The Wall That Refuses to Fall
Has the Great Wall crumbled yet?
「GRIND—CRASH!」
"Ahh... didn't break again."
"Hey! Bring me some more rocks over here — this thing just won't break!"
Out in the distance, the Sui Dynasty's Great Wall was collapsing in patches, looking like a beggar's tattered robe — so what on earth were they talking about?
「CRAAAACK」
"Yahoo! Freed at last!"
"Ha-haha! We're going first!"
The catapult next to them had finally broken down — so why were they celebrating so gleefully?
Simple. Once your equipment broke, you got to fall back, rest, and wait around while the engineers built you a brand-new one.
After test-firing the catapults and the large wall ballistae, the command staff had judged the range workable — and now they simply kept firing, and firing, and firing.
The truth was that pushing siege towers and battering rams up close to the walls was a guaranteed way to get a whole lot of people killed. Word had reached the corps commander that anyone fooling around pointlessly near the capital might well end up hanging upside down in the prayer room alongside the rest of the idiots — and from him the same letter passed down to the division commanders, then the battalion commanders, in one long chain.
Whether it was to minimize casualties or simply because they dreaded being dragged to the prayer room, the invasion force hammered away from a distance with utter delight.
And watching all this with their hearts burning was one particular group.
"Goddammit..."
"Haah..."
The supply soldiers watching from far away were stewing with frustration. They kept hauling supplies back and forth, but once the battle was won, the cleanup was never their job to do.
"Should've just gone combat arms."
"I must've been out of my mind to pick logistics."
It seemed they'd chosen supply duty because the shields combat soldiers lugged around looked absurdly heavy — and it had backfired spectacularly.
「SCREEEECH」
After a long, relentless pounding, the fortress gate — which somehow still hadn't broken — began to creak open.
And out came the Sui soldiers, weapons in hand, charging.
"Hey! They're coming out again! Weapons up, move it!"
"And here I was wondering why they hadn't shown up today!"
It was a siege, but something was badly backwards about it. The picture forming before everyone's eyes was of the defenders opening their own gates and rushing out to attack.
Had there ever been a war this strange?
The Sui began forming ranks in front of their gate, and soon they started their charge — a brisk jog. At that pace, they'd reach the catapults in four or five minutes.
"The moment they're in range, loose your arrows!"
"Like you need to tell me!"
The soldiers manning the siege engines were, at least, split half-and-half — half carrying shields, half carrying bows.
「THUNK—FWIP FWIP」
The archers began loosing arrows while the distant enemies came running — and behind them, their own reinforcements were running up as well.
Their job was to hold the line in the middle and keep the catapults from being destroyed.
"Faster! Shoot faster! We've got to thin their numbers as much as we can!"
The archers' hands began to fly. If the enemy got any closer, they'd have to drop their bows and fight with spears in the front line.
「FWOOOOOSH」
And then came the sound — that skin-crawling whine overhead. It was the sound of their own arrows taking flight: a rain of arrows so dense it blackened the sky.
A large contingent of archers was stationed midway between the main force and the siege engines, positioned specifically to shatter the enemy vanguard.
"Wow... I've seen this more than once and it's still terrifying."
"Thank goodness I wasn't born in Sui."
Far in the distance, an unbelievable number of soldiers lay rolling across the earth. Sui had made their own preparations too, but what someone had named the 'baby arrow' was genuinely terrifying.
It wasn't fired into the sky — it was fired nearly straight ahead, flat and true. It flew absurdly far, and it hit like a hammer.
Shields, armor — it punched clean through everything.
Sui had already tried, time and again, to destroy the siege engines, but they'd never once managed to break through the wall of archers.
And the cavalry that tried wheeling around the flanks simply dropped, one after another, to the baby arrows fired by Daehan's horse archers.
The Sui soldiers who had poured out of the gate were swiftly dealt with, and far away, the corpses were already piling high.
"So this is war? Did I come here to do chores?"
"Guess I'll go pick up rocks again."
