Moling (1)
A month had already slipped by since I crossed the Yangtze and set foot in Jiangdong.
One month. Long if you called it long, short if you called it short.
Through that month, I had applied myself faithfully to the duties at hand.
And what were those duties, you ask?
"W-we've lost again! We're running for it!"
Beating down the forces of Yan Baihu, naturally — the man came picking a fight with us practically every other day.
To put it a touch more precisely, it meant thrashing the Shanyue tribes who followed him.
Subjugating the Shanyue was no great challenge.
So what if they were a foreign people with formidable combat prowess? The generals and soldiers serving under me had been facing men cut from the same cloth as the Shanyue ever since our days in Bing Province.
Which is to say, we had weathered far too many battles by now to lose to Yan Baihu's Shanyue at this stage.
The problem was their sheer, monstrous numbers.
These guys just kept pouring out without end — enough to make me wonder whether they were respawning infinitely somewhere in the depths of Jiangdong.
I had mentioned before that encountering the Shanyue in Jiangdong was like a random-encounter event, but were they seriously actual game monsters?
In the original history, these were the people Sun Quan had spent decades and untold hardship driving back. If they all came swarming at once, well — that made a certain kind of sense.
Watching Yan Baihu's back as he bolted for his life yet again, I spoke from a distance.
"What number is this one?"
"...More than five, my lord."
Good grief. The man simply would not quit.
We had clearly whittled his numbers down by plenty, yet he was still full of fight.
Keep this up, and wouldn't we end up locked in exactly the original history's scenario — trading blows back and forth for decades on end?
Bogged down in that pointless worry, I turned my head toward Zhuge Liang, who had answered my question from nearby.
"How long do you judge they can keep up this resistance?"
"Hmm... If my calculations hold..."
The white-haired Little Strategist gave her White Feather Fan a gentle flutter and continued.
"I anticipate they will not last much longer."
"...Truly?"
"Yes."
With the fan half-veiling her lips, Zhuge Liang let her eyes crinkle into a faint smile.
"However vast their host may be, what future is there for a force that has known nothing but defeat?"
"..."
"Simply watch, my lord. Before long, a great upheaval shall break out within the Shanyue."
Had the entire road to victory already been mapped out to its end inside that little strategist's head?
This was Zhuge Liang's forecast, after all — it could not possibly miss.
"Aww... What a drag."
Lü Bu, who had just torn a swath through the battlefield, came trudging over with oddly deflated steps.
"Leave out the part where they barely ride horses, and they're about the same bunch we used to see in Bing Province or Xiliang."
To her verdict, I had no choice but to say this:
"...That's precisely the problem — that they're like those guys at all."
A people coarse in temperament by nature, who lived their whole lives at war and had grown formidable in battle because of it. It was only because it was us that we could crush them this overwhelmingly; any other force would have floundered until they cracked the secret of dealing with them.
At my words, Lü Bu's shoulders drooped a little.
"Mmm... But I still wanted to fight more..."
She looked like she'd rampaged plenty to me — was her body seriously still itching for more?
I supposed it figured. She had gone nearly a whole long year without standing at the spearhead while she carried Yeo Hwa.
...Well, what could I do about it?
She couldn't spend the rest of her life charging across battlefields with blood on her hands. Adapt she must.
I walked over and gave her head a couple of light taps.
"That's enough for today. You've more than earned the rest."
"I'm still full of figh— Oh."
Mid-reply, a look of sudden realization spread across Lü Bu's face.
"Th-then let's go rest together, just the two of us, nice and cozy! What do you say?!"
Aha.
So she meant to seize this opening for all it was worth.
Seeing through her adorable little ploy, I chuckled and nodded.
"Fine by me."
"...!"
At my answer, Lü Bu's whole face lit up.
"..."
Of course, Seo Yeo would inevitably worm her way in under the pretext of guarding me.
No one on this earth could pry Seo Yeo from my side.
...Not even me.
'Seo Yeo, there's something I need to take care of for a moment, so...'
'...'
'...Never mind. It's nothing.'
The moment I tried to force her away, she would simply stare at me like a puppy abandoned by its master. Faced with that gaze — the kind that needled straight into my heart — I could never bring myself to keep her even a few steps off.
That time, I hadn't even managed to finish the sentence.
"..."
A short distance away, Zhuge Liang watched me trading words with Lü Bu, her expression utterly unreadable.
"Nnnh..."
Pang Tong, meanwhile, stood trembling as she stared at Zhuge Liang — for reasons that remain a mystery to this day.
A few days later.
