The Battle of Didao (3)
"...It has gone exactly as predicted."
Fa Zheng, stationed at the rear and taking reports from the couriers as they came in, let a quiet smile spread across her face.
"Word has arrived that Dong Zhuo's detached force has clashed with the troops we stationed on both wings."
"Just like you said it would."
Several days earlier, Fa Zheng had come to him with a warning: Dong Zhuo's army might well aim for the one weakness of our cavalry — a force bred for the shock charge, and therefore dangerously exposed to attacks on the flanks — and she had asked leave to reorganize the army's order of battle accordingly.
Skillful horse archers like Gongsun Zan's White Horse Volunteers could meet a threat from the side with room to spare, loosing arrows as they wheeled. But our Xiliang cavalry, forged for the headlong charge, found it terribly hard to answer an enemy pressing in from either flank.
"It's a shame Didao is little more than mountains and open ground. If the enemy had come at us through forest, I would have welcomed them properly — with fire attacks, and traps dug in advance."
She who had been granted full command by me plainly took delight in conducting the battlefield exactly as she pleased, yet she seemed to feel no small regret over the terrain she had to fight on.
The old warlord generals, none too pleased with how this fight was being run, were being kept firmly in hand by my father and Chenggong Ying — which left only Fa Zheng and the Ma siblings at my side.
"Incredible!! Military Advisor!!"
"That's right!! How can you come up with ideas so brilliant?!"
Hardly a season into their first war, the Ma siblings — the very distillation of wide-eyed innocence — heaped praise upon Fa Zheng's keen insight and wisdom.
"It isn't me who's brilliant. It's those fools who planned their campaign with such carelessness. They looked down on our army utterly — why, they even sent an envoy to taunt us, remember?"
True to her blunt tongue, Fa Zheng raked Dong Zhuo's tactics with caustic scorn. They had judged Han Sui's army slow-witted, assumed the advantage in the coming war would be theirs, and so sent an envoy to provoke them. She herself had been seated at that banquet when it happened, and the insult she remembered well — her brilliant mind never let even the pettiest slight slip away; it was engraved beyond erasure.
"I suppose it's because our army leans so often on the same trick — the Xiliang cavalry crushing everything by brute force, with General Ma Chao at the spearhead..."
Judging that Dong Zhuo's army would keep a wary eye on the famous Ma Chao, she had instead set Pang De at the vanguard — a general whose reputation lagged far behind her martial skill — and baited them into complacency. Field an unknown commander, and even the most seasoned veteran would look down on her. And the ploy had paid off: two enemy generals had been drawn out and cut down.
I nodded along, echoing her words.
"The detached columns must be having a miserable time of it. Ma Chao isn't the only fine general our army has."
Dong Zhuo's army labors under a colossal delusion. It is true that Ma Chao, who built her name carving up barbarian tribes, stands first in our ranks for valor and renown — but this army is no Ma Chao one-woman show.
Even setting aside Pang De, who is her equal, we possess several more officers of outstanding swordsmanship and courage.
The soldiers of Dong Zhuo's army who had slipped in to strike our flanks would be learning what hardship meant — after all, I had put troops into the hands of men whose skill at arms ranked among the very best our army had to offer, and posted them exactly where the blow would fall...
Driven by the wind that swept hard across the field, the white banner at the rear flew brisker than ever.
On the left wing, Guo Si's column — advancing along a bypath to fall upon the supply depot and put its stores to the torch — ran headlong into a force that had been crouched in ambush among the hills since long before they arrived.
"Gwaaagh!!"
"Wu Xi!!"
Guo Si reined up in horror at the sight of his aide-de-camp — headless in the space of a heartbeat.
"Hmph! All that guff, and this is all you amount to!! You're Guo Si, are you?"
With the keen podao that had taken Wu Xi's head in a single stroke resting against his shoulder, Ma Teng turned his gaze upon Guo Si. Like his daughter, he carried the blood of Ma Yuan, blessed from birth with a warrior's strength and mettle; his fame as a hero of Xiliang ran so high that the foreign tribes dreaded his very name.
"...Ghh, you Liangzhou hick!!"
Guo Si swallowed his groan at that raw power, leveled his blade at Ma Teng, and spat venom.
"Haha!! Not anymore, I'm not!! This is Ma Teng, Administrator of Wuwei, speaking!!"
Poverty in his youth — the fate of a fallen house — had once made him flinch at every sneer about his origins, but the man who had risen to Administrator of Wuwei no longer carried that old inferiority.
"Ma Chao's been snatching every chance at glory from under my nose, so this time I'll take your head and chalk up a feat of my own!!"
"Shut your mouth!!"
Guo Si threw himself forward like a beast cornered at last. There was not a trace of finesse in the movement — pure animal lunging — but the murderous aura rolling off him was threat enough.
CLANG!
The moment Ma Teng's podao met Guo Si's blade, Guo Si — utterly overmatched in sheer strength — felt his stance torn apart.
Th-this bastard — where does he get this kind of strength?!
