At the Hour of the Snake, once the decisive battle near Tuanshan had begun, the position south of the ancient city of Hanzhong had already beaten back two waves of assault led by Wanyan Xiyin. Black smoke drifted on the wind; the heat of the explosions had baked both the air and the earth of the battlefield bone dry, and the bodies of men and warhorses lay heaped in growing piles across the position.

Wanyan Xiyin had already sensed that something was wrong.

Across the ten-odd li between Tuanshan and Hanzhong, small-scale chaos and skirmishing kept breaking out continuously. Scouts sent out from Zonghan’s main camp toward Hanzhong were being ambushed along the way; near Hanzhong’s western gate, two Huaxia companies had once again staged a surprise raid on the gate itself, throwing that morning into a wave of confusion and making it difficult for messengers coming from the west to enter the city easily.

But by now, from the hot-air balloon raised above the city walls, one could already, faintly, make out the fires and chaos of battle over ten li away.

At the third quarter of the Hour of the Snake, Wanyan Yuchi came out from within Hanzhong to Xiyin’s camp southeast of the city, to report on the situation to the west. The fighting on this front happened, at that moment, to be in a lull between waves of assault. Wanyan Xiyin, astride his horse, listened to Yuchi’s report, which confirmed the misgivings already forming in his own mind. The old man closed his eyes and drew a long, deep breath.

“…We chose this place as our decisive battleground. They chose Tuanshan as theirs…” he murmured, then opened his eyes and looked ahead. “Gather three thousand able fighters from within the city and send them west to support the Grand Marshal. Tell the garrison commander in the city: Hanzhong can be given ground — let half of it go.”

Wanyan Yuchi hesitated a moment, then bowed and accepted the order, turning to leave.

The old man rested his hand on the sword at his hip. In this moment he understood, completely, that the two fierce waves of assault he had launched since morning had each been thrown back by a Huaxia force that was, plainly, fighting with insufficient numbers.

On a battlefield like this, it wasn’t strange for an enemy putting up a desperate last stand to beat back several waves of attack with a small force. What truly gnawed at Xiyin’s mind was the fact that the Huaxia Army had kept up continuous harassment from last night straight through this morning — that even while clearly maintaining a rational, level-headed strategy, they had chosen to leave only a small force here.

Even if the entire Huaxia Seventh Army had gone west to attack Tuanshan, it would still amount to no more than ten-thousand-odd men.

Something was hammering away at the back of his mind.

This was a sign he had first sensed years ago — one that had begun taking root the first time, years before, that his gaze had turned toward the small river valley at Xiaocang in the northwest. That rebel Wu army, having killed their own sovereign and risen in revolt, had gone on to crush the Western Xia at Dongzhiyuan; he had sensed, faintly, that this was a potential threat, a bad seed just beginning to sprout — though against the vast scale of the Jin state, that seed had seemed far too small to matter. Still, he had sent men to attempt to win them over, and later moved to wipe them out.

The tenacity shown at Xiaocang River had exceeded his expectations. Though he had never personally gone to the northwest, he had, in the time since, gathered information from that region bit by bit, and against the accumulated experience of his own lifetime of warfare, much of what Xiaocang River had revealed left him genuinely puzzled.

That army should, by all rights, have collapsed long ago.

The Jurchens themselves were a people who had clawed their way up out of the most extreme adversity — but even setting the army once led by Aguda himself in its place, Xiaocang River would still have seemed baffling. And the two armies, in truth, bore utterly different characters besides.

Since the end of the three-year war at Xiaocang River, the sacrifices of Loushi and Cibushi had jolted Zonghan and many others awake; together with Xiyin, they had made the southwest the focus of their attention, and this southern campaign had grown out of that concern. By that time, they had all long since become battle-hardened veterans — some had accumulated their experience purely on the battlefield, others had studied history and military strategy in depth. But what the Huaxia Army in the southwest had revealed existed in no history, in no treatise on warfare that either of them had ever read.

Each successive defeat in the southwest had widened the boundaries of what they understood was possible. And now, with the decisive battle against the Huaxia Seventh Army finally underway, he could faintly sense that something’s true, complete form had at last revealed itself before him.

In these recent days, this feeling had pressed down on his mind with growing weight, over and over, warning him: what he and Zonghan now faced was unlike anything either of them had ever encountered before. When they had first broken open the gates of the Wu dynasty, the people of Wu had perhaps faced a similarly stunned disbelief — but the martial prowess of northern peoples was, after all, recorded across countless histories. This time alone, what he and Zonghan faced was, in all likelihood, something that had never once appeared in any history book at all.

This half-formed, dissonant sense of wrongness kept knocking, again and again, at the back of his skull. The enemy should have collapsed by now — but they hadn’t. The enemy shouldn’t be fighting this way — but they were. He could no longer predict what consequences his own moves on this battlefield might bring.

But beyond fighting the decisive battle, there was nothing left to be done.

He had grown old.

