The Phoenix (5)
The fire arrows loosed by the archers seemed to dye the very sky crimson.
No—not seemed. They truly did. Arrows beyond all reckoning, so many that the sight of them smothering the heavens felt less like a volley than a shift in the weather itself.
In an instant, the depths of the gorge had become a sea of flame. The vine armor—rattan soaked in oil—blazed up fiercely the moment fire touched it, as though it had only been waiting for the chance, and the soldiers clad in it, naturally, stood no chance at all.
They say the searing pain of burning is the most excruciating agony a human being can know.
"AAAAAAGH!"
The vine armor soldiers shrieked, wracked by torment so vast they hadn't the presence of mind even to cry out that it was hot. The lone mercy in the misfortune was that such overwhelming pain meant they did not stay conscious for long.
"Welp. What a total disaster."
Gan Ning, who had clambered up to the rim of the gorge with a light bound of her body, gave a low whistle.
"Shouldn't we be calling our little strategist the Vermilion Bird instead of the Phoenix?"
The guardian beast of the south, said to govern fire among the Five Elements. She had burned the foreign tribes threatening the Han from the southern lands of Yi Province to death in a single stroke, so the poseurs strutting about aspiring to immortality would surely think of the Vermilion Bird at a sight like this.
"Hmm... Still, I wonder if she'll be all right."
Enemy or no, they were still people called barbarians—wouldn't burning tens of thousands of them alive be too much of a shock? Unlike the likes of her, for whom killing at the front lines was simply the day's work, the little strategist had been one to do nothing but tremble behind the General-in-Chief. Soldiers who broke under war's cruelty and lost their minds were hardly a rarity.
"...I do wonder how our little strategist will take it."
She'd learned from this whole affair that the girl could deliver when the moment demanded it, but enduring a gruesome spectacle like this was another matter entirely.
The sly little brat whose depths no one could fathom had already given her the order to kill; the fiery little brat with that downright murderous glare thought nothing of hauling in spies with her own two hands and torturing them besides. What reaction, then, would the meek little girl sandwiched between those two show?
Gan Ning was mulling this over as she turned her head away from the gorge, and then—
"E-EEEK?!"
"General-in-Chief's orders, you see. You mustn't look~"
...She beheld Huang Zhong twirling round and round in place with the tiny girl clutched to her chest.
"......"
Confronted with the sheer absurdity of it, Gan Ning felt something she couldn't possibly have put into words. How to describe it. She could understand sparing someone that gruesome sight on the General-in-Chief's orders, but...
"W-Wait a moment... my insides..."
Wouldn't that leave a mark in an entirely different sense?
Pang Tong, who wore a great big hat for the express purpose of dodging people's stares, complained of dizziness at Huang Zhong's spinning. Unlike the generals who could twirl on the spot all day without turning a hair, Pang Tong's physical abilities were perfectly ordinary. How long could a girl like that hold out against dizziness?
"HUUOOORGH."
"Oh dear."
At the sight of Pang Tong bringing something up with one hand braced against a nearby tree, Huang Zhong smiled and rubbed her back.
"There was never any need for you to see something so harrowing from the very start. All right?" said Huang Zhong.
"B-But I've seen plenty of gruesome things in my time..."
"This is on an entirely different level."
The acrid smoke rising off people burning alive, and the smell of roasting meat, were indeed nothing a stomach took kindly to.
"...Mm. Not a pretty sight."
"I don't think I'll be able to look at meat for a while."
This, from the elite troops of the General-in-Chief—the man who had marched through every battlefield under heaven.
Until yesterday the two sides had been crossing weapons and trying their level best to kill each other, but the cruel end met by the vine armor soldiers was more than enough to stir a pang of pity.
Gan Ning, gazing back down into the gorge, murmured, "...Then again, that stuff burns like a dream."
I doubt even dry kindling slathered in oil would throw off heat like this.
"And with a weakness that blatant, we could never use the stuff ourselves anyway."
Fire attacks were a stratagem that cropped up surprisingly often when humans fought humans. Loosing fire arrows, or—simpler still—hurling the torch itself. She'd been half-tempted to requisition a set of that vine armor, seeing as it was supposedly featherlight and turned a blade beautifully, but if the alternative was being roasted alive, letting it go was unquestionably the right call. Well... seeing as every last piece of vine armor in this place had been burned to nothing, she couldn't have taken it even if she'd wanted to.
