Tianshui Falls
Once I judged that the siege preparations were as complete as they were going to get, I gave the order to begin the assault.
Men threw themselves at breaking down the gates, strained and grunted to scale the walls, and loosed arrows in a ceaseless rain.
A siege, when things go poorly, is the kind of battle that can drag on for ages.
How long had Yuan Shao spent trying to topple Gongsun Zan, that corner-dwelling shut-in who'd barricaded himself inside Yijing Tower? If I recalled correctly, she'd wasted a good four years trying to crack that fortress.
Granted, part of that was because Yijing Tower was an absolute nightmare to breach in its own right…
Either way, I had steeled myself for the possibility of being stuck out here for over a year if things went badly. Dong Zhuo had smuggled a staggering quantity of supplies out of Chang'an, and he still had a considerable number of elite soldiers left besides.
Even in victory, I'd expected it to take a long while to lay hands on the man himself.
But my prediction was pleasantly, thoroughly wrong.
For reasons I couldn't fathom, Dong Zhuo's army was showing signs of utter helplessness here too.
Had something happened inside the city — something I knew nothing about?
Well, it didn't matter. If Dong Zhuo's troops couldn't fight at full strength, all the better for me.
Without missing a beat, I pressed the attack against them even harder.
And so, around the time the battle that had begun in the early morning pushed past noon, something strange occurred.
"F-Fire! There's a fire!"
Black smoke was rising from within the city.
The blaze had started near the main gate, and before long it swallowed up a few unfortunate soldiers of Dong Zhuo's army, growing larger and larger as it fed.
By any measure, the scale of it looked like the work of deliberate arson, and I frowned in confusion.
Dong Zhuo couldn't actually have gone mad enough to set his own city ablaze mid-battle.
That question answered itself the moment a certain crowd appeared on the scene.
"Drive out Dong Zhuo! Drive out Dong Zhuo!"
AAAAGH—!!
The common folk.
The people who had suffered under Dong Zhuo's heel for years upon years were raising their voices in open fury.
Dong Zhuo's garrison belatedly scrambled to suppress the uprising, but these were hardy souls raised and toughened in the crucible of Xiliang.
Facing soldiers hardened by long years of war, they fought back with real grit, buying time for themselves.
But stalling was as far as they could go.
If we didn't help them, they'd be crushed within the hour.
And naturally, I had no intention of standing by and watching that happen.
"Lu Bu."
"Yeah?"
I called out to Lu Bu beside me, my eyes fixed on the scene of the fire.
"Can you manage it?"
She laughed as if the question were barely worth answering.
"Just leave it to me."
With that brimming confidence behind her, I nodded.
"Off you go, then."
"Finally!"
Before the words had even faded, Red Hare shot forward beneath her.
"Let's go!"
…The main gate wasn't even breached yet. What exactly was she planning to do riding straight at the wall?
I'd assumed she'd ride up to the siege ladders or one of the assault towers already pressed against the ramparts and climb over one of them — but no.
Red Hare, the peerless steed among peerless steeds, closed the distance to the wall in the blink of an eye.
As the ramparts loomed close, Lu Bu shifted her posture on horseback, crouching low on Red Hare's back.
……Don't tell me. Is it that?
"MOVE—!!"
Crouched as if about to leap at the wall itself, Lu Bu let out a tremendous roar.
At that feral cry, our own soldiers attacking the wall flinched and scrambled to clear a path for her.
Then, having closed to just the right distance from a siege ladder, Lu Bu launched herself off Red Hare's back.
"……"
Red Hare was, by a wide margin, the largest horse I'd ever seen.
Hurling herself from that great back, Lu Bu soared a good five meters into the air, then landed squarely on the siege ladder — a thing designed to be climbed by hand — and simply ran up it.
The walls defending Tianshui stood roughly ten meters tall.
Lu Bu cleared that height in less time than it took to blink.
"……Every single fight, she finds something new to show me."
This world was oddly fantasy-flavored, wasn't it?
Since this is China, should I call it wuxia rather than fantasy?
Lu Bu had reached the top of the wall.
Everything that followed was a repeat of the siege of Julu from the Yellow Turban Rebellion days.
Dong Zhuo's soldiers got a first-hand lesson in the fact that a human being can briefly fly through the sky without wings, and as our troops poured up in her wake, the section of wall where Lu Bu had landed was completely neutralized.
Red Hare, for some reason, was circling around and around near me without her rider.
When a horse that size does that, it gets genuinely distracting.
Come to think of it, Xiang Yu used to ride a famous horse like Red Hare too, if I remember right.
If anyone could explain what was going on with the beast, it'd be Seo Yeo.
"Seo Yeo?"
"Yes."
As always, she was right behind me, and she answered the instant I called her name — clean as a blade.
I jerked my chin toward Red Hare, still orbiting the area.
"What's wrong with her? Why's she doing that?"
At my question, Seo Yeo turned her eyes briefly toward the horse, then back to me.
"She appears to have taken an interest in you, my lord."
"Me?"
What did I have to do with any of this?
When my face betrayed my confusion, Seo Yeo went on.
"Pets gradually come to resemble their masters. It's only natural."
"……"
"Her mistress has warm feelings toward you, so the pet has simply developed the same feelings in turn."
That was… an explanation I could more or less accept.
……Can you really call Red Hare a pet, though?
