Hell's Front Line
Yu-baek eyed the train warily and muttered under his breath.
"Th-that's not a dragon… right? Yeah. Probably not…"
His tone lacked conviction.
He cocked his head to one side.
"Lots of feet. Some kind of king centipede?"
After fretting a moment longer over the train's true nature, Yu-baek simply watched it steam past into the night, whistle fading, and let his clawed hand drop loose at his side.
"Doesn't seem like it'll hurt anyone if I leave it alone?"
His gaze drifted to the tunnel bored through the mountain.
"That its nest…?"
Having roughly sized up the thing—whatever it was—Yu-baek set off running again.
Just what in the world had happened in Sichuan while he was gone?
"Got to get to the Tang family. Meet Ye-eun."
His form became the wind once more.
Named by a father who revered Möngke Khan, fourth emperor of the Great Yuan, Mongke Khan found himself seriously wondering whether his own Great Khan had lost his mind.
Cross the Kunlun Mountains with a hundred thousand cavalry? Was that the sort of order a sane man gave?
Even if the original Möngke Khan himself rose from the grave, the feat would have been impossible.
Yet Mongke was Adiya Khan's noyon, and though a lesser branch, still a descendant of the Golden Clan.
An order given was an order to be obeyed.
So he drove his men onward, searching out the lowest and widest passes of the Kunlun range.
To keep the horses from dying under them, he ordered the soldiers to dismount and walk; the grumbling only grew louder, but it was the only way to cross without slaughtering every mount before they cleared the mountains.
The Alps might enjoy greater fame across the world, yet the Kunlun range was physically higher. The difference was that while the Alps rose high throughout, the Kunlun offered stretches of lower ground.
At least they were spared the fate of Hannibal's or Napoleon's armies—men plummeting from narrow cliff paths or freezing solid in the cold. Small mercies.
Even so, the forced march remained hell on earth.
While Mongke Khan and the other noyons wrestled with despair and pressed across the Kunlun, Adiya Khan, still holding the Lijiang front, was fighting his own private war of attrition.
After several probes confirmed that the poison-spewing shells no longer rained from the mountains encircling Lijiang, Adiya Khan summoned his noyons to council.
"It's a ruse to lure us back into Lijiang and massacre us all over again!"
"Even the enemy's poison can't be endless. They've already fled to the rear!"
The two opinions clashed without give.
After a long silence, Adiya Khan sent swift scouts into the hills to confirm whether ambushes still waited. Finding none, he issued a calm order.
"Our scouts may simply have missed them. We move under cover of night. Riders dismount; muzzle the horses so they make no sound. We slip through Lijiang in silence."
The city gates still stood open exactly as they had the day the Chagatai dead had forced them.
The noyons nodded.
That night, the first bold noyon to pass through Lijiang's gates clenched his teeth.
"…This is hell itself."
Mongol nomads knew slaughter and abandoned corpses better than anyone, yet the bodies of those killed by poison—still twisted in the exact agony of their deaths, rotting where they had fallen—carried a different kind of horror from men cut down by blades or trampled under hooves.
In the moonlight, the noyon stared at a corpse that had clawed its own throat raw until the fingernails tore free, eyes rolled white, and muttered,
"…Lucky we came at night."
Most of the dead were well advanced in decay, but some still retained a semblance of form.
Fearing plague from the stench and dreading a fresh cloud of poison that would leave them looking exactly like the corpses underfoot, the men hurried on.
The rear gates stood open as well; they exited Lijiang without meeting a single threat.
As tension drained, a hollow sigh escaped.
"And the road was this easy all along…"
Thirty thousand.
Fully thirty thousand warriors had died on this ground.
They had not killed even a thousand of the enemy, yet entire tribes had been wiped out without resistance.
A chill thought struck Noyon Ujla.
If even the border outposts are this well defended… what waits at the heartland? Are we marching straight into an iron fortress?
The next city after Lijiang was Dali, famed for its marble. How many more outposts would they have to smash, and how many men and horses would it cost? And once they reached Dali itself—how many more would the city devour before the road opened?
Adiya Khan passed through Lijiang without losing a single man and could only laugh bitterly.
We spent all those lives just to force a city we could walk through this easily?
The emptiness only fed his rage.
They had crossed Lijiang, yet beyond the physical ground gained they had won nothing.
Had they been able to loot the city for supplies it might have been different, but even Mongol nomads—plunder burned into their bones—were not stupid enough to forage in a city still reeking of poison gas.
Not that there was anything left to take; the fleeing townsfolk of Lijiang had already carried off every scrap of grain and treasure.
The losses at Liangshan are catastrophic…
Lives were not the issue.
Food was.
When the fools who had marched on Liangshan returned without their commander, supplies abandoned in the ravines, Adiya Khan had felt his skull might split. A hundred thousand elite troops and two months of rations had become ninety-five thousand empty-handed idiots.
He had seriously considered whether they might be enemy agents sent to devour his own army's stores.
Yet they were genuine Mongol soldiers—though the comparison to Italian prisoners in the Second World War or Russian captives of a twenty-first-century war was uncomfortably apt.
To leave that mountain of grain behind! Better they had died; at least the mouths to feed would have decreased!
Adiya Khan had formed a flying column and sent it to recover the supplies at Liangshan… none returned.
Any soldier who approached the grain carts and gers had tasted the mortars of the waiting Gale Unit.
At that point Adiya Khan judged Liangshan itself a prepared tiger's maw and abandoned the grain with tears of blood.
