Bandit Extermination! The Three Human Weapons Rampage
The Yuan family’s private soldiers, stationed under Ji Ling and Yuan Shao’s command to snare any fleeing bandits, along with the sentries who had simply snickered among themselves—thinking what could those fools inside the mountain fortress possibly accomplish—and never bothered to report, and even the bandits holed up within who had no idea anyone was coming thanks to those useless lookouts. Every last one of them witnessed the cataclysmic storm unleashed by Xiang Yu’s single strike and stood frozen, mouths hanging open in pure astonishment. Ah, of course, that excluded the poor bastards who had been caught in the shockwave and sent straight to the afterlife.
“Is… is that thing even human…?”
With one blow the painstakingly built wooden palisade was ripped away entirely, sweeping through the stronghold and reducing roughly half of it to rubble. Not even a boulder hurled from a catapult would have caused such utter devastation. It was a natural disaster, plain and simple—merely on a slightly smaller scale—wrought by a single human body. Just how terrifying was this?
Yet Xiang Yu herself, the one who had caused the catastrophe, frowned with clear dissatisfaction.
“Tsk. Fuck. Knew it wouldn’t hold.”
The weapons she had brought were shattered without a trace. Since it was only bandit subjugation, she had simply grabbed whatever was lying around the training yard, and that decision had come back to bite her. Normally she wielded the highest-grade armaments Yuan Shu had generously provided, as any true warrior should. She simply hadn’t wanted to stain that precious weapon with the blood of mere bandits, so she had brought something else. Naturally, it had failed to endure her monstrous strength and ended up like this.
In this era where traces of myth still lingered, there existed rare minerals that defied common sense and master craftsmen capable of shaping them. Naturally the Yuan family employed such valuable artisans. It would not have been strange for legendary blacksmiths unknown to history to exist among them. After all, history is written by the victors; there was no way craftsmen who had sided with the already-doomed Yuan family would have left any records. Even the famous Yan Liang and Wen Chou of the original timeline left few accounts behind.
But because a blacksmith within the Yuan family’s influence could forge weapons strong enough to withstand Xiang Yu’s power—blades worthy of being recorded as famous swords of the age—she had treated the weapon she received far too preciously, and this was the result.
Still…
“Well, if there’s nothing else, I’ll just have to use something different.”
“You crazy bitch! Look what you’ve done to our fortress!! We bled and sweated for years to build this…! Gack?!”
To someone of Xiang Yu’s level, weapons were nice to have but hardly necessary. She grabbed the rage-blinded bandit who had dared charge her, seized his leg in one hand, and swung him like a club as she charged the nearby bandits standing frozen in terror.
“Who the hell said you could just stand there like idiots in the middle of a fight!”
BOOOOM!!!
Over a dozen bandits were instantly pulped into meat paste. Even the sword the man had been holding burst apart from the waist up and vanished.
“Aish, only good for one swing? What a pain in the ass!”
Xiang Yu hurled the blood-drenched human club aside, quickly scanned her surroundings, then snatched a horse’s reins and approached the shattered section of palisade she herself had destroyed.
“Hmm. This’ll do nicely.”
Crack. Crunch…!!
With raw grip strength and pure power she ripped the support logs clean out of the loosened barricade.
“Is… is that really a human…?!”
The sentries who had luckily avoided the initial blast, along with the bandit group that had rushed out thinking a landslide had occurred, stared in utter disbelief. The bandit leader himself layered even more shock atop their horror, wondering if that thing was truly the same species as them.
Of course, Xiang Yu paid their gazes no mind whatsoever.
“You worthless bandit scum! Didn’t I say I’d give you an etiquette lesson?! Take it nicely!!!”
Not only had she ripped the massive logs free with one hand, the sections gripped by her monstrous strength were crushed to splinters. After pulling out two such logs, Xiang Yu adjusted her grip on one and hurled it toward the bandits atop the watchtower-like structure above.
She threw it. Hard.
“U-uwaaaaah!!”
“Y-you crazy bitch!!”
KWAAAAAANG—!!!
The log punched straight through the watchtower and kept going, piercing all the way out the other side. Naturally, everyone on it died without making a sound. Well, it wasn’t as if they were mortal enemies. Satisfied, Xiang Yu swung the log—far longer than her own body—through the air with a whoosh and searched for her next prey.
“All right! Who wants to be the brave suicide volunteer that gets this club bloody?!”
Xiang Yu was having the absolute time of her life. The battlefield she had entered after so long, the refreshing sensation of cutting down as many worthless bandit trash as she wanted, the taste of blood, the thrill of standing at the center of the fight while displaying overwhelming might, and the ecstasy of seeing every enemy gaze filled with terror directed straight at her. Xiang Yu was the type of existence that shone brightest on the battlefield.
