Gas Masks and Poison Gas
Modern gas masks are packed with sophisticated chemical agents designed to counter a vast array of toxins and biological weapons.
Even the Sacheondang Family, for all its resources, could not develop or field anything approaching that level of pharmaceutical technology in this era.
Which meant, in practical terms, that the masks for this operation did not need such a range of functions. They only had to shield their wearers from chlorine gas long enough for the team to sow chaos and slip out of the city.
And a mask that only needs to stop chlorine—that, we can build with the technology we have right now.
They fitted a filter canister packed with activated charcoal and calcium carbonate—limestone—to a mask of natural rubber, with glass panes set into the eye openings.
The activated charcoal’s porous structure adsorbed chlorine and lowered its concentration, while the limestone reacted with the gas—CaCO₃ + Cl₂ → CaCl₂ + CO₂—converting chlorine (Cl₂) into calcium chloride (CaCl₂) and stripping it of its toxicity.
So Wang Yangming and the Sakpungdae pulled on the gas masks Huiyeom had ordered prepared from the moment Sacheondang began developing poison gas, then went for the chlorine shells that had been stockpiled throughout Yeogang.
The bronze warheads, stripped from the crude shells fired by Janggun fire-tubes, were shaped like rugby balls cut in half, each larger than a child’s head.
The Sakpungdae hurled them into the city’s key thoroughfares, point-first so the impact fuzes would strike home.
—Bang! Ba-bang!
Small detonations cracked through the air, and pale yellow-green poison mist billowed outward on the force of each blast.
The explosive charge was modest, but it was still enough to rupture the bronze casings and drive the toxic fog free—and that meant the reports could not go unheard.
The enemy knew at once that something was wrong.
“We’re under attack!”
“On guard! Ambush!”
“Watch the alleys! Don’t scatter! Hold formation!”
The junior officers and noyans gave sound orders.
The only problem was that those perfectly reasonable instructions—issued under the assumption of urban ambushers—were the worst possible orders against poison gas. They funneled their own men straight into a massacre.
And there was a second misfortune: because they were not men of the Central Plains, they knew nothing of the Sacheondang Family’s renown as the greatest poison clan under heaven. Had they been a Central Plains sect or army, the sight of pale mist rising through the city instead of flame would have made them think of Dang poisons at once.
As it was, they only grasped the true nature of the attack after the victims had already begun to fall.
“Khh-hhhk!!!”
“Ghk!!”
“Gurrrk…!”
Soldiers who inhaled the thin yellow-green smoke convulsed in coughing fits, clawing at their lungs and throats before they collapsed. Blood ran from eyes, mouths, and noses.
The mechanism of chlorine gas is brutally simple. Once drawn into the lungs, chlorine meets moisture (H₂O) and forms hypochlorous acid (HClO) and hydrochloric acid (HCl). With hydrochloric acid forming inside the lungs, the alveoli dissolve. A man can no longer breathe; he dies in the agony of lungs that are burning away from within.
“P-poison!”
“The Central Plains dogs have poisoned their own town!”
The Sakpungdae had deliberately thrown the gas warheads first at intersections and other traffic hubs. The soldiers could not simply flee; they were forced to press away from the fog boiling out of the choke points, toward wherever the mist seemed thinner.
Naturally, that herded them toward the center of Yeogang.
And the more men packed into the heart of the city, the more the crush restricted their movement.
“Stop shoving!”
“Ugh! Get off me!”
“There! There! The poison fog is coming!”
By then, no one was listening to the noyans or noyons. A rear current still pushing forward without understanding the situation collided with a front current trying to fall back from the gas, packing bodies tighter and tighter from the alleys into the squares.
From the mountains above, Huiyeom and the Noksan staff could see every current of that human tide with perfect clarity.
“Wang and the Sakpungdae have cleared Yeogang.”
Once they had set off the poison fog and broken through it, there was no need to worry about pursuit. Even if the charcoal-and-lime masks fell far short of a modern gas mask, they bought a martial artist more than enough time to hold his breath and punch through a cloud that had only just begun to spread.
“Everyone out?”
