King of the Man (3)
As she burst out of the Nanman camp, the woman called out in a voice so loud it felt like a deliberate provocation.
"General-in-Chief! Come out here and face me──! Let's see that face of yours──!!"
She looked exactly like what you'd call a blonde, sun-tanned delinquent. I turned my head and asked the robot standing nearby.
"Is that woman Meng Huo?"
"She, is."
The massive robot, born and raised in Nanman, answered my question in staccato bursts.
"She handles, soldiers, more skillfully, than me. Fighting ability, similar."
"……"
"Her mind, is also, fairly sharp."
Quite the glowing review. So that's how she managed to unify the Nanman tribes?
"Meng Huo's spears and blades can't pierce her either, like you?"
"…No, they, cannot."
Oldolgol shook his head at my question. So he was the only robot in Nanman. In that case, nothing particularly difficult about this.
"Stop cowering like a coward and show your face──?!"
I heeded Meng Huo's ongoing shouting and urged my horse forward. Naturally, Seo Yeo, Lü Bu, and the rest of my guard followed close behind, and the soldiers at the front gradually gave way as I approached.
Once I stood before their formation, I tossed out a question.
"You're Meng Huo?"
"And you're the one calling yourself the General-in-Chief?!"
Firing a question right back at mine, Meng Huo wore a mocking smirk, apparently intent on seizing the psychological advantage. Was she actually trying to provoke me? …That wasn't a smart idea.
"I expected so much from the fabled General-in-Chief, but you're uglier than I thought—"
THWIP──!!
"HYAAAH!"
Before she could finish the sentence, a javelin came flying at her with terrifying force, and Meng Huo dodged it by a quick duck of the head.
Wow, she dodged that. Her reaction speed is unbelievable. Or was it just heaven smiling on her? The javelin—fast enough to make even Huang Zhong scream and hit the dirt—sailed clean past the ducking Meng Huo and impaled a Nanman soldier behind her.
"GACK!"
The soldier, run clean through the torso, let out a single strangled scream and died on the spot.
I turned my head slightly toward the girl who was presumably the culprit. There stood Seo Yeo, who at some point had snatched a spear from one of the guards and hurled it. The now-disarmed guard blinked, his expression still unable to process what had just happened.
…Maybe I should just have a few dedicated javelins made for her. Every time Seo Yeo throws one, another guard ends up bare-handed. It's becoming a problem.
Reaching a hand out to her side to reprimand the impulsive act, I said,
"I hate to be the one saying this, but you should watch your mouth."
"……"
"You're really going to get yourself killed one of these days."
Seo Yeo's cheek, deftly pulling off the throw from atop Wuzhui, was as squishy as ever.
"H-hahaha! You think the likes of that would frighten me, the great Man King?!"
Despite having her life threatened moments ago, Meng Huo bellowed with all the swagger in the world.
"Oh? Then let's revisit what you were saying a moment ago…"
"BUT! Insulting an enemy commander's appearance is not an honorable thing to do!"
There we go. Weren't you just insulting MY appearance a second ago, calling it ugly? The way she pivoted her attitude without a shred of embarrassment—I caught a glimpse there of the stubbornness that had once taken seven captures and seven releases before she'd finally surrendered.
"A truly outstanding general proves her skill on the battlefield!"
Meng Huo leveled her enormous sword at me and shouted.
"If you're really the General-in-Chief, prove your ability yourself!"
"…You mean, take the front line and swing a weapon around?"
"That's right!"
A fairly jaw-dropping proposal. Someone like me would be dead before anyone noticed, the instant I stepped into the thickest fighting at the front.
I shrugged.
"I'm afraid I'm not an outstanding general, so I'll have to decline your kind offer."
"…Ha! So you ARE a coward—"
THWIPPPP──!
Just then, an arrow streaked toward Meng Huo with incredible force. This time it wasn't Seo Yeo whose cheek I had in my grip—Lü Bu had moved.
"HIYAAAAH!"
The arrow flew dead-center for her heart, and Meng Huo twisted off her ox in what was nearly a rolling tumble to escape it.
…How on earth is she dodging these? Does that count toward erasing one of her life-stacks too? Wow, if so, that's four lives gone. If we capture her and the Ta Shi Da Wang with her army at the same time, she'd only have one life left.
Clutching the ox's flank and somehow managing not to fall, Meng Huo shouted in fury.
"J-just you wait! I won't forget this humiliation──!"
What is the person who tried to humiliate ME first going on about?
"Tch. She dodged it."
