Bloodstained Qilian Mountains (2)
The head of the Dokgyo, Gyeong-jun, shuddered for only a moment at the sight of Yu-baek’s strike. Then he was the first to snap back to his senses and seize the Gatling’s grip.
He hoisted the ammunition box onto the pack frame at his back and lifted the belt-fed Gatling with both hands. A proper emplaced weapon would never have had a stock, but this one had been rebuilt for a man to carry; a rubber-padded buttstock sat snug against his shoulder. Gyeong-jun nestled it there, sighted through the iron sights on the milling Chagatai horsemen, and began to turn the hand-crank.
Trtrtrtrtrtrtrtrrrrk!!
That was the first moment the Dang Family’s secret weapon—too powerful, too voracious of powder and shot, and far too likely to draw the Emperor’s wary eye—revealed itself to the world.
However slow an early rotary gun might be compared to a modern automatic rifle or a Vulcan cannon, it still put every flintlock the Dang Family had ever fielded to shame. One turn of the crank sent a round downrange; a single gunner could do the work of dozens of musketeers.
Blood fountained on every side and men and horses began to drop. Möngke Khan, shaken yet still in command, bellowed orders.
“Ambush! Don’t panic—return fire!”
“Shield-bearers! Raise shields!”
Infantry lifted wooden shields while cavalry and the rest of the foot drew bows and loosed toward the muzzle flashes. Against bullets that punched through iron plate, leather-faced timber was worthless. The Mongols were no helpless targets; their composite bows still sent whistling arrows through the hellish curtain of fire. But the Dokgyo troopers with the Gatlings were no static machine-gun nests. They hosed a belt, vanished the instant arrows came, and reappeared on a new flank, always firing from the enemy’s blind side.
The Chagatai host had never imagined so few men could spit so many shafts; they could not even guess how many foes ringed them.
Tarrerrerrerrrk!! Tarrerrerrerrrk!!
“Gyaaaaah!!”
In the Second World War it had been axiomatic that only artillery, tanks, or air support could dig out a machine-gun nest. Even when shortages forced that rule to be ignored, a well-sited nest remained the infantry’s private apocalypse; dozens of riflemen routinely died trying to silence a single one. Here every Dokgyo special-forces trooper was a nest unto himself—and worse, the nests moved.
One noyan charged the place where muzzle flashes had blazed, found empty ground, and spun in confusion just as a Gatling reappeared on his flank and stitched him into a bloody rag. The famous Mongol partisan-shot tactics were useless: the fight was in the mountains, the enemy’s positions were unknown, and the Chagatai ranks stood fully exposed to the storm.
There is no clever answer when you are simply being slaughtered. Möngke Khan roared:
“Dismount! Into the trees! Everything that isn’t one of us is the enemy!”
For cavalry to abandon their horses and walk into a forest known to hold ambushers was the worst of bad options. Yet no better choice remained. A fire-attack might have roasted the Dokgyo out of the woods, but living timber does not burn easily; such tactics require careful preparation, and none was possible now. Standing still only invited more losses. Möngke’s order, however desperate, was not foolish.
The moment the Mongols left their mounts and pressed into the trees, the Dokgyo hesitated. Trunks became natural cover, and the sheer press of enemies closing from every direction forced them to fall back. Yet a forest melee is exactly the sort of fight a small elite force thrives in. The Dokgyo withdrew, winding the clockwork fuses of the Tang Thunders hanging at their chests and dropping the grenades at their feet.
“There they are!”
Infantrymen spotted the retreating backs, howled with bloodlust, and charged after them, blades high. The Dokgyo, burdened with heavy packs, seemed to waddle; the soldiers’ spirits soared—they looked easy to catch. But even laden, elite martial artists using light-body technique could never be overtaken by ordinary foot soldiers, most of them dismounted cavalry who had never properly trained in internal arts.
While the pursuers floundered, the spring-fuse Tang Thunders armed themselves.
Kiiiiik… ting.
