Hulao Pass (1)
Yuan Shao was not the only one wary of the Han Yeong faction gaining power while it commanded such a mighty host from Yong-Liang Province. The other lords, all scions of great aristocratic houses, quietly murmured among themselves as well: if the strength of a frontier warlord like Han Yeong swelled any further, it boded ill for them all.
Yuan Shu above all, who had quarreled with Han Yeong openly at every turn, glared at his every move with undisguised displeasure.
"GRAAAAH—!!"
Having arrogantly assumed the vanguard assaulting Sishui Pass was doomed to fail spectacularly, Yuan Shu vented his fury by flinging his lavish ornaments about the room in a fit of nerves. Any one of those pieces would have fetched enough grain to save commoners starving through a famine; to Yuan Shu, they were nothing but things to throw.
Now that Han Yeong—whom he had always dismissed as a snot-nosed brat—was piling up one great feat after another, he shook from head to toe with indignation.
"Damn it all!! A frontier hick like that, throwing his weight around and strutting about..."
Yuan Shu hated the way the war was flowing. He ought to have been rejoicing in the coalition's victories, but he was a petty man who could never look kindly on another's success.
His plans had begun going awry the moment Han Yeong set foot on this stage. By rights, he himself—trueborn heir of the empire's most illustrious house, bathed in the glory of the Yuans of Runan—should have stood as supreme leader of the coalition raised to purge the traitor Ding Yuan, conducting a war at once magnificent and elegant. And with the Yuan household in Luoyang annihilated by the tyrant's cruelty, he had more than ample justification to punish the villainous rabble with his own hands.
But the one who actually claimed the leadership was Yuan Shao, the concubine-born wretch he so despised. It galled him, too, to watch the other lords wag their tails before that lowborn woman, scrambling for her favor. And to top it all off, that mere Liang Province bumpkin Han Yeong had ridden out at the head of the vanguard and was collecting glory like a harvest.
He had been certain they would be humiliated by the Black Mountain Bandits, whose notoriety for savagery was the stuff of legend. Instead, they had put their valiant generals up front, unraveled every trap that had given the whole coalition grief, and walked away with even Zhang Yan's head as a war trophy.
At this rate, that Liang Province hick is going to become the great hero who topples Ding Yuan and seize the reins of power for himself!!
He hardly needed the reminder: the eunuch uprising had already won Han Yeong a direct connection to the Prince of Fufeng, and as a warlord he commanded a military strong enough to mobilize a hundred thousand men. Left to his own devices, he would inevitably ride over every other lord in the coalition and emerge as the new power behind the Han throne.
True, the other lords counted themselves Han Yeong's betters as well—but not one of them was fool enough to overlook the growth of his faction.
...Hmph. Do you really think you're the only one with brave generals at his side?
Originally, Yuan Shu had been charged with the coalition's rear-line supply, but at the latest war council he had haggled with the other lords and won himself a place at the vanguard of Hulao Pass alongside them. And so he called for one of his generals.
"Yu She!!"
"Yes, my lord!!"
The fierce general—second in renown only to Ji Ling, the finest blade in Yuan Shu's service, and famed for running down enemy commanders—knelt at his lord's summons and bellowed.
"At tomorrow's sortie, you will take an enemy general's head—no excuses!! Do you understand me?!"
"Yes, my lord!! I shall lay an enemy general's head at your feet, come what may!!"
In the coming battle for Hulao Pass, the lords would all be unleashing their finest generals in a scramble for glory. Ji Ling, who boasted the greatest valor under his master's command, could not take the field—he held their home base of Nanyang Commandery in Jing Province—and so it was Yu She whom Yuan Shu sent in his stead.
Hulao Pass.
A fortress blessed by nature itself, guarding the gateway to Luoyang—a stronghold where a mere ten thousand men could hold back a host of a million. There, Lu Bu held firm, with Zhang Liao and Gao Shun at her side.
"General! A body of troops approaches from over there!!"
"What? Is it the coalition?"
"No, General!! By their colors, they look to be soldiers belonging to our own army!!"
Soldiers in battered kit, gaunt and haggard, came running toward Hulao Pass. Lu Bu led a detachment, threw open the gate, and marched out to meet them, while from the ramparts above every bow was trained on the newcomers at once.
"Halt!! Who are you?!"
"W-we are conscripts from Sili Province, part of the garrison that held Sishui Pass."
Their voices carried no strength, like men who had gone days without a proper meal. They wore uniforms reduced to rags, yet by their speech alone—neither hoarse nor rough in the manner of Bing Province soldiers—they were unmistakably sons of Sili Province.
"...Sishui Pass? Don't make me laugh!! How could the garrison of Sishui Pass flee all the way to Hulao Pass?!"