As Meng Huo scurried back into the depths of her formation, Lü Bu, bow still drawn, wore a disappointed look.
"I should have targeted her mount first, huh?"
"To catch a general, shoot the horse first."
At my words, Lü Bu marveled.
"Wow, that's a pretty cool saying. Did you come up with it yourself?"
"…No."
Come to think of it, that was a proverb coined long after my time. It felt a little strange, having made an old saying sound like I'd just invented it.
"Alright, next time we take down that ox first!"
Meng Huo's mount was suddenly in danger of becoming beef. Was this my fault? I could almost hear the ox's mournful lowing.
Meng Huo must have been truly furious, because the moment she vanished into her camp, she began advancing her entire army.
BOOM─ BOOM─ BOOM─
They marched with full swagger, beating drums made from the hides of unknown beasts. It was an image straight out of every stereotype about the Nanman tribes, lifted whole and planted there before my eyes.
Watching her, I raised a hand slightly; my aide confirmed the order, shouted to the surrounding soldiers, and set the army in motion.
Meng Huo's army was vastly larger than any Nanman force we had faced so far. The head of the beast really is the head of the beast, I suppose. Despite their king's life having been in danger, the soldiers showed not a flicker of wavering before crashing into our troops.
WAAAAH──!!
The way the Nanman fought was, quite literally, barbaric. Was there any people better suited to the phrase "give flesh, take bone"? They attacked with wild, gaping openings, and the moment one of our soldiers went for them, they'd take the blow with their own bodies as if they'd been waiting for it, then land a fatal counterstrike in a single motion.
Of course, the Nanman who took blades with their bare bodies didn't come away unscathed either—but these hardened tribesmen, raised in a brutal environment, fought on aggressively as if to say so what?
Even the northern horsemen who clashed with me day in and day out had fought like this. …Do all frontier peoples end up resembling one another?
With a fighting style worthy of the name "berserker," we had no reason to humor them. We simply held formation, skewered the enemies who recklessly closed in like shish kebabs, and let the archers stationed behind pour arrows onto them.
Naturally, the Nanman didn't just sit back and watch the archers, either.
HISSSS─!
"Wh-what is that?!"
"Snakes! Snakes!"
From the small clay pots they hurled, venomous snakes and poisonous insects came pouring out. Scorpions and centipedes—the classic venomous vermin. Giant hornets that made me wonder how on earth they'd been packed into a pot at all. And venomous serpents with a menace you could see at a glance.
Watching the enemy drag fantasy elements all the way onto the battlefield, I felt a sudden throb in my head. Since they threw the pots by hand, their range wasn't especially long, but it was more than enough to send our formation-holding soldiers into a panic.
"Don't be scared! Those things can't even catch a stray dog—what are armored men flailing around like this for?!"
At Wei Yan's ringing shout, the soldiers blinked at each other.
"R-right, I suppose?"
"Exactly. They're things that die the moment you stomp or swat them, aren't they?"
These soldiers had grown up amiably wrestling with grain-eating locusts since childhood; their resistance to creepy-crawlies was second nature, and once their courage kicked in, dispatching the venomous vermin was nothing. True, the hornet-like ones put on spectacular evasive maneuvers, but they were soon swatted out of the air by arms well practiced at catching locusts, their bodies bursting apart.
The venomous snakes managed to use their quick movements to bite a few soldiers in vulnerable spots and bring them down, but that didn't last long either.
"Come to think of it, they say snake is good for the body…"
"That's a venomous snake."
"There's a way to handle everything."
It was a moment that made one understand how humankind drove out countless other creatures to become the apex of the ecosystem.
CRASH!
As if that weren't the end of it, the snakes and venomous insects kept coming—but our numbers were so overwhelming that the attack could hardly deal any meaningful damage.
Still, it certainly drew the eye. Thanks to the heroic efforts (?) of the snakes and vermin, the volume of arrows from our own archers dwindled somewhat. It didn't turn the battle around, though.
"You lot didn't put on those weird armors! Then this'll be easy!"
"GWAAAH!"
The soldiers facing Oldolgol were lightly dispatching enemies not nearly as tough as the Vine Armor Soldiers, seizing the upper hand.
"You bastards! I've hunted tigers bare-handed—did you think I couldn't beat the likes of you?!"
The soldiers who had skewered great beasts in the burning forest pressed the enemy hard as well. After one taste of the fire, they'd developed hearts of steel that wouldn't bat an eye at anything short of catastrophe.
When the disparity in raw strength was this wide, the battle was as good as won. I craned my neck, searching for where Meng Huo might be.