The Yellow Turban Rebellion (3)
Night had fallen, the sun sinking away as the moon climbed into the sky.
In the quiet army camp, where the only sounds were the chirp of crickets and the crackle of burning firewood, Lü Bu stared off at something in the distance with eyes the color of blood.
Julu.
The main stronghold of the Yellow Turbans, its gates barred fast. Lü Bu had turned every enemy who dared block her path into a bloody smear, yet even across all those countless battles, this was the first time she had ever fought a siege. The walls rose high and solid, and the gates looked sturdy enough to shrug off anything short of a miracle. Even for the woman they called Peerless Under Heaven, crumbling a wall or blasting a gate off its hinges was simply beyond possible.
So how, then, was she supposed to win tomorrow's battle?
Lü Bu tilted her head, chewed on the problem for a moment, and eventually gave up on thinking altogether.
"Hmm... It'll work out somehow."
With a general having materialized out of nowhere in the middle of their watch, the only ones wound razor-tight were the sentries standing nearby.
Night gave way to dawn.
Once the soldiers had eaten their morning meal and formed up in ranks, a low groan of dragged timber rose from behind the line — battering rams to shatter the gates, and siege towers to assault the walls. Given the ferocious fighting that had already raged at Julu before I arrived, a few of those machines should have been smashed to splinters by now; seeing them still intact told me the imperial army had come with its teeth gritted all the way.
At the sight of the siege engines slowly revealing themselves, the Yellow Turbans atop the walls readied fire arrows with the ease of long practice. The machines were sheathed in leather to keep them from catching, but nobody could call leather proof against flame.
With every preparation complete, Huangfu Song appeared at the center of the army and leveled the point of his blade at the city.
"Charge!"
WAAAAAAAGH──!!
Soldiers to a man went hurtling toward the city with swaggering, chest-out bravado. And as the distance between the imperial army and the walls steadily shrank, the Yellow Turbans sprang into action of their own.
Shwishwishwishwishwish──!!
A hiss of parting air, and a rain of arrows blotted out the sky. I couldn't begin to guess how many archers they had up there, but one thing was certain: there were a great many.
"Aaagh!"
"Gwaaagh!"
The arrows hovering overhead came pouring down, and the soldiers at the front of the charge collapsed screaming. The instant they fell, others stepped in to fill the gap, pressing onward toward the city.
Determined to thin the imperial ranks by every man possible before they reached the walls, the defenders loosed arrow after arrow in a ceaseless downpour. The troops raised their shields and weathered the storm as best they could, but the attrition was beyond their power to stop.
"Set the ladders! Get up those walls!"
The moment the imperial army reached the stonework, ladders began hooking onto it one after another. The Yellow Turbans fought desperately to prevent exactly this, but in the end they could not keep the enemy from swarming up to the walls.
Not that their resistance had softened in the slightest.
"Guaaaagh!"
A soldier halfway up his ladder took a stone to the head and dropped off it, howling in agony. Another was scalded by boiling water poured from above, while the arrows kept hissing down from the ramparts and the casualties stacked higher by the minute.
This is seriously no joke. Sieges already favored the defender, and the Yellow Turbans were holding out with remarkable tenacity. I turned to look at Seo Yeo, who stood beside me watching the battlefield without a flicker of expression.
The moment my head turned, her eyes came up and met mine. How does she always know when I'm looking at her?
"Seo Yeo. What would it take to win this?"
Go on — show me the strategy of Xiang Yu!
Seo Yeo answered without a heartbeat of hesitation.
"Could we not simply kill every enemy atop the walls?"
"..."
That's not an answer — I asked you HOW.
"She's got a point!"
As I sat in silence at Seo Yeo's reply, a response arrived from a most unexpected quarter.
"Lü Bu?"
The famed Peerless Under Heaven herself stepped forward, grinning like a child on festival morning. She turned her head toward me.
"Stay right there and watch closely. Let me show you what kind of person you command!"