If Sishui had fallen, they could all too easily have been taken prisoner by the coalition—and so Gao Shun, who had stayed at Lu Bu's side, suspected them of being enemy agents. At his bark, the soldier flinched and groveled against the dirt.
"It's... it's just that General Zhang Yan went out before the pass to give battle and was killed, and the Black Mountain bandits holding the gate surrendered to spare their own skins. Those of us left watching the situation withdrew here, to Hulao Pass..."
The officers and men of Lu Bu's army had despised the Black Mountain bandits from way back—old rivals within Bing Province—and tongues clicked all around.
"Tch. Knew that lot would fold."
"What else would you expect from common bandits?"
Zhang Liao stepped closer and questioned them, her gaze layered thick with wariness.
"But then, how did the rest of you escape?"
"We ran when the Black Mountain bandits abandoned the gate. With our families in Luoyang hanging in the balance, how could we turn our backs on them?"
Zhang Liao was far too careful to swallow the story whole. One thing was certain from their accents, at least: these were Luoyang men.
"And where are the coalition forces now?"
"By our reckoning, it should only be a few days before they reach Hulao Pass."
"So I would imagine."
Still weighing what to do with the men, Zhang Liao drew her officers aside and issued her orders in a whisper. Lu Bu was in no state to be making level-headed calls, so Zhang Liao took command in her stead.
"...For now, admit them through the gate, but let no one ease their watch. We will judge them by how they conduct themselves in the battle to come."
"Yes, General!!"
They could not rule out the possibility of enemy infiltrators, so surveillance was as far as it went; the refugees themselves accepted the arrangement without complaint—though in pleading for aid at the very least, they made their hostility toward the coalition plain.
A few days later, just as the stragglers had promised, the coalition that had cracked Sishui Pass arrived before Hulao Pass, shield of the capital, trailing a vast wall of dust behind it.
The coalition had pitched its main camp roughly a hundred li from Hulao Pass, and from there the lords who had claimed the vanguard advanced on the fortress guarding the Han capital without a flicker of hesitation, each at the head of his own host.
What an absolute mess.
No preliminary council, no plan—just a headlong rush at Hulao Pass that looked for all the world like moths flinging themselves into a flame. I stayed behind in my own camp and watched their backs.
"...And what do you suppose will happen?"
Fa Zheng had come to my side to ask how the battle would unfold. That was simply her way: she wasn't asking out of ignorance—she wanted to see how I read the tide and where I thought it would break. Truth be told, she already had a fair idea of how this would end.
"They're going to be crushed. Badly."
"And what leads you to that conclusion?"
"For one thing, they're blind with ambition."
They had all watched Liu Bei—nothing more than a commander of volunteer militia—win merit and receive her reward directly from Liu Xie, and now the same thought was burning in every lord's skull: distinguish yourself at Hulao, and win the Prince of Fufeng's favor. Not that I was innocent; I had targeted exactly that soft spot and fanned the flames a little myself.
Their shameless bribe-giving, their scraping to curry Liu Xie's favor, had grated on me enough to spur me into needling them—but I never dreamed they would charge out this thoughtlessly without so much as a council among themselves. Honestly, wasn't that just a herd of boars barreling ahead without a single thought in their heads?
Armies scraped together from a dozen regions, hurling themselves at a single gate—there was no way they would coordinate. They should at least have advanced in detached columns. That was precisely what we had done against Zhang Yan: led our own forces apart, put our bravest generals out front, and closed on him from four directions at once.
And there was one more reason I could flatly promise their defeat.
"...They're all underestimating Lu Bu. Badly."
Even granting that we had taken down Zhang Yan—a man who shared the title of Flying General with her—the Unrivaled Under Heaven was simply not a creature to be measured on the same scale.
"Lu Bu..."
Ma Chao must have been remembering her defeat a while back: her hand closed around her spear, and her eyes narrowed to blades, glinting with an intensity anything but ordinary.
"Don't worry. Your chance to settle the score will come."
We would take Lu Bu with our own hands—of that there was no question. Until then, though, the lords who had been running their mouths at Liu Xie could serve one purpose: fresh meat for her to smash to pieces.
"...Do you believe, then, that the lords who took the vanguard will fail to capture her?"
I chewed on the question for a moment before answering.
"...Well. If they actually coordinated, they might manage it."
There was Zhang Liao to weigh as well—a variable whose art of war could annihilate a hundred thousand with eight hundred elites—but if they ringed Lu Bu in with overwhelming numbers so as to spare their own troops, a faint hope of taking her did exist, however slim.
And yet.
Those same lords who had been so gutlessly passive against the Black Mountain bandits were hardly about to start sacrificing their own soldiers now.
