On the morning of the twenty-fourth of April, the chaotic and brutal battle was already raging around the ancient city of Hanzhong.

The first exchange of fire broke out at the pre-arranged battlefield near Hanzhong’s south gate. Holding this position were the First Brigade of the Huaxia Seventh Army’s First Division, the division’s own artillery and engineering regiments, and the regiment led by Chen Hai. By later count, their numbers came to roughly three thousand three hundred men. Facing them were Wanyan Xiyin’s relatively fresh thirteen thousand troops, along with over ten thousand routed Jin soldiers who had already retreated into Hanzhong ahead of them.

In terms of ratio, they faced roughly eight times their own number.

This would become the single most brutal defensive engagement of the entire Battle of Hanzhong.

The instant the artillery opened fire, the Huaxia position remained utterly silent, showing no reaction at all. The soldiers sheltering behind their earthworks and defenses already understood the mission and purpose of this fight.

They had to hold, together with whatever reinforcements might arrive later — likely not many — pinning Wanyan Xiyin’s army fast against the eastern approach to Hanzhong, buying precious time for the main force racing west to complete its strategic objective.

The instant the cannon fire began, morning clouds drifted overhead; the explosions kicked up low clouds of dust, and the soldiers behind their cover looked up at the sky.

“I’m just saying, why isn’t our mission to kill Wanyan Xiyin right here? He’s only got ten-thousand-odd men over there…”

A soldier said this, and the men around him laughed.

The company commander nearby picked up a clod of dirt and threw it, catching him square on the head.

This was the small comic footnote to how the exchange of fire began.

At this moment, Wanyan Xiyin still had no idea what had changed in the enemy camp across from him. Fifteen li west of Hanzhong, skirmishing had already begun in earnest.

…

The first to clash were the outer scout units.

This was standard procedure in any battle. Wanyan Zonghan’s main force still numbered nearly thirty thousand at this point; as a large army advanced, its scouts ranged nearly two li ahead, and word inevitably came back with some delay. But before long, the intensity of fighting was rising in several different directions at once.

In the days since the Battle of Hanzhong began, the fighting had grown chaotic and fierce, both armies having been broken down into countless small units. As Zonghan continued splitting his own forces into small groups and throwing them out one after another, the Huaxia Army met them in kind, engaging with small units of its own.

Unlike the Jurchen troops, when Huaxia units broke off from the main body, they still maintained a clear sense of direction and fierce fighting will grounded in the larger objective — the result being that, over these past several days, skirmishes between small scout units kept breaking out again and again near the Jurchen main formation.

Sometimes the Huaxia soldiers they encountered were company- or battalion-sized groups who had lost track of their own core forces and simply pushed forward toward this direction with the single goal of “kill Nianhan” — inevitably drawing all manner of attacks along the way, yet remarkably, some units still managed to break through and bring their spearpoint right up to Wanyan Zonghan’s own position, where they would lurk, observe, harass for a moment, and withdraw the instant things looked bad.

At other times, Jurchen outer scouts would run into a handful of Huaxia soldiers, skilled at working together, who had slipped away from their unit on purpose. These men had no illusions of assassinating Zonghan himself — instead, they laid traps continuously along the perimeter, hunting small groups or isolated Jurchen soldiers, killing them, and then moving on.

These Huaxia soldiers fought with initiative and sharply focused purpose. If a Jurchen soldier was caught off guard and killed, that was one thing — but if the scouts, provoked, gathered their strength to hunt these attackers down, the Huaxia soldiers would happily lead them on a chase through the hills for as long as it took. They had few men to begin with, so simply drawing attention counted as a victory. Several times, false alarms triggered by these tactics threw Zonghan’s entire army into a state of alert.

The Jurchens, too, had once possessed a large body of elite scouts, but with the conclusion of the southwestern campaign and the deaths of officers like Yuyu, their scouting strength had fallen to its lowest point in the army’s history. From the afternoon of the nineteenth of April onward, five days of intense fighting had, naturally, burned through these elites first and foremost; by the twenty-fourth, the Jurchen high command’s instructions to their scouts had shifted to conservative defense and pure reconnaissance — they were no longer encouraged to actively pursue and engage in these outer skirmishes, simply because, over the preceding days, they had run into far too many such encounters already.

