The morning sun had not yet reached its full harshness. Signal flares rose one after another into the sky, tracing a vast encircling ring around the advancing army. Wanyan Zonghan sat astride his warhorse, his gaze shifting with each rising flare, wind stirring his white hair. His sword was already drawn.

The advancing column of his thirty-thousand-strong army was vast and imposing — in sheer numbers, the entire Huaxia Seventh Army committed to this campaign didn’t come close to matching it, let alone the old military maxim of needing ten to one to surround an enemy.

But as these flares kept rising, the momentum of the coming assault was clearly gathering, and the scattered Huaxia units converging from every direction showed no sign whatsoever of deception or feint. They meant it — and more strangely still, even Zonghan himself, along with the officers and soldiers of his own army, could somehow tell, more or less, that the enemy meant it.

Even as flares were still rising to the north, the assault began.

The first sound came from the woods to the east — figures burst out from among the trees, not many of them, forming no proper formation at all. More flares rose from the hills to the north as well; this small band of men seemed unable to wait, charging straight ahead with loud shouts, closing the distance to the Jurchen front line.

Twenty or thirty men charging an army of thirty thousand — it seemed a strange, almost absurd act, and yet it drew every nerve in the watching army taut. Among the Jurchen front ranks, archers had already nocked their arrows, but the officers there were seasoned veterans and did not loose their shafts in haste. In that moment, the enormous battlefield seemed, oddly, to grow a little quieter because of the shouts of those few dozen men bursting from the trees.

A low horn sounded from within that “quiet” — low because the bugler had put his full strength into the blast, yet the note still carried, soaring and circling into the high air, and a second black banner rose from a hillside to the southeast.

Then, several li to the north, more figures appeared over the hills, and soon after, others burst out to the south. Then a fifth wave, a sixth, a seventh…

The attacks kept surfacing, one after another, like the rising tide, coming from every direction at once — and yet, against the immense bulk of thirty thousand men, each new wave seemed almost comical in its smallness, most no more than a few dozen strong. But in this moment, appearing at different points scattered across several li, every one of them carried the same air of men who had burned their boats and meant to see it through. Wanyan Zonghan watched all of this unfold in the distance; his longsword seemed almost to ring with the iron and blood in the wind, and a sigh escaped him. “Truly like some brawl in the marketplace…”

Indeed — had this been decades ago, even ten years ago, seeing a scene like this would have made him laugh. The battlefields of that era had been proper battlefields, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men arrayed in formation, fighting as whole armies. At Hubaogang, the banners of the Liao had stretched to blot out the sky, farther than the eye could see; both sides had arrayed their ranks, resolved to fight to the death, and then crashed together in massive formation. Small scattered groups of soldiers like this, thrown onto such a battlefield, would never even have found the courage to charge at all — separated from the sight of their officers or the discipline squads behind them, they would simply have vanished.

But in this moment, wave after wave of units, tens and hundreds strong, kept appearing from every direction across his field of view. Black banners covered the hills and fields. He wanted to laugh, to rally his own spirits — but something like ants seemed to crawl at the back of his skull, and the laugh wouldn’t come, because he knew: the other side wasn’t joking.

These Huaxia soldiers, charging in from every direction across the hills — every single one of them meant it!

To the east, along the Jurchen front line, the officer in command had already given the order to loose. Arrows rose into the sky like rain.

The unit that had first charged from the small woods on this side was a platoon under the First Company, Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Second Brigade of the Huaxia Seventh Army’s First Division — Company Commander Niu Chengshu, Platoon Leader Zhao Xingwang, a tall, lean veteran of thirty-two with a knife scar at the corner of his eye. After days of relentless fighting, his platoon numbered only twenty-three men left. To be the first unit to charge the Jurchen line was to gamble on nine deaths for one chance at life — but at the same time, it was also an enormous honor.

