The Trap (3)
The stockade camp became a sea of fire in an instant.
The wind sweeping through the cold, parched air sent the blaze racing, and with oil already splashed across the timber stockades, the sparks spraying in every direction fused into a single completed thing — a ring of encircling flame that swallowed the camp whole in the space of a breath.
The stores they had taken for military supplies proved to be tinder as well, fanning the inferno's fury even higher.
Suddenly boxed in by roaring flames, the soldiers of Ding Yuan's army — their morale swollen fat with victory — found their minds simply unable to keep pace with the swiftness of it all.
FWOOOSH—!!!
"AAAAAGH—!!"
"S-Save me!!"
The men who had been hauling what they believed was grain, standing amid the dry grass, felt the wind whip their clothes into torches — and the result was a chorus of hideous screaming as they rolled across the ground wrapped in flame.
Fire arrows came sheeting in from both flanks; those unlucky enough to catch one squarely felt their skin sear and split, thrashing under the agony of burning alive.
Only moments before, these same soldiers had been drunk on victory after victory, arrogance swelling in their chests; now, watching their comrades char before their eyes and the camp vanish into a wall of fire, panic began to tear through the ranks.
Ding Yuan, whose world had narrowed to glory and plunder, understood that something had gone catastrophically wrong only after the fire attack had already closed its jaws on him.
...No. Don't tell me they kept falling back all this time — luring us here on purpose?
Cornered by the crisis, Ding Yuan finally grasped what Han Yeong's army had been after.
True, Han Yeong's men had bolted in apparent disarray again and again — but Ding Yuan, convinced of his own ascendancy and blind with hunger for glory, had chased them without a flicker of suspicion.
For the Bingzhou army, it was simply a way of life: whenever the frontier tribes broke and ran, you rode them down and exterminated them.
They had never once stumbled into an ambush or lost an open engagement, and victory had gone to their heads; their vigilance and their edge had dulled into complacency.
The result was this — caught square in the enemy's fire attack.
Even had a trap been laid, they would have smashed straight through it on the back of Lu Bu's overwhelming might. But Lu Bu herself was not here.
Excessive hunger for renown blinds even the seasoned, it seemed. The veteran Ding Yuan, underestimating the enemy, had let exactly this danger slip past him.
...Damn it all!! But if we push straight out of here, it changes nothing!!
Fuming as he was at being caught in the fire attack, Ding Yuan still judged that if they clawed out of the camp quickly and reformed their lines, the losses would not be ruinous.
If they escaped without grievous damage, then Han Yeong would have effectively thrown away the camp he had labored so hard to raise — the trade of a fool.
With that settled in his mind, Ding Yuan moved at once to gather his columns back into order.
"Don't panic!! We're getting out of here — move!!"
But—
Ding Yuan's commands never reached the ears of his officers and men, thrown into turmoil by the flames.
The death-screams of the doomed, the grotesque wailing of men burning alive — the chorus of horrors buried his voice where it stood.
Even at the best of times his command structure barely functioned, the soldiers having been gathered from scattered regions and thrown together without time to drill —
and even setting that aside, there was scarcely a man alive who could have kept his composure amid the pandemonium of being swallowed by fire without warning.
Only Wei Yue and Cheng Lian, who had led troops under Lu Bu, made any real attempt to bring the Bingzhou soldiers back to heel.
"What in blazes are you lot doing!! I said get out — MOVE!!"
At Ding Yuan's bellow, sword slashing the air, the generals beside him — still standing in open-mouthed bewilderment — scrambled to herd the soldiers into some semblance of order.
Unlike the officers who had bled in the field under Lu Bu, these men had spent the entire campaign hoarding credit at their superiors' backs and polishing their flattery; they had no instinct for a battlefield that changed in the space of a breath.
Crackle.
...I knew it would come to this.
Xu Rong, who had warned of a trap and tried to talk Ding Yuan out of the pursuit, ground his teeth hard.
It was never going to end with merely setting the camp alight. Anyone boxed in by flames could simply fight their way free, after all.
Something more was certain to follow.
And as if his foreboding had been summoned, a soldier from the rearguard came tearing into the camp toward Ding Yuan in desperation.
"It's a disaster!! Enemy forces have appeared at our rear!!"
The host that had lain hidden in ambush revealed itself on both flanks and smashed into the tail of Ding Yuan's column.
"Where's Ding Yuan! Stick that neck of yours out here, now!!"
"Don't let the arch-traitor who tried to replace the Emperor get away!!"
From the left charged Ma Chao, from the right Pang De — and at their head the troops began driving Ding Yuan's soldiers, who had been scrambling out of the flame-swathed stockade, back into the burning camp like game herded into a snare.
For the men trying to bolt through the very mouth they had entered by, the road home slammed shut as Han Yeong's army came thundering up behind them like a raging tide.
"General! Fire's broken out at the camp!!"
At last, the signal for the counterblow had been raised.
How many routs had they faked, how many miles of humiliating flight — all to buy the stage for this one fire attack?
Yan Xing, with Sun Qing hard on his heels, heard the report from the officer beside him, stopped mid-flight, and wheeled his horse.
"...Good. The luring ends here."
A pale frost-blue gleam, thick with killing intent, kindled in the eyes of a man who until now had known nothing but headlong flight — and a moment later, his orders rang out.
"All forces, about-turn!!"
At his command, the fleeing cavalry wheeled as one man and hurled themselves upon Sun Qing's army, which had been snapping at Yan Xing's heels.
Charging up from behind, Sun Qing had been unsettled too — flames were rippling over the camp where Ding Yuan lay — but when Yan Xing came galloping back at him, he only laughed and closed in.
He took the man for his own equal at best, and had fully expected him to bolt again in short order.