Krrrumble—
"...Hm? What's that?"
Gan Ning tensed at an ominous sound rolling in from somewhere close by. Thunder, rumbling across the sky.
"...Aha. So our little strategist saw this coming too?"
No wonder the weather had looked a touch overcast—it had all been part of the plan.
'So... this is how Kongming—Zhuge Liang's courtesy name—said to put astrology to use...?'
The timid girl who had endlessly repeated the same cycle—one glance at the night sky, one glance at her books, over and over and over.
'I-It's too hard...'
Difficult and complicated though she'd sobbed it was, in the end it seemed she had pulled it off.
"Good heavens..."
Huang Zhong, still fussing over Pang Tong, who hadn't yet recovered her senses, covered her mouth in astonishment.
"......"
Wei Yan, who had halted the arrow barrage some time ago, silently lifted her head to the sky as well.
And so every gaze converged upon the heavens—and
Shhhaaaaa—
the thing people call spring rain began to fall, soaking the earth below.
"...Hm. Bleed them as little as possible, and break their will to fight..." A feat difficult enough to manage even in words—and the little strategist had just done it.
The more Gan Ning looked, the more astonishing the girl became. Who on earth had ever looked at that child and called her slow? Perched on the cliff edge and gazing into the gorge, Gan Ning rose to her feet thinking that some people, truly, had no eye for others.
At some point, the vine armor soldiers had been whittled down to fewer than half their number. Now the one who would decide their fate was the man who led them—their chieftain, Oldolgol.
"......"
Oldolgol, who trusted a body that turned aside even spear and blade and so wore no armor to speak of, had been largely spared the fire attack. But the tribesfolk who followed him were another story. Every last one of them, without exception, had gone into battle clad in vine armor—and they had screamed and burned beneath the enemy's fire arrows. A few sharp-witted souls did manage to survive by hastily slashing through their armor's bindings, but even they owed their lives to the fact that the arrows had stopped falling.
How much time had passed like that?
Krrrumble—
The flames that had seemed bent on swallowing every last tribesman in the gorge and burning for all eternity abruptly died out, in the very same instant the heavens shook.
Shhhaaaaa—
Rain, pouring down out of nowhere.
"...Rain."
Oldolgol looked about him, once. The sun that had lit the ground so brightly had dimly withdrawn behind the clouds, and around him blackened corpses lay sprawled, still trailing smoke. Well over half his people, dead. As Oldolgol sank slowly into thought, a voice reached him.
"Hey. Back with us yet?"
"...You."
When Oldolgol raised his head, he saw the woman who had grappled with him that exhausting, never-ending bout perched atop a mound of earth. Gan Ning spoke in an even, level voice.
"Even with a head as slow as yours, you can tell you've lost. Right?"
"......"
At the sight of Gan Ning addressing him in exactly the same manner as the day they'd first met, Oldolgol held his silence. For the fact of his defeat was not one he could deny.
"One last question."
"...Speak."
"Even now, that suffocating way of talking just won't quit, huh."
Muttering once, Gan Ning fixed Oldolgol with her gaze. "Will you surrender, or will you fight to the last?"
"......"
Had it been any other day, he would have chosen battle without a moment's hesitation. But the situation had turned dire. Oldolgol swept his eyes across his surroundings. The tribesfolk who yet lived had torn off their vine armor to escape the flames, and the will to fight had drained clean from their eyes.
"......"
Along the rim of the gorge above, the archers who had dealt his people death were drawing their bows once more.
Oldolgol remembered who the soldiers who followed him were. They were the people of the Wuge Kingdom—valiant warriors sworn to defend that land. If he and everyone gathered here breathed their last in this very place, what would become of the nation he ruled? The families of his tribesfolk? His own family?
"......"
In this moment, there was only one course of action a king could take.
THUD!
"I... will... surrender."
The giant who had never once bowed his head, not even to Meng Huo, King of the Nanman, dropped to his knees and pressed his brow to the ground. That was the responsibility a king must bear. His duty. And at the sight of every one of his tribesfolk bowing down after him, Gan Ning gave a nod.
"There's your answer, Strategist."
"Th-Thank... goodness..."
Pang Tong, wheezing as she clambered up the mound of earth, let out a long breath of relief.
And so Oldolgol, who alongside King Mulu had led the finest elite force of the Nanman army, was defeated in his turn.