The midday sun had begun to turn a harsh, blinding white, and the fierce fighting near Hanzhong’s south gate grew more intense with every passing minute.
From morning through noon, Wanyan Xiyin had directed six large-scale waves of assault. The first two had come at a relatively measured pace, more a test of the Huaxia Army’s strength than a full commitment. Once he sensed something was wrong with how the battle was unfolding, the four waves that followed came on like storm and thunder. By the feel of things on the field, some ten thousand men on the enemy side had, by now, rotated through the fighting in turn.
Between each large or small wave of attack, there was only the briefest lull — the moment it took for one Jurchen thousand-strong unit, checked in its advance, to fall back, before the next surged forward to take its place.
The sound of explosions and slaughter carried from a distance. Chen Hai pulled himself up out of a pool of blood, his body swaying unsteadily. The attack on this position had been driven off; fighting still raged at several other points along the line.
Thick, sticky blood dripped down from his hair. He wiped at it with his hand, the smell of blood filling his nostrils. Beside him, corpses lay heaped in drifts across the ground — some Jurchen, some his own comrades. Third Battalion Commander Chen Kuquan lay among them, his belly torn open by an enemy blade, his entrails spilled out, slick and glistening.
No matter how long a man spent fighting on a battlefield, he never grew used to that slick, sticky feeling. Chen Hai wiped at his eyes, only smearing them further with blood, and switched to his relatively cleaner right sleeve instead. He crouched down and closed Chen Kuquan’s eyes — this had been one of the comrades who had stayed with him longest. Back when Chen Hai had first become a squad leader, Chen Kuquan had been one of his own squad’s soldiers. Of that squad, not a single man remained before him now.
Only then did the sounds and smells around him begin to feel real again — men running past, soldiers searching for the wounded. Someone rushed up to report: “…Second Battalion Commander has fallen.” The Second Battalion Commander had been a big man named Chang Feng, his face pitted with old pockmarks.
“…If the battalion commander falls, the company commander takes his place. If the company commanders are all gone, the platoon leaders step up.”
Chen Hai said this calmly, then climbed up onto a low rise nearby. “Get the wounded bandaged, quickly! Every battalion, count your numbers! The Jin dogs will be back any moment! Look at the comrades who’ve fallen at your side! They died in our place — how are we going to pay them back for that—”
His strength gave out by the last words; that usually quiet, flat voice of his came out hoarse — something that almost never happened.
The battlefield had turned red with blood and corpses, and those still standing were, for the most part, stained the same slick red themselves. However much men endured, that sticky, glistening feeling never became something they could simply get used to. Some vomited from the horror of it. Others chose instead to hurl that same overwhelming pain back at whoever had inflicted it.
And so, within their bodies, a little more strength for the fight always seemed to surface.
On the eastern edge of the Jurchen line, a thousand-strong unit thrown into disorder during the earlier fighting was gradually pulling back. Wanyan Xiyin watched from a distance. He had, by now, seen the whole shape of what he was up against — the Huaxia force numbered only around four thousand, had already endured five days of brutal combat, and yet here they still stood, beating back wave after wave of his own elite troops.
The midday sun was blinding in its whiteness, much like this engagement itself, which had dragged on long enough to leave him faintly disgusted. His men were fighting with everything they had, but what he saw before him now was simply the result of an enemy defensive line too resilient to break — Xiyin could only watch as his own superior numbers pushed forward again and again, only to be thrown back, scattered, or locally broken apart each time. Nor had the enemy gained much real advantage from fortification, in truth.
Fighting within Hanzhong itself was still ongoing as well. Some Jin troops had been driving Han civilians ahead of them as they pressed forward, while the Huaxia Army built barricades from debris in the streets, halting the crowd’s advance entirely. Small Huaxia units had slipped past the press of people and into the city, stirring up considerable chaos — most of the soldiers stationed within the city were men who had already broken and fled from the battlefield once already, their will to fight all but spent, and for the moment Xiyin had no ready answer to that problem either.
