The Power of Noksan
“Fuck! It’s those horse-humping bastards!!”
The thunder of hooves seemed ready to shake heaven and earth; then, as the Oirat cavalry swept around the mountain bend, the outpost commander bellowed the warning.
“W-what do we do? Just looking at them, there’s got to be a thousand!”
“Light the beacon!”
“We have to run—this is suicide!”
The garrison holding the outpost numbered fifty men at most.
Couldn’t each of them just take twenty? Against cavalry? That was pure fantasy.
Hadn’t Mongol horsemen overrun the Central Plains and raised the last empire—the Yuan—on that very strength?
In the bones of every Central Plains man was carved a bone-deep fear of what mounted warriors could do.
But the commander clenched his teeth.
“If we run from here, Aba Prefecture is finished! Everyone dies! At the very least we have to buy time!”
If he fled to save his own skin, he would live.
But the woman he secretly loved would die—or be dragged off by the Oirats to become a plaything for horse-humpers.
And the trust of the Dang Family would shatter with it.
They would decide that bandit scum could never be remade into anything useful.
The quiet, ordinary life he had only just managed to grasp, ending—or his own life ending.
Which was he supposed to choose?
The struggle ran deep, but it was brief. They looked once more at the concertina wire and the anti-horse stakes they had laid out ahead, and last of all at the Dabal-shinginjeon.
The commander decided to bet everything on them.
“You bastards! We’ve got a secret weapon! Get ready to fire—now!”
At his roar, the bandits—no, the Noksan employees—who had been drowning in panic bit their lips and found their footing again.
Right. Even if they fell back, they couldn’t escape.
Trying to outrun cavalry on foot was a joke.
Here, there was no choice but to stop them.
“Everyone to positions!”
Those who could draw a bow took one up; those without bows seized throwing axes and spears. The men assigned to the shinginjeon launchers stood ready with torches beside the frames.
Then—
KWA-JIJIJIK!!
The Oirat vanguard slammed into the concertina wire.
In an instant, men and horses became minced meat dangling from the coils—a sight of raw cruelty, yet one that poured courage into the defenders like strong wine.
“Fuuuuck! Young Master! I love you!”
“No way—it’s that powerful?!”
They had thought of the concertina wire as little more than a nuisance, an obstacle to slow the enemy. Instead it was devouring the Oirat spearhead like the thorned maw of some gigantic carnivorous plant.
The cavalry were in utter chaos.
Some of the leaders, like Tatai Noyan, had scoffed at the concertina wire and slashed at it with sword or spear—only to be unable to overcome their own charge’s momentum, crashing into the coils and being shredded to pieces.
The wire itself did not escape unscathed under the combined weight of horse and rider and the full force of a galloping impact. It crumpled, stretched like soft taffy; the stakes that had pinned it snapped and tumbled across the ground.
Even so, the wire did not vanish.
It remained right where it was, still snatching at horses’ legs—an obstacle that refused to die.
It was like punching a net as hard as you liked and never being able to break it.
That was the terror of concertina wire.
Far tougher under shock than any ordinary barrier. Even in the Second World War, a front built of concertina wire and trenches could only be breached by saturating the ground with artillery until the whole sector was leveled, by crushing it under tanks, or by bombing it from the air.
It was not something a cavalry charge could clear away.
Once the first wave became the wire’s meal, the second and third waves, unable to kill their own speed, tried desperately to leap the corpses and the coils.
They only flew through the air and crashed down onto the second and third rows of wire beyond.
“Ee—hihihihihing!”
“Uwaaaaargh!!”
As a horse fell onto the wire, its belly tore open and its guts spilled in streams; the rider, unable to defeat his own momentum, was flung forward.
Those who hit the ground with broken necks and died on the spot were the lucky ones.
Those who landed on the wire itself had their whole bodies raked open, dying in agony that no one should ever have to taste.
“What… what in the hell are those silver thorn-vines?!”
Bahama Taishi, watching the slaughter, could not close his mouth.
To a man who had never even conceived of drawing iron into wire, studding it with barbs, and carpeting the ground with it, the concertina wire looked like some demon’s bramble hauled up out of hell.
“…But even that ends now!”
For all its monstrous stopping power, concertina wire was still a one-use obstacle.
At the cost of dozens of horsemen, gaps had begun to open—places where all four layers of the barrier had been breached.
