King Mulu (5)
She had lost the beast corps she'd doted on and called her darlings, and even her prized sorcery had been snuffed out in a single stroke.
With nothing left to her name but the elephant corps, only one course of action remained to King Mulu.
Chewing down on her lip, she roared:
"...If this is how it ends, then we charge! Trample every last one of them into the dirt!"
WAAARGH──!!
The Nanman handlers who had driven the beasts and the elephant corps fused into a single mass and came surging toward us.
THOOM─ THOOM─ THOOM─
That ponderous, rhythmic footfall pressed on the ears even from far away. Dozens of elephants charging with Nanman archers astride their backs was a sight that could do nothing but crush the spirit.
"Uuugh..."
The infantry holding the line trembled, half convinced they were being marched to a pointless death. And yet they held their ground all the same — they were elite veterans, seasoned by a long, unbroken string of battles. Though I suspected every ounce of that courage would evaporate the moment an elephant forced its way into the square and started raising hell.
I turned to Seo Yeo beside me.
"Seo Yeo, you remember what I asked?"
"Yes."
"Good."
At that unhesitating reply, I nodded and gave the order.
"Knock the rider off that elephant."
"……."
At my word, Seo Yeo lifted a spear from a nearby soldier's hands and settled into her stance.
───Found him.
The memory surfaced of the spear I had once hurled, charged with monstrous force, at Huang Zhong — the very archer who had once marked me for death. It had cleared well over a hundred meters and skewered a whole row of luckless soldiers in Liu Biao's army along the way. Had Huang Zhong not thrown her entire body into a twisting dive to evade it, even a warrior celebrated among the Five Tiger Generals would not have walked away whole.
There is, incidentally, a later anecdote about how Lü Bu — prompted by watching Seo Yeo that day — hunted down Huang Zhong herself and rained a terrifying storm of arrows upon her, but we'll let that story keep for now.
The reason so simple an act as throwing a spear had all but vanished from the battlefield was itself simple: compared to the bow, its range was far too short. An arrow might deliver less raw destruction than a hurled javelin, but it still packed ample force to kill a man. Javelins were also wretched things to carry — no soldier could haul more than ten into the field, a poor showing next to a well-made quiver that held twenty arrows or better. Those two fatal flaws had relegated the javelin to a supplementary weapon, a one-time nasty surprise: hold your spear while keeping formation, hurl it the instant a melee erupts, and draw your sword for everything after.
But what if those drawbacks could be made to vanish? What if the shortfall in range against arrows were overcome — and javelins came pouring forth one after another?
Faster than I could finish the thought, the spear left Seo Yeo's hand.
SHREEEAAK──!!
"KUAHK!"
Seo Yeo's spear split the air with a vicious shriek, sailed a good several hundred meters, and punched clean through the Nanman rider guiding the elephant. ...Granted, this was nothing more than patching the javelin's weaknesses with sheer, overwhelming muscle — but a flaw erased was a flaw erased.
The rider took the javelin square in the chest and was flung backward through the air with a last, wordless rattle. I nodded at the sheer, absurd destructive power of it.
Yeah. That one's dead.
And the spear that had skewered the rider didn't stop there — it slammed deep into the fighting tower mounted on the elephant's back.
"Wh-what in the world—?!"
Inside the tower, an archer who had been readying his shot froze in open shock. The mahout steering the very elephant beneath them had dropped dead without warning — of course they were rattled. With force like that, the spear thrown at the elephant itself would have dropped the beast with a grunt, but I had my reasons for singling out the rider.
"Alright. My turn now, then?"
Lü Bu, who had been loosening up by whirling one arm in great circles, drew from her hip an enormous bow nearly as long as she was tall. She set an arrow to the string and said,
"So what you're telling me is — put an arrow in that long nose?"
"That's right. It's the most eye-catching spot on the beast. Let's see you hit it."
"Hmm. Fine, then."
A target far beyond the reach of any ordinary arrow — and swaying this way and that even now. None of it posed the slightest problem for Lü Bu.
"No idea why you'd want the trunk instead of the forehead... but if Jeong Reung's the one asking."
With one graceless snort, she loosed the straining bowstring.
SHWEEEENG──!!
Just like the spear Seo Yeo had thrown moments before, the arrow shrieked toward the elephant — and without betraying my expectations, Lü Bu's shot struck the beast precisely where it should.
