Clash (3)
Even after the opening skirmish with the Mongol Empire had ended, battle followed battle, as was only natural.
"Those bastards are back again! Don't they ever get sick of this?!"
They sent in small detachments to attack day and night without pause, and—
"A-A surprise attack! The enemy has struck our supply lines!"
—exploiting their superior mobility to launch sudden raids on areas that were absolutely vital to our army.
The strikes against the supply routes in particular could have spiraled into catastrophic losses if handled carelessly, but...
"How could I call myself a strategist if I had failed to prepare for such a contingency?"
Fan in hand — a fan woven of white feathers — our Little Strategist smiled with perfect serenity, as though she had foreseen every last bit of it. The countermeasures had long since been laid.
Frankly, I had been wondering how anyone was supposed to counter nomads sweeping across open ground with plunder on their minds, but...
"Enemy raid——!! All soldiers, move as you were trained——!!"
The instant the general and officers leading the supply convoy caught sight of the nomads, they heaved with all their strength and flipped the carts they had been hauling clean over.
Anyone thinking conventionally would assume that overturned carts meant supplies cascading out in a great heap. But what came pouring out of those carts was not supplies at all — it was something so absurd that no one could possibly have predicted it.
"...Rocks?"
Things that promised a monstrous weight from the name alone.
So that was why the horses and oxen hitched to each cart had seemed absurdly numerous for its size.
CRASH——!
The rocks burst free, half-shattering the carts as they tumbled out, and naturally settled into a wall.
"Crossbowmen, ready your bolts——!!"
The soldiers who saw it readied their crossbows on the spot and ducked down behind the overturned carts. In other words, a barricade had been thrown up in the space of a heartbeat.
"FIRE——!!"
The moment the commander's order fell, our soldiers loosed their arrows into the nomads, whose faces had frozen in bewilderment.
Fweee-fwee-fweee!
The bolts shrieked through the air with a sound unlike anything ordinary — fitting, for weapons that punched through armor as if it were paper.
"GYAAH!"
"Kagh—!"
Mongol soldiers who wore their armor light to begin with were never going to walk away from that unscathed.
"You idiots! What are you dithering for?! Return fire, NOW!"
"Y-Yes, sir!"
At the adjutant's bellow, the nomads scrambled to nock arrows to their bowstrings and shot back at us.
Tik-tik-tik!
But how were soldiers hiding behind cover supposed to take any damage? The vast majority of the arrows glanced off the rocks, and the few that somehow slipped past them were stopped dead by the carts — the nomads could only stand there, utterly dumbfounded.
Fweee-fwee-fweee!
All the while, the reloaded crossbows fired once more, carving heavy losses into the Mongol ranks.
Their own attacks were swallowed whole by the barricade, while the enemy crouched behind it and rained down arrows without end.
At range there was no answer to be had — which left only one option: close combat. But even granting that, charging headlong at that barricade would be sheer madness. Half the unit would clearly drop mid-charge with bolts in their backs, and the other half would just as clearly be skewered on the spears of infantry glaring daggers as they shielded the archers.
"...Tch. We fall back!"
It was a member of the Four Steeds and Four Hounds — a man who had shown himself for one purpose alone: to raid our supply line. He clicked his tongue once, reined in his floundering troops, and withdrew from the battlefield.
As it happened, I had been nearby — I'd come to lend the supply unit a hand — and watching the whole scene play out, I nodded slowly to myself.
A supply train stretched out in a long line is inevitably vulnerable to raids, but our Little Strategist hadn't stopped at using the carts lying around to buy time; she had driven the enemy off entirely.
In a way, this too was a leap of perspective. Everyone else was buried in the conviction that the supply carts must be protected — Zhuge Liang had lightly plucked out the one thing none of them had thought of. It was like that old anecdote known as Columbus's egg: nothing special once you'd seen it, but a genuinely clever idea that cracked the problem wide open.
"...By the way, what are you going to do about those?"
"Ah — you mean the wrecked carts?"
When I asked, pointing at the carts that had been smashed half to splinters, Zhuge Liang answered with an easy smile.
"This is a supply route we will be using often from here on, so I intend to leave them exactly as they are."
"Really?"
"Yes. Though they will need to be cleared away once the fighting is done."
Well, materials were overflowing anyway, so knocking together a few carts was no trouble at all. Every time the enemy came raiding for supplies, the barricade would grow a little larger, and the supply route would paradoxically grow more and more fortified — a truly bizarre state of affairs. And even if the carts did get cleared away somehow, the rocks themselves would remain rooted firmly in place, giving the nomads no end of grief.
...