People spend their youth learning, their prime years living through experience, and by middle age, a wise man has generally seen most of what the world has to offer; even things he has not personally witnessed, he can, more often than not, infer by analogy. Just like the study of natural philosophy that Ning Yi had raised up in the southwest — however many new things kept emerging from it, the underlying principles were, in the end, always something he could grasp. None of it was truly beyond comprehension.

But in this moment, it felt as though some dark, formless shape was rising up from the depths of the sea.

Thud, thud, thud…

He could faintly hear that sound.

But beyond fighting the decisive battle, he had no other choice left.

If he could break through the Huaxia position at Hanzhong’s south gate quickly enough, it could have a decisive effect on the outcome at Tuanshan.

Sending Wanyan Yuchi to lead the elite troops out of the city was meant, in part, to open a retreat route for the Black Banner force outside the south gate — once their position could no longer hold, and they were forced to fall back into the city itself, Xiyin could then push straight on to Tuanshan without delay.

Everything that could be done, in terms of strategy and calculation, he had already done.

Not long after, outside Hanzhong’s south gate, another wave of assault began — the fiercest charge yet, surging forward like an avalanche, shells flying through the air, smoke blotting out the sun.

Chen Hai went out to meet it.

Thud, thud, thud…

The outline of a new age was knocking at the door of every mind on this field.

Wanyan Xiyin pressed the attack with everything he had.

…

At Tuanshan, in the midst of the fighting, Wanyan Zonghan too had by now clearly seen what the Huaxia Seventh Army truly looked like when it launched a genuine, all-out assault.

The vast attack poured across the field like quicksilver spilling across the ground, stripping away the outer shell of the Jurchen army, the fighting spreading everywhere; great numbers of Jin soldiers were routing across the hillsides in every direction. Zonghan watched all of this unfold in silence. He had suspected much of this already, but a scattered-formation charge on this scale — this was truly the first time he had witnessed it with his own eyes.

Against the Huaxia Army’s charge, fighting in tight formation had become utterly useless. Facing a charge of a few dozen men against a formation a thousand strong, the power of massed arrow fire was reduced to almost nothing — and once the enemy closed to close range, his own side had no choice but to organize a countercharge in turn. Standing and waiting in place, hoping to meet a fresh enemy with rested troops, would only mean that a few dozen men could throw a fire-bomb and simply turn and run, while his own side absorbed heavy losses standing still.

There was no choice but to charge and meet them head-on.

But if a hundred-man formation charged out to meet them, after a single engagement that unit might well lose all command cohesion entirely. Soldiers not swept along within the formation would, once it broke apart, look for somewhere to hide or simply flee outright; those unwilling to scatter tended to cluster together instead — which only made them easy targets for fire-bombs, unable to withstand the Huaxia counter-assault that inevitably followed. A Jurchen unit that lost its formation like this couldn’t even fall back properly — a retreat without formation would only spiral into a full-scale rout.

The Huaxia Army never fell into this kind of trouble. This was the most fundamental gap between the two sides. In the early stages of the fighting, one Jurchen hundred-strong unit after another had been thrown forward, only for some to be broken outright by a mere twenty-odd men head-on, while others, engaging a charging Huaxia unit, found themselves struck from both flanks at once and collapsed within moments.

It wasn’t that the Jurchens had no mental preparation for skirmish-style fighting — they had already encountered similar circumstances in the southwest. But faced now with the speed and efficiency of the Huaxia Army’s small-scale charges, his own side was already several tiers behind.

Dozens, even over a hundred points of contact were merging into a single, vast tide across the field — but Zonghan could see clearly that the force the enemy had actually deployed numbered no more than a few thousand men. His own side could throw out several times that number, yet at every single point of contact, his response proved less agile than theirs.

He was, of course, not simply waiting to be overwhelmed. At the second quarter of the Hour of the Snake, as the fighting on the outer perimeter grew increasingly chaotic, Gao Qingyi led two thousand armored cavalry charging out from the north in a great sweeping arc, attempting to scour the entire battlefield clean, while three Huaxia reserve units of a thousand men each surged in from the north, the northeast, and the southwest, pressing into the Jurchen main body.

Gao Qingyi’s two thousand cavalry inflicted severe damage and disruption on the Huaxia assault. Though large numbers of Huaxia units nearby quickly rallied to counter with fire-bombs and spears, several units were still overrun by the cavalry charge, and the battlefield’s exchange rate approached one-for-one.

In the past, that number would have seemed almost laughable. Facing an army of Wu, or even the Liao, two thousand Jurchen cavalry could often single-handedly decide the outcome of an entire battle; against a large, tightly formed infantry line, they would typically avoid direct engagement, but the instant that formation broke, their charge alone could rout an army of tens of thousands. Yet here, against a Huaxia force spread thin across the field, an even exchange rate had somehow become their only remaining trump card.

By noon, the cavalry’s charge had been checked, and Gao Qingyi withdrew his men. Some Huaxia units, meanwhile, had begun peeling back the outer layers of the Jurchen force like peeling an onion, drawing closer and closer to the eight-thousand-strong Jurchen core; the fighting grew even more intense, with some Huaxia units temporarily halting or shifting to reinforce their comrades on the flanks.

