The Baibo Bandits (4)
Acting on Seo Hwang's intelligence, I divided the army into several columns and fell upon the Baibo Bandits at dawn. The result was a success. Four of the bandit strongholds nestled in the mountain range straddling Sili and Bing Province—lairs from which they had made their living plundering—were burned to the ground.
The number of bandits holed up in each stronghold had varied, but it was plain enough that we had wiped out roughly half of them in a single morning. All that remained now was the stronghold of the Baibo chief himself, seated at the very heart of the range.
Guo Tai—that was the man's name, if I remembered correctly. Around his stronghold, several smaller outposts clustered as though to shield him. Compared to the lairs we had raided and burned at daybreak, they were modest in scale, but if the chief kept them at his side, they were likely the elite of the Baibo Bandits.
Not that "elite" amounted to much. How fearsome could men be whose entire trade consisted of robbing commoners too weak to resist?
According to Seo Hwang, Guo Tai was the sort of incompetent who overestimated his own abilities and botched everything he touched. He would be certain to look down on our small army and come charging without rhyme or reason—so she had said, if I recalled right.
The next day.
"The enemy is few! Crush them under your numbers—!"
WAAAAAH—!
Just as Seo Hwang had predicted, the Baibo Bandits came charging with no strategy whatsoever, and I could only laugh hollowly at the sight. No formation, no use of terrain they knew like the backs of their hands—nothing but raw momentum wielded as a weapon. Even Zhang Yan, who had once led the Black Mountain Bandits, had managed at least a clumsy ambush; the Baibo Bandits didn't even bother with that, simply trusting their numbers as they hurled themselves at us.
A contest of strength, decided by numbers. Which suited us just fine. A head-on clash of brute force was the very advantage our army prided itself on above all others.
The Baibo Bandits came on, riding the overwhelming momentum their superiority in numbers afforded them. Our soldiers held their formation firm, watching the enemy approach with calm, steady eyes. WAAAAAAAH—! The gap between the two forces narrowed, and with it the roar of their war cries swelled louder and louder. Soon after, the two armies collided. The real battle had begun.
CLANG! A soldier batted aside a bandit's swinging axe with his shield, so easily it was almost insulting.
"Wh-what the hell?!" The bandit who had charged in first, all bluster and bravado, let out a flustered squawk. Seizing the opening without a moment's hesitation, the soldier ran him through with his spear.
"Guhk!" Wearing no armor to speak of, the bandit failed to stop the thrust and breathed his last right there.
"Aaagh!" Farther off, a bandit attempting to loose an arrow from a crude bow instead handed our archers the first strike. On the rare occasion a Baibo archer did manage to send an arrow flying, it never came anywhere near us—it simply dropped, spent and powerless, to the ground. That much was only natural: the bows were shoddy things slapped together in haste, and the skill of the men handling them was every bit as wretched as their weapons. The true farce was that those falling arrows ended up planted in the crowns of the bandits fighting at the front.
Neigh—! The Baibo cavalry, for their part, accomplished absolutely nothing, being encircled by our spearmen and cut down one by one. Perhaps they had robbed a fairly wealthy merchant caravan of late, for mountain bandits were fielding horsemen—but a cavalry force thrown together in haste could never hope to do its job. Riding alone already demanded considerable practice, and swinging a weapon from the saddle was a genuine art, one that only revealed itself after years of building one's strength and drilling without end. They must have believed they were striking at a weak point, but the Baibo cavalry played no part whatsoever in the battle and were bled away, wasted for nothing.
Even when our soldiers blundered and left openings, the bandits' rusted-out weapons could not pierce the fine armor our troops wore head to toe. Watching it all unfold, I couldn't help thinking: isn't this already over? Our soldiers were cutting the bandits down at an utterly lopsided exchange rate, and...
"You cowards!! Stop running and come at me!!"
More than anything else on that field, no one could stop Lü Bu, rampaging at the very front.
Until now, Lü Bu had always been hampered on the battlefield by her ordinary mounts. She clearly had far more rampage left in her, but the horse beneath her simply couldn't endure it—and every time, she would click her tongue and return to the main camp. But the Lü Bu of today was different.
"Run! If you don't want to die, you'd better run—GYAAAAH!"
"I told you—the ones who show me their backs die first."
Among men, Lü Bu; among horses, Red Hare. Now I finally understood why that saying had been coined. Red Hare galloped through a battlefield packed wall to wall with men as casually as if it were crossing an open plain, and atop that horse, Lü Bu swung the Sky Piercer Halberd in her grip with pure, gleeful abandon.