I gazed at the soldiers — whose faces had drained a deathly gray at the mere thought of hauling those rocks away someday — and felt absolutely delighted.
Originally, Yuan Shao had stepped forward and offered to defend the supply route herself, but the moment the Battle of Guandu flashed through my head, I shook my head and asked her to simply send material support from Jizhou instead. Putting Yuan Shao and supplies in the same sentence only conjured up bad thoughts — whatever the circumstances, the fact remained that she had lost to Cao Cao after her supply depot was raided.
When I declared that I would take responsibility for the supply lines myself, Yuan Shao accepted it with calm composure and joined me on the front lines, waging a grinding war of attrition against the Mongols. And so the one placed in charge of supplies was Zhuge Liang — and as if determined not to betray my expectations, she repelled every single raid the Mongols launched.
...Is this that Eight Formations Diagram thing, or whatever it's called? Apparently no concrete records of it survive into the modern era — a battle formation so shrouded in mystery that even scholars can only guess at its purpose. I found myself genuinely curious what the inside of the stone-soldier Eight Formations would look like, if Zhuge Liang ever built one in the years to come.
The Mongols, for their part, had no real supply lines to speak of. Those men were, after all, war machines who supposedly counted a few strips of dried mutton jerky and some mare's milk as a full day's meal. An army with no need for the supply lines that should exist as a matter of course — that meant one weakness had simply evaporated. Like I said, these people didn't conquer the world and slaughter their way across it for nothing.
At any rate, striking back at the Mongol Empire and driving them off was news worth celebrating — but the real problem lay somewhere else entirely.
"...It's cold."
Fighting through the depths of winter, the drain on our stamina was no joke. The ache in your skin, the creak of every last joint — that was a pain only those who had lived through it could truly know.
And this, too, was a Mongol specialty. Hound the enemy relentlessly until their strength is spent, then sweep up the exhausted remnants. By all rights, the Mongols galloping back and forth across the field should have tired first — yet they were inexplicably full of vigor.
...Honestly, thinking about it coolly, there was nothing strange about it at all. Their everyday life was a winter march. Roaming the steppe in regions where the baseline temperature plunged below freezing — if that wasn't extreme-cold training, what would you call it? Granted, even the Mongols had shown themselves terribly weak to the climate of Vietnam down south, but this place was not Vietnam.
"My lord, what if we were to strike first?"
"Strike first?"
I shook my head at the adjutant's suggestion.
"They won't stand and fight — they'll just run."
They were a people who had spent their whole lives on the open plain, watching from dawn to dusk for hostile tribes or beasts drawing near. In other words, they placed enormous weight on scouting and vigilance — and that bought them a tremendous advantage in war. Any tribe careless about guarding its surroundings had long since been wiped out in the wars of unification.
"And the moment we chase them recklessly, we'll walk straight into a trap."
Cavalry is fast; infantry is slow. A truism if ever there was one — but when battle grows fierce, hunger for glory clouds the eyes and men forget it. The instant our cavalry overextended themselves chasing fleeing enemies, they would be cut down piecemeal.
There was exactly one way for us to deal with the Mongol Empire. Endure, and keep on enduring — and when they finally committed to their all-out assault, throw it back and break them.
"I understand the frustration of being forced to do nothing but hold the line, with an enemy who might attack at any moment sitting right in front of you."
...
"But bear in mind — that impatience is precisely what they are counting on."
When I laid it out like that at the strategy meeting, the assembled generals all bowed with the air of men who understood.
"Like last time, too — why is it that you suddenly sound like a completely different person?"
"N-No, my lord has always been wise and brilliant, I'm certain of it..."
Sima Yi muttered under her breath, low and private, as if genuinely taken aback, and Pang Tong — jolted wide-eyed by the words — scrambled to defend me with everything she had. Just how far had my reputation fallen, exactly?
'Hmm... For this sentence, I think it would be better to simply change it to "the Imperial Road" — the road over which the sovereign travels.'
'The Imperial Road? What's that?'
'......'
...Come to think of it, maybe there was good reason for that reaction. They weren't making a show of it, but the people around me probably saw me as an ignoramus who didn't know a single term and needed help just to put words on paper. If my stats were converted into game terms, my Intelligence was probably loafing around the 50 mark.
"It's quite alright, Master."
"...Hm?"
"So long as one understands, is that not enough?"
...Did she know that kind of comfort only made me feel more pathetic? I seized the cheeks of Seo Yeo — who, in the original history as well, had built a wall between herself and all things scholarly — and pulled them every which way.
"......?"
Seo Yeo herself, for her part, looked utterly unable to grasp why I was doing this.