Unrivaled Under Heaven vs Splendid Ma Chao (1)
A blood-red whirlwind came tearing across the field.
Each swing of the Sky-Piercing Halberd—a weapon grown men could scarcely lift at all—spat out a savage thunderclap, and fountains of blood geysered up across the battlefield.
"Flee! Run for your li-i-ives—!!"
"GRAAAAGH—!!"
The Xiliang cavalry, who boasted the fiercest charge in the Central Plains and had made the blood of those vicious barbarians run cold more than once, were cut down where they stood without ever managing a proper defense. Those who raised their spears to block found the halberd's keen blades shearing through weapon and wielder alike. It was calamity made flesh—they were like frail humans swept away by a flooding tide.
And the one conjuring this impossible spectacle was no army, but a single general. Lu Bu, Fengxian. Unrivaled Under Heaven, meaning no soul in all the world could stand against her; War God of Bingzhou; and Flying General, the commander who flew across the battlefield—title after title, and every one of them pointed to a single person. Charging alone, single rider on a single mount, she looked for all the world like a tiger, lord of the mountain, carving through a pack of wild beasts. Even Dong Zhuo, arrogant as he was, had heard mere rumors of her and begun weighing both caution and an offer of recruitment—her presence beggared description.
"...Why is Lu Bu here?!"
Watching her appear out of nowhere and run wild across the field, I couldn't hold back my astonishment. The general we cut from the army rolls with the discord stratagem—why would she show up here, of all places? It was a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky.
Even in the official histories, Lu Bu's personal valor had been exceptional; in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it was reborn outright as that of the mightiest general alive, one without rival under heaven. In the original history, too, the sight of her—outnumbered, yet seizing the momentum against Dong Zhuo's elite troops, who held the Emperor's person and fielded Liangzhou soldiers, and then dominating them outright—was enough to draw gasps of admiration from many. Had Lu Bu not fallen for Dong Zhuo's ploy with Red Hare, and had she instead campaigned loyally at Ding Yuan's side, it would have been Dong Zhuo, not Ding Yuan, who met his ruin.
I secured Red Hare precisely to prepare for a situation like this... Of course, given that neither Ferghana horses nor treasure had tempted her, it was doubtful she would have come over even for Red Hare.
"...My, this falls outside every projection."
Jia Xu, too, felt her usual languid poise freeze over at the sight of Lu Bu storming onto the field and dumping ash over a meal that had just finished cooking. She hadn't entirely ruled out the possibility of Lu Bu taking the field when she was struck from the roster—if we had pressed a head-on showdown, sending Ma Chao and Pang De out to crush Ding Yuan's vanguard, then Ding Yuan would have hung back instead of taking command in person as he now had, and he would certainly have thrown the valiant Lu Bu into the vanguard. So after setting them at odds, we had avoided any decisive engagement and deliberately fled the field again and again, planting in Ding Yuan the confidence that victory was his for the taking. Victory after victory would convince him he could win without Lu Bu, and he would have kept her posted on camp guard. And so, drunk on triumph and drunker still on his own consequence, he had of course left the very woman he envied and watched warily parked in the rear—and drowning in complacency and vanity, he had walked straight into our fire attack.
It doesn't look as though that old man Ding Yuan saw through my scheme... He seemed neither to have caught on to the discord stratagem nor to have joined hands with Lu Bu to strike back. After all, her entire command amounted to a single aide and a few dozen horsemen. If he had seen through the scheme and meant to counterattack, he would have handed her far more soldiers.
...Don't tell me she's gone rogue? Defied army orders and stormed onto the battlefield? Nothing else could explain the situation. Heaven's fortune, it seemed, was smiling on Ding Yuan.
Lu Bu was grinding the cavalry to pieces like nothing less than a war god descended upon the age.
"What is this?! This is all you've got?!"
As if they hardly counted as an appetizer, she carved straight through the Xiliang riders trying to punch past her toward Ding Yuan, slaughtering them outright. Unlike when I had seen her before, her belligerent streak was on full display, and she butchered the soldiers with cold, methodical cruelty. It was true that her childhood had taught her to cherish the common people and to treat her own side generously; true, too, that she held genuine affection for Ding Yuan as her adoptive father. But none of that ever made Lu Bu a merciful general. Barbarian or Black Mountain Bandit, anyone who showed her enmity—every enemy that swarmed her was slaughtered without a shred of mercy. The blood and flesh they spilled spoke plainly enough for why she had earned the name Unrivaled Under Heaven.
"Don't you dare look down on me!!"
One grizzled rider, hunting for an opening with a veteran's cunning, lunged at her flank with his spear—but Lu Bu jerked her head aside and slipped it by a hair.
"...Yeah, now that's more like it!!"
No—judging by her expression as she coolly appraised the thrust, she was wearing a smile of pure relish.
Swoosh!!
The halberd flashed out like a streak of light, and the rider's head leapt high into the air and flew. Several more surrounded her and came charging with their spears, but she merely pirouetted in place and swung the Sky-Piercing Halberd—her cherished blade drunk on crimson—down in a vertical arc, carving a red half-moon through the air.
KRA-KA-CHAAANG—!! SHWAAAAH—!!
A single blood-red line scored straight across the field. The soldiers mid-charge had the keen points of their spears shatter to fragments, their upper bodies cleaved apart in one stroke, and they fell from their saddles spouting blood like waterfalls.
"F-fire! Loose the arrows!!"
One of the officers leading the troops, judging there was no answer in a head-on fight, gave the order to shoot. The soldiers keeping their distance from Lu Bu drew their bowstrings as one and loosed at the target. A rain of arrows came sheeting down, thick as a torrential downpour. Any ordinary soul would have despaired at the sight; Lu Bu only grinned, slow and thoroughly entertained. She whirled the Sky-Piercing Halberd in her hands like a waterwheel, striking away and turning aside every incoming shaft. The arrows, their heads snapped off as though rebounding from a shield of impossible resilience, dropped pathetically to the ground.