“Advance only where the men ahead have already trampled a path!”
“Watch you don’t slip in the blood and the corpses!”
Where the stakes had broken, the wire lay flattened under the hooves of the warhorses. Unlucky mounts by the dozen still caught a hoof and went down—but at last the Oirats succeeded in completely neutralizing the wire across several stretches.
“We’ve broken through this cursed vine—now go butcher them!!!”
“…Insane. This is truly insane.”
The commander clicked his tongue in awe.
The Dabal-shinginjeon instruction manual he had been reading might as well have looked into this exact moment and written it down in advance:
When the enemy begins to cross the concertina wire, do not attack at once.
The greatest damage that can be inflicted on an enemy mid-crossing is delivered when the crossing is roughly halfway complete.
They will funnel into the few breached gaps, producing a congestion of forces.
Pour one Dabal-shinginjeon into each such cluster and you can annihilate them.
The commander followed the manual’s orders to the letter.
When the Oirat horsemen were about halfway across the wire—
“Fire!”
He swung his sword in a hard arc for the signal.
“Fire!”
The Noksan employees touched their torches to the Dabal-shinginjeon fuses.
Tension knotted every gut.
Ahead, Mongol warriors already soaked in blood, eyes gone completely wild, came charging like demons from the underworld.
The slow burn of the fuses felt exactly like their own hearts burning down to ash.
And when those fuses burned out—
Fyufyufyufyufyufyufyufyufyupung—!!!
A meteor shower erupted from the earth toward the sky.
Even in broad daylight the procession of shinginjeon rockets climbing on orange flame was brilliantly clear.
Daigon, Noyan of the Oirat Choros, clenched his teeth.
“Fire arrows! Shields up!! Full speed—punch through! Freeze in fear and you get hit! Keep running and they fall behind you!”
Soldiers with leather shields thrust them toward the sky; those without frantically spurred for more speed.
But then—
“…Why are the arrows so… big?”
As the shinginjeon rockets—each the thickness of a grown man’s forearm—drew closer, their uncanny shape, nothing like any arrow, set the horsemen reeling.
“Doesn’t matter if they miss!”
Daigon sneered as he dodged the fastest rocket streaking toward him.
“See that? Nothing to it! Just dodge them like—!”
Those were his last words.
—Kwajik…
When the warhead struck the ground, the iron spear-point tip was driven back into the body, shattering the ceramic vessel within.
Nitric acid bursting from the ceramic sprayed over black powder already on the verge of detonating from the impact—and in that instant a violent oxidizing reaction took hold.
All of that in roughly two-tenths of a second. The result:
—KWAAAAAANG—!!
A savage blast that scoured a radius of about one zhang—three meters.
“Ihihihihihihing!!”
The shockwave slammed a horse square in the rump; the beast flailed in midair, crashed to the ground, and smashed into the dirt.
Daigon, every inch the brave Noyan, never once lost his grip on the reins and was never thrown clear—which proved his misfortune. His own mount crushed him, shattering his body like dry biscuits.
—Kwakwakwakwakwakwakwakwang!!!
Dozens, hundreds of shinginjeon rockets hammered the earth like a cloudburst.
It was blatant overkill.
Uncertain of the rockets’ true power and still half-paralyzed by fear of cavalry, the commander had ordered every last one of the outpost’s three hundred shinginjeon fired in a single volley.
That catastrophic meteor storm of destruction began falling first on those charging at the front.
The middle ranks, still trying to cross the wire, were shoved from behind by the rear ranks and could neither advance nor retreat as the storm buried them.
—Pakwakwakwakwakwa—!!
“Kraaaaaah!!”
“Aaaaaaargh!!”
“Ihihihihihihing!!”
Stone chips, dust, blood-spray, and shreds of flesh fountained in every direction.
The rear ranks wrenched their horses about in a frantic bid to flee—and only became the next meal for the shinginjeon.
“Th-this is a dream…”
Bahama watched his tribe’s elite horsemen vanish into flame, and his whole body shook.
A sickening terror and hollow despair owned every inch of him.
Had he not been sitting a horse, he would have collapsed to the ground where he stood.
What in the name of heaven was this?
Had a dragon manifested and breathed fire across the plain?
“T-Taishi!”
The Noyans spun toward him in panic, eyes begging for a decision.
…A decision? In this situation… what decision?
