Clash (1)
With their respective conversations concluded and both armies realizing that war had, at long last, begun, the two sides threw themselves into frantic motion.
No commander worth his salt unloads a full offensive on the very first day of fighting; both sides would spend the opening moves probing each other's strength...
"Leave it to me! I'll sweep every last one of them away!"
Lü Bu stepped forward, bellowing with supreme confidence.
"How much thinking could those bastards even do? They'll just keep their distance and shower us with arrows again!"
"..."
Even a thousand years past the present day, the nations that had been smashed to pieces because they couldn't handle that one trick would have wept tears of blood to hear her say it.
Well, after all—when Lü Bu and I were stationed in Bing Province, the ones we fought day in and day out were the nomadic tribes.
Swarm tactics—loosing arrows from afar, wheeling away the moment the enemy closed in, shooting all the while they fled, then creeping back in to loose more arrows the instant the pursuit was abandoned—was a method the nomads employed constantly.
While we were stationed in the rugged terrain of Bing Province, we'd either fight in mountain country where swarm tactics were hard to pull off or shatter them with sudden ambushes, but that didn't mean we'd never tasted swarm tactics ourselves.
When I clashed with them head-on on the open plains—the nomads' home turf—I used exactly one tactic.
The infantry would weather the rain of arrows for as long as they could, while the archers behind them returned fire, forcing losses on both sides alike.
Then, once the nomads' horses began to show signs of exhaustion from the prolonged fight, I would commit the cavalry that had been biding its time behind the infantry, sending them crashing into the enemy and locking them in close combat.
Light cavalry may be faster than heavy cavalry, but once their stamina runs dry, they have no choice but to be caught. Horses aren't the undead of some fantasy novel—there's no such thing as infinite stamina. When fresh, vigorous heavy cavalry meets winded light cavalry in a melee, the outcome is obvious: light cavalry, already at a disadvantage up close, would be smashed to pieces a hundred times out of a hundred.
Playing tag from sunrise to sundown, all day long, is something that only works in games.
Still, after mulling something over for a moment, I spoke to Lü Bu.
"It won't be difficult. Just remember one thing."
"Hm? What's that?"
"If the nomads look like they're giving up the fight and running, don't pursue them."
"Huh??"
Considering that the bloodiest moment of most battles comes in the chase after a fleeing army, it was a decidedly strange order—in effect, I was telling her to throw away the very moment that could inflict the greatest damage on the enemy.
Lü Bu, well aware of that fact, tilted her head at my command, and I answered with a wry chuckle.
"They're all cavalry, so they fight across an enormous field. There's bound to be a trap."
In fact, in the original course of history, the Mongol Empire produced a man who took that venerable formula by which settled peoples beat the nomads and turned it inside out, shattering it completely.
Subutai.
Ask anyone to name the finest of the Four Steeds and Four Hounds who followed Genghis Khan, and his name would come up without fail. The meaning behind the title was nothing complicated: four fine steeds and four loyal hounds—the eight generals who served Genghis Khan. Honestly, I suspected they, too, had been born out of their proper era, but with Genghis Khan already in this world, what would be strange about the rest of them showing up as well?
Genghis Khan and Subutai. The two greatest cavalry commanders in human history, both on the other side.
And every last soldier of the Mongol Empire was cavalry, no less?
Even the medieval European knights, clanking about in plate armor no arrow could pierce, were hammered again and again by the Mongol Empire until they died screaming.
Specifically, the Mongols would shoot the horse out from under him, send the knight crashing down, and club him to death...
Tsk tsk. How pitiful. So this is the sorrow of the footslogger.
Anyway, knowing all that, would I be mad enough to fling my cavalry about recklessly? Cavalry was a trump card, to be hoarded and committed only at the truly certain moment. That was the right way to use it.
I gazed into Lü Bu's blood-red eyes.
"Can you make it back safe?"
"...Heh. You still don't trust me?"
At my question, Lü Bu curled her lips upward into a grin.
"Don't worry. I'll kill at least a hundred before I come back!"
"I know."
Faced with that boundless confidence, I smiled in kind and nodded.
The first to move, heralding the start of the war, was the Mongol Empire.
In a way, it was only natural. Every one of their soldiers was a horse archer who could handle a bow, and with mobility and marksmanship second to none, they could claim the initiative of any battlefield they pleased. As the old saying goes, the first blow decides the fight—unconditionally seizing the opening attack is a tremendous advantage.
"Shields up——!!"
At Sun Ce's ringing cry—she had weathered no small share of battles by now—the elite soldiers, fearless of death, formed their defensive formation with crisp, disciplined movements.
"Ready for arrows——!! Any man who backs off out of cowardice dies by my hand——!!"
At that ferocious shout, a man let out a hearty laugh.
"That's my girl. Fierce as ever."