A charge like this was built on tremendous courage, but also on faith in countless comrades. They were the first to charge the Jurchen army, and as they burst from the trees into open ground, more flares kept rising; not far southeast, on a hillside, a second black banner had already launched its own assault, and then, the bugle call rising from low to high, more units surged forward from the north, the south, the northeast — one unit after another doing exactly as they were, and this scene, this coordination, was enough to set anyone’s blood on fire, enough to make a man walk toward death without hesitation.

The Jurchen force before them was, admittedly, staggeringly vast — but facing an enemy like this, they already knew exactly what to expect, and knew, too, that the comrades around them would give them everything they had in support.

The twenty-three men charged toward a Jurchen front-line unit a full thousand strong. The Jurchen commander there was an experienced man too, holding his archers’ fire, waiting for the charging Huaxia soldiers to enter the range of maximum lethality — but against a loose skirmish line of twenty or thirty men, any choice his archers made would leave them at a disadvantage.

“Heads up!”

The twenty-three men advanced at a measured pace, keeping roughly the same speed, and as they reached the first outcropping of scattered rocks, Zhao Xingwang shouted, short and firm. He raised his shield slightly; the men around him raised theirs as well. The shouting and clamor of battle was already spreading, dozens of units charging at once, and they had now entered the archers’ optimal range.

A cloud of black arrows rose like a swarm of locusts.

“Down—”

Zhao Xingwang threw himself behind a large boulder, raising his shield; his men each found their own cover and crouched low. Then the arrows came down in a hail, a whistling, thudding rain of impacts. The shouts of battle still spread all around; Zhao Xingwang could see Huaxia soldiers cutting diagonally down from the northeastern ridge as well, and behind them, Company Commander Niu Chengshu was leading the other two platoons out too, moving a little slower, holding back to react as needed. He knew that, at this very moment, countless comrades all across this vast battlefield were charging the Jurchen ranks just as they were.

The interval between launching an attack and actually making contact always felt strangely peculiar, throughout the whole course of a battle. It was silent and yet clamorous, roiling yet soundless — like water in a kettle waiting to boil, like a great wave gathering just before it crashes and breaks upon the shore.

The arrow storm had finished falling. Zhao Xingwang had no time to check whether anyone had been hit; he lifted his head, glancing forward from behind the boulder. They were now less than fifty zhang from the Jurchen thousand-strong unit ahead. One of the enemy’s ranks was already shifting formation — roughly a hundred men, preparing to charge out toward them.

Zhao Xingwang let out a breath. He already understood: the commander across from him was an experienced Jurchen officer. Once grenades entered common use in the Huaxia Army, fighting in tight formation had become the single most dangerous thing a force could do, barring cases of defending a camp, a wall, or fortified works. Even a thousand-strong unit, if the Huaxia soldiers could close the distance and unleash a single volley of grenades, would lose its momentum entirely — and once the second and third platoons pressed through afterward, there would be little fighting left to do.

Meeting them with a roughly hundred-strong force, using fire-bombs to counter their momentum head-on, was, relatively speaking, a sound choice.

Zhao Xingwang made a hand signal. “Wait for my order — go—”

His comrades, shields raised, bodies bent low, began breaking from their scattered cover, their pace quickening. Then the Jin hundred-strong unit charged out as well. The gap closed to thirty-five zhang; Zhao Xingwang, having advanced only a short distance, stopped, and the rest of the men stopped with him. “Grenades ready—”

“Three!”

“Two!”

A fierce light flashed in every man’s eyes: “Charge—”

The twenty-odd men surged forward with everything they had, merging into the great tide of the battlefield.

This kind of small-unit close combat — using grenades and fire-bombs to break the enemy’s momentum — had only begun to emerge in recent years. As the Jurchens gradually adapted to this style of fighting during the current southern campaign, the Huaxia Army’s countermeasures had grown more sophisticated in turn. Facing a small Jurchen unit closing in like this, the rhythm of “advance, pause, charge” was a countertactic that had only taken shape in company- and platoon-level combat within the past several days. That three-second pause at the point of closing distance was, for their own side, a well-rehearsed step — but for the Jurchen unit charging with everything wound up and ready, it landed like a sudden stitch in the side.

