Snowball Fight (2)
As expected, the moment the snowball fight began, it turned into a completely one-sided offensive. I darted from tree to tree, ducking behind cover as snowballs came hurtling in from behind me.
They closed the distance at terrifying speed, slamming into my body and bursting apart on impact. Thankfully, they were still just snow—even thrown by Ma Chao, a Match for Ten Thousand Men, they didn't hurt all that much.
"Han Yeong! You're dead—!!"
For all her talk of killing me, the gloom had lifted from Ma Chao's face, and a smile was brimming at the corners of her mouth. It wasn't the battle-drunk grin of a warrior, but something closer to the pure, unguarded smile she used to wear as a child, back when the two of us ran wild together as playmates.
Somewhere along the way, she had gotten swept up in the fun herself; a smile playing at her lips, she hurled snowball after snowball with all her might.
WHUMP!!
There wasn't so much as a pebble hidden inside it, and yet the snowball struck the tree with a dull, heavy thud before bursting apart. The speed it came flying at was about on par with the pitching of a decent Major League pitcher back in my modern days.
As expected of a Match for Ten Thousand Men. That was the kind of prodigious strength befitting a general of that rank.
This time, too, the snowball tore through the air, grazed my cheek by a hair's breadth, and slammed into the tree behind me with a dull whump! If she'd decided to play some nasty prank and packed a rock into it, I'd have taken a critical hit and been bleeding out on the spot.
Well, Ma Chao would never pack a rock into a snowball and throw it at me. Mischievous as she was, she'd grown up enough to know the difference between playful fun and a prank that crossed the line.
SMACK!!
Another snowball came screaming in. The white projectile smashed against the tree I was hiding behind and burst apart, scattering into fine grains of powder.
In answer, I packed a snowball of my own and hurled it at her.
"Where are you even aiming?!"
But the gap in our physical abilities was simply too vast; Ma Chao slipped aside and dodged it with ease. Short of a surprise attack, there was no way I was landing a proper hit on her.
Before long, the exchange had devolved into a halfhearted back-and-forth, snowballs flying this way and that without either side gaining ground. And then—
POW!!
A snowball about the size of a fist in each hand, Ma Chao kicked off the ground and came charging straight at me. I broke away and ran, but she ran me down in no time, and I took one of those snowballs square to the face.
"Gahh!!"
Cold flooded over me as it struck, and Ma Chao wrapped her arms around my body and drove me straight down into the ground.
The ground was blanketed in snow, so the landing was soft enough—but the moment I hit it, a chill spread out from the small of my back and swallowed me whole.
In an instant, Ma Chao had straddled and pinned me, claiming the mount position, gripping my head tight as a beaming smile spread across her face. It was the smile of a mischievous little imp.
"Guess it's over now?"
"......Yeah. Don't tell me it's what I think it is?"
But my uneasy premonition proved dead on—her smile only deepened.
"You know me so well. That's right."
With the prodigious strength she was born with, Ma Chao seized my face and shoved it straight down into the snow.
Once the snowball fight started, time flowed past like a river in spring. The battle had begun in the morning, yet the hours had already slipped into afternoon; sunlight poured down from above, setting the white snowfield ablaze with brilliance.
Ma Chao—the girl who had forcibly buried my face in the freezing snow—was still panting for breath, yet her face looked thoroughly refreshed as she asked:
"Haah... haah... I won, didn't I?"
"......Yeah. You did."
Judging by how utterly satisfied she looked, I must have gotten on her nerves far more than I'd realized. My own face, having been buried in the snow, had flushed a deep red.
Our strength spent, we paid no mind to hygiene or filthy clothes—without a word of negotiation, we both made a bed of the snowfield at the same time and flopped onto our backs. This was exactly why I'd told her to come in comfortable clothes; I'd known the dirt and snow would ruin anything nicer.
Ma Chao must have felt both refreshed and unburdened, because she let out a soft giggle. And so we lay there gazing up at the sky, savoring a moment of peace so complete it was hard to believe the world was in chaos.
"......Han Yeong."
Ordinarily, her stamina would have been more than enough to overwhelm mine—but she'd drilled in the martial arts since morning and then burned what was left on the snowball fight. Catching her breath for a moment, Ma Chao asked me:
"What is it?"
"You said if I won the snowball fight, you'd tell me something. What was it?"
Having thoroughly enjoyed a snowball fight with her childhood friend for the first time in ages, Ma Chao had suddenly remembered what Han Yeong had said at the very beginning.
"You said you'd tell me if I won. What was it you wanted to say?"
"Ah, that......"
I turned my head toward Ma Chao. She'd run herself ragged sprinting back and forth across the snowfield, and there was a trace of fatigue on her face, but......
"Feeling better now? Like something that was stuck in your chest has finally come loose?"
"...What?"
"You've been down ever since what happened a while back. Lost your spark, too. I'm asking if you're feeling a lot better now."
"........."
Ma Chao's eyes widened slightly as she stared at me. A flicker of surprise stirred in her clear, jade-green eyes.
