King Mulu (1)
The Nanman had smashed aside every army that dared bar their path, rolling forward in an unstoppable tide.
But the invaders from beyond the frontier now faced another mountain — one that any tribe hoping to conquer the lands of Han would inevitably have to cross.
The city wall.
It is practically a law of nature that even the northern nomads, so terrifying in the open field, look feeble in a siege. It isn't as though a horse can leap a rampart; what exactly is a rider supposed to do about one? Even Genghis Khan of the Mongols had shown no particular gift for siegecraft when he first attacked the Jin dynasty.
...Not that it slowed him down for long. He adapted almost immediately and carried on his conquest by blasting every last gate and pass to pieces. If even Genghis Khan managed that, what were the odds the tribes of the far southern jungles would prove any different?
As things stood, the Nanman could not sweep aside the strongholds barring the road into Yi Province, not right away. Which meant that, bleak as the situation looked, the defenders still had time to catch their breath and mount a counterattack.
Too much breath, however, was another matter. If they lounged about at their ease, the odds of those strongholds cracking open under the Nanman's fists would only grow.
Liu Tan and Nuban, as though determined to prove their loyalty, began falling over one another to bog the Nanman down and hang off their ankles. And really, when you looked into it, that was hardly out of character — the two of them were Xiangyang men by birth.
The Nanman, one imagines, were furious. Day after day, stuck in the same spot, unable to get past a single wall.
They could always ignore the place and march elsewhere — but why does anyone call a stronghold a stronghold? It earns the name precisely because it lets you keep watch over everything the enemy does.
Leave it untaken — grumbling all the while that such tactics were dirty and underhanded — and someday they might find their supply lines severed, or catch a blade in the back. Dirtier and more underhanded still.
Could the Nanman really reason that far ahead? A fair question. But even in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Meng Huo had shown herself reasonably shrewd. It was only her habit of screaming that round doesn't count! and demanding rematches that had shaved her image down to the bone.
At any rate, thanks to those two men's heroic, tear-jerking struggle, I finished every last preparation and marched out on schedule. The hour had come to face, with my own eyes, the fantasy army I had only ever heard tell of.
Near Zizhong County, Jianwei Commandery, Yi Province.
For days now, the Nanman army had been hurling itself at the fortress that stood there.
"Ugh, this is SO annoying! Why won't these bastards just die already?!"
Meng Huo — who had crowned herself King of the Nanman — flung her sword down into the dirt as she growled.
She had taken plenty of passes and fortresses on the way here, yet siege warfare never got any less miserable, no matter how many times she fought one. Men who would have been swept away by a single solid clash simply hid behind their walls and rained down arrows. It was enough to make anyone climb the nearest rampart and scream.
Even back home, when she had united the tribes, nothing had ever been this suffocating, Meng Huo fumed.
It was then that a girl who looked very much like Meng Huo shrunk down in miniature tilted her head.
"Sis, why are you so hung up on this place? Can't we just go around it?"
"Nope! Look at this!"
At her little sister's question, Meng Huo shook out a topographic map of Ba-Shu — torn haphazardly from a nearby fortress — with a flourish.
Pointing to the map, Meng Huo began. "This is where we are right now, see?"
"Uh-huh."
"And this is the fortress we're attacking."
As she said it, her finger came down squarely on the very center of the map.
"So! What happens if we ignore this fortress sitting in the middle of Yi Province and march off somewhere else?"
"...We get attacked from behind later?"
"Exactly that!"
Declaring her clever little sister sharp as ever, Meng Huo crammed the map away without ceremony and pressed on.
"The only reason we can fight at all right now is because food keeps flowing in from home. So what happens if those bastards hit our rear and cut that road clean off?"
"...That's my sis for you! You're amazing!"
"Aren't I just?!"
The two sisters, born of the same womb, collapsed into giggles together. Their manner was so breezy you would never have taken this for a battlefield.
"...Good grief."
A woman had been watching from a short distance away, and now she let out a long, deep sigh.
If you had welded every tribe into one, you ought to carry yourself with the gravity that achievement deserved. Plainly she'd had the ability to do the welding — but every time Meng Huo put on one of these lighthearted displays, there was no shaking the sense that she fell short.
Though born to a different tribe, the woman had been at her side since childhood. She turned her gaze toward the fortress.
A fortress planted dead center in Yi Province. Its defenders — the Han, one supposed, was the word for them — clearly understood what it would mean: if this place fell, all of Yi Province would drop into the Nanman's hands. They were fighting for their walls with the desperation of cornered men.