Is there some secret bond shared by girls who are good at fighting?
Declaration made with utter confidence, Lü Bu didn't even bother mounting a horse — she sprinted for the walls on her own two legs. The moment the defenders below caught the red hair charging toward them, they shouted.
"It's Lü Bu! Lü Bu is here!"
"Focus your arrows on her!"
That eye-catching hair made her a target instantly; even at a distance from the wall, concentrated fire came raining down on her alone.
"If you want me dead, you'll have to come down here and do it yourselves!"
Utterly unbothered, Lü Bu batted the arrows aside with the Sky Piercer Halberd in one hand while scooping up a masterless spear lying in the dirt nearby.
Several Yellow Turbans flinched and ducked below the parapet, evidently realizing that spear would shortly be coming their way.
"Pfft! Scared, are we?"
Lü Bu laughed at the sight of them cowering behind the wall.
"Though honestly? That's the smart move!"
SHWAAAAACK!
The words were barely out of her mouth before she hurled the spear at the men who hadn't taken cover. It tore through the air with a terrifying shriek, skewering an archer mid-draw and, as a bonus, carrying clean through the unlucky soldiers lined up behind him.
"How many was that? Three, I think."
At strength so far beyond human, the Yellow Turbans on the wall wavered. Meanwhile, before anyone had noticed, the rams and towers had all but reached the city.
"Loose! Burn them all!"
"Push! Push it in!"
Pandemonium unfolded between those who would hold the line and those who would break it. The engines had reached the city, but the Yellow Turbans' resistance was as ferocious as ever, and the imperial troops were slowly wearing down. Soldiers grazed by even a single arrow doubled over from its poison and dropped out of the fight, while the machines, under concentrated fire, burst apart one after another.
Melee had broken out atop the walls where the siege towers had docked, and the defenders' skill was anything but ordinary — perhaps Zhang Jue's elite guard really was the real deal. Watching them deftly parry attacks and slip in counters, they seemed to fight better than the imperial soldiers facing them.
As I directed the troops under my command, I realized at some point that Lü Bu had slipped out of my field of view.
Huh? Where did Lü Bu go?
Just as I was whipping my head about in search of her, screams rang out from the wall and Yellow Turbans came tumbling off the far side in a steady stream.
"Gwaaaaagh!"
"Aaaaagh!"
I had no idea when she'd gone up, but Lü Bu — presumably via one of the towers docked against the wall — was now atop the ramparts, swinging her Sky Piercer Halberd and spreading an air of outright slaughter.
She told me to watch, and then fights where I can't see her.
I pulled my gaze from the Lü Bu-shaped gap in my line of sight, faced front, and kept commanding my soldiers. For all my going on about how strong the Yellow Turbans were, the imperial troops gathered here were no pushovers either — after all, the warlords who would later each forge their own ambitions and spring up like bamboo shoots after the rain were all assembled on this field.
"So, Seo Yeo. Still no interest in taking the field yourself?"
"No. None whatsoever."
And I suppose that counts as a problem.
Seo Yeo had no thought of leading an army; her entire world began and ended with guarding my safety at my side. I was sitting on a guaranteed victory button for every battle, and I couldn't press it.
"Next! Anyone else want to die?!"
Every sweep of Lü Bu's Sky Piercer Halberd sent several Yellow Turbans sailing through the sky — a spectacle that belonged in no sane world.
"You monstrous bitch! I, Lord Deng Mu, will face you myself!"
A burly man burst from among the Yellow Turbans, bellowing his challenge. Lü Bu smirked at the sight of him.
"Feeling confident, are we?"
Fearless of death, Deng Mu charged the girl they called Peerless Under Heaven.
"For the Yellow Heaven!!"
"You're fun."
CLANG!
Lightly batting aside the sword Deng Mu swung, Lü Bu spoke.
"I liked the look in your eyes."
With those words, she took his head.
"The Azure Sky is dead! The Yellow Sky shall rise!"
