The Gentry of Jing Province (14)
The bandits really did keep coming, wave after wave without end.
Even a rough count put them comfortably past several hundred — a truly staggering horde. And if you added in the ones currently locked in combat with the escort force I'd brought along, who knew what the total would come to.
I was starting to understand why the gentry hadn't fled and had instead held out so confidently inside Jiangling Castle. Facing an enemy that outnumbered you several times over, this much probably felt like a fight worth taking.
If I had come at the head of an army, they'd have used the bandits as bait and run. Coming with only an escort, I'd be buried under their sheer numbers while they took my life.
But supposing I really did die — how, exactly, did they plan to deal with everything that came after?
Sima Yi had once put it this way: if I ever vanished, this whole faction would be torn apart at the seams.
Had the gentry of Jing Province seen through that weakness and set their sights on my head? Or had they simply started this fire to put out the most urgent blaze first, and worry about the ashes later?
Whatever their intentions, this was no longer the moment to dwell on them.
"Block it or die!"
Lü Bu roared the words and swept the Sky Piercer Halberd in a wide horizontal arc through the bandits blocking our path.
CLANG!
"Gwaaagh?!"
Most of the bandits too slow to react to that blow simply died where they stood, but one man — who by some miraculous fluke actually parried her strike — went rolling across the floor with a hideous wail.
Needless to say, the bandit who had lost his footing and toppled over was cut down moments later by Lü Bu's follow-up blow.
And so it went, over and over, as Lü Bu carved her way forward. Fail to react, and you died. Somehow manage to block a swing, and your stance shattered, leaving you helpless against the next one.
WHAM!
"Gwahk!"
Then, with a crack that rang in my ears, one of the bandits in front of Lü Bu popped up into the air and went sailing backward.
...He hadn't even been hit by a truck, and yet apparently a human being could fly like that.
CRASH—!
"Aaagh!"
"Kehk!"
And of course, the bandit who'd been launched backward plowed straight into his comrades, knocking the whole lot of them flat.
Taking in the scene, Lü Bu flashed a grin.
"Everyone else is out here fighting. Why are you lot the only ones lying down on the job?"
"What kind of nonsense is tha—... huk!"
The bandit, mid-retort in a tone of pure incredulity, went bug-eyed the moment he got a look at Lü Bu's face.
She had closed the distance in the span of a heartbeat. The Sky Piercer Halberd came sweeping down over the sprawled bandits.
They were cleaved apart like blocks of tofu, each one split so cleanly that he became a pair of ban/dits.
It was a mercy those bastards died of shock. Had they survived that blow even briefly, what kind of agony would they have died in? It turned my stomach just to imagine.
Of course, that changed nothing about how gruesome the sight was, so I quietly turned my gaze toward Seo Yeo.
While Lü Bu forced a path straight through the enemy, Seo Yeo stayed at my side. She devoted herself to one duty and one duty only — guarding me — and as for how, exactly, she fought...
"...Damn it! This is ba—!"
Shff.
The instant a bandit stepped within her reach, his head left his shoulders. No hesitation. None at all.
What was I even supposed to call that?
You know how fantasy and wuxia novels always have techniques like domain expansion? The kind where the moment enemies step inside your domain, every manner of supernatural power comes raining down on them?
That was Seo Yeo. The moment a bandit set so much as a single foot inside her domain, the Chu Heaven Sword swung around and ended him on the spot.
Lü Bu left alone anyone who didn't stand in her way; Seo Yeo, by contrast, matched her steps to mine while keeping watch over all three hundred and sixty degrees around us.
There was just one problem: the corridors here were not exactly generous with space.
Even a bandit lucky enough to slip through Lü Bu's slaughter and press himself flat against the wall still ended up well within Seo Yeo's reach.
"W-wait, just a moment! I bear you all no ill wi—!"
The bandit threw down his weapon, trying to prove he had no will to fight. It accomplished nothing.
Surrender or not, Seo Yeo took his head all the same.
An ordinary person might have hesitated, if only once. Seo Yeo showed not a trace of it. Truly, mercilessly ruthless — entirely befitting the woman who, in the original history, had buried hundreds of thousands of Qin prisoners alive.
By then, we had pushed roughly halfway through.
A bandit shrieked in a voice trembling like a leaf.
"How are we supposed to fight a monster like that?!"
"This isn't what I signed up for!"
In the end, one of them couldn't stomach the fear any longer and hurled his weapon to the ground.
"Hang the money — my life matters more! I'm done! I quit!"
"Y-yeah! Me too!"
With that, the deserters spun on their heels and started to run, shoving their own allies out of the way.