The old man’s brow furrowed. Though his face still looked calm enough on the surface, the veins at his temple pulsed now and then with strain. Some twenty li to the west, Zonghan was locked in what was meant to be the decisive engagement of the entire campaign. The moment he had confirmed this news, Xiyin had, in fact, weighed several options — abandoning this position and sending the bulk of his force around through Hanzhong to reinforce Zonghan, or boarding his ships and sailing upriver along the Han. That last option, of course, was the least efficient of all — the river was running high with the flood season, its current growing swifter still past Hanzhong, and that stretch of water might well prove slower than marching overland, with the added risk of ambush upon making landfall.
None of that deliberation mattered in the end, because if his own force here couldn’t crush this four-thousand-strong enemy at Hanzhong, then everything that came after would lose its meaning regardless.
Zonghan was no child. He wouldn’t assume, simply because his own men had come under attack, that he needed rescuing at once — particularly with thirty thousand men facing an assault from little more than ten thousand, and plenty of scattered troops still to be gathered back in. This force of Xiyin’s own, the one positioned farthest from Zonghan, had no cause to go rushing to his aid in a panic. Nor would Zonghan make some careless tactical error and walk into a trap or ambush, suffering heavy losses because of it…
The correct course was to crush this Huaxia force here with overwhelming force first, and only then move to reinforce the main battlefield. If he could break them within an hour, all the better; if not, then within half a day. But half a day had come and gone already. Their resilience had, at last, begun to genuinely trouble him.
If this was what the entire Huaxia Seventh Army fought like, what would the battle at Tuanshan look like?
“Tula.” He swept his command flag downward. “Your turn now. The Huaxia Army is nearly spent… break through them—”
The meng’an named Tula received the order. Beneath the noon sun, the war drums beat harder still.
Zonghan was no child. He would not make a tactical error.
And he himself had to win here, to prove that the battle as a whole could still be won.
He glanced up at the sun.
One more hour, and they’d be broken.
“Kill—”
As yet another formation surged forward, the old man raised his sword and let out a great roar.
Then came the answering roar of a thousand Jurchen voices, sweeping across the field like thunder, the fresh troops joining the fray lending new heart to the men still locked in the fighting.
Chen Hai raised his longsword to meet the enemy bearing down on him, and sent a runner off at the same time.
“Tell Brigade Commander Lin — my regiment has no reserves left.”
He wasn’t asking for reinforcements; he could more or less guess what the reply would be. Lin Dongshan would probably say something like: I don’t have any either — hold your ground. But he wanted Lin Dongshan to know the situation regardless, because if his men here were wiped out, Lin Dongshan would have to decide what came next on his own.
Before long, the runner came back with Lin Dongshan’s reply. By then, this position had already been swallowed whole into the tide of battle.
…
Stark, pale sunlight bore down on the land. Along the road running west from Hanzhong toward Tuanshan, friction of every scale — large and small — kept breaking out without pause.
The Huaxia Army had only a handful of men posted here, but since morning, two companies had been circling the area near the western gate — ambushing Jurchen scouts carrying dispatches, harassing routed troops retreating toward Hanzhong. They had even staged two feint attacks against the gate itself, raising enough of a commotion that the garrison had shut the gates fast and dared not venture out at all.
After the Hour of the Snake, Wanyan Yuchi led over three thousand men out through the western gate, bound for Tuanshan, and was struck immediately by these same two companies. Using the hill terrain to their advantage, they attacked the Jurchen column moving along the main road, even wheeling out two captured iron cannons — no one quite knew where they’d gotten them — to bombard Yuchi’s formation, forcing him to send cavalry to drive them off. The two companies promptly withdrew into the woods, adopting a posture of desperate, delaying resistance.
Of Wanyan Yuchi’s three-thousand-strong force, nearly a thousand were cavalry — eliminating these two companies outright would have posed no real difficulty. But understanding their purpose, he simply had his riders loose flaming arrows to set the woods ablaze, letting his infantry push through more quickly instead.
