The Battle of Laling
The fortress line that Lu Zhi had perfected from my original concept—known as the Great Encirclement Operation—was not a strategy any ordinary person could hope to replicate. In this era without radios or wireless communication, where one had to rely on carrier pigeons carrying a few scribbled words or messengers galloping on horseback, actively controlling a fluid frontline and turning the entire Shandong Peninsula, a stretch longer than most national borders, into a single encirclement net was practically impossible.
It all came down to whether one possessed the ability to overcome the physical limitations of information transmission through sheer personal talent and innate strategic vision. If the army had been like the old Prussian forces, where every single soldier was so well-educated they could execute mission-type tactics, it might have been different. But to compensate for the imperial army’s level of education—which wasn’t all that different from the Yellow Turbans—one needed a commander with truly transcendent ability.
General of the Household Lu Zhi possessed that ability. His successor, Dong Zhuo, did not. That tiny difference was all it took.
In truth, Dong Zhuo was not as incompetent a general as history claimed. The process by which he grew into a major warlord in Xiliang involved his own martial prowess, as well as genuine leadership and charisma capable of commanding his officers. His tactical ability was real. In Xiliang, simply maneuvering to crush the nomadic tribes had been enough to solve every problem. Moreover, he already possessed the engineering skill to build fortresses in Xiliang’s harsh environment and drive out the nomads. The defensive strength of each completed fortress was actually superior to the mobile fortresses Lu Zhi had designed. So it wasn’t as if his tactical insight was lacking.
But the Great Encirclement was something else entirely.
The defensive strength of individual fortresses? That wasn’t the issue. Each one only needed to be strong enough to hold off five hundred Yellow Turbans. Since they had to build, dismantle, and advance hundreds of them every single day, overly sturdy fortresses would actually become a hindrance.
The natural borders formed by the mountains and rivers surrounding the Shandong Peninsula—provincial boundaries, whatever—required a strategic vision capable of predicting the Yellow Turbans’ movements in advance, along with psychological warfare to guide those movements. They also needed simple, makeshift fortresses that could be erected and torn down in a day or two.
Though Huangfu Song’s army had served as the driving force, slipping through the gaps in the fortress line like a needle to tighten the noose, in this era it still took days just to deliver the operational plan. The only real difference was that Lu Zhi could anticipate the enemy’s moves in advance, while Dong Zhuo could not.
And yet, despite that single difference, the Great Encirclement ultimately collapsed.
In a way, it was a mistake that could only be called bad luck. There had been a unit scheduled to dismantle its fortress and advance, and the date of that advance had simply been moved up by a few days. Yes, just a few days.
If they had waited those few days, Huangfu Song’s army would have driven through the gaps, scattered the Yellow Turban hordes, and then it would have been simple to mop up the dispersed rebels while building new fortresses. Because of that tiny gap of a few days, Zhang Jue managed to escape from Ji Province.
The western side of Qing Province was too thick with fortress lines leading toward Luoyang, and the south was still untamed jungle. Fleeing there would have meant becoming prey for nature itself. In the end, they fled past Laling toward the vicinity of Bohai and Ji Province. The great blunder that would be remembered throughout the history books occurred in the summer of 184.
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The farmers’ accumulated rage finally erupted in the form of yellow headbands. The rebellion broke out across eight of the Han Empire’s thirteen provinces—excluding the capital region and the remote frontier of Xiliang—swelling to millions upon millions.
The Yellow Turban army led by their religious leader and supreme commander Zhang Jue knew how to make use of that sheer number. They swiftly seized Qing Province and Xu Province and began their march on Luoyang. The imperial troops, who apparently hadn’t even received proper training, were crushed wherever the Yellow Turbans set foot. It seemed only a matter of time before they would take the emperor’s head as he hid in Luoyang.
At least until they encountered the bizarre fortresses created by that monster called Lu Zhi.
Looking back, they weren’t much. Just simple field positions surrounded by wooden palisades. Even a thousand Yellow Turbans could have overrun one in half a day. Individually, they truly meant nothing.
But there were simply too many of those meaningless fortresses.
One hundred and fifty in Hejian, one hundred in Anping, fifty in Yangping, forty in Dongping, one hundred and ten in Pengcheng, fifty in Xiapi. Those were only the numbers reported directly. Many regions hadn’t even sent reports, so the actual total was undoubtedly far higher. It was as if the imperial army was being plucked straight from the fields—wherever his forces went, a fortress had already been planted every half-day’s march.
If they tried to detour around one, another fortress waited. If they avoided that one too, yet another appeared. If they slept for one night and rose, a new fortress stood before their eyes. If they pulled their army back to avoid them, another fortress would rise behind them.
