Battle of Yangren (2)
Mount Song, a rugged mountain range in Sili Province, served as a barrier that prevented the Guandong rebels from invading Luoyang.
They would circle around Mount Song and strike the enemy's rear.
By linking up with Li Jue and Guo Si's forces defending Sishui Pass and launching a simultaneous assault from front and rear, the rebel army of tens of thousands would scatter in utter confusion and rout. The moment he heard Hua Xiong's plan, Li Ru, Director of the Palace Gentlemen, was certain of victory.
"How could they ever expect our troops defending Luoyang to traverse Mount Song and strike their rear by surprise? The Commander is truly one of the realm's finest generals!"
It was brilliant.
The enemy were nothing more than sewer rats trapped in a jar with no way out.
Even the southern elites, once surrounded in a single stroke, would be reduced to powerless, ragged soldiers. If the tactic succeeded completely, they might even take the head of the rebel supreme commander, Liu Seong-hwi.
"I congratulate you on your victory in advance!"
"I can already hear the screams of the country bumpkins who crawled up from the south!"
Dong Zhuo's officers seated to the left and right offered their salutations.
At this, Dong Zhuo burst into uproarious laughter.
"By now Commander Hua Xiong's Imperial Guard will have entered Yangren. First, let us wait solemnly for Commander Hua Xiong's victory report."
He would crush the rebels with overwhelming force and cow the feudal lords of the realm into submission. If he slaughtered Liu Seong-hwi, the one they called the Hero of the South, even the lords and marquises of the Han Imperial House would have no choice but to accept the man who had enthroned a new emperor.
Hua Xiong was the finest fierce general in Xiliang.
He was a Monster of Superhuman Strength who boasted a giant frame of a full ten chi.
Such a creature could never be defeated.
He trusted wholeheartedly in the Monster of Superhuman Strength, who had led them to victory through countless crises.
"Elder Director of the Palace Gentlemen."
"Ah, it is you. What is it?"
When the simple banquet had broken up,
a beautiful woman with a voluptuous figure approached Li Ru.
It was the Barbarian-Suppressing Colonel, Jia Xu.
She served as a subordinate official under Li Ru, Director of the Palace Gentlemen.
A native of Wuwei Prefecture in Liang Province, she had taken office in Dong Zhuo's forces and proposed numerous stratagems. Because they always struck with sharp precision like a skilled acupuncturist, she enjoyed the full support of Dong Zhuo's camp.
"Liu Seong-hwi, who has been acclaimed as the Coalition Army's Alliance Leader, is a renowned commander of the south. Expecting Commander Hua Xiong's tactic to succeed perfectly without any variables whatsoever would be dire arrogance. Elder, what about making preparations to respond at once should any unforeseen event occur?"
"There is merit in your words. Very well, you mean we should attach a relief force to Commander Hua Xiong. But do we not lack the troops to commit to the front at this very moment? By now Hua Xiong's troops will have passed Mount Song and reached Yangren."
"There is one. Please entrust this unworthy girl with the matter."
"Hmm...! Of course. This time too, I shall trust your judgment."
Rashly organizing a relief force would create a gap in their battle strength.
There were no troops suited to be dispatched.
The forces deployed to the Sishui Pass front alone already numbered nearly one hundred thousand.
The enchantress with flowing ash-gray hair shrugged her shoulders and gave a deeply meaningful smile. She was telling him to leave it all to her.
* * *
The Imperial Guard.
A blade of power that defended the Han Imperial House and the Imperial Court.
The Imperial Guard had always wielded its sword at the heart of power struggles and drenched the palace precincts in blood.
They had once belonged to the Eight Colonels of the Western Garden under the Regular Palace Attendant Jian Shuo, but were soon disbanded. Then they were reassigned to the Office of the General-in-Chief, which had destroyed Jian Shuo—only to meet the tragedy of General-in-Chief He Jin being assassinated through the eunuchs' schemes.
The one who ultimately seized command of the masterless Imperial Guard was Dong Zhuo.
All power flows from the tip of a sword.
To sustain all-encompassing authority, a palace guard force was essential.
Dong Zhuo used the gold, silver, and treasure he had plundered from Luoyang to thoroughly win over the Imperial Guard's officers and men. Exploited by power-holders all that time and never properly treated, the Imperial Guard in the end pledged their heartfelt loyalty to Dong Zhuo, who recognized their true worth.
"The enemy! Battle stations!"
A shout rang out.
At once the southern archers and crossbowmen pulled back their bowstrings and nocked their arrows in unison.
"Raise your swords against the traitors!"
"Brothers of Jiangdong! At last the chance has come to make our martial renown known throughout the realm!"
Liu Bei's troops. Sun Jian's troops.
The forces deployed on the flanks had also completed their preparations.
Realizing their tactic had been discovered, the Imperial Guard stirred for a moment. Yet, as befitted the Han dynasty's strongest elite corps, composed solely of veterans, they suppressed their wavering at once and reformed their battle lines.
Buuuuuuuuuuu───!!!
There was no process to discuss terms of surrender,
nor any procedure designed to break the enemy's will to fight.
They meant to smash through with strength alone.
The blare of the cow-horn trumpets signaling a general attack spread thunderously. From it, one could confirm that the overall commander, Hua Xiong, was a man filled with stubborn yet cold-hearted pride.
"They come! Loose!"
"They are nothing but the guard dogs of power who follow a traitor for the ages!"
The Imperial Guard's vanguard came into range.