Of Zonghan’s roughly thirty thousand-strong main body, more than half were, by now, routed soldiers who had already suffered defeat once — some had returned of their own accord, others had simply happened upon Zonghan’s line of march and been folded back in and reorganized. In this respect, men like Han Qixian showed first-rate administrative skill, swiftly resolving questions of command for the returning troops. One Huaxia unit, disguised and attempting to slip into the Jurchen ranks amid the confusion, was also caught and screened out, fleeing in disarray — they had underestimated Han Qixian’s command over his own army, assuming that amid such chaos the Jurchens would have no time to tell one group of routed men from another. Naive indeed.

In a certain sense, aside from a few areas where forces remained tightly concentrated, the entire countryside around Hanzhong had by now become one vast battlefield of scattered skirmishing, with friction great and small breaking out constantly, every day, every hour. Even Jurchen soldiers who had lost the will to fight and simply wanted to flee in some direction might, without warning, stumble into an ambush and be cut down. Small Huaxia units, too, kept running into the enemy at every turn.

By the time Zonghan and the others, deep within the fighting, received word of engagements breaking out in several directions, nearly half the scout network to the southeast had already been broken through, with fighting spreading to the east and north as well.

The decisive battle originally planned for the area near Hanzhong’s south gate was now imminent, and there were, naturally, two possible explanations for the attacks now coming in — either a Huaxia unit at regiment strength was harassing them heavily to keep them from reaching Hanzhong at all, or the Huaxia main force itself was already bearing down on them. Zonghan’s instinct, in the first instant, ruled out the former possibility.

Given his pride, there were certain things he kept buried deep within himself. In terms of results, over these five days of fighting at Hanzhong, he had not yet actually lost. A great many of his units had broken and scattered in the fighting, true, but the Jurchen army as a whole was not about to collapse outright; meanwhile the Huaxia Seventh Army was, by now, far more exhausted than his own side. Once he’d worn the enemy down to the point of exhaustion, and the two sides fought one great decisive engagement, his own side would not lose.

This was the strangest campaign of his entire life — this Huaxia army’s ability to break through fortified positions was terrifyingly strong, almost like some vengeful spirit come to collect a debt. If both sides met at full strength in open battle, his own army, having already suffered the defeat in the southwest, would only taste something like the bitter fruit of Hubaogang all over again. Grinding the enemy down like this was the only way to make the most of his own temporary numerical advantage — and from a strategic standpoint, this had been the correct call.

He still had one good fight left in him. And with Xiyin’s arrival, the Huaxia Army had likewise, as ever, deployed its fiercest posture south of Hanzhong — from the start of the battle to now, the ferocious fighting style under Qin Shaoqian’s command had never once wavered. But as the intensity of the outer scout fighting kept climbing, this old Jurchen general who had campaigned his whole life finally realized: he had been blind to what was right under his own nose.

The Huaxia Army’s arrival here was not simply a matter of a diversionary harassment force, meant to hold him back with a handful of men and keep his western force from reaching the Hanzhong battlefield. Rather, over these several days of continuous fighting, compared to Xiyin’s smaller but still-fresh force, his own side had fallen to its lowest point, had become the battlefield’s weak point — had become, in the eyes of the Huaxia Army, an “opportunity.”

Across decades of countless campaigns, no one had ever underestimated Wanyan Zonghan; no one could underestimate Wanyan Zonghan. Wherever he stood was, by definition, the single most solid, most formidable point on the entire battlefield. Which was precisely why, until he had woken and risen this very morning, he had never once seriously entertained this possibility — perhaps, on some level of reason, the thought had existed, but it had never fully taken shape, smothered beneath his own pride before it could.

