Phoenix (1)
With every one of her war-bands routed, capturing King Mulu was not a particularly difficult task.
Honestly, at first I did find myself wondering just how one went about seizing someone perched atop a white elephant...
"W-waaah?!"
"Please hold still."
Zhao Yun, who had been carving her way across the battlefield alongside her white horse, had at some point ended up atop the white elephant itself. Using the beast's trunk as a springboard, she had vaulted into the air with such astonishing agility that it might as well have been an acrobatic performance.
For all her command of savage beasts and her sorcery besides, King Mulu's own martial skill was a negligible thing. Then again, she knew that well enough herself—presumably why she sat atop an elephant in the first place.
Pawooo... The white elephant King Mulu rode, sensing its master's peril, planted itself where it stood and went utterly still.
Clever beast, I'll give it that. The sight of that white elephant—larger than any of its gray kin, its coloring unlike any other—halting so abruptly was genuinely striking.
"They've taken our Chieftain!"
"Wh-what?! Then what are we supposed to do...!"
Even amid the chaos of the battlefield, the white elephant's sudden strangeness was impossible to miss. The Nanman soldiers nearby, realizing their leader had been seized by an enemy general, sank into still deeper confusion.
"Surrender quietly, and I will spare your lives!"
I watched as Zhang Liao bellowed the offer at the head of our mounted column. This was no war to stamp out the Nanman root and branch—it was, first and last, a battle to bring them to their knees. Unless we meant to hunt down and kill the very last one of them, the sensible course was to thrash them soundly and stop there. Why spill blood that didn't need spilling?
"W-we surrender!"
"Please, spare us!"
With even the leader they had believed in now taken, the Nanman's will to fight collapsed entirely; they cast down their weapons and flung themselves flat against the earth.
It was an extreme order of battle: savage beasts and elephants aside, nothing in it but foot soldiers. Bereft of mobility, they did not so much as dare attempt a run for it. Unless a man belonged to that rare breed said to outrun a horse on the strength of the hair growing from his feet, throwing off cavalry pursuit was simply out of the question. ...It truly is a marvel, every time the thought crosses my mind. What manner of hair could possibly let a person run that fast?
"Ah... yeah, this one's on me."
Surveying the battlefield from atop the elephant, King Mulu raised both hands in a sheepish little gesture.
"So, um... I'd rather you didn't, like, treat me strangely or anything..."
"That is a matter for my lord to decide."
"I see..."
At the sight of Zhao Yun brushing her off without a moment's hesitation, King Mulu's eyes went rolling every which way.
"If you try anything foolish, I will break your arms and legs."
"O-okay! I'll be good! I'll stay put!"
Meeting those frost-chilled eyes, King Mulu froze rigid on the spot. She must have sensed it plainly by now: Zhao Yun was a woman who did exactly what she said she would. Having watched the whole unwitting comedy sketch play out, I gave a faint wry smile and turned my head away.
"I-I have a good idea too, tho?!"
That was what the timid little strategist had said, back when we were deciding how to counter King Mulu's beast corps. The pint-sized tactician, who had bitten her tongue yet again mid-sentence from sheer nerves, opened her mouth with tears welling in her eyes.
"If you grant me a corps of my own, I will deliver results without fail!"
"Without fail?"
At my question, the strategist's gaze slid away.
"...W-well, now that I think of it, not without fail, but with a very high probability of good results..."
Her bottomless lack of confidence pulled a snort out of me, and I gave my answer.
"Very well. I'll assign you nothing but handpicked Elite Frontier Veterans—manage them as you see fit."
"..."
This was the first opinion she had ever ventured—the girl who spent her days trembling, wedged between dragons and tigers. A lord who couldn't grant even this much had no right to call himself one.
With that thought, I gazed into those green eyes, the very color of fresh spring grass, and spoke.
"Remember only this."
"..."
"One day, you will become a phoenix."
The crouching dragon had awakened from its slumber, and the great tiger had begun to roar at all the world. Now it was time for the young phoenix to leave its nest and soar.
"My King! Enemy reinforcements have appeared on the right flank of our formation!"
"Again?"
A slight scowl crossed Meng Huo's face as she took in her aide's report. Barely any time had passed since King Mulu had set out to deal with the previous wave of reinforcements. And now another relief force had shown up?
"What a headache these people are! Where the hell do they keep popping out from?" Meng Huo scratched her head as she grumbled.