"...Impossible."
"...Th-that's not possible."
A war god, plain and simple. To stretch a point, it was as if the soldiers were witnessing the second coming of Hegemon-King Xiang Yu, the peerless hero hailed as matchless from antiquity to the present. Han Yeong's army—morale soaring to the very heavens now that the fire attack had succeeded and victory was in hand—began to lose its will to fight before her crushing display of might. The Sky-Piercing Halberd, crescent blades mounted on both sides, was dyed red with fresh blood and radiated an eerie, bewitching glow.
Seizing that opening, Ding Yuan slipped out of the camp with the soldiers who had survived the fire attack and was pulling his army back. To think I would owe my life to Lu Bu defying my orders... His feelings were hopelessly tangled. He resented her for flouting his command as she pleased, yet first and foremost he was profoundly relieved simply to be alive. ...But if it ends this way, her name will only climb higher. The whole point of this battle had been to take Han Yeong's head without Lu Bu's help and blazon his own fame across the realm—and that plan had burst like a soap bubble. Choked with inferiority and resentment, Ding Yuan wrenched hard on his reins and ground his teeth. Now that she had saved his life outright, he would never again be able to treat Lu Bu with contempt.
...That's the Flying General, Lu Bu?
Shock rippled through everyone who witnessed Lu Bu's martial feats, and Ma Chao was no exception. On the march to Luoyang, Han Yeong had warned her, time and again until his mouth went dry, to beware the Flying General; Ma Chao had waved it off, thinking he fussed too much. But the prowess she now witnessed with her own eyes was beyond anything she had imagined.
Ma Chao had done her share of one-sided slaughter against rebel troops—work closer to butchering civilians than battle—but Lu Bu's opponents were the Xiliang cavalry that she herself and Pang De had poured heart and soul into forging. Those men were a different class entirely from the soft garrison armies of the Central Plains, or from the rebel forces—lacking any discipline worth the name or professional training, little better than a ragtag mob. She could not have sworn, hand on heart, that she could match what Lu Bu was doing against the Xiliang cavalry. Even a rough gauge of the woman's prowess made it plain: she stood above Ma Chao.
...But on a battlefield, you don't always get to face someone weaker than you. Yet along with the shock, a competitor's hunger to cross blades with the Unrivaled Under Heaven herself set her blood on fire. And I can't just let Ding Yuan slip away like this, either. Coldly speaking, the aim of this battle was not to beat Lu Bu but to bring down Ding Yuan. If they let him escape here and Lu Bu was formally taken into service and took the field, the strategic picture ahead would swing badly against them. She even remembered how furiously she'd fumed when Red Hare let Dong Zhuo slip the noose at Didao. To let an enemy chieftain escape twice running—this time she truly would not have the face to look Han Yeong in the eye.
...I absolutely cannot let him get away. The goal she had pledged herself to since childhood stood right before her eyes. Her dream of helping Han Yeong bring peace to the people who suffered along the frontier—Liang Province above all—was within arm's reach. All that remained was to run down the retreating Ding Yuan and take him, and it would be done. And she could not simply stand and watch the cavalry she had trained with such devotion being cut down. With an enemy unlike any she had ever faced raging before her, emotion boiled up through Ma Chao's innately combative nature, and her grip on her spear clenched harder than it ever had. Snapping the reins of her beloved Shalifei, she charged straight at Lu Bu, who was stemming the tide of pursuers.
"What's with them? Could they be any more bland?"
Seeing the Xiliang cavalry cower before her, Lu Bu couldn't hide her disappointment. They toppled Dong Zhuo, so I'd looked forward to this... Were my expectations too high? Her own army was in full retreat at the moment, which meant her task was to buy a little more time.
"Ding Yuan's getting away! We absolutely cannot let him escape!!"
The moment Lu Bu spotted an officer of Han Yeong's army issuing orders to the Xiliang cavalry, she charged him. Removing the enemy commander was the most basic play on any battlefield.
"Die—!!"
"Kuhk!!"
CLANG!!
A spear that had cut in at the last instant took the blow in the officer's stead.
"...General Ma Chao?"
...Krrk-kak.
Ma Chao's spear had locked against Lu Bu's Sky-Piercing Halberd, grinding out a rough, razor-edged shriek.
"...I'll take it from here. Go capture Ding Yuan."
"...Y-yes, ma'am!!"
The moment the aide spurred his horse into a run, Lu Bu swept the Sky-Piercing Halberd across, aiming for his neck—but Ma Chao checked her once more.
"...Oh ho."
The young warrior who had stopped her strikes twice now had roused Lu Bu's interest. Judging by her face, she put her in mind of the general who, like herself, had lately thundered into fame across the Central Plains.
"So you're Splendid Ma Chao?"
It was a question brimming with certainty. The peerless beauty with silk-soft white-blonde hair and limpid jade-green eyes was exactly as the rumors had painted her.
"That's right. And you're Unrivaled Under Heaven, aren't you?"
Ma Chao, closing in with her emotions reined in tight, showed not a trace of being daunted by the woman's oppressive presence, and asked back with a bright, unclouded smile.
"And if I am?"
"...Simple."
THWANG!!
Ma Chao swung her spear to knock the Sky-Piercing Halberd away and cried out with all her fighting spirit:
"I, Splendid Ma Chao of Xiliang, have come for your head!!"
"...Hah!! Now this is fun!! Come at me, then—!!"
KWAAANG!!
Ma Chao's spear crashed against Lu Bu's halberd, spitting out a monstrous peal of thunder.