This realization struck him now like a thunderclap; blood surged in his skull, and he felt a rush of humiliation and shame, followed by towering fury. He could almost see the scene in the Huaxia staff office as they planned this: Here, there’s a soft persimmon called Nianhan — let’s go squeeze him. It was much the same insult and rage Xiyin himself had once felt when Yue Fei, outside Zhenjiang, threw caution to the wind trying to break through his own lines.

Of course, his face remained calm in this moment. No one could see the storm crashing through him within.

“…Prepare for battle.”

Not long after, the Huaxia Army confirmed exactly what he had suspected.

…

Only looking back, after the fact, can people feel that charged, heart-stirring atmosphere that surrounds a decisive battle. In the moment itself, none of that exists.

The Huaxia Seventh Army had already endured five days of complex, fast-moving combat. Though Xiyin had arrayed a fearsome posture south of Hanzhong, to the men actually on the battlefield, what difference did it really make? This was simply one more clash among the many fierce battles they’d already fought.

They had been fighting continuously, moving continuously, since the first days of this campaign — right up through last night, when that madman Chen Hai kept launching attacks against Xiyin’s camp without pause; and this morning, once rested, the units had shifted northwest again, launching a new assault. Only a fool like Xiyin would mistake that position as the decisive point of the whole battle.

Like a game of chess, where both sides keep putting each other in check — if the first check doesn’t finish it, you simply move again — these past several days had, in essence, been exactly this kind of back-and-forth between the two sides locked in their decisive struggle.

At the third quarter of the Hour of the Dragon, the smell of blood pressed forward through the sparse woods. Company Commander Niu Chengshu watched a scattered group of Jurchen scouts running through the trees, drew the powerful bow slung across his back — recently captured — and loosed an arrow at the retreating figures. It missed. The soldiers of his company halted at the edge of the woods; the silhouette of the Jurchen main army could already be glimpsed in the distance.

Niu Chengshu estimated the time. “Xiao Sun, ride as fast as you can and tell regiment headquarters — we’ve broken through the outer perimeter, ready for battle at any moment.”

The area over which the whole regiment was spread was not large. The runner, Xiao Sun, mounted up and rode off swiftly. Niu Chengshu looked around at his men.

“I’ll say the mission again, so everyone stays sharp. First Platoon!”

“Here!” The platoon leader stepped forward.

“You’re on the breach! The moment there’s an opening, push through! Grenades go into the enemy formation in staggered waves — blow the bastards apart! But you don’t have many grenades left, so pace yourselves — save enough for three separate breaks in their line!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Second Platoon, stand ready for their cavalry. If their horsemen come at us, they’re yours to handle. If it really comes to it, trading one grenade for one horse isn’t a bad deal — if they’re truly willing to die, their cavalry will be in real danger, so don’t hold anything back!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Third Platoon is the reserve, in charge of the final push. The moment First Platoon opens a gap, you press through. Cut those dogs down! Understood?”

“Yes, sir—”

“One thing to remember — if their artillery fire gets heavy, take cover, find somewhere to protect yourselves! The moment their guns shift target, we make ourselves loud again, draw their attention! As long as they’re watching us, the rest of our brothers can go make trouble elsewhere!”

Niu Chengshu’s build was as sturdy as an ox; as he spoke, he gestured broadly with his arms and legs before his men. His voice was still ringing out when, on a nearby hilltop, a firework shot skyward with a great roar. Moments later, more flares rose in succession to the southeast as well.

“The whole regiment is in position! Everyone, today’s a big day — keep your spirits up! We’ve got Wanyan Zonghan surrounded, and today we’re going to treat him to a meal! I’ll say it again — observe carefully! Fight with a clear head! And killing — should be a celebration!”

Signal flares rose one after another into the clear summer sky, each marking a Huaxia unit — at least battalion strength — bringing the enemy into view. Across the battlefield, the vast Jurchen formation roared and shifted, reforming its lines; the great beast had lowered itself into a crouch, while over seven thousand Huaxia troops had already, in the very first moments, encircled this Jurchen force of nearly thirty thousand, with more men still arriving.

Before the third quarter of the Hour of the Dragon was up, the attack began.

The ant swarm cut into the great beast!