The War Begins (3)
Arriving at Sishui Pass with a great army of eighty thousand, Zhang Yan made the audacious choice to pitch his camp directly in front of the gate.
He was a warlord whose reach spanned Bingzhou and Sili, and the host he commanded as leader of the entire Black Mountain Bandits casually numbered several hundred thousand. Set against that, eighty thousand was a paltry figure indeed.
The sheer scale of the Black Mountain Bandits—an army that dwarfed nearly every warlord under heaven—was one of the chief reasons Ding Yuan had sought to draw Zhang Yan in as an ally and join hands with him in the first place.
Zhang Yan left thirty thousand men to hold Sishui Pass itself and stationed the remaining fifty thousand in a forward camp erected before its walls.
To an outsider it might seem senseless to plant a camp in front of the very pass one was meant to defend, but Zhang Yan had his reasons.
The Black Mountain Bandits had built their trade on banditry in rugged mountain country, so mountain warfare was their specialty—but as men of Bingzhou, a region where foreign tribes prowled at will, they were every bit as practiced in horsemanship. That was why Zhang Yan chose the open field over a siege.
Bandits to the bone, he reasoned, they were better off flaunting the Black Mountain's ferocity by drawing on all their experience of ranging across plains and peaks than attempting a defensive battle they had never properly fought in their lives.
Besides, confident as he was in his own martial prowess, he took personal command of the fifty thousand and marched out to seize the initiative from the enemy.
Ding Jianyang. That cursed bastard...!!
Zhang Yan's resentment toward Ding Yuan ran deep. Only recently the man had been his partner in seizing the reins of the Luoyang government; now he was treating him less like an ally and more like a hired hand with every passing day.
Since rising to Grand General, Ding Yuan had grown more arrogant by the hour. With breathtaking gall he had even laid hands on the imperial storehouses—ostensibly to fund the restoration of the war-ravaged Sili Province—while filling his own pockets in the process.
Zhang Yan had thrown in under Ding Yuan's banner for one reason only: he coveted a high court post and the luxurious, ruinously expensive treasures locked in those warehouses. Never once had he intended to become the man's servant down to the marrow.
And yet when his men and Guo Tai's had set about pillaging Sili exactly as they had been given leave to do, Ding Yuan hadn't dared stand up to Lü Bu—only wrung his hands and muttered that there was nothing to be done.
Zhang Yan had no end of grievances against a warlord who couldn't keep a single subordinate in line and let her lead him around by the nose.
Without that bitch Lü Bu, he wouldn't amount to anything...
What was more, Zhang Yan simply could not fathom Lü Bu's character at all.
She clashed with Ding Yuan over the treatment of her men, the two of them at each other's throats—and still she offered up her loyalty, an arrangement so ironic it bordered on farce. And for all that loyalty, Ding Yuan refused to put her to use and did nothing but eye her with suspicion.
By any ordinary man's common sense, the relationship defied understanding.
I'll stack up enough merit to show that old fossil Ding Yuan I'm no general to be taken lightly.
Just as Zhang Yan was dreaming of crushing Ding Yuan's pride by routing the coalition army, one of his officers came bursting into his tent.
"Chief!! We've got trouble!!"
"Who are you calling Chief?! You address me as General of Chariots and Cavalry!!"
Having repelled Wang Kuang's army and carved out a battle honor, Zhang Yan had risen to the rank of General of Chariots and Cavalry—effectively the second seat in the military hierarchy—so he was acutely sensitive to the title people used for him.
"My apologies, General—the enemy has attacked!! Their numbers are roughly twenty thousand!!"
"Hmph. A measly twenty thousand of ragtag rabble, and they come swaggering all this way."
Even the ferocious soldiers of Bingzhou had never managed to stamp out his host, mighty as it was.
And in Zhang Yan's judgment, an army scraped together from every province but Bingzhou—men who had done nothing but be battered about by the Yellow Turbans until their fighting spirit was wrung dry—posed no real threat to him.
True, there were the forces led by the battle-hardened Tiger of Jiangdong, Sun Jian, and by Han Yeong, the warlord of Liang Province. But given the nature of a coalition thrown together from a dozen quarreling lords, he was certain they would never manage to bring that strength to bear.
"They drape themselves in a grand word like 'coalition,' but the enemy is nothing more than rabble whose hands and feet can't move in step. Ride them down with the cavalry and grind every last one of them into the dirt!!"
"Yes, sir!!"
The officer carried Zhang Yan's order to each of the chieftains, and they rode out to meet the coalition's vanguard.
Barely a quarter of an hour had passed—hardly long enough for a cup of tea to steep—when the man came scrambling back, white as a corpse.
"General!! It's our side that's being slaughtered!! You have to fall back, now!!"
"What—!?"
Reeling at his subordinate's words, Zhang Yan tore out of his tent and made for the battlefield.
The enemy was outnumbered more than two to one—yet his men were failing utterly to hold the soldiers pressing in from four directions at once.
"What in blazes is going on out there!!"
Even the official histories spoke of the Black Mountain Bandits in awed terms, citing a strength of one million—quite possibly an exaggeration, but a measure of their staggering scale all the same.
Certainly, on numbers alone their host was fearsome, and their leader's charisma was beyond dispute—enough that for all his low birth, he bore the epithet Flying General, the very same one carried by Lü Bu.
But as the old saying goes, wherever five people gather there is bound to be at least one piece of trash. However numerous an army might be, one with no organization and no discipline was nothing but rabble—and rabble breaks easily.
In mountain warfare they might well have had the advantage. But this was open ground.