The bandits struck down by Red Hare were smashed apart, bodies and all; the headless corpses her halberd left behind sprayed blood in every direction. The Baibo Bandits, who had charged on bravado alone, only now sensed that something had gone terribly wrong, and their ranks began to seethe and waver. And into that broken spirit, the cavalry crashed in from behind.
Several hundred riders, charging straight for the main camp where Guo Tai sat. When the bandits blocking their path were swept aside without managing a thing, Guo Tai erupted in fury.
"You can't stop even that measly handful of riders? What in the hell are you lot doing?! Stop them!"
At his command, the bandits scrambled to bar the cavalry's way.
"Guhk!"
"AAAGH!"
The instant a bandit planted himself in the road and hefted his weapon to slow the horsemen, the woman at the very head of the column brushed him aside without a thought and trampled him underfoot. However many bandits stood before her, she punched straight through and drove relentlessly on. Where the riders passed, only bone-chilling death remained.
"Why can't you stop them?! Why, damn it!" Watching the riders shed not a shred of speed, anxiety gnawed at Guo Tai's heart. He roared at Yang Feng, who stood trembling beside him as he stared at the horsemen.
"Stop standing there gawking and block them! Block them, I said!"
"B-Boss?"
Yang Feng's eyes went wide at the sight of Guo Tai already swinging himself into the saddle, ready to bolt. "You don't mean to abandon us?!"
"Shut your mouth!"
How could they fail to beat a force five times their inferior—and worse, hand them an opening on top of it? Even now, thousands were failing to stop a cavalry that likely numbered no more than three hundred. It was a situation Guo Tai's mind simply could not grasp.
"This is all the fruit of your incompetence, so you will pay the price!" With those parting words, Guo Tai kicked his horse's flanks and fled.
Yang Feng's face twisted as he watched him go. "Goddamn it all! And to think I called that bastard my boss—"
He heard the curses hurled at his back, but Guo Tai paid them no mind. War, after all, could always be salvaged so long as its leader lived! Fleeing so, deaf to the screams of his own men, Guo Tai in time noticed something strange. The thunder of hooves that should have been busy butchering his soldiers behind him had never once left his ears. It was drawing closer. Despite the warmth of high noon, a chill crept over his body.
"Faster! Run faster!"
The hoofbeats were closer than before. It felt as though he would be caught at any moment. "No! You sluggish wretch! Run, damn you!!" No matter how Guo Tai spurred the animal, its speed did not rise one whit. The horse, utterly indifferent to its master's desperation to live, only trailed drool as though worn to the bone. It was plainly drenched in sweat from head to tail—yet Guo Tai could feel his own body turning cold in a way that made no sense at all.
How close was it now? Could he truly escape? Cold. Strangely, terribly cold. Wrenching his horse along in a panic, stomach lurching, Guo Tai twisted his head around. And he saw it.
"..."
A brown-haired woman atop a black horse, directly behind him, her weapon already swinging. That was the last thing Guo Tai ever saw.
"You certainly made us chase you all the way to the end." Having severed Guo Tai's head in a single stroke, Zhang Liao reined her horse to a halt. Guo Tai lay dead, a look of dumb disbelief frozen on his face. She had hardly imagined he would use his own soldiers as bait and bolt alone—thanks to which the battle itself had been an easy victory, not that it meant she approved of the man's conduct.
"General!" A short while after she brought her horse to a stop, Seo Hwang came riding up urgently from behind. She glanced at the head rolling across the ground and gave a satisfied nod. "So you've taken Guo Tai. Splendid work, as expected of you."
"There's no need to sing my praises." Zhang Liao smiled and shook her head. Running down a commander who could barely ride was a task any of her soldiers could have handled with ease. "Though I'll admit, I was rather taken aback when you suddenly handed over command of the men and rode off somewhere on your own."
"Ah..." Seeing the Baibo Bandits collapsing around her, Zhang Liao had judged there was no longer any need to carve the path at the front herself, and had passed command of the cavalry to Seo Hwang. And so, while Seo Hwang led the horsemen in punching clean through the bandit lines, Zhang Liao had wheeled off alone to hunt down the fleeing chief. Naturally, every last bandit who barred her path along the way, without a single exception, met his end at her blade. When Zhang Liao gave a sheepish laugh, Seo Hwang spoke.
"The mop-up of the survivors is finished." Blood was dripping steadily from the axe with which Seo Hwang had cut down the bandits. "Our lord is waiting—let us return."
As if she had finally made up her mind, the title she used for Jeong Reung had changed to "our lord."
"Yes." Zhang Liao nodded, secured the head, and spurred her horse onward.