"For the Way of Great Peace!"
Their commander had fallen in barely two exchanges of arms, but the Yellow Turbans couldn't have cared less, swinging their weapons at Lü Bu all the same. She casually cleaved five of them down at once and clicked her tongue.
"I've honestly never seen fighters like these."
Don't soldiers usually panic and scatter when their commander dies? From leadership down to the last common footsoldier, not one of them feared death. These vicious devils were a breed apart — the first she'd ever seen.
As the Yellow Turbans stopped rushing in blindly and began holding their distance to watch for openings, Lü Bu's gaze drifted to a single spot. Not on her own level, perhaps, but with the defenders in such an uproar over there, it seemed others were rampaging through their ranks the same way she was here.
A black-haired woman with beautiful hair that reached her ankles, tied in a low ponytail, was felling the Yellow Turbans around her with a crescent blade engraved with an azure dragon. Another black-haired woman, hair bound to one side, ran two of them through at once with a long serpent of a spear and flung their corpses into the open air.
"Follow us!"
A black-haired woman with long straight hair spilling to the small of her back and a face made for smiling was leading soldiers forward, carving a path with twin swords.
...Doesn't fighting with that thing strapped on get uncomfortable?
By Lü Bu's eye, the black-haired women fighting so capably all had excellent figures as well — but the woman commanding the army at the very center carried something of outright, overwhelming size on her front.
Just then, a lone Yellow Turban spotted an opening and rushed her.
"Gwack!"
The man, hoping to catch her distracted, impaled himself on the Sky Piercer Halberd and ended his life right there.
"What's the hurry? Wait your turn — I'll get to you eventually."
Lü Bu swept the halberd through the empty air to shake off the corpse, then looked over the defenders standing rigid with tension.
"Doesn't look like any of you feel like surrendering, so..."
She smiled sweetly.
"I'll kill you all, then?"
What on earth is she doing up there?
A short while after Lü Bu went up the wall, the frequency of things flying off it dropped in a way you couldn't miss. And whatever came sailing over now, the biggest difference was that instead of arrows and stones, it was people. They weren't playing ball with human bodies — the whole spectacle defied belief.
With the counterpressure reduced, the imperial troops below pressed the defenders harder than ever, lending fresh impetus to the siege.
WHAM!
The battering ram hammered away at the gate, already crushed nearly flat. The troops poured arrows onto the ramparts and kept swarming up the walls into the melee.
"Gwaaagh!"
On the wall, Yellow Turbans were still being flung off screaming as though they'd wandered into a natural disaster.
KRA-BOOM!
At last the gate, pounded without pause, burst open half-shattered.
WAAAAAH!!
The moment it opened, the imperial troops flooded through and collided with the Yellow Turbans waiting in reserve. Defender and attacker alike — neither side yielded an inch, and the front line before the gate held taut.
Just as the corpses of both armies piled higher and higher before the gate, the battle took a sudden turn.
"Please make way!"
A woman with brown hair tied in a ponytail rode her horse straight into the heart of the Yellow Turbans' square formation. As if they'd been waiting for her, the defenders thrust their spears at the rider burrowing into their ranks.
For anyone ordinary, a lethal moment.
KLANG!
The woman swept aside every spear aimed at her with an effortless twirl of the one in her hand. When their attacks failed to so much as touch her, the stunned Yellow Turbans fell one after another to her follow-up strikes.
The formation began collapsing with startling speed. With the woman at its very tip, the soldiers bored into the Yellow Turbans, and the tide of battle tipped in a single breath.
When the woman fixed her brown eyes — the same shade as her hair — upon her enemies, the defenders' fighting spirit deflated all at once.
She's dependable.
Even though this was her first time riding out to battle, she was performing beyond anything I'd hoped, and I couldn't hide the warmth rising in my chest.
Zhang Liao, courtesy name Wenyuan.
A general famous enough that everyone who was anyone knew her name had now made her debut upon the stage of the world.