As soon as the signal dropped, the southern archers and crossbowmen poured a torrent of fierce arrows onto them like a heavy downpour.
"Kh!"
"Shields up!"
As the arrow storm swept through, scores of Imperial Guard officers and men in the vanguard fell. They had no choice but to form a dense formation to withstand the shock of hand-to-hand combat, and so they were inevitably exposed to the volley.
Yet the arrow storm did not deal fatal injuries.
Their whole bodies were defended by sturdy iron armor.
Shields that did not crack through under countless arrows.
And the Imperial Guard officers and men possessed an indomitable courage that let them charge into the arrow storm without the slightest hesitation.
"I am Sun Jian!"
Indeed, they were the Han dynasty's strongest elite corps. The Imperial Guard, composed entirely of battle-hardened veterans who had served on the desolate frontiers, initiated a charge, boasting a reputation as fighters capable of taking on a hundred men each.
But on this side, we had the Tiger of Jiangdong.
Sun Jian let out a sharp lion's roar and charged in alone. At the sight of Sun Jian's daring exploit, the Imperial Guard soldiers who had been advancing in a charge faltered in their steps for a moment.
"Guheok!"
"It's the enemy commander! The enemy commander has charged in!"
It was unbelievable.
The enemy commander, riding alone, was tearing through their own formation.
Sun Jian did not turn his horse around even as Imperial Guard officers and men rushed at him from all sides. Instead, he plunged into the heart of the enemy's battle line, where the elite troops were massed, and even engaged in an absurdly reckless melee.
"Our lord is in danger!"
"From now on, we follow our lord and break the enemy lines!"
Sun Jian was not the only reckless one.
The officers and men from Jiangdong threw themselves into the inferno.
They must all be utterly deranged and eager to die.
One could even sense madness in the way the Jiangdong soldiers threw their lives away as though they were bits of straw.
"Yunchang! Let us advance as well!"
"Yes, elder sister!"
Sun Jian's forces, holding the right wing, were pressing their charge freely in every direction. If they, deployed on the left wing, did not match the charge, their army's formation would collapse.
The white-haired beauty raised her sword high.
At once, the troops led by the sworn sisters continued the charge as though competing with Sun Jian's army.
"Strike down the traitors of Luoyang!"
"They are scum clinging to a traitor for the ages! Wipe them all out!"
The opponent was the Han dynasty's strongest elite corps.
But we had the Zhuojun Volunteer Army and Jiangdong's valiant warriors.
It was Liu Seong-hwi who first seized the upper hand in the head-on clash. The hard fighting of Sun Jian's army and Liu Bei's army, deployed on the left and right wings, had blunted Dong Zhuo's sharpest edge, allowing them to gain a favorable position in the struggle for dominance.
We can win.
Just as the soldiers were growing optimistic for a moment,
"Kkuhheok──!!"
the soldiers who had been pressing their charge like arrows loosed from a bow recoiled with ghastly screams. An unforeseen event had occurred on the side of Sun Jian's forces, who had been aiming for Dong Zhuo's main camp with their high-spirited charge.
A colossal iron mace, as though a mass of solid iron were being swung whole.
A giant in iron armor, a full ten chi tall, revealed himself.
As the giant swung his mace, scores of Sun Jian's officers and men who had broken through the lines were swept away. A ghastly sight unfolded, the heavy mace smashing helmets to pulp and tearing apart armor.
"Do not fall back. Imperial Guard of Luoyang, punish the traitors of Guandong."
Kuuung—
Kuuung—
The ironclad giant stepped forward with heavy footfalls.
The Sun Jian troops, who had momentarily retreated a few steps, rallied their courage and rushed in again. But the armored giant pounded them down with one heavy mace-blow after another.
He crushed bone and pulped muscle.
The soldiers struck by the mace never rose again.
"...Hua Xiong. So you have graced us with your presence at last."
Hua Xiong.
The foremost warrior of Dong Zhuo's army and a famous fierce general representing Xiliang.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he appears as a tragic minor commander who dies in a single slash from Guan Yu, but in actual historical records Hua Xiong, along with Xu Rong, had achieved the feat of routing Sun Jian's army when it marched north on Luoyang.
In that crushing defeat, thanks to the veteran commander Zu Mao sacrificing himself, the remnants of the Sun Jian army barely managed to preserve a few dozen cavalry and flee. Later, after withdrawing for a time, Sun Jian's forces rallied the scattered survivors and scored a great victory through a desperate counterattack, but the loss inflicted by the earlier defeat was so enormous that after the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition dissolved they were subordinated to Yuan Shu's army.
"Shoot your bows!"
"Kill the monster in iron armor!"
The archers and crossbowmen took aim at Hua Xiong, who had raised his mace.
Then, to turn the monster into a pincushion, they loosed a massed volley.
Claaang—!
Clagagagang—!!
The sharp arrows struck his iron armor.
And, unable to pierce through, they bounced off in every direction.
This was on a different level from the armored troops fielded by the bandits who had raided their prefecture. The iron protection that guarded the Monster of Superhuman Strength was a defense forged from superior steel. As if to prove it, the armor remained completely unblemished despite the volley that had rained down like a deluge.
'What an outrageously monstrous creature. I'll have to strip off his armor somehow and sink an arrow in...'
A ten-chi giant was still, in the end, a man.
Hit his vitals with a storm of arrows and he would inevitably die.
Extending my hand, I drew an arrow from my leather quiver.
Then I aimed for the joints where one plate of iron armor connected to another.