Liu Biao (14)
For days on end I had been hammering Xiangyang Castle with trebuchets, and staring straight at its walls, I muttered under my breath.
"It's about time."
No matter how sturdy a castle wall might be, it was bound to crumble eventually if boulders kept slamming into it without pause. Xiangyang had somehow endured the stones of several dozen trebuchets for days now, but that was never going to overturn a hopelessly lopsided situation.
"Reporting! Deserters from Liu Biao's army are approaching our camp as we speak!"
"Oh?"
Receiving the now-familiar report, I answered evenly.
"Just check their faces to confirm they're Liu Biao's men, then open the way for them."
"Yes, sir!"
As the messenger acknowledged my order, I added one more thing.
"Ah — and don't forget to keep your distance."
"By your command!"
"Good. Off you go, then."
The messenger bowed once and withdrew.
There was a reason I had ordered them to keep their distance and verify faces.
"Liu Biao's forces may disguise their soldiers as deserters and launch a surprise attack against us."
"…"
"I would suggest keeping the policy of releasing the deserters exactly as it stands — but tightening our vigilance just a little further, if you please."
That was Jia Xu, offering her counsel after watching me do nothing more than check the deserters' faces and wave them safely through.
I had nodded and replied, "…That's a point I never would have caught. Brilliant as always."
"You give me too much credit."
Jia Xu had demurred with modest grace, saying that preparing for contingencies was simply her duty. It was the sort of quality that made it obvious why the warlords she served in the original history had treasured her so.
Convinced her point was sound, I overhauled the deserter policy on the spot.
The moment a deserter was spotted, the sentry was to report it to the nearest commanding officer, hold his distance, and verify nothing but the face. Until word came down granting them passage, they were to keep the deserters at arrow's point and let no one take a single step closer.
And should anyone ignore that warning and try to force their way in regardless, they were to be shot — those were my orders.
Who, with arrows trained on them and warnings ringing in their ears, would still insist on coming closer? Unless they were nursing something sinister up their sleeve, no one would act that way. And if someone did, I was certain they'd be the type looking to turn our camp upside down.
"…Hm."
I turned my gaze on Xiangyang, where deserters were now pouring out day and night alike.
The scene must have looked much like the Battle of Gaixia, where Xiang Yu met the end in the original history.
The Chu army, encircled on every side, and the Han army pressing in for the kill.
Xiang Yu's army, its morale already in tatters after a string of defeats, began hemorrhaging even its last remaining soldiers the moment the songs of Chu came drifting in from all four directions.
Chu songs on every side.
When the Han army deliberately spared the Chu soldiers rather than cutting them down, the tide of deserters swelled by the day — until even the officers meant to stop them deserted, and all that remained to Xiang Yu were a few hundred men.
That was where I'd gotten the idea to let our own deserters go free.
The astonishing part is that Xiang Yu then broke through the encirclement of a Han army three hundred thousand strong with nothing but those few hundred men.
Of course, it wasn't as if Xiang Yu came through unscathed — the escort that had numbered several hundred was cut down to a mere thirty.
…Was that really such a heavy loss, though?
Xiang Yu had managed to smash through the encirclement and escape. Liu Biao had no chance in hell of pulling off anything like that.
Liu Biao, Hegemon-King of Jingzhou, awakening at last the moment his own life hung in the balance…?
Even to me, the mental picture was pretty hilarious.
Of course, deserters or no deserters, the trebuchet bombardment continued today as well, right on schedule.
CRASH! CRASH!
Thanks to the structural limits of a trebuchet — which took a crowd of ten or so people hauling with all their might to fling a single stone — only a modest number of rocks ever actually reached Xiangyang. But with several dozen of the machines at work and that bombardment repeating for days on end, the castle had still taken a meaningful pounding.
Ask anyone to name the person who had dealt Xiangyang the most damage so far, and every last one of them would chorus the same name.
Lü Bu.
"Here comes another rock——!"
Hardly had the thought crossed my mind before Lü Bu's voice rang out nearby.
I turned my head to find her giving the rope rigged to a trebuchet one tremendous yank.
Stones that more than ten soldiers had to groan and heave to launch, Lü Bu was flinging all by herself, one after another, each one whistling through the air. And her accuracy was another matter entirely — after a few rounds of trial and error, she could now plant a rock squarely against the wall without the slightest difficulty.
KRA-KOOM—!
"GYAAAH!"
The instant Lü Bu's stone slammed into the wall, a Liu Biao soldier standing atop it shrieked and dropped flat. With the ramparts already half-crippled, from where they stood it must have felt like an outright earthquake.