Horses, panicked by the blasts, were thrashing like mad things.
The middle-rank cavalry were too busy trying to soothe their mounts for any charge to be possible.
And even if he gave the order—would anyone listen?
Bahama saw the fear swimming in the Noyans’ eyes.
Who among them would turn a horse’s head into that hell of fire?
The explosions that had seemed as if they would never end finally ceased.
A thick black fog lay over the defensive line, like the sulfur-reeking mists of the underworld welling up at the gate of the Yellow Springs.
A moment later a wind from somewhere blew the smoke aside—and the ruin it revealed stole the speech from every throat present.
Oirat soldiers and Noksan employees alike.
There were no corpses there. No Man’s Land.
More precisely: nothing that still held the shape of a corpse.
Only flesh torn beyond recognition, entrails, and bone shards, flung across the earth like vomit.
Even the horsemen in the rear ranks who had luckily escaped that merciless bombardment were in no better shape.
Horses driven wild by the unimaginable noise, flame, and concussion left only a handful of riders still somehow clinging to their saddles.
And the men themselves were half out of their minds with terror.
Simply being thrown was the best outcome. Others were trampled to death by their own mounts, or spun in circles weeping tears and snot in a daze, or displayed every other symptom of broken minds—soldiers who, in practical terms, no longer had any combat value whatsoever.
It was a scene that stunned even the Oirat, a cruel and merciless nomadic warrior people, and stunned the Noksan employees, former bandits who had seen more than their share of men dying on blades.
In a single shock, roughly six hundred warriors had been turned into scraps of meat, and four hundred more rendered combat-ineffective.
Bahama felt a cold rattle run down his spine.
The road to the enemy line lay wide open.
That meteor shower of unknown origin had reduced not only the silver rose-vines but even the anti-horse stakes to twisted scrap iron.
If the middle and rear ranks charged as one right now, that tiny stone outpost would be crushed in a heartbeat. And beyond it, the village ripe for plunder…
But—
What if they committed to a desperate charge with the middle ranks…
and that same meteor shower fell again?
It would be over. Not one of them would make it home alive.
And whether anyone would even obey a charge order was already in doubt.
Bahama saw the killing light kindling in the eyes of some of the Noyans who were watching him.
Even after he had purged the anti-war faction before they set out—this.
“…Retreat.”
In the end, Bahama had no choice left.
“…All forces, retreat. We are going back.”
Having gained nothing, leaving only catastrophic losses of men and horses, the Oirat’s all-or-nothing invasion of Sichuan was halted at the very first step.
The affair was only a single defeat, a small local action with cavalry casualties of some six hundred. Yet its aftershocks would ripple out into a considerable butterfly effect across history.
First, Bahama Taishi was toppled from power with this failure as the pretext.
Originally a federation of four tribes, the Oirat had already lost two of them in the clash with Chagatai; only the Choros under Bahama and the Khoshut remained.
But after Bahama lost tens of thousands of soldiers and suffered defeat against Chagatai, and then failed again in his invasion of the Central Plains, the Khoshut declared they could no longer acknowledge him as their Taishi.
In the end Bahama was assassinated by a Noyan of Khoshut stock, and that murder became the spark that split the Oirat into Choros and Khoshut and set them at war with each other.
For Chagatai—already waiting for a chance to strike the Oirat—this was a gift from heaven.
Chagatai delivered an ultimatum of “surrender, or annihilation.”
Without a unified commander, bled white by civil war, the Oirat no longer had the strength to resist and submitted to Chagatai.
With the fall of the Oirat, “Esen Taishi,” the man who in another history would have caused the Tumu Crisis, would never appear upon the stage—
and the Dzungar Khanate the Oirat would have founded would never step into the light of history at all.
Every one of these butterfly effects was completely different from the history Hwi-yeom had once known.
In the history he remembered, Chagatai had never unified and had instead been swallowed by the Oirat—yet here the exact opposite had unfolded.
Of course, this was a world in which Gyeong had risen in place of Ming, so the comparison was meaningless in the end.
Word of the battle fought that day reached the Sichuan Dang Family through Noksan.
When Hwi-yeom received the report, he frowned.
“There are a lot of problems.”
Dang Un-sang looked at him as if he had gone mad.
“A lot of problems? After this absurd, impossible victory?”
“Yes. I think we need a fundamental solution.”
Hwi-yeom’s eyes lit up.