Invasion (8)
Yufuluo, who had been personally leading the main force against the Black Mountain Bandits, was currently in a state of utter bewilderment.
The troops he had detached to his younger brother Huchuquan were fleeing helter-skelter, like foals with their tails on fire. And the things they screamed as they ran were truly a sight to behold.
"It's Lü Bu—! Lü Bu is here——!!"
To flee in such undignified fashion, shrieking the name of a Lü Bu who by any reckoning had only just set out from Luoyang, was a spectacle pathetic enough to turn any onlooker's stomach.
Yufuluo roared at the top of his lungs.
"You blockheads! You're falling for the enemy's trick—why cower before a Lü Bu who isn't even here?!"
"C-Chanyu! It's no trick! The real Lü Bu has come!"
One of the Xiongnu, seized fast by Yufuluo, blurted this out with urgent looks. Listening to his subordinate's protest, Yufuluo replied as though his head were throbbing.
"So you're telling me she crossed all that distance in this little time... how, exactly?"
He had been continuing evenly enough when his eyes suddenly snapped wide open.
"You pesky bastards! Quit running and fight me for once—!"
The sight of her glued to the rear of his desperately fleeing army, weapon whirling, was one Yufuluo knew all too well.
He had seen it countless times, and yet that menacing weapon still left him wondering how on earth such a slight frame could possibly swing it. Without a shred of exaggeration, hers was a monstrous strength that let her handle, even atop a horse, a colossal bow nearly the length of her own body. And her blood-red hair and crimson eyes—red as spilled gore—were more than enough to sear an unforgettable first impression into anyone who laid eyes on her for the first time.
In all of Yufuluo's memory, only a single commander alive bore such blazing red.
Yufuluo muttered, unable to make sense of the situation.
"...Why on earth is she actually here?"
Then something struck him, and he asked hurriedly,
"Wait—if the formation broke because of Lü Bu, what has become of my brother?"
Lü Bu's presence had been so overwhelming that it had drowned everything else out, but the plain truth was that he had committed those soldiers to hold back a single person.
The Xiongnu soldier answered, carefully gauging his lord's mood.
"Th-that, I couldn't rightly say..."
"All I know is that he declared he would speak with that enemy commander himself and rode for the front line."
"So that's how it is."
At his subordinate's report, Yufuluo sank briefly into thought. Having methodically sorted through the situation, he muttered,
"Tch. Knowing him, he'll have bolted and saved his own skin."
Anyone born of the Chanyu's bloodline inevitably came to ride steeds of staggering pedigree. Their endurance left ordinary horses far in the dust, and their speed went without saying—no comparison at all.
And yet even men mounted on such steeds had been cut down?
Which meant that had he himself been standing in that spot, the outcome would have been no different—and with that thought, rather than fret, Yufuluo could only heave a sigh of relief.
He summoned his adjutant.
"You there."
"You called, my lord?"
"This raid is a bust. See to our withdrawal."
"At once!"
Having quietly delivered his orders, Yufuluo tore the gaudy ornaments from his body without a moment's hesitation and flung them to the ground. That wench Lü Bu had instincts that were irritatingly sharp, though her ability to read a situation left much to be desired—this much ought to keep her off his trail.
He flashed a wry smile at the adjutant staring at him.
"Why are you gawking like that? If you're that sorry to see them go, take them."
"N-no, my lord!"
In a rout where every man was running for his life, parading around in such conspicuous finery was as good as begging to be hunted down and killed.
"Really? A shame, then."
Perhaps it had been no more than a joke; either way, Yufuluo steered the matter aside without ceremony.
Lü Bu Fengxian.
However mighty that woman raging about like a wild foal might be, there was a limit to how many she could fell alone. If soldiers versed in war threw themselves at her with death in their hearts, they could at least bog her down—and once the scale climbed past hundreds into the thousands, even the Peerless Under Heaven herself could hardly avoid being hard-pressed.
...Though tying down that many soldiers against a single person was already a ruinous loss in itself.
Raiding was, after all, scarcely different from daily life for the Xiongnu, and so their spirit could never match what they would bring to a war with the tribe's very survival at stake. Today they had merely strolled out with light hearts and run headlong into a savage beast—of course the soldiers panicked and scattered to the four winds. Even they, when hunting great beasts on the steppe, moved only after every last preparation was complete.
"...When I return, I must increase my escort."