"Kwahaha!! This time, at last, the glory is min—"
But—
Yan Xing's spear came on at a speed altogether unlike anything before it — quick, vicious — and tore straight for Sun Qing's utterly unguarded throat.
SHLUNK—!!
Sun Qing, lunging in full swagger, never so much as reacted to Yan Xing's blinding shift before the point punched through his neck.
...Huh?
Throat skewered, he could not bear the shock; he pitched from the saddle, cracked his skull against the earth, and died on the spot.
The Black Mountain Bandits who had galloped exultantly at their chieftain's heels froze to the marrow at the sight of his death.
All this while, Yan Xing had traded passes with Sun Qing without ever pressing for a kill — precisely to fatten the enemy's arrogance and bait them along.
Having claimed a commander's head in the space of a blink, Yan Xing gave his soldiers their orders.
"We slaughter every bandit in front of us — then ride straight for Ding Yuan's head."
Fire surging from the camp meant the enemy had stepped into the trap. He had to answer it, and fast.
He spurred forward and began scything through the Black Mountain vanguard in great sweeping arcs of his spear, while behind him the cavalry gathered their reins and plunged in like a hedge of sharpened lances, shattering the bandits where they stood.
The Black Mountain Bandits were learning, in their very bones, the ferocity of the Liang Province cavalry that shattered the tribes of the northern frontier on nothing but the weight of its charge.
Liang Province's crack troops pressed in from both flanks of the rearguard, bearing down on Ding Yuan's host from behind.
"Don't let a single one of them out of that camp—!!"
Astride her white charger, Pang De surged forward on the heels of her own order and laid into the soldiers clawing out of the burning stockade with her crescent blade, granting no quarter whatsoever.
Ding Yuan's army, muddled senseless by the flames, could offer nothing resembling a response to her strokes, and died in droves.
SHRAAK.
Every sweep of the crescent blade drew a thread-fine red line across an enemy body — and from that line blood cascaded like a waterfall.
Under cuts swift as lightning, men died screaming with neck or torso cleaved clean through; the ground was lined thick with their corpses.
WHAM!!
"Wipe out every last one of them!!"
Ma Chao, for her part, thrust and wheeled her spear until it blurred into afterimages, mowing soldiers down. Ding Yuan's men, thrashing in desperation, could not begin to withstand her strength — they were hurled from their feet, dead before they landed.
With two generals worthy of the name "match for ten thousand" grinding in from either flank, the soldiers who had barely clawed their way free of the stockade perished to no purpose at all.
Ma Chao shook enemy soldiers off her spear as she fought, but her mind was elsewhere, turning over the whole anatomy of the trap they had sprung.
...Jia Xu.
Fa Zheng had long since taught her that no army could march far without a strategist — and Jia Xu, whose talents she had always eyed with suspicion, had proven herself more than worthy of awe.
Ma Chao didn't particularly like the woman, who broadcast a ripe, sultry charm and seemed chiefly occupied with beguiling Han Yeong — but faced with results like these, refusal to acknowledge her was no longer an option.
Unearthing just how deep Ding Yuan's greed for power ran, and how fiercely he envied anyone near it, then seeding rumor through Luoyang until he and Lu Bu were at daggers drawn and Lu Bu was struck from the army's order of battle — that alone had been staggering.
...But to think she would dangle the camp and the supply stores as bait, and open the whole affair with fire.
The "military stores" whispered about through the land — spread in league with Lu Bu's secret collusion — had in truth been nothing but oil and dry grass, quietly gathered from the surrounding districts.
Ma Chao was already famous across the Central Plains, and Pang De's name had begun to ring out ever since she took Hua Xiong — had either of them been seen fleeing in rout, the enemy might have smelled something wrong. To rule that out, they had set Yan Xing at the vanguard: a man entirely capable of cutting his way clear, but lacking the renown to draw scrutiny.
Then, after bleeding the enemy with engagement after fierce engagement, they had lured them to the ground where the camp stood and sprung the snare.
Just as predicted, the foe — arrogant off an unbroken run of victories, eyes glazed with glory and plunder — had swum straight into the net like fish.
It was the Arrogant Army Stratagem: goading the enemy into carelessness.
Ding Yuan's hunger for wealth ran deep, and so — exactly as calculated — the sight of military grain heaped mountain-high was not something he could simply ride past.
Dry grass had been packed into the decoy sacks disguised as grain, so the wind would lift it and carry the flames wider still, while the oil sent the fire racing outward at a dead sprint.
An army thrown together in haste, never properly drilled, its command structure already a tangle — Ding Yuan's host had had no choice but to be devoured whole by the fire attack.
And chained to that came the Empty Fort Stratagem — the trick of baring one's own main camp to strike the enemy from behind.
The instant Ding Yuan's men tried to flee the burning stockade, Ma Chao and Pang De came whirling in from both flanks of the rear at the head of their troops, and the enemy found no answer at all.
Jia Xu's merciless thoroughness — welding stratagem to stratagem into a single linked chain — sent a chill crawling down Ma Chao's spine.
Perhaps if Dong Zhuo had ever thought to use her properly... even the verdict at Didao might have gone either way...
A strategist one truly dreads to count among one's enemies.
Fa Zheng, hailed as a genius of strategy, and Jia Xu were not so far apart in overall ability — yet whether from sheer depth of experience, there seemed to be a few degrees by which Jia Xu ran ahead.
...Well. This line of thinking can wait.
SHHK!!
Ma Chao cut the thought short — and with it, the head of a Ding Yuan officer barking orders right in front of her.
First things first — take Ding Yuan's head!!
The gateway into the Central Plains was within arm's reach now.
Swearing that Ding Yuan would not slip her grasp, Ma Chao seized Shalifei's reins in a savage grip and drove forward toward her quarry, spear wheeling.