The hundred-strong Jurchen charge had, up to that point, tried to hold formation as it always had, but the instant that pause happened, their pace suddenly faltered, their line beginning to warp and deform mid-charge — skirmish fighting inherently required some breaking of formation, of course, but there was a world of difference between choosing to break formation and being forced into disorder. And now there was no more room left to adjust.

The distance between the two sides closed in a rush; at fifteen zhang, Zhao Xingwang and his men hurled their grenades toward the crowd ahead. Several grenades arced through the sky and fell; the enemy’s fire-bombs came flying back in turn. Compared to the Huaxia Army’s wooden-handled grenades, the enemy’s round fire-bombs had a shorter throwing range and poorer accuracy.

Explosions burst among the enemy ranks; some men were flung backward, others rolled to the ground. On this side, the Huaxia soldiers, caught in the blast, also threw themselves down mid-charge, adopting defensive postures. In truth, the enemy’s fire-bombs had scattered wide across a broad area, but the three-second pause before the Huaxia charge had thrown off the timing of the enemy’s own fire-bomb throws.

Black smoke coiled across the battlefield, the smell of blood spreading through the air. Within the smoke, a Jurchen officer’s hysterical roar could be heard, along with the writhing and wailing of the wounded. The instant the explosions died down, Zhao Xingwang was already back on his feet; he glanced to the side and saw his comrades struggling up as well, gripping their steel blades, shaking off the dust.

“—Charge the line!”

The soldiers plunged into the smoke, bursting out the other side.

The clash began.

…

Across the whole battlefield, arrows kept rising in waves, and the sound of cannon fire joined in as well. Unit after Huaxia unit chose to fall back or hold defensively amid the arrows and artillery fire, but far more pressed forward through every gap that opened. The entire perimeter of the battlefield had become like an oil pan slowly heating to a boil, the sizzling and popping growing more intense by the moment.

By the Hour of the Snake, the encircling assault, spreading for several li across three directions, had gone into full swing. The Huaxia Army’s attacking units had, by now, been broken down almost to platoon level — with the broad direction set, each unit adapted as it saw fit. Some Huaxia officers, admittedly, could do little more than judge when to advance and when to fall back — but even this level of adaptability was more than the Jurchen command structure could keep pace with.

To the loose skirmish lines on the outer perimeter, artillery bombardment was like using a cannon to swat mosquitoes, but the Jurchens dared not adopt a purely passive defense either. As the Huaxia charge unfolded, Jurchen troops on the outer edge met them in hundred-strong counter-formations; some units, already scarred by earlier defeats, broke almost on contact, while a handful managed to hold against that first wave.

Chaos began to spread. At the second quarter of the Hour of the Snake, the Huaxia assault was like a series of needles piercing through the outer shell of Zonghan’s army, driving steadily inward. By now, Gao Qingyi had also gathered a large body of cavalry and begun the opening moves of a counterattack.

The sun now hung high overhead — it was ten in the morning on the twenty-fourth of April, the sixth and final day of the entire Battle of Hanzhong. Since the fighting had first broken out on the nineteenth, the Huaxia Seventh Army had never once shied from combat; this was the sharpest blade the Huaxia Army had spent years forging, and now, as the entire southwestern campaign neared its close, they were about to complete the mission that was theirs alone to finish.

Wanyan Zonghan had initially wanted to force a decisive battle from the very start, but decades of combat experience had led him instead to a strategy of prolonged delay — a struggle that was not without its reasons. But everyone understood that the decisive clash was bound to come at some point, and now, on this twenty-fourth day, with the Jurchens finally settling into a firm resolve, the Huaxia Army had likewise set its own posture straight, throwing everything it had into the open field. All in.

In the fighting that followed, the Jurchens mounted a stubborn resistance…