Perhaps they'd convinced themselves that ranging across Bingzhou made them masters of the open field. If so...
They had made the mistake of running into the wrong opponents.
Taking the vanguard, we had split our twenty thousand into four battalions of five thousand each and driven them toward Zhang Yan's camp—and just as expected, the Black Mountain host came swarming at us like an army of ants.
There was a reason the old adage warned that the few cannot withstand the many: in battle, sheer numbers contributed overwhelmingly to morale and to the winning of wars.
What was more, the lords of the coalition were all busy weighing their own gains and losses, hanging back to protect their skin.
But there was no need to worry in the slightest.
Quite the opposite—advancing with a smaller force would make the Black Mountain Bandits complacent in their numerical superiority and draw their army out to meet us head-on.
And our vanguard was lined wall to wall with fierce generals each called a Match for Ten Thousand Men. If we were outnumbered in men, we had only to crush them with the quality of our commanders. Simple as that.
At the center of our line, Ma Chao swung her spear a single time, and the cutting edge of the enemy vanguard shattered and fell away.
WHAM—!!
"Move aside, all of you—!!"
Astride her beloved steed Shalifei, Ma Chao led the Xiliang cavalry in an Arrowhead Formation, plunging like a bolt loosed from a bow and smashing through the enemy line at a single point.
She had shaken off the slump of her defeat to Lü Bu completely. Her skill was sharper than it had ever been, overflowing with vitality and unbreakable stubbornness.
"S-Splendid Ma Chao!!"
Even the notoriously vicious Black Mountain Bandits of Hebei had heard the name of the woman who had blazed across Xiliang against the tribes pouring down from the north—and they turned tail in terror.
"D-don't be scared!! She's nothing but the bitch who got her ass kicked by Lü Bu at Luoyang!!"
The words came from Bai Yao, one of the Black Mountain commanders trying to steady his terrified soldiers—but they only succeeded in touching the dragon's reverse scale.
"That little bastard..."
Crack—her jaw set, her face twisting at his words as she ground her lips between her teeth.
The light in Ma Chao's eyes had gone cold, lethal blue at Bai Yao's remark. She burst through the enemy line in a flash and charged straight at him.
Shhk—!!
Reining in her galloping horse in a heartbeat, Ma Chao took the head of the commander who had dared touch her reverse scale.
"UWAAAAH—!!"
"General Bai Yao has fallen!!"
Having claimed the enemy commander's head in a single stroke, Ma Chao whirled her spear in every direction and raged so savagely that she was, quite literally, mincing the Black Mountain Bandits into paste.
SHRAAAAK—!!
Her power, rampaging across the field without hindrance, bore down on the bandits who had once made all of Hebei tremble until they cowered.
It went without saying that for outlaws, the loss of a commander crumbled their battle line in an instant.
And Ma Chao was not the only one at the vanguard carving up the enemy ranks with martial brilliance.
Thwack-thwack—!!
"GWAAAGH!!"
"Arrows! Watch out—!!"
Pang De, drawing her bowstring, was picking off the enemy officers barking orders to the Black Mountain Bandits with unerring precision.
"There she is!! Stop her from loosing!!"
The Black Mountain bands closed in on her to pin down her bow—but that, too, was a poor choice.
As the bandits rushed her, Pang De put away her raised bow, took up her crescent blade in its place, and began reaping the enemy before her.
SHHK—!!
Every sweep of the crescent blade from atop her white horse turned Black Mountain Bandits into guests who would never see home again, and she drove onward without pause to link up with Ma Chao's force, smashing the enemy front head-on.
If this is all they have, it isn't so different from the tribal suppression campaigns back in Xiliang.
But—this battlefield did not belong to us alone.
SHLUK—!!
On the left flank, a man with sun-bronzed copper skin and auburn hair swung his spear clean through an enemy commander's throat.
"Yeah!! Enemy general!! This Sun Bofu has taken you down—!!"
With that hearty roar, Sun Ce lopped off the Black Mountain officer's head.
A future founding lord of the Kingdom of Wu, and the Little Conqueror whose title was drawn from the Hegemon-King Xiang Yu himself—his martial prowess gave up nothing even against our own fiercest generals.
Watching Ma Chao's exploits seemed to set his competitive spirit ablaze, for his movements were growing nimbler with every passing exchange.
No matter how many heads the Black Mountain Bandits could count, they were, in the end, bandits and nothing more.
Men who had never once fought to protect a thing in their lives—whose blades were drawn only to steal the bread of others—could never withstand a regular army led by Matches for Ten Thousand Men.
"Good! Now's the time!! Drive them into the ground!!"
Heartened by his son's exploits, Sun Jian swung his beloved Ancient Ingot Sword in great arcs and began claiming the heads of enemy commanders in turn.
At his side, the veteran generals Cheng Pu, Han Dang, and Huang Gai, who had long guarded his flanks, each raised their own weapons and mercilessly ground the Black Mountain Bandits to pieces.
Watching from the rear as the sheer gulf in the quality of our officers overwhelmed the enemy host, I turned my gaze toward the coalition's encampments.
Just as predicted.
The instant our vanguard pushed past merely holding the savage Black Mountain bands at bay and began outright crushing them, the allied lords hurriedly marshaled their own troops and made ready to march.
Their intention was never simply to come to the vanguard's aid.
...I suppose they'd rather not sit quietly and watch all the glory get carried off without them.
But this day they would earn nothing.
The fifteen thousand under Cao Cao and Bao Xin were already looping back through the forest, moving under cover with orders to strike Zhang Yan's army from behind—and, beyond that, to seize Sishui Pass itself.