Six li west of Hanzhong, at a small trading post called Qingyang Station, a Huaxia battalion had already dug in. Around noon, this roughly two-hundred-strong force spotted Wanyan Yuchi’s approaching column and fortified their position to meet it. Yuchi deployed to assault them as well, fighting for half an hour, but their defense proved remarkably tough, and in the end he chose to take a side road and bypass them entirely, pressing straight on toward Tuanshan rather than let two hundred men delay him from reaching the battlefield.
He had barely cleared Qingyang Station when more men crept up along the roadside — three Huaxia soldiers, hidden in the roadside grass, leapt out as the Jurchen column passed, hurled three grenades, and took off running. They vaulted a small ditch beside the road and plunged into a nearby stream, making their escape — clearly a plan worked out in advance using the terrain. Nearby cavalry gave chase at once, but failed to strike them down before they went under.
Wanyan Yuchi had always served under Xiyin and had never taken part in the great southwestern campaign; only here at Hanzhong had he begun facing the Huaxia Seventh Army directly. He had already picked up some sense of this army from routed troops passing through earlier, but in this moment, facing a force willing to attack him no matter how badly outnumbered, he finally found himself thoroughly worn down with exasperation.
Men skilled in wilderness scouting warfare, he thought, perhaps had their weaknesses when it came to open battle. With that thought in mind, he turned his gaze west, toward Tuanshan…
…
At this moment, southeast of Tuanshan, in the hills and low ground along the road to Hanzhong, the fighting had risen into a raging storm.
Just past noon. The fiercest counterattack of the day, led personally by Wanyan Zonghan, had begun.
Beneath the sky, for several li in every direction, routed soldiers lay scattered across the ground, their bodies left where they fell; dust still rose from the shelled positions. At the very core of the fighting, the most intense combat of all was taking shape — Zonghan had committed his elite core of eight thousand men, throwing wave after wave of them, in a frenzy, against Qin Shaoqian’s forces on the hills to the northeast.
After half a day of fighting, more than half of the outer army had already broken; what remained of organized units, several thousand strong, amounted, after their earlier defeats and flight, to little more than numbers on a page. Only this inner core of eight thousand still held to its fighting will — led by officers who had, in many cases, risen up through Zonghan’s own personal guard over the years, or who were bound to him by marriage or close kinship. At Zonghan’s call, these men understood: the moment had finally come for them to give everything.
Just past noon, the Jurchen meng’an Chala led the first thousand-strong unit in a fierce charge against the northeastern front. He was an old general who had followed Zonghan since the days of Aguda’s uprising, now fifty-five, tall and broad-shouldered, his record in his younger years somewhat unremarkable — partly due to a slight deformity in his right little finger, and partly simply because so many brilliant generals had crowded the Jin’s early years. He had remained close to Zonghan for decades; his eldest daughter had married into Xiebao’s household as a consort. Though well along in years now, he remained vigorous and formidably strong, and was said to keep a great many concubines at home, spending his nights in revelry without ever showing signs of fatigue.
Once Qin Shaoqian’s position had been confirmed and the target set, Chala was the first to step forward and request the charge. Zonghan looked at him and nodded.
The old Jurchen general raised his great axe and led his thousand men charging toward the Huaxia forces on the hillside ahead.
A Huaxia battalion moved up to meet them head-on — over two hundred men of the First Battalion, Second Regiment, Third Brigade, First Division. As the First Battalion engaged, the Second Battalion struck in from the flank, forcing Chala to split his forces in response. Amid the hills and confusion, arrows filled the air first, then came explosion after explosion; once the two sides closed to melee range, grenades and fire-bombs kept flying without pause. In the blink of an eye, both formations had been torn into disorder, with large numbers of Huaxia soldiers driving straight toward the axe-wielding Jurchen commander.
The moment formation broke down, even Jurchen elites showed signs of small numbers instinctively scattering sideways once free of the group’s restraint. Zonghan summoned Wanyan Shaba’s cavalry: “Enforce military law! Kill any who flee!”