"Do not give a single step! We will not let our families be ravaged by savage hands!"
"Hahaha! To think, even at my age, the battlefield hasn't changed one bit!"
Even at a glance, these were commanders no one would find easy to deal with. Zhang Ren and Yan Yan — the two men Liu Tan had entrusted with the defense of the stronghold — skewered with their weapons every Nanman who dared set foot on the walls.
"...This is dragging on far too long," the woman murmured, worry seeping into her voice. If the enemy's reinforcements arrived while things dragged on like this, the battle would only grow harder.
Meng Huo, catching the mutter, simply laughed, brimming with confidence.
"So what! If reinforcements show up, we'll just smash those too!"
"...Right. How nice it must be, being able to relax."
"Huh? What's that supposed to mean?"
Meng Huo blinked at her friend.
Just then, a Nanman officer in a light coat of vine armor came hurrying up with a report.
"Your Majesty! Enemies sighted on our left flank!"
The enemy's reinforcements had appeared — precisely the development the woman had been dreading. Meng Huo only cocked her head, utterly unbothered.
"Huh? They really did come?"
"......"
"Eh, doesn't matter."
Had the string of victories finally gone to her head? Meng Huo planted a hand on her hip and bellowed.
"Let them all come! I'll smash the whole lot of them!"
"As expected of our great King!"
"See?!"
Watching Meng Huo roar with laughter, the woman heaved yet another sigh — thinking, this time, that all that arrogance would sooner or later deal their own side a bitter defeat.
"For the moment, it would be best to turn that momentum of theirs against them."
"Their momentum?"
Listening to Zhuge Liang's counsel before we marched, I voiced my puzzlement.
"The Nanman have fought their way into the heart of Yi Province without suffering so much as a single true defeat."
"......"
"And somewhere along the way, their leader went so far as to proclaim herself King of the Nanman..."
Reciting, in that calm voice of hers, how best to handle the Nanman, Zhuge Liang allowed herself the faintest curl of a smile.
"One need not see it to know she has grown arrogant, no?"
"I see."
I nodded along. It happens in games too — the moment someone decides the odds favor them, they start playing reckless. Then, when they die and the match gets turned around on them, they hammer their keyboard until it shatters. With such players in mind, Zhuge Liang's argument hardly seemed strange.
"Though they do seem to obey their leader's orders well enough... from the composition of their army, one can see the tribes each keeping to their own kind."
She was probably not wrong. A corps of war beasts, a corps of venomous snakes, a corps of Vine Armor Soldiers... Merely lashing that pack of fiercely individual oddballs into a single army was an achievement in itself. From that alone, anyone could tell Meng Huo was no fool.
Zhuge Liang raised the White Feather Fan to half-hide her lips and continued.
"Should we wag our tail ever so teasingly, is there not one unit that will come darting out all on its own, sworn to run us down?"
"Darting out?"
Listening to Zhuge Liang, I raised the question again.
"Yes. Say... a unit able to run a good deal faster than any man. A unit of that description."
"Ah."
I understood at once. King Mulu, commander of the beast corps, had little chance of distinguishing herself in a siege. What were elephants and tigers supposed to do once they reached a wall? At best they would bellow near the ramparts until they were shot into pincushions. A King Mulu left twiddling her thumbs through the whole siege would not let a chance for glory slip by — the moment we withdrew, she would come howling after us. In other words, Zhuge Liang meant to lure the beast corps out first, elephants and tigers and all, and destroy it in detail.
"Entrust an outstanding commander with a force of cavalry," Zhuge Liang said with a smile. "Draw them as far as the nearby forest, and no four-footed beast will make it home alive."
"Understood."
Settle the beast-shaped variable first, and the rest of the campaign would likely be a smooth, stable win. Honestly, the snake corps under King Duosi or the Vine Armor Soldiers under Oldolgol didn't frighten me much. In a straight contest of strength, the only real problem was the beasts — the ones not even our well-trained soldiers could stand against.
Having heard Zhuge Liang out, I found myself thinking of the blue-silver-haired commander who had marched after us with her troops, swearing to carve out merit in this campaign come what may. If anyone could live up to my expectations, it was her — keeping her distance just barely out of reach, close enough to tempt and never quite close enough to catch, and doing her part to perfection. When facing fantasy, you answer with fantasy.
"...No, seriously, what on earth is this bizarre contraption?"
"How would I know? Go ask Zhuge Liang."
It was time for Zhuge Liang's invention — the one that had left even Sima Yi utterly flustered — to take the field.