A report reached me: Yan Baihu, who had been hurling himself at us every other day, had barricaded himself inside Moling and gone completely still.
Had he finally grasped that attacking was getting him nowhere?
...Not that cowering behind city walls was much of an improvement.
Then again, I doubted even Yan Baihu had shut himself in that city without some manner of plan.
Sure enough, the moment Pang Tong sized up the situation, she answered without missing a beat.
"M-maybe he means to gather every Shanyue tribe scattered across Jiangdong and hurl the whole lot at us in a counteroffensive?"
"Gather every Shanyue tribe?"
When I echoed her, Pang Tong hemmed and hawed, but nodded all the same.
"Yes... And if he pulls it off, we would be the ones surrounded instead..."
"Hmm..."
That would not be a pleasant position to be in.
I had no way of knowing how many Shanyue still remained across this sprawling land of Jiangdong, but these were people who had resisted the Han and fought for their homeland for hundreds of years — their numbers could not be few.
I wasn't joking when I thought they might gather by the hundreds of thousands.
Hadn't it been the same when I faced Meng Huo in Nanzhong?
As a rule, foreign tribes were hopeless at unity — yet the moment another people trespassed on their land, they had a habit of closing ranks.
So this was that 'temporary alliance' business, was it? You know the one — "a dangerous combination has been born," and all that.
In all likelihood, even the Shanyue who had refused Yan Baihu would now take the full measure of the situation in Jiangdong and flock to his banner to lend their strength.
If this went on, I'd be condensing decades' worth of the original history's suffering into the here and now.
...Not that I hadn't planned it that way.
After a moment's deliberation, I opened my mouth again.
"In that case, would it be better to write off Yan Baihu and mop up the rest of Jiangdong first?"
Pang Tong chewed on my question briefly.
"Ordinarily, that would be the right call... Hmm..."
"For the present, I ask that you place your faith in General Cao Cao."
It was then that Zhuge Liang slipped into the conversation, her voice calm and measured.
"According to the reports, General Cao Cao has already succeeded in opening contact with the great clans of southern Jiangdong."
"Hm? Weren't we told that region was under siege as well, with all exchange cut off?"
"Word has it a certain general smashed through the Shanyue encirclement all on her own."
"..."
Broke through an encirclement alone?
...Could it be that person?
At Zhuge Liang's words, one figure rose unbidden in my mind.
Taishi Ci, courtesy name Ziyi.
A general mighty enough to trade blows neck and neck with the Little Conqueror herself, and sharp-minded enough that her name is forever cited as the textbook example of Deceive the Heavens to Cross the Sea, one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
True, even she had failed to escape Wu's infamous jinx of dying young, perishing before the Battle of Red Cliffs — but her ability was beyond dispute.
And she was said to be a terrifying shot with a bow, too.
The story goes that when a bandit climbed atop a watchtower to heap abuse on Sun Ce, she put an arrow clean through the very hand he had braced on the tower.
...God, that must have hurt.
Still — who would have thought I'd hear Zhuge Liang herself tell me to trust Cao Cao?
For a man who knew the original history, it was a thoroughly surreal feeling.
Having mulled it over, I gave a slow nod.
"Very well. If it's Cao Cao, she'll hold the line against whatever Shanyue come pushing up from the south."
Jiangdong was far too vast to seal every path, but I had complete confidence that she would pulverize each and every Shanyue who crossed her path.
Of course, if the Shanyue happened to field a brilliant general of their own, that was another story.
But as far as I recalled, this era had produced no famous general from among the Shanyue.
Yan Baihu, naturally, didn't even count.
He seemed to possess a baseline of competence, but "famous general" was a stretch.
Then again, it would be too harsh to call him flat-out incompetent, given that he was out there leading all those Shanyue...
I spoke in my usual, level tone.
"Good. Then we move on Moling."
"A wise choice, my lord."
Zhuge Liang answered my decision with perfect composure.
Moling.
In the original history, the city Sun Quan proclaimed her capital the very moment she ascended the throne as emperor, renaming it Jianye — the heart of the kingdom of Wu.
As such, it was among the most developed cities in all of Jiangdong.
In other words, if I meant to pacify Jiangdong, this city was indispensable.
Our army might be fed by a steady supply line from the Yangtze, but we still needed at least one proper city to anchor ourselves in.
Until now, that burr stuck to my heel named Yan Baihu had kept me from seizing any stronghold worth the name.
With an army as enormous as ours, billeting in any ordinary place came with no end of headaches — and the local residents were anxious enough as it was...
"..."
It was nothing more than a simple hunch, but I could feel it all the same: the pacification of Jiangdong was close at hand.