The Battle of Kuangting (3)
Not long after the armies of Cao Cao and Yuan Shu collided, the tide of battle began tilting swiftly toward one side.
The reason was simple. The bulk of Yuan Shu's soldiers were commoners conscripted at spearpoint, and the training meant to forge those farmers into true troops was woefully inadequate. The moment his host met Cao Cao's army head-on, it was swept away like autumn leaves before the wind.
Xiahou Dun, boring through Yuan Shu's ranks at the very tip of the line, remarked with genuine puzzlement.
"What's wrong with these chumps? They can barely stay on their feet!"
"...I can already see their morale breaking."
So saying, Xiahou Yuan loosed an arrow with the most natural ease in the world.
"Gwaaagh!"
"Ughaaah!"
The arrows, loosed in the same breath, threaded the gaps between Cao Cao's own soldiers and buried themselves in Yuan Shu's men.
At that near-acrobatic display of archery, Xiahou Dun whistled in admiration.
"Your aim's gotten even better than last time."
"One must keep up one's practice, after all."
"Then I can't afford to fall behind either!"
Grinning, Xiahou Dun plunged confidently into the midst of Yuan Shu's troops and began to cut loose. In the blink of an eye, the soldiers around her were losing their heads to her massive saber or dropping dead where they stood, arrows planted in their foreheads.
An army whose morale was already guttering for want of training was hardly going to hold its ground after watching that. The gulf in quality between the two sides' soldiers and officers was simply too vast, and Yuan Shu's host collapsed as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
"R-Run! Run for your lives!"
Before long, Yuan Shu's soldiers were hurling down their weapons and fleeing, and once the rout began it knew no end, the stampede swelling by the moment.
"You dogs! Hold your lines! Where do you think you're running?!"
"Well, well. So you're an officer, hm?"
"Wh-What the—?! Where did you even come from—?!"
Yuan Shu's officer strained every sinew to keep the formation from dissolving, only to make himself the choicest of targets for Cao Cao's officers and lose his head in short order. And when Cao Cao's elite cavalry slammed into their flank on top of it all, Yuan Shu's army was sent tumbling clean off the field, its formation shattered beyond repair.
It was the moment the victor of the Battle of Kuangting was decided.
As matters careened off in a direction he could not fathom, Yuan Shu made no effort to hide his bewilderment.
"What in the world is the meaning of this?!"
By sheer numbers alone, his own host should have been the larger one—should it not? So how was it that his army was fleeing the moment that eunuch bitch's forces so much as charged?!
"You useless wretches, can you not manage the one task you were given?! What are you doing! Turn back and fight this instant!"
He bellowed until his face went scarlet, but the soldiers, deigning to spare Yuan Shu not so much as a glance, were far too busy saving their own skins.
Ji Ling, attending Yuan Shu at close hand, shouted.
"My lord! The battle is lost! You must withdraw, even now!"
"...Grr! Enough of this! They are no longer worth my consideration—I shall return to Nanyang Commandery!"
Ever arrogant, he would not let the word retreat pass his lips to the very last.
Just as Yuan Shu, conceding defeat at last, turned to make his escape, a messenger came rushing up to him with frantic gestures and cried out.
"Urgent report! Liu Biao's army has sealed off the road to Nanyang Commandery!"
"Wh-What did you say?!"
Give an inch, and they take a mile—was that not how the saying went? Yuan Shu, who had coveted the Jingzhou under Liu Biao's rule and kept probing across his borders, now found the counterblow landing square upon himself, and felt his head swim.
A moment later, having recovered his wits, Yuan Shu shrieked with enough fury to leap clear off the ground.
"What in blazes has Li Feng been doing all this while, that he could not stop a single move like that?!"
Ji Ling drew near and spoke.
"There is not a moment to lose, my lord! We must flee at once, in any direction—"
"You need not tell me! At this point anywhere will do—just get us away from here, and quickly!"
"Yes, my lord! I shall carve a blood path—hewing our way straight through their encirclement!"
No sooner had Yuan Shu's order fallen than Ji Ling was racing ahead, hacking open a way through Cao Cao's encirclement. Following in his wake, Yuan Shu ground his teeth.
"Cao Cao...!"
To inflict such humiliation upon me, the rightful heir of Four Generations of Three Excellencies! I shall never forget this!
Unable to smother his rage, Yuan Shu hurried on his way.
"Where is Yuan Shu?! Come out here and offer up your neck!"
"H-Hurk!"
At the voice of the enemy commander whose arrows flew like a specter's, Yuan Shu swallowed hard and whipped his horse into a frantic gallop. In his blind flight, he somehow lost even Ji Ling, who had been carving the road ahead of him.
On and on he rode, until an unfamiliar vista swam into view; only then did Yuan Shu steady his breathing and look about him.
"Surely nothing can reach me if I've come this fa—"
Before he could finish, a rumble like the earth's very axis groaning rolled in from nearby. To put a name to it: the thunder of cavalry tearing across the plain.