The spring unwound, a blade severed the taut string, and the striker slammed into the primer under coiled pressure. With a sharp bang the casings burst, flinging shrapnel in every direction; scores of infantry screamed and went down.
“Aaaagh!!”
Grenades detonating all around them made the Chagatai footmen falter. Their deepest trauma had been pressed: the memory of Dali County’s First Outpost, where buried Musinpo mines and rocket-arrow volleys had annihilated twenty thousand of their comrades, was burned into every mind. The Tang Thunders themselves looked, at a glance, like oversized pinecones; soldiers who had once jumped at the sight of a turtle now flung themselves away from every pinecone they saw.
In that chaos the Dokgyo slipped clear of the woods and raced for the next ambush site.
Not every fight was flight, however. Elsewhere in the forest, slaughter was still under way.
“Khuh… haah…”
Möngke Khan clamped his left stump with his remaining hand, blood sheeting over one eye. Where a powerful arm had been, only a pulsing cross-section remained. The thirty Kheshig guards who had sworn to protect him lay in finely shredded meat. Each had been a warrior who could have stood among the rising stars of the Central Plains.
The martial artists of the Central Plains liked to claim their arts were supreme. They were wrong. Precision and systemization might favor the Middle Kingdom, yet Mongolia’s own dykhaniye—the Breath—was no whit inferior. The Central Plains feared the arts of Potala Palace in Tibet; Möngke had always believed Mongol dykhaniye stood equal to them. Yet men who had stepped past the realm of the Swinging Sword into the realm of the Screaming Blade had been torn apart like paper…!
“Haaah… haah…”
He pressed the vital point on his shoulder to stem the bleeding, gripped his great saber, and demanded:
“Who… the hell… are you?!”
Yu-baek, who had been turning a severed Kheshig head this way and that with idle curiosity, let it drop with a soft thud and rotated his neck toward Möngke. In those unblinking green-glass eyes the khan saw his own terrified face reflected. Möngke’s breath rasped like metal.
“That vicious hand…! Are you of the Persian Demonic Cult? Did you invade the Central Plains ahead of us?!”
A man who could tear living bodies into wet rags without blinking was, in Möngke’s mind, unmistakably a Demonic Cultist; the question was really an accusation.
Something that might have been emotion flickered for the first time in Yu-baek’s eyes. It was anger.
“Demonic Cult… me?”
Crick, crack.
Knuckles popped one after another. Still unsatisfied, Yu-baek rolled his neck until it gave a sharp crack of its own, then tossed the words out like refuse.
“Those trash… still… around?”
“What?”
“I thought… I tore them all… Hmm.”
“What nonsense is this?! You’re not a Demonic Cultist?!”
“Mmm.”
Yu-baek’s anger drained away as quickly as it had come. He asked, almost politely:
“Question. You… Demonic Cultist… no?”
“No! I am a proud son of the Golden Clan, the khan who led the Urzul Ulus—Möngke, descendant of the Great Chinggis Khan!”
“Ah. Okay.”
Yu-baek nodded. His claws shortened a fraction.
“Next question. Demonic Cultists… where… know?”
“Demonic Cultists?”
Möngke, past astonishment and into a strange calm, answered:
“Why ask me where those scum are? Rolling in their deserts, no doubt. Xinjiang is their base; their true lair lies beyond the Great Desert in Persian lands. They’ll be there.”
“Ah. So that was it.”
Yu-baek nodded as though he had received a gift.
“They had… a home base. That’s why… couldn’t wipe them out.”
“What in the world are you—”
“Mmm.”
Yu-baek scratched his white hair with a blood-smeared hand.
“Changed my mind. You’re… good guy.”
“?”
“Take your men. Go home… your land. Then… I won’t kill.”
“This is—”
Emotions Möngke had thought burned away boiled up again. The creature did not even regard him as an opponent; it spoke the way a hunter releases a catch that no longer interests him—grace for the sake of convenience. In cold terms the offer was generous. Even with tens of thousands of horsemen at his back, Möngke alone against this monster stood no chance. The wise course was to thank the enemy’s mercy, withdraw, and plan for another day.
