Huaxia Army cares about most right now should be the situation at Jiange. Feint the real, and make real the feint—it’s entirely possible Qin Shaoqian has simply put his main force to the north,” Zonghan said. “Still, Shaba has always fought cautiously, skilled at reading the moment—even if Pucha can’t hold against the Huaxia Seventh Army, Shaba should be able to steady the line. We’re not far apart now; the moment we get word, we can march at dawn, press on through the night, and by tomorrow catch up with Qin Shaoqian.”
The bonfires in the camp burned bright; dinner had only just been finished when a new round of battle reports came in, confirming that the Huaxia force appearing near Lueyang numbered somewhere between seven and ten thousand, and that their fighting strength was fierce—Pucha intended to hold them off with a conservative defense.
This report had been relayed through Shaba before reaching the main camp, so the delay was considerable, but hearing the description of the battlefield, both Zonghan and Han Qixian judged that Pucha had made the correct response, and felt somewhat reassured. But not long after, Shaba’s personal guard came galloping into camp at full speed.
Zonghan and Gao Qingyi, in the main tent, listened to that guard describe the scene Shaba had come upon when he reached the battlefield: contact at Lueyang had only just been made around the Hour of the Monkey that afternoon, and by the first quarter of the Hour of the Dog, Pucha’s ten-thousand-strong army had been almost entirely routed—only just over two thousand men left, pinned against the banks of the Jialing River in a state of desperate, burn-the-boats last stand. In other words, in roughly two hours, under Pucha’s cautious strategy, eight thousand men had already been broken.
“How is this possible—”
Zonghan had already slammed the table and stood.
The guard knelt there. “…The general told me to come back and report to the Grand Marshal that in this battle, the Huaxia Army is extraordinarily skilled at decapitation tactics on the field. It was the seven thousand men of the Huaxia Seventh Army’s First Division who engaged General Pucha, and every single one of their soldiers is capable of fighting independent of the main formation. When the general entered the battlefield to gather the routed troops, the several thousand men originally under General Pucha had already been thrown into total disarray—the reason being that, of our army’s meng’an and mouke, virtually everyone who could give an order had been singled out and hunted down, one by one, by the Huaxia soldiers, and killed to the last. Our own officers were left leaderless, and could do nothing but scatter and flee in every direction. And that Huaxia army—they show almost no fear at all of being decapitated in turn. Such tactics… have never been seen before. The general said, if there is no way to counter this, then we… we may have no chance of victory at all…”
The guard let out a mournful cry, and what showed through in that moment was Shaba’s own alarm and belated terror—the instant he had first noticed this pattern, Shaba had already sensed just how terrifying the matter truly was.
When the Jurchen Western Route Army had entered Jianmen Pass and fought its way toward Zizhou, the Huaxia Fifth Army had still needed to rely on the pass’s natural defenses, and a portion of their troops had still been raw recruits—the pure decapitation-style tactics had not yet fully come into their own. But now that Zonghan had taken the initiative to attack in open field, with both sides no longer holding back or playing games, every card on the table had been turned face up.
The crushing, generational advantage of a modern military system over an ancient one had now been laid bare, directly before the eyes of Zonghan and Han Qixian. The two of them rose slowly to their feet, gazing at the markers pinned into the map—their reading of the battlefield now needed, in this very moment, a complete overhaul.
A creeping chill spread through them, layer upon layer, gooseflesh rising along with the cold in the pit of their stomachs.
…
By the Jialing River, Pucha, having been struck by two brigades of the Huaxia Army’s First Division, did not manage to break through to link up with Shaba that night.
Charged with holding off Shaba’s cavalry were the over two thousand men led by Brigade Commander Hou Lietang, together with Chen Hai on the flanking slope, who together delayed Shaba for a time along Pucha’s line of retreat.
Meanwhile, Qi Xinyi’s unit clashed fiercely with Pucha’s personal guard; Jin troops scattered in every direction, the entire scene one of chaos. Shaba’s cavalry could not force their way into the midst of the Jin troops to save them—within sight of one another, the Huaxia Army cut Pucha down where he stood and set his command banner ablaze.
The rescue having failed, Shaba decisively pulled back on the move, while the infantry under his command was, at this same time, gradually converging toward this area.
Together with the routed Jin soldiers he had gathered up, Shaba’s forces now outnumbered the enemy more than threefold. He even had a cavalry unit with him—yet in that moment, he found himself hesitating over whether to press the attack.
In the more than an hour since his arrival, he had gathered over four thousand of the Jin soldiers scattered through the darkness. Some of them had not lost the will to fight—they could, in fact, still fight. But among these four thousand, there were no mid- or high-ranking officers left…
From meng’an down to mouke, every leader within these four thousand-odd troops had been hunted down and killed, one by one, in the relentless string of engagements by the Huaxia Army. Some soldiers, unable to find anyone to give them orders, had simply been scattered, dazed and directionless. They themselves did not yet grasp how terrifying this fact truly was; they still believed themselves willing to keep fighting…
In the darkness, the Huaxia forces on the opposite hillside, as Shaba looked upon them, sent a chill straight to his heart. They seemed like an unsheathed demon blade, carrying the scent of blood, eager and restless, ready at any moment to choose its next victim and devour it. He had fought his whole life through countless battles, and had never seen an army like this.
Those seven thousand men—they must have gone utterly mad.
“Prepare to attack…” he said.
…
The night wind rose howling. It snuffed out some flames, and fanned others into greater life.
In the mountains around Yangba, the battle was about to begin.
“If Ning Yi were here, he’d say we’re a bunch of spendthrifts squandering the family fortune.” Lowering his spyglass, Qin Shaoqian, standing somewhere in the dark hills, gave a low laugh. “But as for the general dying a hundred deaths in battle… the hero returns after ten years’ toil…”
More than ten years since his father and elder brother had died…
…
On the nineteenth of April, a scene the Jurchens had never anticipated had already appeared before their eyes. Facing an encirclement of over ninety thousand men, with every hidden card now revealed, the Huaxia Seventh Army launched a wholly unreserved, head-on collision. A single stunning blow had already come slicing down—splitting skin, severing vessel, tearing muscle—and this single stroke drove straight for the very marrow, plunging deep—
This was the beginning of the decisive battle.