People stood there, genuinely unsure whether any of this counted as a war at all.
「WHUUUUM... KU-GU-GUNG. KU-GUNG.」
"Wiped out again?"
The general defending the Sui Great Wall had fallen into despair. There was nothing — nothing — he could do.
Their single success had come one night, when they'd sent a strike team out to burn the catapults and ballistae.
That night, it had seemed like they might just manage to hold on somehow. But from the following day onward, the enemy began firing jars at them every night.
Strangely enough, these fire jars burned without ever going out — and they burned the corpses scattered across the plain along with them. The soldiers hiding among the dead were annihilated to a man.
So even when they gathered soldiers willing to risk their lives on a desperate charge, the attackers couldn't get anywhere close.
"General! Another strike team wiped out!"
"Yes. I know."
Anyone could figure that out just from the impact thundering against the walls, couldn't they?
「KWOONG—CRUMBLE」
"AAARGH!"
Something gave way with a rumble, and moans and screams spread through the men.
The walls were cracking everywhere, on the verge of collapse. He'd hastily dispatched a messenger, but he had a feeling the fortress would come down before the man ever returned.
"Form defensive lines in preparation for the wall collapsing!"
"General!"
He worried about the men of Sui — the ones who had relaxed, thinking surely the wall would never fall. He himself had worried about the enemy climbing over the wall. It had never once occurred to him to worry about it crumbling.
Where in the world did the enemy keep finding this many rocks and arrows?
In places where the stones had piled up, it looked as though an entire hill might form the moment the wall gave way.
"If the wall falls, there'll be nowhere to hide. We must stop them from breaking through — right here, at the breach!"
Plenty of his soldiers had been wounded, but many still remained here.
Once the enemy advanced through the collapsed wall, his men could surround and attack them from all sides — wouldn't that favor them, in the end?
"Corps Commander, the breaches in the wall are growing wider."
"Good. And the special detachment?"
"By now, I'd say they've pushed about halfway to position."
Daehan had long since used the navy to ferry a special detachment across the sea.
Their mission was to scale a section of the distant wall where the garrison was comparatively thin, seize it, and then keep pushing along the top of the wall until they met the main force.
"They'll have noticed by now. We depart as well."
"Yes, sir!"
With no reliable way to communicate, they had no choice but to move on prediction. If the plan slipped, casualties would balloon — for the detachment and the main force alike.
「PHUUUUNG」
"Advance! Form ranks!"
The trumpet blared, and the shield bearers began taking their places at the front of the column.
These were Daehan's most prized soldiers — the troops who punched through enemy lines at the very front. They received the finest armor and were first in line at every meal.
"Alright, boys! Time to earn our supper!"
"UWOOOAH!"
"Turtle formation!"
"Ha-haha! Turtle time!"
Laughing all the while, they locked their shields over their front and tops.
Unlike in the days of old Han, this time long iron plates had been added — plates that draped over the shoulders so they could block arrows coming in from the sides as well.
"If you're going to give us this, give us both sides, not just one! You trying to give me a lopsided set of muscles?"
In the middle of a war march, worried about muscle symmetry. What soldiers.
"Oh? Then you'd rather take it off and have a hole punched through your flank instead?"
"Fair point. Next time I'm standing on the right."
Something a bit off about them — and yet somehow wise?
「PHUUUUNG」
"FORWARD!"
"One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!"
Chanting in rhythm, the soldiers advanced slowly with small, measured steps. Their footsteps were in almost no danger at all.
The catapults and large wall ballistae on the enemy's wall had long since been battered into scrap and vanished entirely.
「TA-DA-DANG, TA-DANG, TA-RA-RA-RANG」
"Geez, those bastards sure shoot a hell of a lot!"
"The noise is killing me!"
Even at a considerable distance, the wall's height clearly had its advantages. Despite the short range of Sui bows, arrows had begun raining down on them.
「TA-DA-DANG—THUNK」
"Whoa! That startled me!"