When I extended a hand toward the great red horse, she approached slowly and pressed her forehead into my palm.
Strangely enough, it was almost cute.
Lu Bu, having broken the wall's resistance, seemed to have leapt straight down into the city itself — she was nowhere to be seen.
CRASH—!
With the ramparts neutralized and the covering fire thinning out, the blooded soldiers following behind surged forward with real aggression and blasted the main gate apart.
I gave Red Hare's head one last pat.
"Go on, then. Go help your mistress."
"Hiihing!"
At my words, Red Hare let out a short whinny and thundered off toward the shattered gate.
Proving just how clever a horse she was, Red Hare wove past our allies while slamming headlong into enemies and leaving them broken in her wake.
She was, quite literally, a living war chariot.
Zhang Liao, as if she'd been waiting for exactly this moment, was already readying her cavalry for the charge, and Gao Shun drove the infantry forward, putting the final screws to the siege.
Seo Hwang had scaled a different section of wall — one Lu Bu hadn't touched — and was busy dismantling Dong Zhuo's defenses there.
Call it a convergence of factors, but still — a siege ended in a single day.
I suppose torching Chang'an was the last act of resistance Dong Zhuo's army had left in it.
In the heart of the embattled city, Seo Hwang swept her axe in a great arc and hammered down the officer charging at her.
"Gghah…!"
The man — middle-aged, with a neatly trimmed beard — grimaced, feeling the arm that had blocked the axe go numb to the bone.
"Good grief. You're all strength, aren't you."
"Will you resist to the very end, then?"
At Seo Hwang's words, axe leveled at him, the man let out a long breath.
"…And yet he was my lord, once I chose to serve him. What kind of man betrays that?"
"Even if that man is a wicked, monstrous traitor to the realm?"
"……"
At that question, the man fell silent.
"While I was restoring order in Chang'an, I heard something," Seo Hwang said. "Do you know what it was?"
"What?"
"That while everyone else was drunk on slaughter and plunder, there was one unit that did nothing at all."
"……"
"I compared your description to the reports. It matches you exactly."
The man's arms trembled as he spoke.
"Even so, I am hardly without guilt. Turning a blind eye is one sin among the many committed that day."
"But it is not a sin worth dying for."
Seo Hwang lowered her axe and continued.
"To walk the path of duty alone, while everyone around you drowns in evil — that is a hard thing to do."
"……"
"And yet you did it. That, surely, is worthy of respect."
At her words, the man closed his eyes.
"Surrender. A man like you is too fine a thing to waste dying here."
"…Haha. A young lady who argues as well as she swings that axe."
The middle-aged officer who had stood against Seo Hwang let his sword drop from his hand.
"This Xu Rong surrenders."
The moment Xu Rong yielded, the soldiers of Dong Zhuo's army around him laid down their arms one and all, following their commander.
The walls had fallen completely.
"Why is it nothing but spineless cowards in this army?!"
Red Hare had come charging to Lu Bu the instant the gate broke, and mounted upon her, Lu Bu carved her way through the city in a continuous slaughter.
A calamity that could neither be fled nor fought.
"It's Lu Bu! Lu Bu is here!"
"RUN!!"
Dong Zhuo's soldiers felt their knees turn to water and couldn't even entertain the thought of standing against her.
By now, within their ranks, Lu Bu had come to be regarded as nothing less than an insurmountable force of nature.
It was then that two mounted officers came racing at her.
"Lu Bu—! I, Li Jue, will be your opponent—!!"
"And Guo Si stands here as well—!!"
These were officers who had remained in Xiliang guarding the cities back when Dong Zhuo's army and Jeong Reung's had first clashed at Luoyang.
Having never once witnessed Lu Bu's martial terror with their own eyes, they charged her with their heads held high.
"Let this old-timer see just what the famed Peerless Under Heaven is really made of—!"
"What is wrong with this guy?"
Lu Bu muttered the words flatly and swung the Sky Piercer Halberd — and Li Jue, too slow to react, was cleaved in two at the torso.
An officer renowned for his valor in Xiliang had lost his life in a single exchange.
Guo Si could not close his mouth as he stared at the legless half of his comrade spraying blood across the ground.
"L-Li Jue?"
"Oh. So this one's name was Li Jue? Then he wasn't one of the ones from Chang'an — must've been doing home guard duty."
Lv Bu's bloodshot eyes turned toward Guo Si.
"Then you must be Guo Si."
"U-uh…"
Still unable to process what was happening, Guo Si could not properly answer her question.
"Jeong Reung gave orders to capture the officers who were in Chang'an alive whenever possible — but I don't need to bother with that for you."
"Wh-what is that supposed to…"
"You're the lucky one. At least you won't suffer."
Lu Bu flashed a grin, dug her heels into Red Hare's flanks, and charged.
"GRAAAAAGH—!!"
Screaming, Guo Si flailed the spear in his hand in a wild, thoughtless arc.
CLANG!
A spear swung with neither strength nor skill, out of sheer terror alone, naturally never came close to touching her.
When Lu Bu lightly batted his spear aside, Guo Si understood, instinctively.
It's over.
The Sky Piercer Halberd took his head in a single stroke, and Guo Si crumpled lifelessly to the earth.
Watching two officers who had once made names for themselves in Xiliang fail to so much as put up a fight, the terror in Dong Zhuo's army only swelled greater and greater.