The Trap (4)
Overconfidence bred by victory after victory, and naked greed for plunder, had driven Ding Yuan's vast army into a death trap in the space of a heartbeat. They tried to slip out the back of the camp they had blundered into, but Ma Chao's and Pang De's forces came surging in like a flood tide, slaughtering the soldiers in the rear—there was no way out.
"We have to break through the front!!"
With Ma Chao and Pang De holding the rear and carving up their own men, the only avenue left was the direction Sun Qing had taken when he rode out in pursuit of Yan Xing. But for an army drowning in chaos, that judgment came far too late.
"Don't let a single enemy slip out!!"
Yan Xing—who had lain in wait with his ambushers and, once the lure had played out and he could at last reveal his true strength, taken Sun Qing's head in a single stroke—now barred the opposite entrance. On top of that, the force Han Yeong had led in the rear came up as fresh reinforcements and folded into Yan Xing's vanguard.
At his command the cavalry snatched up their bows and loosed as one volley, turning the soldiers who came scrambling out of the flames into human pincushions.
"What in blazes are you doing, you witless fools!! Get out of there, move!!"
Trapped in the flame-swallowed camp, Ding Yuan hectored his dull, lumbering soldiers without pause—but amid the screaming and the chaos, his commands went unheard. The only reason any of them held firm at all amid the carnage was—
"Pack in tight, block their advance, and get those shields up—hold fast! When the flames die down, a path will open!!"
—the dogged stand of a general named Xu Rong, commanding the Central Army from the rear. He had raced his own troops to the tail of the column and, keeping formation as unshakable as bedrock, begun to withstand everything the enemy pressed against them.
Fire, however, does not burn forever. For now it roared fiercely on the dry grass that fed it, but it could not last long. 'Hold out, and a gap will open—it must!!' So Xu Rong judged, and so he ordered his soldiers to stand fast. Under his command they closed ranks as one and, firm as Mount Tai, barred the way against the Liang Province host swirling in at their backs like a swarm of ants. Even with fierce flames raging on both flanks, he kept his composure and his cold clarity through sheer strength of will, working all the while to carve out a way of escape.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Xu Rong had been little more than the general who carried out Li Ru's stratagem and handed Cao Cao a crushing defeat. But in the annals of true history, as a commander under Dong Zhuo, he was a leader of rare caliber—one of the finest of the early Three Kingdoms era—whose command had earned him the distinction of routing both the Tiger of Jiangdong, Sun Jian, and Cao Cao, the Hero of Chaos who would one day found Wei, and of putting their very lives in peril.
Xu Rong's own soldiers moved in perfect unison at their commander's word, planting their shields to stem Han Yeong's army as it came on like a roaring tide. The plan had been to herd the enemy into the camp, let the soldiers' own panic cut Ding Yuan off, and take his head the moment he stood alone. But Xu Rong's ironclad defense refused to let it unfold.
"Huh. Never knew there was a man like that."
With Xu Rong's soldiers raising their shields and devoting themselves to the defense, Ma Chao felt as though she had run headlong into a wall.
"...I will have to deal with that general first."
Pang De, too, found her advance toward Ding Yuan cut off by Xu Rong, and so she raised her bow to remove him.
"...Hm?"
In the thick of command, Xu Rong felt something prickle at him—a wrongness—and turned his head toward it. There, at a distance, stood Pang De, calmly drawing a bead on him with her bow.
'...She means to hit me from a hundred and fifty paces?'
Even an archer confident in his skill would have found that range a struggle on a practice field, and on a battlefield where men fought for their lives, finding that kind of perfect focus would be next to impossible.
But Pang De's blue eyes were sharp as a hawk's, and without so much as a tremor she drew the string taut in one supple, unbroken motion.
'...Danger!!'
Sensing death in that stance, Xu Rong frantically snatched a shield from one of his soldiers. The instant he heaved it up, Pang De released the drawn string.
TWANG!!
With a vicious crack of splitting air, the arrow tore across the distance, shaved the shield Xu Rong had thrown up barely in time, and buried itself in his shoulder.
"Gahk—!!"
The shaft had struck his shoulder—but had he raised that shield even a heartbeat later, the arrow would have torn straight through Xu Rong's heart.
"General Xu Rong!!"
Arrow buried in his shoulder, face contorted with pain, Xu Rong lost his seat and crashed from his horse.
"Did you get him?"
"No. He only took an arrow to the shoulder and fell from his saddle. I doubt he's dead."
But when the general who had been holding the men in formation is thrown from his horse, even a line as tight as iron must begin to unravel.
"Now! Press in!!"
At Pang De's command the Liang Province cavalry smashed through the ironclad defense and set about carving up Ding Yuan's soldiers once more.
'Still... she actually hit that.'
It was a sight she saw every time they fought, and every time, Ma Chao could only marvel at Pang De's archery, which seemed nothing short of miraculous. Truly a goddess of the bow—she was the finest shot in all Liang Province, and she could well have called herself the Finest Bow of Liang Province without a soul objecting. Her martial prowess stood nearly level with Ma Chao's own, she carried the epithet of the White Horse General, and though her horsemanship fell a step short of Ma Chao's—the best in the province—it still outclassed most of Liang Province's officers.
'And every one of them is so outstanding...'
