Upheaval (5)
Having led my army into the Jizhou region, I found myself facing Yuan Shao for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
When had it been, I wondered, since I last saw her in person? After driving Dong Zhuo out of Luoyang, surely — that had been the last time we spoke face to face. Counting it up, something like seven years must have passed. We had exchanged nothing but letters since then.
Standing before the woman again at last, I opened with a remark calculated to feel as natural as possible.
"Hmm... It really has been a long time."
"Indeed it has."
Just as on the day we first met, that brusque, clipped manner of speaking hadn't changed one bit.
"......"
Having addressed her, I cast a sidelong glance at the host of troops arrayed behind her. Was it true that she had spent years locked in struggle with Gongsun Zan, the White Horse General? Because the force under Yuan Shao's command did not feel like a ragtag mob even at first glance.
No — if anything, they deserved to be called the elite of the elite.
Yuan Shao had spent years grinding against Gongsun Zan for hegemony over Hebei, so it stood to reason her soldiers' proficiency had climbed accordingly. And Gongsun Zan was, after all, a general who built his entire army around cavalry — the kind of troops that once made even the nomadic tribes themselves tremble.
What did that tell us? Simply this: in facing him, Yuan Shao's army had learned, quite naturally, how to counter cavalry. Had they failed to grasp it, could she ever have won against him in the first place?
There was no doubt the forces under Yuan Shao would prove a great asset to us in the coming battle against the Mongol Empire.
Two generals standing vigilantly at her side also caught my eye rather sharply. Women with fearsome visages, built on a scale that wouldn't have suffered comparison with any man — no, that in fact exceeded most men. They left a deep impression on me.
...If my guess was right, wouldn't those two be Yan Liang and Wen Chou, the famed Twin Pillars of Hebei?
By the standards of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, they were both terribly strong — the pair who gave Cao Cao endless headaches. Yan Liang repelling Xu Hwang was impressive enough, but Wen Chou, thanks to a proper buff from old Luo Guanzhong himself, pulled off the monstrous feat of defeating both Xu Hwang and Zhang Liao at once.
Of course, the trouble was that it turned out to be his final fireworks.
Yan Liang and Wen Chou, having left such a mark on readers with their tremendous exploits, both promptly lost their heads the moment Guan Yu gave her Green Dragon Crescent Blade a single flourish. ...In actual history, too, it remains astonishing that Guan Yu charged alone into the enemy lines, carved her way through in a dance of carnage, and took Yan Liang's head outright.
As for Wen Chou of the original history, she died in an utterly absurd fashion after falling for one of Xun You's crooked little schemes.
"Hmm..."
Just how capable were the Twin Pillars of Hebei standing before me now? Well, considering this was a world where superhuman strength and divine prowess genuinely existed, the two of them were probably terrifyingly strong.
Truthfully, there was only one general in the Yuan Shao army I was truly concerned about, but searching for her here would have looked strange, so I spoke in a measured voice instead.
"Ordinarily, now that we've finally met again, I would like nothing more than to sit down at leisure, talk, and catch up on old times... but the situation does not permit it."
"Your consideration alone is an honor, General-in-Chief."
"Good. Then we can be brief."
When we first met, I distinctly remember us both speaking with careful politeness. Was this, too, what one might call the passage of time?
After the exchange of simple greetings, I went straight to the heart of the matter.
"As you well know, a massive army of nomadic tribes has appeared in the north."
I shrugged as I laid out the opening.
"The Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Wuhuan... you'd have to be sick of hearing those names by now, wouldn't you?"
"......"
Yuan Shao, who must have suffered dearly at the nomads' hands while holding Jizhou, said nothing — silent agreement.
"The gravest problem is that their powers have merged into one."
I glanced around at those nearby, then continued.
"This is, I believe, a threat much like the one Emperor Gaozu of Han himself once faced."
Back before the Xiongnu had splintered and fractured apart — back when the Xianbei and Wuhuan bowed their heads and paid tribute to them — Emperor Gaozu, Liu Bang, set out to punish the nomads for the sake of the Han he had founded, only to suffer a crushing defeat at the hands of Modu, the Chanyu, with his very life hanging in the balance. In the end, the man who had felled the Hegemon-King of Western Chu was reduced to signing a humiliating peace treaty in which the Han paid annual tribute.
The present situation was if anything more dangerous than that — certainly no less. One careless step, and this would be no matter of vassalage; the empire could meet outright destruction, just as Jin or Song did in the original history.
"Which is why, right now, nothing matters more to me than your help. What say you?"
"......"