To make shields truly solid you needed to sheath them in iron — but even for the mighty Daehan people, there were limits. Make them too heavy, and hauling them this far would be impossible.
The arrows began punching through, one by one. Even so, none of them passed clean through. An arrow that penetrated a shield lost most of its force and barely pricked the skin beneath.
"Ow ow ow, that stings! Quit shooting already!"
"AAARGH, the noise!"
By the time they were nearly at the base of the wall, the arrows were coming down like a downpour.
"You bastards get it easy in the middle! I've already taken what, five hits to the flank?"
Even with the iron plates added for side protection, they weren't shields — they were far easier to punch through.
The column that had marched from far away began collapsing from the flanks, one man at a time, until the formation broke apart entirely. Some sections were wiped out to the last man.
No matter how good your weapons and equipment were, a battle without casualties simply did not exist.
And then, at some point, the incoming arrows began to thin. It was the moment the special detachment finally pushed up to the wall.
In the gray light just before dawn, five thousand men were crossing the sea by boat under cover of night.
The special detachment, assigned to seize the top of the Great Wall.
They had disembarked at a distance where the wall was invisible, while the sky was still dark.
"Move quickly! Eat all your rations now, drink only half your water, and carry your pouches. There will be no rest until the battle ends this evening!"
An grueling forced march awaited them.
"Units that are ready, depart! We must be on top of the wall before the sun is fully up!"
Their mission was a single one: charge along the top of the wall, no matter what, until they met their comrades. It was quite a long stretch, so they had to hurry.
The soldiers who reached the wall threw up ropes, hooked them, and began climbing immediately. Then they stood atop the wall.
"Huh? What — there's nothing here?"
"Good for us. Move, let's go!"
"Ha. These idiots — couldn't they have made the wall a bit thicker? Five or six men standing abreast and you couldn't even move on this thing."
Apparently Daehan had no idea just how absurdly thick the wall was not — a walkway wide enough for two carts to pass with room to spare.
"Hey! I see something over there!"
"Archers, quick!"
「TWANG—THWACK」
The baby arrows used assistive equipment as well — aiming devices that raised accuracy to a remarkable degree. Within visual range, they practically flew in a straight line.
"Got him! He's down! The spacing's wide, but there are patrols out there. Moving out first!"
The sentry hadn't managed to send any signal, but the enemy could appear from anywhere at any moment — they had to hurry.
It was pure luck that they had scaled the wall at precisely the one hour when no one was watching.
Soldiers lightly armed with small shields and swords or axes began moving along the wall.
"Don't sprint at full speed! We've got half a day of marching ahead of us!"
"Yes, sir!"
The morning sun rose startlingly fast. Soon their strange procession would be visible even from a distance.
They were volunteers all — the mission might turn them into expendable lambs, but if it succeeded, they could save an enormous number of their comrades' lives.
After running a long way, a gate tower rose up directly in their path.
"Get down and hold position until the rear catches up. Archers stand by, just in case. The moment you see anything suspicious, shoot!"
"Yes, sir!"
With no way of knowing how many enemy soldiers occupied the gate tower, the lead group held still — and they numbered barely ten men.
They could see their comrades sprinting up from behind, but the fear of being spotted had them chewing their lips raw with impatience.
Once roughly forty had gathered, someone appeared at the gate tower. The instant he seemed to notice the soldiers lying flat—
「THWACK—THUD」
The man's head burst open and flew clean off in a single shot. Fortunately, no one else heard a thing. Silence held.
"We'll be spotted soon. We launch the raid now."
"Aren't our numbers too few?"
"What, you don't have the confidence to handle ten or so?"
"Haha. Surely you're joking?"
「TAK-TAK, TAK-TAK」
The archers pulled the two staff rods they'd been carrying across their backs and, in moments, had assembled them into spears.
"A few of you stay here to deal with anyone coming out or rushing to reinforce them, then alert the ones coming up behind!"
"Yes, sir!"
"Go!"
Silently, the soldiers crept toward the gate tower and began slipping quietly inside.