An elephant's trunk is famed for its exquisite delicacy. It is the limb the animal evolved for feeding itself, its head being far too heavy to move. There's even a famous children's song about how the elephant's nose is his hand. And in truth, an elephant will gather its food with the trunk and carry it to its mouth. A limb capable of such fine work is naturally packed dense with nerves.
Now — what happens when a sharp blade buries itself in so sensitive a spot?
What happens, you ask?
PAWOOOO──!!
That happens.
In human terms, would it be like the sting of a fat needle jabbed into your lips? No — seeing as it was an arrow off Lü Bu's bow, better to say the beast had simply been stabbed with a knife. It wouldn't die of it. It would only hurt like dying. ...Dreadful enough just to imagine.
An elephant's wits rival a chimpanzee's or a dolphin's, and the beast had kept marching in calm order even after losing its rider — but the instant that monstrous arrow sank into its trunk, it raised a great wail and began thrashing from side to side.
"Wha—?! What's gotten into it?!"
"I-I'm falling! Aaagh!"
Several of the Nanman archers astride its back lost their grip against the frenzy and plummeted to the ground. Those who fell landed headfirst and died on the spot; the rest were trampled beneath the rampaging beast.
And of course, the tantrum of an elephant that had snapped the last thread of its reason did not end there.
"...The hell? It just charged its own side."
"Guess it decided it's done fighting and is heading home."
I answered Lü Bu's remark in the flattest tone I could manage.
PAWOOO──!!
"GYAAH!"
"KRAGH!"
As though my flippant guess had struck true, the elephant plowed a highway straight through the Nanman ranks and bolted clean off the battlefield.
Temperaments differ from animal to animal, but elephants are, at heart, tremendous cowards. Strike so sensitive a part as the trunk and they startle and run. And what if, on top of that, the mahout steering them is gone? You get precisely what we had just witnessed: a berserk rampage visited on friendly lines instead of enemy ones. Comb through the reasons the powers of old who fielded war elephants were beaten, and it's there every time — the elephants panicked and bolted, or trampled their own men with eyes rolled white and lost the day. Later eras came to bolt armor over the trunk, the one true weak point, but the Nanman arrayed before me had done no such thing.
The truth is, unless you turned the animal's own temperament against it, there was no good way to drive one off. That hide is so thick that any ordinary blade or spearhead barely registers — which is exactly why I'd likened the arrow sunk in the trunk to a mere needle. If the cat-claw punches of lions and tigers, predators the elephant meets in the wild, cannot get through, what hope has a weapon swung by a human hand? If anything, you'd only inflame its temper; you'd count yourself lucky just to survive. Infection through the wound might finish it days later, but by then the battle would be long over, which makes that a very meaningless hypothetical.
"Kill the rider who gives the commands... strike the sensitive parts... and set the beast rampaging through its own ranks..."
Sima Yi, who had been watching the battlefield at my elbow, murmured in a level voice.
"Have you seen these beasts before, my lord? You know a remarkable lot about them."
Shrugging at the perfectly natural question, I answered,
"One came up to the palace as tribute, once."
Think about it. What happens when word spreads that the Emperor keeps a pet? Every toady angling for her favor comes crawling in hauling whatever rare creature he can lay hands on. Among those rarities, as it happened, had been an elephant — the kind of beast said to be seen only at China's southernmost edge.
'So enormous, and yet everything it does is honestly rather adorable.'
It ate a mountain of food and produced a mountain of dung besides, which made its upkeep a genuine headache — but to a palace that could summon manpower at will, that was no obstacle at all.
'Your name from this day forth is Pawoo.'
'......'
Confronted with Her Majesty's truly catastrophic naming sense, I had simply kept my silence. Put a puppy in that woman's arms and she would christen it Woofie — I'd have sworn it on my life. I could only pray she would find something worthier for the child growing in her belly.
"Target the mahouts controlling the elephants first. Understood?"
"Yes, my lord. I shall relay it to the archers at once."
Gao Shun bowed with perfect courtesy and began moving the soldiers. By now, every unit in the army knew exactly how to deal with the elephants. The men who had just watched one tear the enemy's formation to ribbons wore visibly harder, more resolute faces — courage visibly renewed.
PAWOOOO──!!
Which meant the hour had come to smash that knockoff fantasy army playing dress-up as druids into paste.