Hulao Pass (4)
Lü Bu's anguish had festered until it became a suffocating turmoil, and in the end she marched into battle resolved to die fighting. She had never believed for a moment that the treacherous Ding Yuan would honor his promise to her. If he broke it yet again, she would take his head even if it cost her her own life—she fixed that vow in her heart like a blade held to her own throat, and with it, turned her back on every problem staring her in the face.
But when Zhang Fei hurled her crude curses and raked at Lü Bu's shame, at the one thing she could never forgive, Lü Bu spurred her Xiongnu steed and charged headlong into the enemy lines to seize her.
"Scatter!!"
"Yes, ma'am!!"
As Zhang Fei drew Lü Bu out, the soldiers of Han Yeong's army moved with swift, practiced precision, exactly as the plan had been laid down beforehand. Command of the infantry went to Xu Huang, who until that moment had been occupied keeping the scheming courtiers from latching onto Liu Xie; now she stepped up to the front line. For the task of severing Lü Bu from her Bingzhou cavalry, she had been judged the better fit—more at home handling infantry than cavalry.
Inwardly, Pang De—ever conscious of Zhang Liao, and aching for the chance to settle their rivalry—mourned the missed opportunity, but it was the command of the lord she revered, and she accepted it without a word of complaint.
Taking Pang De's place at the front, Xu Huang directed her infantry to open a corridor on purpose, letting Zhang Fei and Lü Bu pass through unhindered. Lü Bu, blood-mad with the chase, was blind to everything around her, and simply kept galloping.
"Lady Fengxian! Something feels wrong here!! You have to turn back!!"
Zhang Liao, leading the cavalry in hot pursuit of the rider far ahead of her, shouted with suspicion and unease crawling up her spine—but her voice never reached Lü Bu's ears. She knew all too well how Ding Yuan had once given chase without a shred of doubt only to be swallowed by a fire attack, and watching Lü Bu ride straight into the same kind of lure, she began to grow frantic.
"Now!! Block them!!"
"Yes, ma'am!!"
The soldiers, drilled to a razor's edge under Xu Huang's merciless training—the kind that scarcely left them time to eat—converged at her word with startling speed, raising their shields in a solid, unyielding wall across Zhang Liao's cavalry.
'...Cut off!! So it was a trap after all!?'
Under Xu Huang's command, the soldiers of the front rank planted their shields and held like stone, and Zhang Liao gritted her teeth and hurled her riders at the infantry line to break it.
"Brace your shields and ready your spears!!"
The shields the front rank raised in an unbroken line might have been a single great wall, and from the gaps between them, spearpoints bristled out to halt the cavalry's advance dead. This was the fruit of the anti-cavalry drills that Xu Huang and Xu Rong had put their men through in Chang'an, training them against Xiliang cavalry. At the sight of spear blades gleaming with a cold blue edge, the charging horses reared as if on instinct and pulled up short—and in that instant, Xu Huang's soldiers drove their spears into the riders with all their strength.
"N-no—!!"
As their horses were run through and crippled beneath them, the Bingzhou cavalry lost their balance and tumbled from the saddle. For soldiers who lived and died by the horse, being unhorsed stripped away more than half of everything they were.
"I tolerate no mistakes!! Trust in what your training has made of you!!"
Coaxing her own men onward even as she swung her great axe to take enemy heads, Xu Huang gave the order, and the soldiers of the rear ranks raised their bows high and loosed as one.
"Victory belongs to us only so long as we hold them in place!! Loose!!"
The bowstrings of the archer-infantry snapped in unison, and a hail of arrows came surging over the shields toward the cavalry stalled on the far side. Thwack-thwack-thwack!! Struck by the cascading volley, the Bingzhou riders went down with short, tearing screams.
"Guh—!!"
Zhang Liao beat away the arrow-storm with her Azure Dragon halberds, hunting desperately for a way through. '...How am I supposed to break this?'
However much battlefield experience they had gained sweeping the northern frontier, their enemies had always been steppe raiders and Black Mountain bandits, fighting them horseback to horseback on even terms. They could not simply smash through regulars armed, down to the last man, with systematic anti-cavalry tactics. The woman with the massive axe had planted spear and shield to seal away the one advantage cavalry possessed—speed—turning every step of the advance into a fight of its own. And if Lü Bu were left isolated like this, the coalition's soldiers would come swarming like hornets.
'At the very least, I have to drive back that axe-wielding commander—'
"General Zhang Liao!!"
Just then, Gao Shun appeared—having halted the rout of Kong Rong's fleeing army and hurried back to the rescue—leading the soldiers of the Trapped Camp. At the arrival of a general whose martial prowess and gift for war rivaled her own, Zhang Liao brightened for the space of a breath, then hardened her face and shouted.
"General Gao Shun!! Lady Fengxian is in danger!!"
"Understood. All forces—break the enemy's line!!"
Zhang Liao called out to him, and he, every inch the commander who had spent long years drilling into step with her, swept the soldiers of the Trapped Camp forward into a head-on collision with Xu Huang's army.
While Xu Huang pinned Gao Shun and Zhang Liao in place, Zhang Fei hauled on the reins and brought her galloping horse to a stop.
'My job was to keep Lü Bu tied up, wasn't it?' That was how Han Yeong had put it—but Zhang Fei's fighting spirit burned too hot for that. The pride of a warrior. It was why, from the very beginning, she—along with Guan Yu, Ma Chao, and the rest of the generals—had refused Han Yeong's proposal that they all set upon Lü Bu together.
"This spot will do, won't it?"