Just as she was now suspecting, this had been my true purpose all along. To help her shake off the gloom that had settled over her—letting the enemy's commanders slip through her fingers one after another, then losing to Lu Bu—by letting her cut loose in a snowball fight, a shared memory from our childhood.
There had never been any words to give her in the first place. I'd called her out here simply to comfort her with a snowball fight. And it had been the right call, too—because this was about Ma Chao.
"...You did all this just to comfort me?"
"That's right."
"Why? I'm......"
"There you go again, getting all deflated."
"Mmph—!?"
I pinched Ma Chao's cheek and pulled, stopping her expression from sinking any further. It was soft and squishy between my fingers—a rather pleasant feeling, all things considered.
"There's no need to be so hard on yourself."
Propping myself up on one arm, I began to tell her everything I wanted to say, a gentle smile on my face.
"This age of chaos is crawling with warlords who've got decades of experience and cunning behind them, while the two of us are so young we haven't even come of age. People might look down on us for our lack of experience—but flip that around, and it means our potential is limitless."
Compared to the grand dream of unifying the realm—a goal whose very name sets the heart soaring—it might not amount to much, but we had already accomplished a great deal in the Yong and Liang provinces. We had begun to improve the lives of the common people who suffered and starved at the hands of the foreign tribes. We had crushed the rebel uprising that otherwise would have dragged on for years more, and dragged out the madman who'd styled himself a king.
In the course of that, we had struck down Dong Zhuo, the tyrant we'd been forced to clash with, seized his forces for our own, and secured a bridgehead toward the Central Plains. Countless commoners who would otherwise have died were alive because of it.
And though we'd failed to capture Ding Yuan in the last battle, the course of history had changed: Liu Xie, who was supposed to ascend the throne as a puppet emperor, had instead been invested as the Prince of Fufeng and now rested under my protection. Thanks to that, I couldn't speak for Empress Dowager He, but Liu Bian had found a path to survival, keeping both his throne and his life—and Liu Xie had escaped the fate of becoming a puppet.
More haste, less speed, as the saying goes. It fit Ma Chao's situation perfectly. I put it to her in the form of an old classical idiom.
"There are old sayings, you know—'yanking up the seedlings won't make them grow any faster,' and 'the more you rush, the further you fall short.' Hurry too much, and you'll never achieve the very thing you're chasing."
"......"
I couldn't tell whether the classical allusions had landed, but at some point Ma Chao had begun listening to me in earnest, hanging on my every word.
"Compared to Lu Bu, who's in the prime of both body and experience, you still fall a little short. But you're still young, Ma Chao—and that means you carry more than enough potential within you."
Ma Chao's martial prowess and valor had been judged by Cao Cao—the very man who unified Hebei and the Central Plains—as comparable to Lu Bu's. Coming from Cao Cao's eye for talent, that assessment carried real weight.
"Even if you can't beat Lu Bu right now, don't put yourself down for it. Don't belittle yourself as lesser than her and work yourself up over it."
She hadn't even reached her twentieth year—nowhere near the age at which she'd truly make her name in the chronicles. Her body had yet to hit its prime, and her experience was still green. But I believed that once all of it ripened in its proper season, matching Lu Bu blow for blow would be far from impossible.
Brushing the last of the snow from Ma Chao's hair with my hand, I brought my long speech to a close.
"Because the Ma Chao I've watched grow up is the finest general there is—greater than anyone."
One could call it a slight exaggeration, an overblown bit of flattery—but considering her martial skill had once fought Zhang Fei, one of the mightiest warriors in the Three Kingdoms, to a standstill, it was a fair assessment.
At my words, Ma Chao's eyes wavered almost imperceptibly, and she bowed her head low.
...Did I lay it on too thick? Now that the long speech was over, I felt a touch embarrassed.
Well, it beats being stingy with praise. Better to give credit where credit was due than to hoard compliments and let things grow awkward between us. I counted that among the arts of leadership, too.
In any case, if we lay around like this much longer we'd both catch our deaths of cold, and there were people who'd worry. It was time to head back. With that thought, I sat up, brushed the snow from my backside, and turned my head toward Chang'an.
"Let's start heading back. The others are probably waiting for us......"
"...Haah, honestly."
Just then, Ma Chao seized my wrist and pushed herself up.
"Ma Chao?"
Startled by the strength of her grip, I looked up at her—and her snow-white face was burning crimson. Some emotion had surged up within her; her eyes blazed with a heat like kindled fire.
"It's because of you."
Ma Chao raised her hand and grabbed me by the collar.
"What do you mean—!?"
Whatever Han Yeong had been about to say was cut off as Ma Chao, collar still in her fist, yanked him toward her with all her strength......
Over his dry, chapped lips, a soft, moist warmth swept down and covered them in an instant.
A stillness settled over the two of them, faces folded close together—and in that same breath, a chill winter wind came sweeping past, scattering flurries of snow through the empty air.