The tide of battle surged onward, wave after wave of explosions, the smell of death drifting on the wind. On the right side of the field, the Huaxia Army was contesting a Jurchen artillery position on a hilltop; a unit of personal guards was sent to reinforce it. Ahead, black banners were gradually converging into what looked like a mighty river; on the left, among the hills, routed soldiers streamed toward the ridgeline in scattered clusters. Zonghan stood beneath his command banner, unmoving, exchanging words now and then with Han Qixian at his side.

“A few dozen men, and they can form up and adapt on the fly once they’re scattered… How are they doing this…”

“I’ve heard they even teach every single soldier to read and write…”

“Whatever strategy and formation we knew, most of it seems useless now…”

Since thousands of years ago, all manner of military strategy had arisen from the particular natures of armies. Coordinating the movement of thousands or tens of thousands of men on a battlefield was inherently difficult, which was why drumbeats had always been needed to set the pace of the march; when countless soldiers stood arrayed shoulder to shoulder in formation, packed tight against one another, even a man who lost his nerve and wanted to flee simply could not move. A handful of men capable of receiving an order and doing their best to carry it out could become officers; the great mass of soldiers were simply carried along by the army’s momentum. If thousands of men could advance in one direction without falling into disorder, that alone was, more often than not, the very heart of military strategy.

If your own thousand-strong formation moved clumsily while mine moved with even slightly more fluidity, I could slip around your flank before you had time to react, throwing you into confusion — only the soldiers with the strongest sense of belonging, the personal retainers, could break from formation without falling apart, without fleeing, without shirking, and these were the men who became scouts; scouts, in turn, often decided the outcome of the entire battle.

But the Huaxia Army had scattered tens of thousands of men across the entire hillside.

They needed no drumbeat, no formation to hold them together, no momentum to carry them along… Every military strategy of the past, from this point forward, had become useless. Zonghan knew it: everything he had accumulated across decades of campaigning had, here, come to nothing.

This wasn’t a matter of winning or losing through tactical skill.

This was simply elite troops steamrolling over everything in their path.

Even the once so-called finest force under heaven, the Tushan Guard, could no longer measure up to the Huaxia Seventh Army standing before him now.

He understood, in a general sense, what men like Ning Yi and Qin Shaoqian had achieved. What he couldn’t understand was how they had done it.

“Qixian…”

At one point, his voice came out somewhat dry as he spoke, then he fell silent for a long while, because the sounds of battle carried on the wind. Han Qixian clasped his hands and waited; after a moment, he said: “Grand Marshal, perhaps it’s time to break out.”

What he understood clearly, so too had many other Jurchen generals come, over these past several days, to understand just as clearly.

Zonghan shook his head. Carried on the wind around him was the Huaxia Army’s battle cry, faintly discernible as: “Kill Nianhan”

In his mind rose a scene from ten-odd years earlier — the Jin’s first southern campaign, when they had breached the gates at Yanmen Pass and swept south, crushing all resistance in their path. The Han people had put up a feeble, powerless defense; a few relatively stubborn resisters had been killed, their bodies left hanging above the city walls. When the army had advanced as far as Xinzhou, there had been one — first, and nearly the only — time a band of assassins had brought their blades close enough to threaten him directly.

It had happened in a Daoist shrine at Xinzhou. Leading them had been a white-haired old Han man, wielding a great spear, charging in with several dozen fellow swordsmen, cutting through blood and chaos amid the encircling tide of soldiers. That old man’s spear had, at one point, come thrusting toward his very face, coming within a hair’s breadth of a successful assassination — but in the end, all of them had been swallowed by the surrounding army and cut down.

“Kill Nianhan” — that was what those Han men had shouted, back then.

In the many years since, perhaps others had shouted the same thing, but Zonghan had never heard it again. In this moment, that cry was carrying toward him once more from afar, as though the ten-odd years between then and now had folded away, and it was charging toward him all over again. Zonghan raised his head; fire burned in his eyes.

“Qixian… look…”

He pointed east.

“That is Qin Shaoqian.”

In this moment, the Jurchen army still held the numerical advantage. Across these decades, the old man had never been a timid sheep; more often than not, he had long grown accustomed to playing the lion. And even now, standing at a disadvantage, he was not one to let any opportunity slip past him.

Noon was drawing to a close. The great beast moved.

…

“Fine men! Follow me into the fray!”

Within the Jurchen main formation, Wanyan Shaba drew his sword alongside the old man, roaring as he charged.

…

From the front, the center, and the rear — from three directions at once, Huaxia units came surging forward, wave after wave.

Company Commander Niu Chengshu swung his longsword, his whole body drenched in blood, driving into the enemy’s line.

“Kill Nianhan”

…

The roar of shouting voices merged into a single surging tide, both sides crashing together with unstoppable momentum, shattering as one.