She had known the lands of Yi Province were prosperous—but never this prosperous. Even after beating back a staggering number of soldiers, the enemy's resistance showed no sign of drying up, and Meng Huo sank into a brief reverie. Did soldiers sprout right out of the ground somewhere? Or come tumbling down from the sky? A land that grew more wondrous the more one learned of it, she marveled—and then turned to a messenger standing nearby.
"Tch. Go tell Oldolgol it's his turn this time."
"At once!"
No sooner had the lightly armored soldier hurried off than the red-haired woman nearby asked:
"Mulu isn't even back yet. Will you really be fine?"
"Her? She's probably ambling about at her leisure, off feeding her beasts again."
The destructive power of King Mulu's corps was something everyone acknowledged—but the sheer amount they ate was the problem. Even the lightest eater among beasts devoured several times what a man did; keeping them fed, one might say, was a trial in itself. King Mulu had boomed out her hearty laughter over the blockheads who starved their own beasts to make them fiercer, only to end up as the beasts' next meal instead. ...Though for the life of me, I couldn't tell which part of that was supposed to be funny.
"Besieging the city? Me and Duosi alone are more than enough for that."
King Duosi—the man who tormented his enemies into exquisite agony with every poison under the sun. By his own telling, he extracted his venoms from the venomous serpents and the like that dwelt in his homeland. Meng Huo, who had witnessed the process with her own two eyes, shuddered from head to toe. One careless bite meant instant death—and there he had been, hemmed in by those very creatures, smiling as happy as a man could be...
King Duosi kept up a ceaseless torment of the enemy holed up inside the city walls with his extracted poisons, while she herself hammered them from without with her immense host of soldiers.
"Each of us ought to take charge of the field we're most confident in, no?" Meng Huo said in an even voice.
"Mmm..."
"They're detachments set apart for exactly this purpose in the first place."
If anyone understood, it was Meng Huo, who had gathered every tribe under a single banner. Mulu and Oldolgol. The two of them had personalities so overpowering that any clumsy attempt to blend their armies would yield efficiency worse than leaving each to stand alone. It counted for much, too, that they led tribes of such influence she could hardly order them about at her whim...
"Whew. Thank goodness we at least manage to talk to each other."
Armed with her inborn knack for winning hearts and no small mountain of gifts, Meng Huo had gently coaxed the pair along, folding their strength into hers by comparatively peaceful means. It was a mercy, at least, that neither of them was the sort of fool who would sooner die than tolerate anyone standing above her.
"Don't worry! On open ground, those two have never lost a fight. Not once!"
Frankly, she added with an untroubled smile, even she wasn't especially confident she could beat them herself.
...
Why, though?
It was not, as Meng Huo said, a situation that warranted such dread—yet the woman could not shake the persistent feeling that something was deeply wrong. It felt as though someone were deliberately carving a vast host into pieces, bit by bit. Even so, the woman forced down her nagging disquiet and nodded. Just as Meng Huo said, those two had never once been beaten in a head-on contest of strength. However few of their own remained, the two of them would surely see it through—so she believed, and waited for the outcome.
"—The King commands you to destroy the enemy reinforcements that have appeared in the east!"
"I see."
The vast army camp gathered around Meng Huo. From within it, in the quarter staked out on the right, a colossal figure answered in a blunt, toneless voice.
A full zhang and two chi tall—nearly nine feet of sheer, staggering size. Every time the soldier charged with delivering Meng Huo's order laid eyes on him, cold sweat ran down his back; nothing about the man suggested he belonged to the same species.
The giant of a man—a figure so immense that even calling him a giant felt like an understatement—hoisted his enormous axe and spoke.
"Relay, to the King."
...
"I, will, follow, the order."
"Y-yes, sir!"
At that deep, weighty voice—like the very air itself ringing with it—the soldier snapped a salute and then bolted from the spot as fast as his legs would carry him.
...
The mountain of muscle watched him go for a long moment, then heaved his colossal frame upright.
A size that no man under heaven could presume even to measure against. No one alive could stop him. The man who had once swept away every enemy that barred his path with that gigantic axe stepped onto the battlefield once more.
"Hieee... I-is that... is that truly a person, same as us...?"
...
The man who had marched out in high spirits fell silent at the sight of the frail-looking enemy commander before his eyes. He had sworn himself a firm resolve: no matter who came, he would not let his guard down. And in that instant, that resolve felt as though it were crumbling to nothing.