At Huiyeom’s question, the commander of Noksan’s Fourth Outpost lowered the telescope from his eye and reported. It was a collapsible model from Niccolo’s glassworks.
“I saw the last Sakpungdae man clear and wave a green cloth hard.”
“All clear, then. Begin.”
“The targeting points—”
“As Wang directed. Hit the middle of the enemy force outside the walls.”
Shelling the city alone would not spread the damage to the troops outside. Wang Yangming’s plan was both brilliant and vicious: bisect the waiting enemy companies outside the walls with poison fog from the barrage, drive them into the city to escape it, then concentrate fire inside the walls to maximize the slaughter.
“Understood.”
The cannons were new equipment to them, but the Noksan staff had already worked the Dabal-shinginjeon. Under Huiyeom’s direction they adapted at once, packing powder into the barrels with practiced hands and loading Janggunjeon whose warheads held not solid iron but poison fog.
Sacheondang had supplied Yunnan with four thousand guns in total, counting the Musinpo among them. Of those, just under a thousand steel cannons could reach the enemy from this range. Five hundred each from the facing ridges—the array was truly majestic.
A mirror flashed the agreed signal to the mountain opposite; the answer came back.
Huiyeom gave the command.
“Fire!”
Torches touched the fuzes. The cords burned down in an instant—and then a roar no flintlock, matchlock, or Dabal-shinginjeon could match shook the mountains.
—KWA-BOOM!!!
Unlike the Dabal-shinginjeon, which streaked away in brilliant trails of fire, the Janggunjeon were little more than logs carved into a missile shape and fitted with warheads. Their flight was hard to see at all. The soldiers outside the walls had no idea what was happening until a dark flock of shapes heaved up out of the forest, cut across the sky, and came screaming down at them.
“Wh-what is that? Coming this way—”
By the time they recognized the Janggunjeon for what they were, the heavy projectiles were already slamming into the center of their ranks like thunderbolts, freighted with enormous kinetic energy.
“GRAAAAH!!”
Even without detonating, a mass of timber traveling at that speed was catastrophic. Horse and rider alike were crushed as if they had been stamped into tofu.
Janggunjeon that struck at an angle buried themselves in the ground. Startled horses reared and screamed; men spilled from their saddles in droves. Those that came in shallower skipped across the earth like stones on water, shredding every man and mount in their path as if they were dumpling dough.
“Steady! All noise and no substance—nothing like those fire-bolts!”
A brave noyon drew his saber and shouted.
And he was right—
Fssssssshhh—!!!
Ba-BOOM! Fsssssssshhh—!!
—until the Janggunjeon driven into the earth began to belch pale yellow-green smoke in furious plumes.
Some still in flight tore through horses’ bodies and sprayed yellow vapor in every direction. Some mist burst outward like a sharp explosion; some rose slowly from the craters the way steam seeps from a rice pot. However it came, the smoke was lethal.
“Ghk…!”
“Grrrrrk…!!”
Before the men who had dodged the physical impact could even feel relief, those who carelessly breathed the vapor began clawing at their throats and chests, thrashing, and going down.
It did not take the soldiers and noyons long to understand what the smoke was.
“Damn it! Poison!!”
“AAAAAAHH!!”
Watching men before their eyes thrash and die, weeping blood and frothing crimson from their mouths, the soldiers bolted on pure instinct—away from the smoke.
Because the Janggunjeon fire had cut the Chagatai cavalry like a semicircle, their flight split naturally in two. Those lucky enough to be in the rear put the poison fog at their backs and fell away from the city. Those at the front, with the fog rising behind them, had no choice but to be driven through the gates—into the walls. Men who did not know what was already happening inside the city could do nothing else.
“Y-you dogs! Obey your orders— uwaaargh?!”
In the face of the poison fog and the wholesale slaughter of their comrades, the lines collapsed. Noyans and noyons lost all control of their troops.
Outside the walls, men fought desperately to get in, away from the gas. Inside the walls, men fought desperately to get out. Near the gates, soldiers crushed to death by the press of bodies piled up in heaps.
And at that exact moment, the second volley came in.