"Move! If anyone's fighting, you fight!"
"H-huh? What's going on?! Why all of a sudden—!"
Once it came to this, even the men at the back sensed that something had gone terribly wrong, and the whole atmosphere curdled. The sight of them tangling into one another, tripping and sprawling every which way, was quite the spectacle.
Not that any of this was strange, mind you. On a battlefield where lives are traded back and forth, fighting to the very last man is exceedingly rare.
Only a band of do-or-die veterans staring down the destruction of their nation could manage something like that.
Lü Bu turned her head and looked at me.
"What do we do now?"
I answered in an even voice.
"Kill only the ones who resist to the very end."
"Got it."
Reading my intent, Lü Bu flicked the blood from the Sky Piercer Halberd with a snap of her wrist.
"Sh-she's insane!"
"Run! Run for it──!!"
The bandits who witnessed that, apparently convinced Lü Bu would come charging in at any moment, fled with more frantic flailing than ever.
"Off they go. What a hilarious bunch."
Lü Bu snorted at the sight of them.
As the bandits bolted in a cacophony of crashes and clatters, I quietly turned my head to look behind us.
Shishan xuehai — mountains of corpses, seas of blood. The old saying for when human bodies pile up like mountains and blood flows like the sea.
It hadn't truly reached that level, but there was no denying that a great many people lay dead. The days of sinking into gloom over having killed this many were long behind me, yet I couldn't help feeling sour every time I looked upon a scene like this.
...Still, the fact that such an uncomfortable feeling could stir in me at all was a blessing in disguise. If a modern soul ever grew so numb to human death that scenes like this left him unfazed, wouldn't something somewhere in his heart have begun to fester?
Turning such thoughts over, I kept walking — and before I knew it, the world outside came into view.
"Wow. Every last one of them ran. Not a single straggler."
Lü Bu exclaimed, gazing off in the direction the bandits had fled. They were still pumping their legs for all they were worth, desperate to put as much distance between us as possible.
It would be nice if they came to their senses now and lived honest lives, like everyone else. They'd been lucky to keep their lives this time, but if they went right back to pillaging after all this, then one day soldiers would come to hunt them down for it.
The choice was theirs to make, though — no sense troubling myself over it today.
Thinking of the gentry, our original quarry, I asked Lü Bu:
"Lü Bu. Do you remember how many of the gentry slipped away?"
"Uh..."
At my question, she tilted her head for a moment, tallying it up.
"Two or three, give or take?"
"Yeah?"
"Mm. The ones who ran first."
Hearing her answer, I sank into thought.
If I had been one of the gentry, where would I have run? For one thing, I couldn't picture them escaping overland on horseback.
And for good reason — we had those horses, after all.
Just then, Seo Yeo and Lü Bu both turned to look at the same spot.
"..."
"Ah, there they are."
— Neighhh!
Ochyma and Red Hare. The fierce-tempered steeds that carried Seo Yeo and Lü Bu emerged one after another from the darkness.
Lü Bu had been stroking Red Hare's neck, and when she saw the blood smeared across her palm, her face went blank with surprise.
"What the—? Why is there blood on my hand?"
She blinked at Red Hare.
"Who did you kill?"
Neigh.
Red Hare let out a short whinny, for all the world as if in affirmation.
Then again — who did you kill? Wasn't that a rather blood-chilling bit of conversation to be having?
Though in a way, it was only natural. Ordinarily those horses should have been standing quietly in their stables, but did the bastards who had tried to dispose of me really seem like the type to leave such magnificent animals alone?
Whether they meant to hide the horses somewhere or saddle them for their own getaway, they were bound to sneak a hand in sooner or later.
And then get promptly demolished by those terrifying beasts.
"..."
— ...
Seo Yeo and Ochyma went on staring at each other in perfect silence — living proof, if any were needed, of the saying "like master, like horse."
Ochyma, too, was spattered with blood all over its body, so apparently it had gone and beaten someone half to death as well.
Now, let's take stock. The gentry would surely have known of Red Hare's existence.
Did they honestly believe they could outrun a horse capable of covering 1,800 li — some 700 kilometers — in a single day?
Ochyma isn't famous yet, so we'll set that one aside. No matter how optimistic a man might be, he wouldn't convince himself of that.
If the land route was out, only one road of escape remained.
First we would check on the escort unit, who should still be fighting somewhere; if they seemed to be holding their own, we would head for the harbor by the southern gate.
With my thoughts in order, I climbed onto my own horse, which had trotted along behind Ochyma and Red Hare.
Come to think of it, the horse beneath me was a clever one, too.
Perhaps I ought to give this one a name as well?