In reality, countless fortresses were being organically repositioned under Lu Zhi’s orders, but to those on the receiving end, it felt as though they were fighting an army of tens of millions. Even though this was an era without machine guns, it was also an era without field artillery or tanks. Among the Yellow Turbans—nothing more than a peasant uprising—there were precious few soldiers who even knew how to shoot a bow. To break the fortresses, they had no choice but to pile the ground high with corpses.
The march on Luoyang stalled. The Yellow Turbans, who had once held eight provinces at their peak, were eventually driven all the way to the Shandong Peninsula, left waiting for their final day.
The once somewhat sparse fortresses gradually grew denser. The distance between them, once half a day’s march, shrank to three shichen. The few remaining passages that could still be forced through became proud pathways for General of the Left Household Huangfu Song’s army to trample the once-mighty Yellow Turbans.
Even when they barely managed to recapture a fortress, all they gained were a few hundred still-green logs and a bit of food. It was an exchange that didn’t even begin to compensate for the blood they had shed.
Then, in that summer when they waited only for death, word arrived that the heavens had not completely abandoned Zhang Jue. The General of the Household Lu Zhi—the man who had completed this hellish fortress line—had been dismissed from his post.
“This is our only chance! North! We must break through to the north and await the next opportunity!”
“Great Worthy Leader! The north is that monster’s territory!”
The monster of the northeast, the human butcher Gongsun Zan. They had received reports that his army was descending through Changli. They had also heard that his forces were literally grinding through tens of thousands, already hundreds of thousands of Yellow Turbans as they advanced.
“It’s fine! There are still one million three hundred thousand Yellow Turbans left in Guangzong! As long as their arrows don’t exceed a million, we win!”
Of the millions they had once commanded, only one million three hundred thousand remained—a pitifully shrunken number compared to the beginning. Yet they had not declined so far that they could not attempt one final march. History had proven that leaders driven to the brink would always roll the dice.
And history occasionally permitted such gamblers to hit the jackpot. Dong Zhuo’s petty blunder overlapped with the goddess of fate’s permission, allowing a million-strong army to break through the fortress line.
North. North. Ever northward.
Behind the breached line lay abandoned fortresses scattered everywhere. Only then did Zhang Jue realize that those insane fortresses had been built and abandoned in real time. Yet strangely, he no longer felt deceived. All that remained was respect for Lu Zhi, who had succeeded with a plan so mad no other word could describe it, and a mixture of contempt and gratitude toward the Han imperial court that had dismissed such a man.
“It’s Gongsun Zan’s army! Those cavalry are Gongsun Zan’s horsemen!”
It was around that time that Gongsun Zan’s scouts finally encountered the Yellow Turban horde.
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“Yellow Turbans! A massive horde of Yellow Turbans is approaching from this direction!”
Near Lanan County in Qing Province, the scout from the Liaodong army who had been advancing alongside the garrison of a dismantled mobile fortress delivered strange news.
“Scale?”
“O-one million or more!”
“Are you certain?”
“The entire coastline is packed solid with Yellow Turbans!”
“...Guide me. I’ll see for myself and make the judgment.”
This was strange. Before my master’s encirclement had been completed, perhaps, but the net was already finished. If they were trying to concentrate their forces on one point and break through, Huangfu Song’s army should have been able to strike at their soft underbelly. If that happened, this primitive-ancient-zergling hive mind would soon have its head severed and rocket-delivered to the emperor. The headless Yellow Turban swarm would either revert to wild zerg and return to being ordinary farmers or become one of the countless bandit groups labeled A, B, or C.
Besides, even if the Yellow Turbans had huge numbers, the question of whether they could actually operate a million-man army was another matter entirely. Setting aside issues of supply and encampment, there was a physical limit to how much ground people could occupy. Roughly ten to twenty thousand troops could cover a decent-sized hill behind a village. A hundred thousand could densely pack a tall mountain like Seoraksan. And a million—the size of an entire Korean peninsula if laid side to side.
Numbers were violence, but violence that could not be controlled was meaningless.
If they could fill an entire coastline… perhaps around fifty thousand? I followed the scout up the mountain on horseback.
Correction. I had underestimated the population mobilization capacity of this primitive ancient Chinatown.
Just as the scout had said, Yellow Turbans covered every visible inch of land from the shoreline all the way to the mountains on the opposite side. From one end of the horizon to the other, the yellow headbands—their identity and friend-or-foe identifier—dyed the entire field.
A few years ago, fields dyed golden with ripe grain had looked so beautiful. Now, fields dyed yellow with the headbands of the Yellow Turbans looked utterly terrifying.