This time the target was the gate itself.
—PA-KWA-KWA-KWA-KWA!!
—Ba-BOOM! Fsssssssshhh…!!
“Grrrrrk!!”
“Gueeeergh!”
“Khg, ghk, gurrrlk…!!”
A living hell. In their panic, soldiers abandoned their horses and scrambled up the walls, forced their way into empty houses, even threw themselves into wells.
One noyon tore his cloak and pressed it over his mouth, shouting,
“All of you! Don’t breathe the fog directly! It sinks—don’t inhale it, get to high ground and you’ll live!!”
Chlorine gas primarily attacks the respiratory tract and the mucous membranes of the eyes, so the advice was not bad.
But the pale yellow-brown fog leaking from the second wave of shells was something else entirely.
“Cough—cough… what is this smoke?”
“It stings…”
Soldiers who brushed the ochre fog soon felt their skin heat and itch. Compared to the yellow-green vapor that could kill a man for clawing at his own chest after a single breath, it seemed mild. Some even fled the yellow-green clouds into the ochre ones.
They had no idea that this was the seed of a far greater tragedy.
That slight warmth on the skin was the first sign that mustard-gas toxins were seeping through the dermis and dissolving into the subcutaneous fat. It would feel like nothing much for now—but from six hours onward it would raise chemical burns, blistering every exposed inch of the body into a horrific landscape. When the blisters burst and infection set in—sepsis and worse—this vicious agent would kill so many that dying to chlorine would almost seem clean by comparison.
Mustard gas.
The weapon infamous as the devil’s armament was making its debut in the Central Plains.
White and yellow poison fog swallowed Yeogang whole. There was not so much as a breath of wind; the city, nestled between the two mountains, became a town drowned in mist.
The Chagatai troops lucky enough not to have been driven inside could only watch, rigid with terror, as the screams from within that fog slowly thinned—and then fell silent.
As the dead piled higher and the fog gradually settled—heavier than air, it sank as the bodies stilled—the choke points finally cleared. The survivors fled Yeogang, a city of the dead, with bloody tears in their eyes.
Along the way, men coated in mustard gas became accidental vectors. Anyone who supported them took the residue from their clothes and skin. At first there was only a faint roughness, a prickling, a mild heat—nothing anyone noticed.
Having lost so many men in a single stroke and seen the catastrophe at Yeogang with his own eyes, Adiya Khan could no longer order another advance on the city. They fell back a short distance to the riverbank, made camp, and took stock of the damage.
But the tragedy was not over yet.
About three hours after the retreat, Adiya Khan’s camp was staring into hell.
“It burns!!!”
“AAAAAAHH!!”
“H-help me! My body—my body’s on fire!!”
The survivors who had come back from the day’s hell were melting.
When their clothes were stripped away, their skin looked as if they had rolled through a fire pit, swollen with enormous blisters. Inside the blisters was a mustard-yellow pus; the slightest touch made them pop, spilling foul-smelling matter.
The sight was so appalling that even Adiya Khan—a man of plunder and massacre with neither blood nor tears—clenched his teeth. He seized a military physician by the collar and shook him.
“What is this?! What the hell is it?!”
“B-burns, Great Khan.”
“Burns? Burns, you say? You idiot—where is the fire that burned them?!”
Adiya Khan roared at the physician, but raging at the man changed nothing.
These were steppe nomads with no concept of a “chemical burn,” men who had never so much as handled hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. They had no proper answer for people suddenly transforming and dying like this.
And human beings, when faced with phenomena they cannot understand, tend to force understanding by bolting on unscientific explanations.
“…A curse.”
Someone muttered it.
“We’re cursed. We’ve been cursed.”
“Tengri, Lord of the Steppe and the Eternal Blue Sky, is angry! He did not want this war, and Adiya Khan forced the invasion of the Central Plains—so He is wrathful!”
Distrust and terror spread through Adiya Khan’s host like wildfire. He felt the gazes of his soldiers slowly fill with fury, and he ground his teeth.
“Not yet—not yet! We cannot fall back for this!”
He still had a last stratagem that could break this situation open.