Even excluding the hundred-thousand-strong detachment sent toward Qinghai Province, Adiya Khan still commanded nearly two hundred thousand men.
With the rations he now possessed, he could not sustain such a force for long.
Damn Yunnan! Once one of the greatest granaries of the Central Plains—what the hell happened? There's nothing to eat!
Yunnan was a land of deserts, jungles, wastelands, and fertile valleys all at once; the sector they had invaded sat precisely where desert gave way to barren scrub.
In truth, cursing Yunnan was rich coming from an army that had chosen to strike the mining cities of Lijiang and Dali rather than the true breadbasket—but even a deeper thrust would have changed little.
Yunnan's farmers had long since abandoned unprofitable food crops for cash crops; the invaders would have found only endless tea plantations and coffee trees no man could eat.
Adiya Khan ground his teeth.
The next outpost we meet, we smash through in a single rush no matter the cost. We cannot afford more delay!
Every hour given the enemy was an hour to prepare, and if the scorched-earth campaign continued the great host would starve by degrees.
With that resolve hard in his heart, the next outpost of Noksan rose before him.
Adiya Khan stared at the triple belts of barbed wire and the trenches laid out in front of the stockade and bared his teeth.
"The enemy will just rain fire from the outpost again, damn them."
No enemy showed near the trenches; they seemed to hold the high ground around the outpost itself. The only oddity was the ground between the trenches, deliberately torn up as though a field had been plowed to ruin, with rocks jutting here and there.
Adiya Khan gave the only order left to him.
"Infantry to the front. Tear down the wire and charge!"
He hated himself for the banality of the command, yet no better option existed.
With a roar the Chagatai host surged toward the coiled barbed wire.
"They're coming."
Huiyeom raised a hand. One of the Gale Unit troopers who saw the signal waved a flag.
Wang Yangming, receiving the signal, looked down on the soldiers lying camouflaged in the torn fields between the trenches.
They were the garrison troops of Noksan and Lijiang, two thousand strong, armed with the flintlock muskets Huiyeom had brought.
Virtually the entire Lijiang force remained intact; sixteen hundred-man companies waited on his word.
Normally ten such companies formed a single wei of a thousand, but military organization of the age was flexible at best and slapdash at worst. Thus two wei of eight hundred men each, each commanding eight companies, now held the line.
The Lijiang garrison commander held one wei in the second trench line; Wang Yangming himself commanded the other, hidden in the first. Huiyeom, with the Gale Unit and the Noksan contingent, prepared artillery fire from the outpost to the rear—forming a three-tiered battle array like the character for "three."
The great advantage of the stepped formation on the sloping hillside was that rear fire was unlikely to strike friendly backs by accident.
Holding the high ground and protected by obstacles, Huiyeom's force already possessed every natural edge.
Huiyeom did not hurry. Only when the enemy infantry closed on the first belt of wire did he give the order.
"Throw the Tang Thunders!"
Soldiers who had been lying face-down, caked in dirt on the trench floors beyond the first wire, surged to their feet as one. In each hand a spherical Tang Thunder already burned, fuse lit by flint and steel.
"Yaaaaahhh!!!"
The grenades arced through the air like flung stones. Few men had never thrown a rock in boyhood; even without formal training the Tang Thunders flew true enough. They detonated among the wire, and in an instant the ground became a slaughterhouse of flying blood and flesh.
—Buh-buh-boom!!
"Aaaagh!! Help me!!"
Yet not everything went well. Friendly fire claimed a grim toll as well.
Even in the modern age grenade accidents occurred during training with depressing regularity; handing live grenades to half-trained men and ordering them to throw was a recipe for disaster. Some dropped the bombs at their feet and died with their comrades; others held on a heartbeat too long and watched their own hands explode.
Such "accidents," however, remained a tiny fraction of the whole.
And the front-line commander, Wang Yangming, had no intention of letting his men fixate on them.
"Front rank—aim!!"
Soldiers snatched up the flintlock muskets lying at their sides and leveled them. The first round had been loaded long before the enemy appeared; all that remained was to open the pan cover and squeeze the trigger.
Precision was unnecessary.
Even after the massed Tang Thunder volley had melted so many, a dense crowd of enemies still pressed against the wire. Firing by ranks in area suppression, a man needed only avoid pointing at the dirt or the sky to be certain of hitting someone.
"Fire!"
—Bang! Buh-buh-buh-bang! Bang-bang!
"Gyaaaah!!"
The first volley dropped enemies in heaps.
"Load cartridges!"
As drilled, the soldiers pulled oiled-paper bundles from their pouches. They tore one end, poured the black powder down the muzzle, dropped the ball in after, stuffed the remaining paper as wadding, and rammed the charge home with the iron rod.
In that interval the enemy threw themselves at the wire, tearing at it with desperate strength or prying posts free and lifting whole sections.
Only when they were a breath from spilling over the first belt did the second volley crash out.
"Fire!"
Buh-buh-buh-bang!!
Infantrymen spun and fell.
Yet their sacrifice would not be wasted.
Behind them, enraged horsemen were already thundering forward like a breaking wave.
Wang Yangming shouted at once.
"Fall back! Fall back!!"
Watching the battle unfold from above, Huiyeom turned to the Gale Unit.
"Are the multi-launch Singijeon ready?"
"Aimed and waiting, my lord. We can fire on your word."
"Understood."
He narrowed his eyes and looked down upon the battlefield.