"If my uncle heard you say that, he'd be furious."
"Oh, come now. We can't have that."
Sun Jian—the Tiger of Jiangdong, justly proud of his brilliant command—feigned shock at Zhou Yu's reply.
Gazing at the nomads narrowing the distance from afar, he went on.
"Melee combat, now that I'd relish."
"...The enemy won't oblige us so easily."
"But we can't turn our backs on them either, so there's only one answer."
Having traded words with Zhou Yu, Sun Jian shrugged his shoulders.
"I do wonder which side will kill more with arrows."
"..."
"We're killing and dying in equal measure, so there's hardly any difference! Hahaha!"
Sun Jian, a born slaughterer if ever there was one, held a truly blood-chilling outlook.
The trouble was, it wasn't exactly wrong. More dead by spear and blade, or more dead by arrow—in the end, taking a life was taking a life either way.
Hmm... at this range, that should be plenty.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, a familiar voice sounded nearby.
"Order the archers to loose."
"Yes, ma'am!"
The aide who took Cao Cao's command relayed it at the top of his lungs—
Thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip———!!
The instant our troops loosed their arrows, the nomads began answering in kind—both sides firing the moment the other crossed into range. Whether the officers commanding the enemy or those commanding our allies, the caliber on display was frighteningly high. Ordinarily, shooting from horseback—what with the strain on the core and the legs—drastically shortens one's effective range, but the nomads, as if to ask what any of that mattered, rained curved shots from the very same range as our foot archers.
Had they spent their entire lives doing nothing but this, until their very bodies evolved for it? ...Even granting that, I don't think they counted as the same species of human anymore. And their accuracy was monstrous, too.
The Mongol Empire... no, rather, the Yuan dynasty led by Kublai Khan would later press on with its wars of conquest and cross paths with a corps of war elephants. In that day, war elephants were, as everyone knows, the genuine article—ancient tanks that ordinary weapons could barely scratch. The Mongol answer to them was simple: they aimed for the eyes, targets even harder to hit than an elephant's trunk. An absurd thing to attempt—and yet they pulled it off, and blew the elephant corps to pieces. That alone showed just how terrifying the Mongol army's arrow accuracy truly was.
"Aaagh!"
"Urk!"
Among our shield-bearers, one unlucky soldier whose hand was skewered let out a scream—and far away, a Mongol nocking his next arrow promptly became a hedgehog along with his horse, tumbling from the field. If both sides kept forcing losses on each other, the larger power would win in the end, but right now there was exactly one problem.
"Disperse! Disperse!"
They could move freely, while we were pinned fast in one place.
"...Whoa."
Watching the Mongol army scatter this way and that, Sima Yi spoke in a voice of sheer disbelief rather than admiration.
"Those things are splitting into units of how few, exactly?"
"Looks like ten or so apiece."
"How on earth are they commanding them, that something like that is even possible?"
Well, it was only possible because they were Mongols. An army in which every single man was an elite soldier, and whose organization was every bit as peerless—they could scatter like the wind and mass like boulders. And once units broken into small bands each acted on their own initiative and swarmed in a chaotic rush, there was simply no answer to it. These people weren't called the strongest in open-field battle for nothing.
Watching the Mongol forces fan out wide to left and right, I realized the moment had come.
"Lü Bu. Your turn."
"Finally!"
The instant my permission to advance came down, Lü Bu vaulted lightly into Red Hare's saddle.
"I'll kill every last one of them! Wait for me!"
"...Alright."
Lü Bu was spouting bloodcurdling words with the brightest, most innocent expression imaginable, and I could only answer with a wry smile.
"Come back safe."
BOOM——!
As I explained just a moment ago, the nomads were fond of their swarm tactics: close the distance and they fled; open it up and they crept back in to torment you. A wonderfully simple, wonderfully effective tactic.
But Lü Bu was... hmm, how should I put it. She was the kind of woman who sealed off the nomads' swarm tactics entirely, from the very first moment.
"DIE——!!"
"Wh-What the—?!"
Whoosh!
With a speed gap that enormous, what did swarm tactics or anything else even matter?
"How in the world did you run us down?!"
"I-It's Lü Bu! It's Lü Bu!"
Some of the nomads wore stunned expressions, unable to believe she had caught up with them; others had gone ghost-pale, clearly knowing exactly who she was.
Lü Bu flaunted her presence to the fullest and roared:
"You sluggish bastards! Stop running and come at me——!!"
"...For the Great Khan——!!"
The nomads, who at any other time would have bolted on the spot to save their own skins, came charging with their leader's name on their lips. Their number: easily several hundred.
"You lot—something's different about you this time!"
Even with these nomads—men who had lived and breathed war their whole lives—right in front of her, Lü Bu simply grinned, brimming with confidence.