He strained with everything he had to keep his seat in the saddle, but with Ma Teng's next stroke already falling, Guo Si hastily hauled his blade up over his head to guard.
WHAM!!
The podao came down with a shriek of parted air and hammered Guo Si's blade low.
Nor did it stop there. Ma Teng simply lifted the podao and brought it crashing down again — the same labor, repeated without pause.
WHAM!! WHAM!! WHAM!!
In Ma Teng's swordwork there was, unlike his daughter's, scarcely a trace of finesse to be found. He merely hacked down with bovine simplicity, like a woodcutter swinging his axe — the habits ground into him by a boyhood spent felling timber had passed straight into his martial art.
Th-this lunatic!!
Krrk.
Each strike fell with the stolid honesty of a man splitting firewood, and under blows charged with his immense strength, cracks began to spider across Guo Si's blade.
"...D-damn it all!!"
At last his sword could bear no more and burst into shards, and Ma Teng's podao split Guo Si's skull the way one might cleave a ripe melon.
Shlick—!!
With Guo Si's breath snuffed out, Ma Teng loosed his trademark booming laugh from the bottom of his lungs and declared his victory.
His soldiers, fired by that burst of spirit, came surging up in wild elation and swept Guo Si's men from the field.
On the right wing, Li Jue likewise found himself locked in a pitched fight with Han Sui's army, which had taken up its ground well in advance.
"U... Uncle—"
SCHLUK!!
The spear came free, and blood fountained from the young officer's chest like a waterfall; he slid from his horse without a sound.
"Li Xian!!"
Li Jue's grief burst out of him as he screamed the name of his nephew, butchered before his eyes.
"How dare you!! My own brother—!!"
Li Li, Li Xian's brother, came on in a fury of his own, sword raised against his family's killer.
CLANG!
But the blade met that immovable spear and was swatted aside without the slightest effort.
"...Wide open."
Yan Xing said it quietly, almost idly, flicking the sword away — then drove his counterstroke home in the same breath, punching through the throat of a man whose stance had already collapsed into nothing. Away from Han Yeong's company, where his banter ran light and easy, he was every inch the hardened warrior now.
"Kgh—!!"
To officers green in war and clumsy of blade, the thrust had simply been too fast to see. Li Li dropped with a single strangled scream, gone to join his brother.
"Y-you!! How dare—how dare you—!! My nephews—!!"
Even a man who had slaughtered his subjects by the thousand and drowned a province in tyranny held his own flesh and blood dear, it seemed; Li Jue raged, weeping tears of blood.
"It was you who started this war."
Yan Xing rolled the spear once in his grip and leveled it at Li Jue.
"Then you should have braced yourself for at least this much."
"Shut up!!"
He had no ears for that coldly accurate point. Li Jue abandoned reason entirely, flung his body to his rage, and charged.
The emotion drowning his eyes was engraved with a single vow: to tear apart the mortal enemy who had butchered his beloved nephews before him.
"I'll kill you!!"
Guo Si, having lost a mere subordinate, had at least kept hold of some scrap of reason; Li Jue, robbed of kinsmen he cherished, hurled himself forward like a man who had forgotten what fear was. He brought a wild boar to mind.
KRRAK!! CLANG!!
Sword blows of unrestrained savagery hammered at Yan Xing from every side, and he merely turned them aside at his leisure.
Nothing but a beast.
To charge blind, swallowed whole by rage — that was the mark of a third-rate officer. There was a time when Yan Xing had been the finest warrior in Han Sui's army; then Ma Chao and Pang De had appeared — once-in-a-generation dragons of war, freaks of natural talent — and he had found himself nudged, however gracefully, toward the rear.
But Yan Xing possessed something those two did not: years upon years of real combat, banked since boyhood. That experience, and the instincts honed since his youth, did not so much as tremble at the killing intent prickling his skin — they let him read each incoming blow with icy clarity.
Spear sweeping in smooth arcs, he turned aside every berserk stroke of the beast that came at him.
"Why—why?!"
Blow after blow swallowed by Yan Xing's spear, never once landing clean, Li Jue loosed a raw scream — and his movements, quite naturally, grew wild and wide.
Now!!
CLANG—!!
The instant Li Jue's motions spread wide, Yan Xing — who had been waiting for exactly that gap — snapped his spear around with a veteran's economy and knocked the sword clean from his hands.
The blade went spinning through the air, tumbling end over end, and vanished into the distance.
"...D-damn—!!"
Disarmed of everything, utterly defenseless, Li Jue felt Yan Xing's spear punch straight through his throat.
Yan Xing drew his blade, took the head of Li Jue — who might have been called one of the two great wings of Dong Zhuo's host — in a single stroke, skewered it upon his spear, and lifted it high.
At that roar rolling across the field, the soldiers under Li Jue's banner lost their stomach for the fight; they were cut down where they stood or threw down their arms and surrendered to the force Yan Xing led.
And so met a wretched end the fierce generals Li Jue and Guo Si — butchers of the frontier tribes, and men whose gift for war had set them apart even among the Four Robbers of Dong Zhuo's army.