Changes (7)
"You're quick, I'll give you that—but all you do is dodge! You think that's how you're going to beat me?!"
"And do you think you can take me down?!"
Zhang Fei, her enormously long Serpent Spear refusing Ma Chao so much as an inch of approach. Ma Chao, tearing back and forth across the training ground atop a Ferghana Horse with seemingly inexhaustible stamina.
I watched the two commanders still trading fierce blows and let out a sigh of admiration. One thing was certain: Ma Chao had grown strong enough that calling her a match for anyone under heaven wouldn't have been the least bit embarrassing.
And the moment that thought crossed my mind, her Ferghana Horse bored into a gap in Zhang Fei's guard at blistering speed.
"Wha—!"
"Tsk! So close!"
Zhang Fei was no pushover, of course, and she shook Ma Chao off without much trouble—but it was also true that her iron-fortress defense had cracked, if only for an instant.
Watching Ma Chao strike and slip away, strike and slip away, Zhang Fei muttered like a woman with a splitting headache.
"Ugh... this is so dirty and underhanded, seriously. I'm telling you, let's just clash head-on and settle it."
"I'd rather not."
Ma Chao wove this way and that through Zhang Fei's menacing attacks on her superb horsemanship, all the while hunting for an opening.
Truthfully, she had no other choice. With the difference in reach, her only option was to wait for the gaps that opened the instant Zhang Fei finished a swing.
Except those gaps never seemed to come, so the fight was doomed to drag on. And whenever Zhang Fei's patience ran out and she charged in first, Ma Chao would wheel sharply around with her horse and snap at her rear—a genuinely maddening situation.
In other words, it came down to whether the Ferghana tired out first or Zhang Fei's guard broke first...
And honestly? I couldn't see that guard breaking. A hundred times out of a hundred, the horse would give out first.
The problem was that the Ferghana was a thousand-li steed, the kind that could run a full 1,000 li (400 kilometers) in a single day.
This isn't going to turn into an all-day brawl like the Battle of Jiameng Pass, is it?
Half-wondering whether I should start preparing torches right now, I turned my full attention back to the duel.
The duel carried on long after that. Zhang Fei, apparently resolved to drain the horse's stamina dry, began pressing in with abandon, while Ma Chao evaded her attacks with acrobatics dizzying just to watch.
"Waaaaah──!!"
The handful of soldiers present at the start swelled like bamboo shoots after a spring rain as time went on, until the training ground was packed tight enough to pass for a street market.
"I've got my money on General Ma to win..."
"Ha! You clearly don't know a thing. If you'd seen the Battle of Hulao Pass, you'd put it all on the General-in-Chief's colonel without a second thought..."
What in the world were those two doing?
A few soldiers had tucked themselves somewhere out of sight to wager on the outcome—at this rate, something was bound to blow up sooner or later.
"My, what admirable courage. Gambling out in the open, in a military camp where discipline is to be upheld."
"Uh—uh-oh?"
Almost before the thought had finished forming, Gao Shun materialized like a ghost.
...Honestly, she startled me too. Where on earth had she come from?
"You two had best give up on seeing your families for the foreseeable future."
"N-no!!"
One of the gamblers shrieked at Gao Shun, who pronounced the sentence in a voice as cold as a reaper's.
I felt a little sorry for them, that much was true.
As for Gao Shun and the rest of Zhang Liao's company—I had reassigned their postings once more. With Seo Yeo, Lü Bu, and Guan Yu all pregnant, none of them could take the field for the time being.
I had single-handedly removed three Match for Ten Thousand warriors, each capable of holding ten thousand men alone, from the battlefield for at least ten months.
I had gone and accomplished what no one in history ever had. Was I allowed to feel proud of that?
Anyway, with the pillar-like commanders propping up my army sidelined for months, I had filled the gap by calling Zhang Liao's company back to the front.
"Oh my... General Lü is with child?"
"...That's right."
"We were all so worried, you being so shy about such things—but you finally did it!"
"S-shut up!"
I could still picture Zhang Liao as she'd been that day, beaming sunnily and nodding away at Lü Bu. Naturally, Lü Bu had eventually roared her down—she was hardly the type to be cowed by a bit of teasing.
And since I had forbidden Lü Bu from any violent movement, all she could do was tremble with fury without acting on it.
"Huh? Then who's going to spar with me...?"
There was also the small matter of the sparring fanatic—who had been grinning ear to ear at the prospect of a bout with Lü Bu—sinking into despair, but let's not dwell on that.