“Goddamn it, seriously…”
An operation of this scale should never have been allowed to gather. To even reach Lanan, they would have had to pierce five layers of fortress lines. Each of those lines, even if it only bought time, should have gained them several days. And those few days would have been enough for a messenger to reach General of the Left Household and for the Han All-Stars to assemble and launch an assault on the hive mind.
In other words, something had gone wrong. Strategy was an activity prone to blunders, but if a blunder this catastrophic had occurred, it was highly likely that one of the higher-ups had pulled a—Fengxian warlord—move. Meaning they had clearly surrendered the fortresses without resistance. That would explain why no messenger had been sent, and without a messenger, the Avengers who should have stabbed the soft underbelly could never have formed.
Which meant we—only about ten thousand men, more than half of whom were former Yellow Turbans—had to face this horde.
“We’re pulling back! Prepare to retreat immediately!”
At least with that many troops, it would take them several shichen just to reach this position. Throughout history and across cultures, the larger something was, the slower it moved. Controlling that many men and deciding on a direction would require constant stopping and starting, slowing their already sluggish advance even further.
We returned to the fortress where we had spent the previous night, explained the situation, dispatched messengers to nearby fortresses, and connected the gaps between the fortress lines with walls of negative height—trenches. Since we had no guns and arrows were not particularly effective when fired from inside pits, the idle infantry spent the entire day gathering stones and piling them high along one side of the trench line. The cavalry moved without rest, confirming the enemy’s intended objectives.
Those of us who prided ourselves on our strength, myself included, cut down every tree in front of the trenches to create as much open ground as possible. Since we were already cutting wood, we carved wooden stakes, dug countless pits, and buried them.
There was no way we could kill all of them. In that case, in this “Western Front” created by humanity’s concentrated malice, we would buy as much time as possible and wait for the hive mind’s head to fall.
We worked without rest—digging earth, cutting trees, driving usable branches into the pits… By the time our bodies were screaming from the endless repetition, a scout’s urgent cry rang out.
“They’re almost here! Less than half a shichen away!”
We deliberately exposed the appearance of our horse archers to lure them in the desired direction. Troops we couldn’t use immediately had already retreated to the rear to rebuild the dismantled fortresses. Only the throwers and a portion of the heavy crossbowmen remained, finishing their preparations to face a million-man army.
“...Liu Bei, got any ideas?”
“If it were only a hundred thousand, I might be able to do something with my sworn sisters… but can’t your miraculous charge break through, brother?”
“There’s no way I can pierce a formation that thick. Once cavalry get their feet tangled, it’s over.”
“Should I buy us some time?”
“Save that for when we retreat. The area ahead is a mine—no, a trap field. I don’t even remember exactly where I dug all the holes, so for now… haa.”
It was infuriating. The fact that I was facing death at the hands of mere tutorial monsters for stage one—the Yellow Turbans—and that some new General of the Household had attempted a Fengxian warlord meta two thousand years too early.
There weren’t that many arrows left in the fortress. Even if the archers fired without pause, they would run out after five or six volleys. Although we had gathered stones while digging the trenches, the total amount we had collected wasn’t nearly enough to fill the human wave that stretched from one side of our vision to the other.
“We hold them here for two shichen. Once the heavy crossbowmen run out of bolts, they retreat. The grenadiers retreat according to plan once half the throwing stones are gone. Cavalry… let’s earn our keep today.”
““Yes!””
No one said things like “I’ll treat you when we get back” or “Let’s survive and meet again.” The ones who had said such things were all dead. Well… even the ones who hadn’t said them had mostly died too, but those who kept their mouths shut at least had slightly better odds of survival.
“Don’t shoot until I give the signal.”
Our army numbered just over ten thousand. Roughly a third of those ten thousand hands had been assigned to logging, and three thousand hands had somehow managed to turn the hundred paces in front of the fortress into wasteland. Tree stumps remained scattered everywhere, and the logs we hadn’t been able to clear became natural breakwaters obstructing the enemy’s advance. In the few patches of ground that could still be stepped on amid this mess, hidden stake traps lay waiting alongside the pits. There was no need to waste precious arrows and stones just yet.
Gradually, the Yellow Turban horde came into view.
As expected, there was no space for an ambush. I climbed to the top of the watchtower to at least throw out some trash talk.
“Surrender! I will spare your lives! I am Gongsun Zan of You Province!”
“If you’re Gongsun Zan, then I’m the Hegemon-King Xiang Yu!”
Tsk… it doesn’t work anymore, huh. A bad reputation is easier to forget than one might think. Especially in this Three Kingdoms world where people are slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
No matter how many people I had shown the mysteries of the human body, the blood that had actually stained my own hands numbered fewer than a few dozen. It might work on scattered remnants or leaderless Yellow Turbans who had simply banded together, but I had not yet earned enough of a fearsome name to make properly commanded Yellow Turbans freeze in their tracks.