Every time she watched the other women display talents she did not possess—watched them burn so brightly—Ma Chao felt a nameless restlessness gnaw at her. It wasn't envy of gifts she simply lacked. Only the fear that Han Yeong might lose his heart to women whose charms ran along different lines than hers. The single exceptional thing Ma Chao could call her own, one no one else shared, was being Han Yeong's childhood friend. That, and nothing more.
"...Then I just can't lose."
Pang De's exploits set her fighting spirit ablaze, and Ma Chao went tearing off across the field on Shalifei, intent on taking Ding Yuan's head.
Han Yeong, who had handed even the rear troops over to Yan Xing, watched the battle unfold from a distance, guarded by Jia Xu and a small escort under Huche'er's watchful eye.
"Good. Keep this up, and Ding Yuan is finished."
One of Ding Yuan's officers had been holding the cavalry at bay with steady command, buying his side a good stretch of time—until Pang De's arrow cut him down.
'Going by his armor, he's Central Army... could that be Xu Rong?'
If it was, it explained the caliber of command that had kept Liang Province's men—swirling, trapped, with fire raging on every side—calm and in formation, grinding away the clock. Either way, the iron wall was broken now. All that remained was Ding Yuan's head.
'Ding Yuan has two choices left.'
Stand still and die under a rain of arrows—or run, and be cut down by Ma Chao or Pang De.
'Unless he smashes through the burning palisade and forces a way out, there is no escaping this.'
Trapped in the flames, with nowhere to flee. It was the very moment Han Yeong allowed himself to think the victory was sealed. Then—
"My lord! Something's coming from over there!!"
His adjutant shouted, pointing off to one side.
"...What is that?"
Judging by the wall of dust, a few dozen riders were driving straight for the burning camp.
"Damn it all! I said secure a retreat—NOW!!"
Even in the thick of the chaos, Ding Yuan was still swinging his sword and bellowing at his soldiers. But the officers and men staring death in the face had begun to defy him.
"Shut your mouth!! This is all your fault!!"
"Wh-what did you say!!"
"That's right! If you hadn't been blinded by plunder and called off the pursuit here, none of this would have happened!!"
It is the way of cornered men to lay the blame for their ruin at another's feet—and so the Central Army's officers and soldiers heaped curses and reproach upon Ding Yuan. Xu Rong had held the head of their formation resolved to die, and even that had been broken for nothing; now every man among them counted himself as good as dead.
"...Damn it, if only Big Sis were here at a time like this!!"
"If Big Sis were here, a palisade like this would be nothing...!!"
Wei Yue and Cheng Lian joined no chorus of blame; they only cried out for Lü Bu, hearts aching with longing for her. But those very cries only soured Ding Yuan's mood further.
'These bastards—dragged to death's door, and still they call for Lü Bu...'
True, with Lü Bu there, they might yet glimpse a hope of living. But by now she would be standing guard over the main camp, knowing nothing of any of this. And that was what gnawed at him: that this was precisely the crisis only she could answer—and that he, the man who had cast her aside, would be the one forced to call her name.
'...So this is how it ends.'
With his soldiers slipping beyond all control, Ding Yuan seethed at the bitterness of it—dead before he had even begun to savor his power.
CRASH—!!
Then the burning palisade burst apart with a tremendous blow, and splinters of flaming wood scattered into the air.
"Wh-what the hell!!"
"A log?"
WHAM!!
Logs lashed together with rope had been swung like a ram, smashing through the palisade that the fire had gnawed down to a charred skeleton. It was a tactic cavalry customarily used for battering down the inner gates of palaces, and in Bing Province it saw frequent service against the gates of bandit strongholds and tribal villages alike.
'...It couldn't be.'
Ding Yuan turned his gaze toward the breach—and there stood a crimson-haired woman, Sky-Piercing Halberd in hand, her voice ringing across the flames:
"Get out here, hurry!! We have to fall back—now!!"
"L-Lü Bu!!"
Lü Bu had come crashing into the inferno with Zhang Liao and several dozen riders, bent on dragging her own army back out of the fire. At the sight of the adopted daughter he had so envied, tangled emotions warred across Ding Yuan's face—indignation at her defiance of his orders, and beneath it, relief that a road to survival had opened after all.
'To think the day would come when I owed my life to Lü Bu...'
"Everyone withdraw!!"
The moment a path opened in that hellish blaze, the soldiers flung themselves bodily toward the breach Lü Bu and her riders had torn open.
"Don't let them get away!!"
The Liang Province cavalry saw the palisade come down and threw themselves forward as one to plug the gap. But what stood in their path was the war god of Bing Province—Lü Bu. Alone, she spurred her horse into a dead gallop and hurled herself headlong at the tide of Liang Province cavalry swarming like ants.
It looked like sheer madness—until the Sky-Piercing Halberd swung, and the whole face of the battle changed.
SHRRK!! SHRAAAAACK—!!
With a single stroke—only one—the foremost Liang Province soldiers went down, heads and bodies cut asunder, blood fountaining like a waterfall.
KRA-KOOM!!
A detonation no polearm should have been able to produce wrenched the taut nerves of Han Yeong's triumph-drunk army tighter still. And then Lü Bu began to whirl the Sky-Piercing Halberd in every direction, shredding the very air—crimson light flashed and flickered, and a wind of blood came howling through the ranks.
That thunderous roar snapped the spirit of Han Yeong's army—an army that had never once known defeat in Liang Province—as cleanly as a dry branch.