He had capped the escort at around a hundred men, grumbling that the expense was getting out of hand, but yesterday's spectacle—the majority of them dying to a single enemy commander—had changed his mind. Had his guard numbered even a thousand, he would never have been hounded so absurdly by one lone warrior.
Had it been otherwise, they could surely have smashed through the defenders on sheer momentum yesterday; from there they might have swept through the villages and farmsteads, plundered the supplies, and slipped away with their tails between their legs. A flawless operation.
A scattering of small choices—each dismissed at a glance as beneath notice—had piled up into today's fiasco.
Swallowing his bitterness, Yufuluo quit the field, chewing over the vow that next time would be different.
The pursuit, in the event, was not particularly tenacious.
Had it not been for the feats of enemy commanders whose very names now set teeth on edge, the Black Mountain Bandits' lines would have broken long before. They were in no state to spare strength for a chase, and for all their cunning with terrain, they were not horsemen skilled enough to run down nomads like the Xiongnu. Lü Bu too—arriving first, and leaving behind even Zhao Yun, the commander who had appeared so abruptly on this battlefield, along with her own troops—did not bother pressing the pursuit beyond the mountains.
Yufuluo turned his head and looked back over his soldiers. They bore the slight weariness of a punishing march.
"How many men have we lost?"
His adjutant answered with deference.
"Some have yet to rejoin us... but I would say roughly five thousand are unaccounted for."
"...A heavy toll."
Setting Lü Bu aside, they had never so much as glimpsed the enemy reinforcements—suffering losses of this magnitude meant the Bing Province defenders had resisted desperately in their own right. It seemed the province did indeed possess the sinew to have held this frontier for so long.
"For the time being, I suppose it's back to watching for my chance."
It was a declaration of intent: he would invade again, boldly and in broad daylight, biding for a moment when—just like this time—no answer to a sudden assault would be possible. Even this war had been picked for precisely such an opening: Jeong Reung was occupied untangling affairs in the Jing Province region, and his interior lay in disarray.
His scouts had been handpicked from the very finest among the Xiongnu's already exceptional riders. Yufuluo knew better than anyone that no war begins without reconnaissance—that the survey must come before the sword.
And it was not that Yufuluo lacked the desire to settle things once and for all. But to pour out everything he had was still unthinkable while those in the north gnawed at his mind.
The northerners—those who wandered the bitter cold of the high plateau and had clashed with his people across long centuries. Long ago they had joined hands with the Han and come within a hair's breadth of annihilating them, yet somehow, like the weeds strewn across the steppe, they had endured with stubborn, weedy persistence. In the years since, the gulf in strength had widened so far that they were trampled by every people under the sun, but it remained true that they were too troublesome to simply ignore.
Yufuluo muttered, looking put upon.
"Someday those bastards will need dealing with as well...."
Just then, a band of riders revealed themselves.
Curved blades with recurved edges in hand, two and even three quivers slung at their hips as if to advertise their mastery of the bow—from their appearance alone, they were unmistakably Xiongnu.
Yufuluo opened his mouth and put the question to the band that had materialized out of nowhere.
"...And who might you be?"
"...Surely you can guess?"
When the figure at the head of the column spoke those words, Yufuluo, Chanyu of the Southern Xiongnu, laughed aloud, unable to contain his delight.
"So it is you! The Chanyu of the Northern Xiongnu himself—the one I'd heard nothing of but rumor!"
"..."
"And to appear at a moment like this—there can be only one meaning to it!"
The Chanyu of the Northern Xiongnu neither affirmed nor denied.
"Do I look such easy prey to you?"
Even with his words tossed aside unanswered, Yufuluo laughed with calculated good humor—then his expression hardened.
"Cowards who could do nothing but tuck tail and flee at the mere sight of me—and now you come stalking me?!"
The Northern Xiongnu held his silence still, and Yufuluo pressed on.
"Fine, then! I had just been thinking the time had come to settle this—and here you are, delivered straight to me!"
"Silent to the very end, I see. Then answer me this one question!"
Yufuluo bellowed.
"Do you truly believe you can beat me with an army that doesn't even number half of mine?!"
"...Yes."
The Chanyu of the Northern Xiongnu bowed his head in answer—and at the sight, Yufuluo's face began to flush red as a ripe jujube.
"Then let us end it all here! CHARGE——!!"
Southern Xiongnu and Northern Xiongnu. The end of an internecine war that had raged across centuries drew near at an hour no one had foreseen.