As the cavalry surged out, Zonghan ordered the meng’an Wanyan Zhentu to bring up a second thousand-strong unit. This was Sheyema and Xiebao’s cousin, thirty-two years old, who had inherited the title of county earl, and a formidable fighter besides. On receiving the order, he pushed forward.
The noise of shouting and slaughter grew so chaotic it was almost stifling. Some Jurchen units still held to something like order, but the Huaxia forces converging from every direction looked, at first glance, dizzyingly disordered. Most of them had already fought through one or two engagements already, inferior in both numbers and stamina — but the trouble was that once his own men were thrown into the fray and scattered, they were essentially impossible to reorganize, while the Huaxia troops kept pressing forward regardless.
Wanyan Zhentu’s second thousand-strong unit was blocked by his own men in disarray and failed to arrive in time; Chala’s thousand had already been ground apart within the crisscrossing Huaxia assault. His personal guards converged around him, trying to shield their commander as he fell back to link up with Zhentu, when two grenades landed among them, swallowing the group in smoke, and several Huaxia soldiers charged straight in after them.
The fighting descended into total chaos. Through his spyglass, Zonghan could still make out Chala’s figure, swinging his great axe furiously. A Huaxia soldier lunged at him, and the two went down together; Chala rolled, rose, drew his blade, and kept fighting. The Huaxia soldier came at him again; one of Chala’s guards cut in and forced the man back a step, but two more Huaxia soldiers had already closed in. They fought in a tangled knot, and within moments Chala was drenched in blood. Someone threw yet another fire-bomb, and the rising smoke swallowed the struggling figures whole.
A third wave surged out along the flank, and Zonghan’s own main formation pressed forward in full.
By this stage of the fighting, all the so-called strategy and scheming had grown nearly useless — or rather, such things amounted, in the end, to nothing more than the basic groundwork of command. Both sides could only take up their pieces and throw everything they had onto the board; once committed, nothing remained but to fight with everything one had.
Unit after unit widened the path forward. At the third quarter of the Hour of the Sheep, Zonghan committed his entire army to the battle, and two great whirlpools merged into one, tearing at each other with ferocious intensity.
Earlier, Han Qixian and others had urged Zonghan not to risk himself directly in the fighting, but he had refused every such counsel.
…
Arrows crisscrossed the sky without pause; explosions sounded now and again; the neighing of horses, the roar of voices, the echo of blasts — it felt as though the whole world had fallen into slaughter.
The eye-patched general stood on a low rise, scanning the field with his single eye as the great Jurchen assault unfolded before him.
Jurchen soldiers breaking under the fierce fighting seemed to evaporate outward from the great whirlpool at the center, scattering toward the edges, while small Huaxia units cut through villages and open country, trying to form themselves into lines that would bore straight through the Jurchen core.
The assault to the south was especially fierce — the Jurchen center had already been twisted and torn apart by it. Qi Xinhan’s entire brigade had been scattered, but he had gathered a regiment’s worth of men to the south, trying to cut the still several-thousand-strong Jurchen main body clean in two.
As for Qin Shaoqian’s own position, the sound of fighting had all but reached him directly by now. Over four thousand men, Zonghan among them, were pressing everything they had toward this hillside; blocking them at the front was a regiment under Xu Xiaohu — roughly six or seven battalions, some fragmented down to company strength — striking simultaneously from several directions at the very point where Wanyan Zonghan himself stood. This assault was slowing the Jurchen advance considerably; one might say the great beast was being carved apart even as it pushed forward.
Qin Shaoqian himself stood less than a hundred meters from the front line, and Jurchen marksmen occasionally loosed arrows this way when the chance arose. He had, at most, a security company of roughly a hundred men with him. A handful more companies and battalions were active on the nearby hills and slopes; Wanyan Shaba, leading cavalry, had broken through and swung around toward Qin Shaoqian’s rear, meaning both to cut off his retreat and to launch an assault up this very hillside at any moment.
Fortunately, this hillside was rugged with jagged rock, which made things difficult for cavalry.