At my words, Yuan Shao held her silence with an unreadable expression. I expected her to accept my proposal — she probably would — but I couldn't help feeling a twinge of tension all the same. Unlike Cao Cao, who had thrust herself into my presence day in and day out, Yuan Shao and I had never shared anything one could call common ground.
If she had been unable to let go of her ambition to stand above everyone else, she might well have joined forces with me now only to strike me in the back of the head later, whenever it suited her.
As though she had finished turning every thought over in her mind, Yuan Shao answered in a calm voice.
"How could I possibly refuse so generous an offer?"
Having made her decision, she spoke those words and knelt gracefully upon one knee — and the talented retainers who followed her likewise paid their respects.
"Myself and all the soldiers under my command shall devote our full strength to supporting you, General-in-Chief."
"...Good."
Watching the scion of the Yuan clan — one of the Four Excellencies, a name that echoed through generations — bow her head, I allowed myself a faint smile.
"You chose wisely."
With the Yuan Shao faction, which had ruled the Jizhou region, fully absorbed into my own, the army I led swelled to a truly enormous size.
No exaggeration — our numbers had grown by a good hundred thousand soldiers, and half of them were elite troops whose very eyes marked them as different breed. I mean that they were on another plane entirely from your average conscripts, tossed onto the battlefield clutching nothing but one battered old weapon.
Solid armor and mail that inspired confidence just to look at, and weapons kept in immaculate condition. The sturdy crossbows borne by the soldiers in the rear ranks in particular radiated such obvious penetrating power that I half expected them to punch clean through armor itself. If that armament ever unleashed a concentrated barrage, even cataphracts in full barding would end up looking like hedgehogs.
...Hmm. I can definitely see why Goguryeo got trounced when it picked a fight with Wei. No matter how hard your armor is, there's just no answering piercing damage, is there?
The other half were far too well equipped to be dismissed as mere conscripts either. They fell somewhere between conscript and elite — yes, "regular soldiers" was the right word for them.
Ask anyone to name the wealthiest, most populous region in the Three Kingdoms, and the answer would almost universally be Jizhou. Having claimed that region, it was hardly surprising her stores overflowed with materiel. Cao Cao hadn't feared facing Yuan Shao in the original history for nothing.
The single point that gave me pause was that Yuan Shao's forces would need to be operated as a semi-independent army. An army that had belonged to a separate power mere days ago couldn't be expected to coordinate smoothly as one body, and since the Yuan Shao army clearly had a strong identity of its own, running it as a detached force — much as Cao Cao did — was wiser than clumsily merging everything and stirring up needless confusion.
This was the force that had racked up victory after victory against that thug Gongsun Zan, the White Horse General. It would manage itself just fine.
It's said that extremes resemble each other, and indeed, Gongsun Zan — who despised the nomads to the point of outright hatred — commanded his cavalry in a manner almost exactly like the nomads themselves. He did employ infantry as well, of course, so there remained a gap between him and the Mongol Empire, where every last soldier rode. Still, compared to other forces with no experience against nomads, his men would fight with remarkable fluency.
"My lord! We will reach You Province shortly!"
"Good."
Thanks to the merger, I now commanded an army of three hundred thousand, and I nodded in acknowledgment. Unlike our neighbor Bing Province over there, both Jizhou and You Province were mostly wide-open plains, so the march posed no difficulty.
Which meant, in other words, that this was practically the nomads' home ground.
...Then again, those nomads are strange creatures who ride as well in the mountains as anywhere, so I suppose it wouldn't matter where we fought them.
Crossing You Province — territory once ruled by Gongsun Zan — I muttered under my breath.
"Not a single village left standing, is there."
No, calling them villages wasn't right. Ruins was more like it. A place with not one living soul, where only crumbling buildings remained — you couldn't call that a village.
Had the nomads not bothered occupying the cities and simply plundered everything and moved on? Yuan Shao, having noticed my train of thought, spoke up nearby.
"...This was Gongsun Zan's doing."
"Hm?"
My eyes went wide at that. What kind of lunatic plunders his own territory? Logically speaking...
...Well. If it's Gongsun Zan, I can believe it.
He'd have gutted each village of everything it owned, then forcibly relocated the population into the cities he held. The Yijing Tower where he was currently holed up — hadn't that fortress too been built through exactly such a cruel process?
I had tried to avoid ever using this particular phrase, but the man was, in truth, a barbarian wearing the mask of civilization.
For days we marched on, passing ruin after ruined village, until at last I brought our footsteps to a halt and gazed ahead, murmuring softly.
"So you've come out to greet us in person."
Before us, a host of cavalry sprawled across the plain so vast it could not be contained within a single glance.
"......"
Facing a sight that made it clear beyond any argument that battle could not be avoided, I let out a long sigh.