"Comb every last inch of it! The Governor has promised a fortune to whoever brings back Yuan Shu's head!"
The color drained from Yuan Shu's face.
"I refuse to die in a place like this!"
And with that, Yuan Shu fled for his very life. Perhaps the desperation to survive had driven him past his own limits—he handled his horse with more skill than he had ever shown in his days, slipping the pursuit again and again.
Hours more bled past like that. Having spent the entire day in the saddle, nearly through the night besides, Yuan Shu could no longer mask his exhaustion and dragged himself along on leaden feet. The pursuers seemed to have been well and truly thrown off, but every officer and soldier who had followed him had scattered to the four winds.
Just as Yuan Shu was wracking his brains for a way out of this predicament, someone burst out of the brush nearby.
"My lord! Thank the heavens you are safe!"
"Hwaaagh?!"
Body and mind already frayed by the relentless chase, Yuan Shu let out a thoroughly undignified shriek. That he at least did not tumble from his saddle was the one mercy in it all.
"My lord? Is something the matter?"
It was Ji Ling—the officer who had ridden at the fore and carved through Cao Cao's encirclement—who asked, puzzlement written across his face. Recognizing him, Yuan Shu heaved a long sigh of relief.
"Wh-What the... ah. It's only you. Don't go startling a man like that."
Ordinarily he would have flown into a magnificent rage, but relief ran stronger in him just then, and he let the matter pass without further reproach.
"In any case, good to see you alive. I lost sight of you partway through and worried myself sick over it."
It was, naturally, a lie from top to bottom—Yuan Shu had been far too busy fleeing with his own precious skin in mind to spare anyone else a thought. The unsuspecting Ji Ling answered in a voice thick with remorse.
"Forgive me! Meager as my talents are, I should have attended you to the very end—!"
"Haha, how could I ever hold it against you?"
Donning a studied expression of benevolence, Yuan Shu offered his consolation even as his eyes flicked elsewhere.
"By the by, who are those soldiers back there?"
Just as he said, behind Ji Ling stood a knot of cavalry in the sorry guise of routed stragglers, weariness hanging over them like a shroud.
Ji Ling answered.
"Soldiers I gathered up on the road here, my lord."
"Oho! Splendidly done!"
At Ji Ling's words, Yuan Shu's delight was entirely genuine.
"With this many at my back, I shall want for nothing when I rise again! Once I secure a new stronghold, I shall see you richly rewarded!"
"You honor me, my lord!"
Ji Ling bowed with due ceremony.
Stroking his beard with one hand, Yuan Shu turned matters over in his mind. True, he had been reduced to abandoning his home base and running—but if he rallied the routed survivors as Ji Ling just had, he could build himself a power as vast as before. He, Yuan Shu, was far from finished.
"Ji Ling, do you know where we are?"
"I do, my lord. The folk of a nearby village say Shuchun lies not far from here."
"Shuchun, you say?"
Shuchun sat in Jiujiang Commandery, in Yangzhou. Which could only mean that in a single day's ride, he had come from Yanzhou all the way to the edge of Yangzhou. It had to be a thousand li at the very least—some four hundred kilometers—and he had crossed the whole of it. True, he had rested whenever his horse flagged, but even so, the distance refused to feel real.
How far was it, now, that Red Hare—the fabled steed of Peerless Under Heaven Lü Bu—was said to run in a single day? The thought drew a great, booming laugh from Yuan Shu.
"Hahahaha! They say Red Hare covers a thousand li by day and eight hundred by night—yet having done the like myself, I find it a trifling distance after all!"
"As expected of you, my lord! Truly remarkable!"
Had anyone actually pressed him to ride those eighteen hundred li himself, Yuan Shu would have gone white and bolted on the spot—but no one present knew him well enough to call the bluff.
Yuan Shu proclaimed with all the dignity he could muster.
"Excellent! I hear Yangzhou is all but a masterless mountain these days—an empty land with no one to claim it—so seizing it should pose little difficulty! We shall take Shuchun for our own!"
"We obey your command!"
And so the battered remnant of Yuan Shu's force, having somehow scraped through alive, set off. Having driven out Chen Wen, the Inspector of Yangzhou, and made himself master of the province, Yuan Shu was swaggering once more—until a fresh piece of news reached him and struck him speechless with horror.
And what, you ask, was that news?
Jeong Reung, who had held his silence in Luoyang ever since the coalition campaign, had abruptly marched his army out to attack Nanyang Commandery in Jing Province. Liu Biao, who had designs on Nanyang himself, had jolted upright in alarm and hastily recalled his forces—and before long, the Grand General's army had taken Nanyang Commandery.
In the span of a heartbeat, Yuan Shu had handed the Grand General's faction its gateway into Jing Province. The ground seemed to tilt beneath him all over again, and he very nearly crumpled where he stood.