Then there was no helping it.
“If you want to die, come and try! The first one to step forward will be the first to die! I swear it!”
I received the heavy crossbow—an arbalest—and nocked a bolt. The distance was roughly two hundred paces. Thanks to the technological level of the first century, two hundred paces was nearly maximum range. But just as China had always been the tanking nation and Japan the close-range damage nation, Korea was the… well, the long-range damage nation.
Since arrows were far easier to reuse than bullets, we had been able to conduct marksmanship training quite regularly. The zero on my heavy crossbow was perfectly set.
I hooked my stirrup over the watchtower railing and steadied my breathing. Fortunately the wind was calm. It was blowing from behind me, so there shouldn’t be any major issues. I aimed at the only Yellow Turban on horseback, held my breath, and pulled the trigger.
- Thunk!
With the sound of metal springing free, a bolt—barely half the length of a normal arrow—flew.
- Thud!
Without even a decent helmet, the commander wearing only a yellow headband lost his life just like that.
“Next!”
“U-uaaah! Charge! Charge!!”
“G-General, should we shoot?”
“Wait!”
We had to wait. There were still plenty of obstacles left. We couldn’t afford to waste precious bolts already.
- Crunch!
The ground gave way, and four or five Yellow Turbans at the front vanished into the hole. The ones behind them paused for a moment, but the press of bodies from the rear pushed them forward again. They began filling the pits with human corpses, just like lemmings charging toward a cliff.
- Crunch! Crunch! Craaaack!
The pre-dug pits revealed themselves one by one.
“Wait! Don’t shoot yet!”
Not yet. Not yet. There was still fighting spirit left in their eyes. So we had to wait just a little longer. Just a little more.
“Open fire!”
“Fuck! I said wait… fuck!”
- Thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk!
The former Yellow Turbans had lost their nerve. If we had drawn them in further, the visual shock would have been maximized, but the poorly trained peasant soldiers couldn’t overcome their terror and pulled the triggers anyway.
“Goddamn it, open fire! Don’t bother aiming, just shoot! Save the stones! How far do you think you can throw them anyway!”
It felt filthy, but if the shooting stopped here, things would get even worse. The enemy’s morale would rise thinking our resistance was weaker than expected, while our own troops’ morale would drop after receiving orders they couldn’t understand by their standards. That would lead to annihilation.
The arrows would run out faster than anticipated, but it looked like we could just barely buy enough time for the ones who had retreated earlier to lay down the trench line.
I drew back the arbalest’s string and loaded the second bolt. Amid the Yellow Turbans being torn apart by booby traps and arrow storms, I spotted some trying to reform their lines.
- Thunk!
Those were my prey.
“Waaaaah!”
“Throw stones! Keep throwing until your arms fall off!”
The Yellow Turbans’ war cry rang out, and we answered with my homeland’s folk game of stone fighting. The heavy crossbowmen, who had run out of bolts first, retreated to the rear, followed by the grenadiers.
“Liu Bei, we’ll have to buy some time… can you do it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry to your sworn sisters as well.”
“It is an honor.”
“If we can hold for one shichen, the sun will set. Although summer hasn’t ended yet… I doubt they’re the type who can continue advancing after dark.”
This was a world without flares, let alone flashlights. Moreover, it was an era when mountains were teeming with bears, wolves, and tigers. Night marches were difficult even for modern elite troops, so there was no way this primitive ancient Chinatown’s proto-Protestant revolutionary army would choose that hardcore route.
Therefore, the opportunity was now.
Instead of a cavalry lance, I took up a thick moon blade. I idly touched the nine jincheonroe hanging at my waist, then once again tried to calm the boiling irritation in my chest.
No, correction. It refused to calm at all.
Although the enemy numbers had decreased, even by the most generous estimate we had only reduced them by the tens of thousands. My vision was still completely filled with Yellow Turbans. A mere hundred or so cavalry could not possibly handle such numbers.
“If we survive this, I guess I’ll have earned the title of Ten Thousand Man Slayer. One man for every ten thousand, after all.”
“Kid… why didn’t you retreat?”
“If my eldest sister is staying, how can I run away? There is no such phrase as ‘abandoning family’ in the dictionary of us Yan people.”
“I see.”
“Indeed.”
I grabbed the horse’s reins and lightly tapped its flanks with my feet.
“I, Gongsun Zan of You Province, stand here! Whoever wants to die first, step forward!”
Holding the first jincheonroe in one hand and swinging the moon blade in the other, I charged into the Yellow Turban horde. It was a decision the me from my original country would never have made, but my body, filled with irritation and rage, naturally took the lead.
If things went wrong, I’d detonate everything I had left and flee to Goguryeo. I was dead serious.