Zhang Fei steadied her mount.
"...So this was all to isolate me?"
Realizing she had been cut off from her cavalry, Lü Bu's face twisted into something ugly, and she lifted the Sky-Piercing Halberd high.
"But what are you getting so angry for? It's not like I said anything untrue."
"......"
Lü Bu could not summon much of a rebuttal to Zhang Fei's words. No—there was nothing she could say. She knew as well as anyone that the things she had done were wrong; she was drowning in regret over them. And yet, a woman who had once lost her mother to foreign raiders could not bring herself to cast off the bond with the adoptive father she had once looked upon as her own flesh and blood.
"So then—after all that running, this is where you ended up?"
"...Running? Who's running?"
Zhang Fei grinned with easy confidence, and Lü Bu tilted her head slightly, puzzled.
"Finally. We meet."
"...You."
A white-blonde woman appeared, riding Shalifei, her snow-white Ferghana steed, and carrying a spear that Liangzhou's master smith had poured heart and soul into forging. It was Ma Chao, who had once crossed blades with Lü Bu and gone down with a wound in her shoulder. Whether to wash away the humiliation of her defeat at Luoyang, her fighting spirit had caught fire and blazed.
"Sorry—I'd love to take you one-on-one myself, but the General Who Pacifies the West gave orders that you're not to slip away under any circumstances."
When both Zhang Fei and Ma Chao had raised their hands at yesterday's council to be the ones to face Lü Bu, Han Yeong had instructed the two of them to take her together.
"...The General Who Pacifies the West?"
'So that's who he is?' Lü Bu dredged up her memory of meeting Han Yeong in Luoyang. At the time, she had judged him a decent enough sort, as warlords steeped in every corruption under heaven went—but now that he had turned against her, the thought chafed.
'Two of them, then...'
Perhaps worthy opponents to die against. Lü Bu had a rough measure of Ma Chao's strength from their earlier clash, but the other woman's ability was an unknown.
"Well then—let's begin!!"
Zhang Fei's Serpent Spear carved through the wall of air in a savage rush, and Lü Bu swung the Sky-Piercing Halberd to answer it.
CLANG—!!
"Guh—!!"
Lü Bu swallowed a groan at a strength greater than she had expected—but she was granted no leisure even for astonishment.
Whoosh—!!
She wrenched her head aside, and Ma Chao's spear sliced clean through her crimson hair. Weapons came flying in on its heels, streaking afterimages like an onrushing storm, and Lü Bu threw everything she had into defense.
Han Yeong had originally intended Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to handle Lü Bu, but at Ma Chao's request—she who carried the bitter memory of her crushing defeat at Lü Bu's hands—she had been placed here in Guan Yu's stead.
'What is this? Her movements are slower than they were last time?'
Ma Chao had fought Lü Bu one-on-one before, and something about this felt off. The aura that the Unrivaled Under Heaven once poured out, that crushing pressure she had felt before—neither could be found. Her face, too, looked hollowed out somewhere beneath the surface, like a person worn thin by life itself.
But this was war, and Ma Chao shoved the thought into a far corner of her mind. 'Two-on-one does a number on my pride, sure... but victory comes first.'
The three warhorses whirled and raged like dragons dancing entwined, kicking up clouds of dust in great, rough bursts.
"Th-this...!!"
His hands and feet shook uncontrollably. Watching from his camp, Yuan Shu was drowning in a thick, black jealousy.
Unlike his own soldiers, who had been routed in utter disgrace, Han Yeong's army had isolated Lü Bu, severed her from her cavalry, and was now pressing her to the wall. And over toward Hulao Pass itself, while Lü Bu was held fast, Cao Cao was leading her army in a relentless assault.
"This cannot be allowed to stand!!"
The legitimate heir of the illustrious house of Four Generations and Three Excellencies, reduced to watching the battle from camp without a single deed to his name. This was the same Yuan Shu who, even in the original history, had begrudged Sun Jian—a general under his own command—the merits he earned and the prominence he rose to. It went without saying that he loathed nothing more than watching some lowborn rustic from the frontier, a man beneath his station, pile up accomplishments. That Sun Jian's army had been kept out of this battle at Hulao Pass was likewise the doing of Yuan Shu's order, born of his jealousy at seeing others win glory.
'I cannot leave things as they are. How dare a creature like that, while I, Yuan Shu—!!' If this went on, Han Yeong would stand as the coalition's greatest contributor and claim the position of Grand General once Ding Yuan was destroyed. 'Absolutely not. It will not happen!!'
"Xun Zheng!!"
"Yes, my lord!!"
"When Lü Bu tires, lead the army out and attack!! We must be the ones to take her captive!!"
"Yes? But... the alliance leader has placed us under confinement—"
"Did my command not reach your ears?!"
Tormented by impatience and by the compulsive need to win glory worthy of his great house, Yuan Shu issued a reckless order.
"Is my word not reaching you?! Or have you become that concubine-born bitch's servant too?!"
Yuan Shao, leader of the alliance, had placed the lords whose blunders in the last battle had gutted the coalition's morale under confinement, which was why Xun Zheng had hesitated—but before Yuan Shu's ensuing roar, he found he had no choice but to obey.
"N-no, my lord!! We march at once!!"
He had already turned his back on the elders of the Runan Yuan clan sacrificed in Luoyang; if he could not now scrape together even a respectable achievement, the gentry of the Central Plains would flay him alive as a fool. '...It absolutely cannot be allowed!!' Yuan Shu's eyes burned with a deep, venomous envy.