“I’ve told Ni Hua down below to keep an eye on Wanyan Shaba. He has a battalion he can use — not enough men, so I told him to conscript locally as needed…” Chief of Staff Chi Wenguang came up, and the two of them looked out together at the battlefield. “…What do you think — how long before Zonghan reaches us? Care to bet on it?”
Qin Shaoqian lowered his spyglass. “…He’ll never reach us.”
The Huaxia Army’s assault cut through like a blade, stripping flesh from bone, boring straight through the body of the Jurchen army…
…
It had been a long time since Zonghan had felt the sensation of charging into the thick of battle himself.
He had held high rank for so long now — since the middle years of the war against Liao, what he’d needed to weigh had, for the most part, been matters of grand strategy: large troop movements, siege warfare, an open assault on the field followed by the enemy’s collapse.
Across this world, over the past several decades, few had ever matched the Jurchens in strength; rarely had anyone managed to bring a blade so close to him personally — and on the few occasions that had happened, he had generally chosen to withdraw or break out beforehand.
What lay before him now was different.
The Huaxia Army fought with ferocity, but its numbers, after all, were not great; his own men, though they hadn’t fought particularly well of late, still had one good fight left in them.
If he pulled back now, the Jurchens would lose every chance they had — only by leading from the front himself, giving everything he had, might Heaven still grant the Jurchen people some measure of protection this afternoon.
The command banner advanced amid the roaring shouts, Jurchen soldiers fighting furiously all around; cannons were pushed forward, blasting black dust skyward. Zonghan advanced sword in hand, surrounded by his personal guard; arrows and crossbow bolts flew past him now and then, and his guards tried to close ranks tight around him, only to be waved fiercely away.
At some point, the Huaxia assault had begun to threaten the artillery position; Zonghan sent two hundred men to reinforce it, driving back the attacking Huaxia company — but before long, more small Huaxia units began slipping in from the flank as well, an inevitable consequence once that flank had already fallen into disorder. A small Jurchen unit would rarely have found the courage to charge straight in from the outer edge like this, but the Huaxia troops seemed to relish it; some appeared already within a few dozen zhang before being driven back by the thousand-strong unit around Zonghan.
The formation leading the assault at the very front had already been ground apart. Chala was the first to fall to a Huaxia blade. Wanyan Zhentu, after fighting fiercely, had one hand and one leg severed by a Huaxia soldier, and after taking several more wounds was carried off by his guards, barely clinging to life. On every side, small Huaxia units cut straight through one disordered Jurchen formation after another, drawing the troops around Zonghan himself into the fighting as well.
“Follow me — charge—”
Zonghan pressed forward with his sword, and his banner did rally a fair number of Jurchen soldiers, drawing them back together even after their earlier rout.
A Huaxia unit struck from the flank; a crossbow bolt flew over the heads of the crowd and struck one of Zonghan’s guards on the armor with a sharp clang. Someone threw a grenade; after the blast, roiling smoke rose, and the guards along the forward flank surged to meet it. Several mounted guards rode up close, trying to shield Zonghan from any attack that might come, but Zonghan waved his riding crop to push them back: “Don’t be reckless! If they throw a fire-bomb, you’ll all be caught in it—”
Amid the smoke on the forward flank, figures clashed and fell, blood scattering through the air with the flash of blades. Beyond the smoke, Zonghan heard someone shout: “Nianhan is here—”
“Kill him—”
“—Kill Nianhan!!!”
Within the swirling smoke, leading the charge was a Huaxia soldier built like an ox. His eyes found Zonghan across the field as he drove forward through the melee. Zonghan raised his sword: “Go kill him! A hundred gold pieces to whoever does!” Riders surged forward — but on one side of the field, a small band of Huaxia soldiers appeared as well, seemingly answering the call of “Kill Nianhan,” charging in to block the horsemen, and the two groups clashed.
The ox-built Huaxia soldier, amid the chaos not far off, was helping a wounded comrade to his feet; he took up his blade and came this way. Someone shot an arrow at him; he raised his shield to block it, his body drenched in blood. Zonghan glanced to his side, then toward the nearby slope — fighting raged everywhere he looked. He raised his longsword: “On my command!”