And at this moment, with no one capable of opposing her and their morale already completely shattered, she decided to take her time and play with the rest, but—
“Stop striking useless poses over there! The bandit leader’s head is mine, you mountain beast bitch!”
However, Xiang Yu was not the only one who wanted to run wild on this battlefield. Nor was she the only one with the talent to sweep across it.
The moment Xiang Yu carved open a path, Richard—who had been watching for the perfect angle—charged straight in, grinning with bloodlust as she joined the bandit extermination.
“Huh?! You shameless bitch, now you’re trying to steal the credit?! Hey!! They say the bear does all the work but the owner takes all the money—where’s your sense of decency?!”
“Go ahead and burn with jealousy then!!”
Like a storm wind, Richard plunged into the chaotic mass of bandits.
“Kiyahhh!”
Where the tempest passed, only wreckage remained. The trail left by Richard, a monster of a completely different style from Xiang Yu, looked much the same. After a momentary storm, bandits with holes punched through their bodies or clean lines carved across them simply collapsed without even managing a proper reaction. Richard’s peerless speed and the terrifying precision with which she used it did not produce the same brutish displays as Xiang Yu, yet she proved her lethality was in no way inferior. After all, whether a person is split in half or simply has a hole punched through their heart, the result is the same.
“U-uwaaaaah…!!”
“A-are those really the government troops…!”
“Fuck, fuck…! What the hell are those monsters?!”
“Is this even real? Holy shit, is that actually happening right now?!”
“Uh… uhbuh… uhbuber…”
Even when Xiang Yu first arrived, the absurdity had delayed their reactions. Now that she was moving in earnest and Richard had joined the slaughter, a colorful variety of responses poured from the bandits—fear, shock, denial, refusal to accept reality, or simply losing their minds entirely. For mere local thugs, the power of those who had descended upon them was far beyond anything they could imagine. The will to fight had vanished long ago. They had turned to banditry because life was hard and they wanted to steal from the weak; they had never once imagined facing monsters who transcended human limits.
Roughly half of them had already half-lost their sanity, but those who still possessed it panicked and tried to flee. Even that proved impossible.
“Haha! Look at them squirming like fish back in water! Well, I don’t have to worry about cleanup anyway.”
If they managed any distance at all, Yuan Shu’s mace—positioned exactly where fleeing bandits would emerge after seeing Richard and Xiang Yu rampaging—would smash their skulls and crush their bodies like tofu.
And if they stayed close…
“Look at these bastards? Trying to run when I’m standing right here?!”
“You pathetic bandit idiots!! I pulled out one club, so let’s smash some radishes!!”
Richard and Xiang Yu, having spotted them instantly, went wild. Bandits would not possess many valuable horses to begin with, and only human weapons like Xiang Yu, Richard, Yuan Shu, or Choe Jun-gyeong could outpace them anyway. With necks being severed and sent flying or bodies turning into chunks of meat in the blink of an eye, the bandits outside were swept away so easily that those left on standby to catch escapees had almost nothing to do.
“Where’s the bandit leader?! Don’t tell me he got swept up and died at the start??”
“Does their boss actually know how to fight?”
“Not particularly well,” Choe Jun-gyeong answered Richard as she dragged a blood-drenched man out of a still-intact building.
“Huh? This bastard was just relaxing while we fought our asses off?!”
“You could call it efficient.”
With an utterly expressionless face, Choe Jun-gyeong shook the blood from her blade. In her grip was the bandit leader, who looked as if dying would be a mercy; he could only groan feebly.
“Uh… ugh… uuuuuh…”
His body was brutally, excessively mangled. The scene visible through the open doorway behind her was no less horrific. She had not simply killed them—she had gone so far that it felt excessive, torturing them with cruel precision. In any case, having captured the leader, Choe Jun-gyeong dragged him before Yuan Shu and offered him up.
“I present the leader of the bandit stronghold to my lord.”
“Since you caught him, you finish him.”
“Understood.”
She had thoroughly broken him so he could not resist even slightly, as he was meant to be a gift for her lord. When that same gift was returned to her, Choe Jun-gyeong split the bandit neatly in half and ended his life.
“Round up only those who look like the higher ranks and hand them over to the authorities! Hahaha! The number of commoners shouting my name, Yuan Shu, will surely increase now!”
Yuan Shu cleanly ordered the retainers and Ji Ling to handle the aftermath, then moved on with Yuan Shao and the three human weapons, laughing all the while. Thus, the bandits who had the terrible misfortune of encountering a living natural disaster were annihilated in an instant.