I had worried, too, that Zhang Liao's company leaving their posts might thin Bing Province's defenses, but the strategists around me had this to say:
"I hear the tribes have been beating each other bloody lately? Then this is exactly when we should move boldly as well."
"...You think so?"
"No one with half a brain invades a third country and stretches their front lines while an enemy sits right in front of them."
So spoke Sima Yi, who had long since come of age yet still looked like a little kid to me.
"Know your enemy, and you can fight a hundred battles without peril—or so they say."
"......"
"The tribes are hopelessly tangled in endless infighting at the moment. They have no strength to spare for attacking us."
So spoke the white-haired little strategist who seemed to know everything, as if gazing straight into the future.
"I-I'll just agree with both of them!"
...And with the baby bird trembling between tiger and dragon nodding along vigorously to both opinions, my decision came fast. Declaring that now, if ever, was the moment to move boldly, I summoned several of the generals who had been holding the borders.
That wasn't to say I'd left us without any defensive arrangements, of course.
Jing Province had settled down of late, and with soldiers and funds pouring in without pause, we finally had room to breathe. Jing Province truly was a colossal land, one fit to stand beside Jizhou itself—supplies of every kind simply gushed out of it without end.
I intended to send large-scale reinforcements to the border regions: Bing Province, Xiliang, and their like. Come to think of it, hadn't Bing Province been driven into danger last time for the simple reason that it lacked soldiers? Asking infantry of similar size to hold back tens of thousands of cavalry—of course they couldn't hold.
The hour had come to put Napoleon's maxim into practice: when your soldiers outnumber the enemy's, that alone is strategy.
CLANG─!
So when, exactly, was that duel going to end? You'd think all that movement would drain a person, but Zhang Fei and Ma Chao were still going at it full tilt.
──Snort!
──Whinny!
If anything, it was the horses carrying them on their backs that seemed to be struggling a little. Humans with better stamina than beasts—were they truly the same species as me?
Just then, Zhang Fei, her strike slicing through empty air, growled:
"Argh, damn it...! That is one fine horse! You sneaky little brat! Quit running away and fight!"
"If you put away that uselessly overlong weapon of yours, I'll consider it!"
"Then you put yours away!"
"Right back at you!"
CLANG─!
Even as they traded blows, the two kept up a ceaseless war of words. Zhang Fei whirling a four-meter weapon about with strength that belonged to no human; Ma Chao handling her Ferghana as though horse and rider were a single body.
To an ordinary observer, both were magnificent. But if I absolutely had to rank them, Zhang Fei held the edge. Had she possessed a thousand-li steed like Ma Chao's, the odds were good the disadvantage would have flipped—Zhang Fei's riding, while nothing next to Ma Chao's horsemanship, was superb in its own right.
Of course, "disadvantaged" was all that meant; I couldn't claim Zhang Fei would win for certain. What I could say for sure was that I now had a clear measure of just how far Ma Chao had climbed. Word had it that while I was away from Luoyang, she had spent entire days at a stretch crushing the tribes that kept stirring up trouble.
I nodded as I watched Ma Chao, who looked perfectly prepared to cross weapons with a Match for Ten Thousand from dawn to dusk.
How much time had passed like that?
Grrrowl.
My stomach chose that moment to rumble, loudly demanding food.
"...Time to eat."
I murmured it, watching the sun hang at its height, and Liu Bei, who had been observing me, asked:
"Shall we have them stop?"
"Yes. Keep this up and one of them is going to get hurt."
The moment I agreed, Liu Bei gave the order to a soldier standing nearby. Before long, the note of a gong rolled across the training ground, and at the sound, Zhang Fei and Ma Chao stopped dead where they stood and turned to look at me.
I addressed the two of them in a level voice.
"That's enough. Let's go eat. I'm starving."
"...Yes, my lord!"
Ma Chao answered, her eyes sparkling bright. Nothing about her suggested the woman who had been trading murderous blows with Zhang Fei mere moments before. Watching her, I felt faintly dazed.
...It was like whiplash, swinging between spicy and mild.
"Aww... I could still keep going..."
"Yide."
"I know, I know."
Zhang Fei, who had been grumbling in disappointment, shrugged her shoulders at Guan Yu's word.
Then Ma Chao spoke up carefully, as if feeling out my mood.
"U-um... then, about my proposal...?"
"Yes. I'll grant your request—within reason."
At my nod, Ma Chao's face lit up all at once. Honestly, I had been given quite the show, so I owed her at least this much. The only question was what, exactly, she would ask for.
"......"
Trusting it wouldn't be anything too strange, I set off.
The weather was still, as ever, needlessly cold.