The main gate, which had caught a lucky hit here and there, was dented and crumpled all over — nowhere near intact either. Gate or wall, both looked bound to come down sooner or later.
They were being gnawed away one-sidedly by siege engines, and yet Liu Biao's army had no means whatsoever of answering them. What exactly was anyone supposed to do about stones raining down from beyond arrow range?
There were only two ways to counter siege engines: the defenders could answer in kind with engines of their own, or they could take to guerrilla raids and set the besiegers' camp ablaze.
Every one of the countless defensive engines that had once crowned Xiangyang's walls now lay smashed to pieces. The massive crossbows, shaped much like Western ballistae, had been the very first thing I ordered destroyed, and the trebuchets that had stood sparsely along the ramparts had been pounded into scrap thanks to Lü Bu's exploits.
They weren't in any state to throw open their gates and raid our camp in return, so the only choice left to Liu Biao's army was to keep hunkering down under the rain of stone. The only question was how long they could hold out.
A siege, at its heart, begins with the stronger side surrounding the weaker side's castle. And if nothing out of the ordinary happens — if time simply passes — victory goes to the besiegers in the end.
No relief army was coming to their aid, and they had neither the overwhelming force nor the masterstroke of strategy needed to flip a losing board. To anyone with eyes, Liu Biao's defeat was a foregone conclusion.
"…Found her."
I had dismounted and was calmly surveying the battlefield when Seo Yeo, at my side, suddenly murmured.
"Hm?"
I turned to her, mildly puzzled, and saw that Seo Yeo — dismounted like me — was relieving a nearby guard of his spear.
"Wh-what—?!"
"……"
Then again, relieving wasn't quite the word. Confiscating might be more accurate.
Stripped of his weapon in a blink and left empty-handed, the guard could only blink in bewilderment. Seo Yeo spared him not so much as a glance as she went about her business.
She shifted her grip on the spear, reversing it once, and leveled its point toward the wall. The stance looked for all the world like a javelin thrower about to let fly, so I turned my head to see who she was aiming at.
"Ah."
It was the officer who had loosed an arrow at me before, on Liu Biao's orders. She was too far off to make out in detail, but I still remembered that distinctive bow and armor.
If I had to guess, that was Huang Zhong.
In the original history, she served under Liu Biao, passed into Han Xian's command after Liu Biao's death, and then entered Liu Bei's service — one of the Five Tiger Generals…
SHWOOOOSH—!
Before I could even finish the thought, the spear left Seo Yeo's hand.
I was stationed well to the rear for safety's sake, so the wall stood a considerable distance away — several hundred meters by eyeball, at the least. But Seo Yeo, as if to ask what any of that mattered, hurled the spear straight at Huang Zhong.
The spear sailed a good several hundred meters through the air, locked dead on its target.
…I'm fairly certain the modern javelin-throw world record doesn't even break a hundred meters.
Wow. Enter her in the Olympics and the gold medal's a done deal.
Assuming I live long enough to see the Olympics held, that is.
The attack came without warning, but Huang Zhong was a general whose martial skill was nothing to scoff at, and she sensed the incoming spear on pure instinct. Eyes flying wide, she threw herself into a hasty roll, and the spear, cheated of its target, skewered an innocent Liu Biao soldier behind her.
Wasn't there a saying that one of the most dangerous abilities a human being can possess is the act of throwing something? An arrow, at least, left you some chance of surviving the hit; a thrown spear struck with such force that you might as well radio in your own death the moment it landed. It simply saw less use than the bow — shorter range, a pain to carry — but it was hardly an attack to be dismissed.
"…If only it had been a little closer."
As Huang Zhong evaded the throw by a hair's breadth, Seo Yeo murmured, sounding disappointed. Then again, a bodyguard's spear wasn't built for throwing, so it couldn't have been an easy thing to hurl in the first place. Apparently, to Seo Yeo, such details hardly counted as problems.
"Huh? Wait — isn't that the bitch from before?"
Lü Bu had apparently noticed Huang Zhong as well, because she drew her bow and took aim. The aim lasted only an instant before an arrow leapt from her great bow.
Barely back on her feet, Huang Zhong just barely turned aside the arrow streaking toward her. She seemed to be breaking out in a cold sweat — or was that just my imagination?
Seo Yeo and Lü Bu trained their weapons on Huang Zhong as though it were the most natural thing in the world. And Huang Zhong, today as ever, accomplished nothing of note, far too busy simply keeping herself in one piece.
…She was still the enemy, but at this point it was getting a little hard not to feel sorry for her.