Setting aside the battle-hardened Sun Jian and the brilliant Cao Cao—and the Peach Garden Oath sisters, who needed no telling at all—I judged it impossible for the rest of the coalition's lords to capture Lu Bu.
"But for the lords of this coalition, weighing every gain and counting every loss? Capturing Lu Bu is impossible."
With that, I settled in and simply watched the ramshackle coalition trundle toward Hulao Pass. Our army had already laid the groundwork for bringing down the pass in due time, so I had no intention whatsoever of lending them a hand.
And if anyone ever pressed me on the secret measures I'd prepared for taking the pass, I could always plead that I had Liu Xie's authorization.
Blind to all of it, Yuan Shu and the Luoyang-bred warlords of the Clear Stream faction led their armies forward, eyes fixed on glory.
"Charge!! The glory is ours to take!!"
"Don't stop!!"
"My lord!! There's someone standing before the gate!!"
"Doesn't matter!! Smash them flat!!"
A young woman in the very bloom of her youth stood guarding the gates of Hulao Pass, though her eyes were haggard and her body seemed worn to rags, the Sky-Piercing Halberd with its twin crescent moons held in her grip. Even so, her blood-red hair blazed crimson, and her eyes were the gray of a hunting hawk. The black armor she wore carried an oppressive menace that struck anyone who so much as looked at her.
The black steed newly issued to her was a Ferghana horse of Xiongnu stock, a finer animal than the one she had ridden in Luoyang.
Lu Bu Fengxian.
On the ramparts, Zhang Liao—who had waited for the enemy to close within easy reach—raised her Azure Dragon halberds aloft and gave the order.
"Loose!!"
At her word, the archers lying in wait along the top of Hulao Pass drew and loosed as one. Into the arrow-fall that came down like a cloudburst, the blood-mad soldiers only quickened their pace—and were turned into pincushions, toppling where they ran.
Thwack-thwack-thwack—!!
"GYAAAH!!"
The cavalry and foot soldiers at the very front were dead before they ever came close to the pass.
"...Damn it all!!"
"Was this a trap?!"
Watching the lords grind to a halt beneath the storm of arrows loosed at Zhang Liao's command, Lu Bu gave her order.
"Charge!!"
The gates of Hulao Pass swung open. Zhang Liao led the cavalry out; Gao Shun marched at the head of the shield-bearing infantry; and Lu Bu drove her Xiongnu steed forward, straight into the enemy lines.
"So you're the Unrivaled Under Heaven, are you, wench!! Take this—Yu She's spear—!!"
Yu She, a general of Yuan Shu's army, flung himself at the warrior famed throughout the realm with furious abandon.
Shhk—!!
Before he could so much as swing his spear, the Sky-Piercing Halberd came hurtling in and tore straight through his throat. Yu She's eyes bulged wide; he never managed even a scream as he dropped from the saddle and hit the ground.
"...All mouth, that one."
"Yu, Yu She!!"
For all his gallant charge, he had not even withstood a single exchange. Yuan Shu let out a full-throated shriek to see the brave general he so boasted of crumple so feebly.
And even as Yu She tumbled from his horse, someone came tearing in at Lu Bu, who had written the man off with cold disappointment.
"Lu Bu!! You wretched bitch!! Take this Pan Feng's axe!!"
Pan Feng, the master axeman boasted by Han Fu, Governor of Jizhou, had watched Yu She fall—and scenting an opening in the seemingly careless Lu Bu, he came charging in at once. The towering, bull-necked man's great axe hurtled toward Lu Bu's neck.
KRAANG!!
But Lu Bu gave the Sky-Piercing Halberd the lightest of flicks, and the axe bounced away as futilely as if it had slammed into some colossal shield.
Swish—!!
"...Huh?"
His head left his shoulders, and Pan Feng's unfocused gaze went blank as the severed thing dropped and rolled across the dirt.
Two of the coalition's celebrated generals, cut down in the space of a breath—and every soldier on the field froze where they stood. Awe at an untouchable martial prowess curdled into a dread that sent ice crawling unbidden up their spines.
Th-that... that is Lu Bu...!!
...A warrior who has truly reached the summit of the Unrivaled Under Heaven?!
She had dispatched two generals with two strokes, and Lu Bu's eyes held not the slightest flicker of feeling. She had been searching, it seemed, for a single warrior worth dying to—someone who might actually kill her—but they were all roar and no bite.
"...If you won't come to me, then I'll come to you!!"
Lu Bu drummed her heels against the Xiongnu steed's flanks, and the horse exploded into a furious gallop, bearing down on the coalition's soldiers.
"AAAAAH—!!"
"S-spare us—!!"
Paralyzed by the sheer, staggering horror of Lu Bu's might, the lords of the coalition broke all at once and fled helter-skelter for their camps.