But Yu-baek had already turned away, utterly uninterested, and that casual back set fire to the khan’s pride. A wounded warrior’s pride can weigh more than life itself.
“You dare mock meeeee!!”
Möngke drew up the Breath of dykhaniye. The saber in his hand began to thrum, then to scream, light and sparks leaping from the steel. Any Central Plains martial artist would have cried “Sword Aura?!” in shock. In Mongol terms this was the realm of the Screaming Blade—an intermediate stage between mere sword-qi and true sword-aura, a blade that spat sparks like an arc-welding rod.
Ready to die for his honor, Möngke drove his heels into his warhorse’s belly. The great steed leapt down the blood-slick mountain path like an arrow. Yu-baek’s back rushed closer. Still the white-haired figure did not turn. Möngke howled and raised the great saber—
“Idiot.”
Yu-baek’s torso stayed forward, but his head spun all the way around. Their eyes met; Möngke sucked in a useless breath and brought the saber down.
Yu-baek spoke.
“When I let you go… you should’ve… left.”
Kwa-jak!!
Yu-baek’s arm cracked like a whip and tore Möngke Khan into eight pieces. The wind that followed the blow was sharp enough to fell trees on every side.
“Oh. Not bad.”
Yu-baek examined the forearm half-severed by the Screaming Blade; green blood welled in thick bubbles. He licked the wound. White foam rose, and the flesh closed as though it had never been cut.
He squatted for a moment, gazing down at Möngke’s still-furious face, and offered what might have been respect.
“Still… Demonic Cult fanatics… stronger than this.”
“Elder.”
Dang Su-jeong parted the brush and stepped into the clearing. Yu-baek sniffed the air.
“Smell of fire… poison… you did… quite a bit?”
“Half water, half meat, as they say.”
She smiled sweetly. She had emptied ten Hagyeongchong revolvers and more than twenty poison pouches.
“I wanted to kill their commanders and sow chaos… and here they all were.”
“What… now?”
“I’ll take the heads and hang them. That should break the rest of their spirit.”
“Do that.”
Yu-baek nodded.
“Weapons… left?”
“About half. When they regroup and come again, we’ll keep ambushing them until their souls leave their bodies.”
Möngke Khan, a giant among men, was dead, yet most of the seventy-thousand-strong host still lived. The Gatling-and-Tang-Thunder combination had accounted for perhaps two thousand at best. An astonishing result for a hundred men, yet also a textbook case of tactical brilliance failing to reverse strategic reality. Another noyan would simply step into the dead khan’s place.
“We need reinforcements. Could you go to Sichuan for us?”
“Without me… okay…?”
Yu-baek asked with something like worry. Dang Su-jeong’s smile never wavered.
“Don’t worry about us.”
“All… right.”
He grinned.
“Then… I’ll be back. Hang on.”
“Yes.”
Yu-baek vanished.
Word soon reached Qinghai Province that a small Sacheondang flying column had ambushed seventy thousand Chagatai cavalry at the mouth of the Qilian Mountains, killed two thousand, and put the rest to flight. Only after hearing that report did Pi Se-ha finally march the White Tiger Army on Xining. If a mere hundred men drawn from a provincial family could blunt the enemy spearhead and force a retreat, any general who still hesitated with a hundred-thousand-man host under his command would face a very pointed inquiry afterward.
Meanwhile Dang Su-jeong won several more guerrilla actions. By the time the last Gatling belt and the last grenade were spent, five thousand Chagatai dead had become fertilizer for the Qilian slopes. Unwilling to destroy weapons that might still be useful, the Dokgyo simply cached the Gatlings in a hidden mountain cache where the central armies would never find them, then descended to rejoin the main force at Xining.
There Pi Se-ha met Dang Su-jeong and the Dokgyo with a single cold command.
“The Dang Family will surrender every weapon and every poison it possesses.”