He roared: “Kill them—”
The formation pushed forward; the ranks behind lit fire-bombs and hurled them ahead. The handful of Huaxia soldiers there — no more than a dozen or so — scattered in every direction, scrambling for cover; some rolled into muddy ditches, some ducked behind rocks, and some were blown clean off their feet where they stood. Amid the billowing smoke, the front rank of Jurchen soldiers charged in. Zonghan watched as that same Huaxia soldier burst out of the smoke from behind a rock and cleaved one of his guards clean through the chest with a single stroke, blood spraying out as the guard’s body was flung two or three zhang through the air. That soldier then found himself beset on both sides by two Jurchen fighters, stumbling backward, hard-pressed — but as a wounded Huaxia comrade came to his aid, he swung his blade again, opening the throat of a Jurchen soldier.
“Good—”
Zonghan spurred his horse forward!
Blood surged hot in his chest; he rode like thunder, and in an instant closed the distance to that Huaxia soldier, bringing his sword down in a single overhead strike!
The Huaxia soldier’s body flung itself forward, using its own momentum to drive his longsword into the leg of Zonghan’s warhorse!
Blood sprayed; the Huaxia soldier, struck by the horse, tumbled and rolled across the ground. Zonghan, horse and all, pitched forward as well. Since the horse hadn’t been at a full gallop, its speed not yet at its peak, its forelegs — though slashed — only stumbled rather than collapsed outright, and Zonghan swung himself down from the saddle. He flung aside his longsword; the guards around him were shouting, “Grand Marshal!” Zonghan threw off his cloak and snatched up a broadsword from the ground instead, charging forward.
In his prime he had favored the blade; in recent years he had mostly given orders from behind the lines, wielding an imposing longsword instead — but in a moment like this, that sword, in the end, wasn’t good enough.
Every Jurchen general who had made his name in the early years of Jin had, without exception, been a warrior on the battlefield. Even in old age, Wanyan Loushi still delighted in personally leading a handful of elite men in armored assaults to seize cities. Wanyan Xiyin, though he mostly handled matters of governance now, could still, in single combat, best men like Wanyan Zongbi — men who would go on to earn fearsome reputations in history — without much trouble. Zonghan was no different. Decades of commanding armies from a distance had never let his own martial skill lapse; even now, blade in hand, he remained one of the finest warriors and hunters among the Jurchen people.
Tall of build, long accustomed to holding great power, he carried an authority and presence that far exceeded the ordinary man; blade now in hand, the chilling killing intent he radiated was enough to shake anyone to the core. The powerfully built Huaxia soldier climbed up from the ground, blood streaked across his face and forehead, Jurchen guards closing in around him, and ahead of them all, Wanyan Zonghan came charging in, blade raised. A flash of wild fervor crossed the soldier’s eyes; his teeth showed in a grin that looked, with the blood-froth at his lips, almost like mad laughter—
He drove off his legs and charged to meet Zonghan. This renowned Jurchen veteran, who had killed more men than could be counted, brought his blade down like a butcher striking his prey — and the Huaxia soldier, half a head shorter than him, swung his own blade up from below with everything he had! Steel flashed skyward to meet steel.
With a resounding crack, the two blades collided with full force in midair. Zonghan’s full-strength strike was, in that instant, forced apart; he staggered back half a step, while the Huaxia soldier surged forward half a step in turn, blade still raised, eyes blazing with fervor, blood-froth spraying from his open mouth as he roared in Zonghan’s face.
“Kill—”
Killing should be a celebration.
Ten-odd years had passed, and now First Company Commander of the Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Second Brigade, First Division of the Huaxia Seventh Army, Niu Chengshu, brought his blade down once more before Wanyan Zonghan. On one side stood a Huaxia soldier who seemed, at a glance, utterly insignificant; on the other, a Jurchen hero who had cast a shadow over this world for decades. Blade met blade, sparks bursting into the air, and in an instant, Wanyan Zonghan was driven back, stumbling into the crowd behind him.
The Jurchen soldiers around him surged forward to close the gap—