The Yellow Turbans are finished! No more! But in this heart! They burn as one!
The Yellow Turbans are finished! No more! But in this heart! They burn as one!
"Wh... what is that?"
"Enemy raid! The enemy has struck the main camp!"
Zhang Bao and tens of thousands of Yellow Turbans had been on the verge of charging the enemy.
But the moment they left the main camp, a sudden raid threw them into confusion, freezing Zhang Bao and his Yellow Turbans in their tracks, unable to advance or retreat.
Before their eyes, their main camp collapsed helplessly despite its numerical superiority.
There, flames and smoke were already soaring skyward.
What that meant...
"Ah... no... B-Brother!"
"Ge... General! Calm yourself! For now, you must withdraw..."
"Let go! I will... I will return at once! It... it cannot end like this! I must go and save Brother myself..."
"General!"
Zhang Bao, half out of his mind and desperate to go back, and his subordinates struggling to hold him back.
But this scuffle did not last long.
"Guaaagh!!!"
"!"
"Attack! Wipe them all out except those who surrender!"
Government troops were already surging through the Yellow Turban camp.
At their head, golden-haired women wielding giant three-pointed blades and greatswords were literally grinding soldiers to paste, while forces led by a silver-haired woman on their left and a red-haired woman on their right had completely encircled the Yellow Turbans.
The camp collapsed helplessly under the shock of the sudden assault on the main base.
And the soldiers assigned to guard duty were swept away in droves.
In an instant, there was nowhere left to flee.
Gripped by despair, Zhang Bao stood among his dying subordinates and began to laugh hollowly.
'Yes... in the end... in the end it ends like this... The dream of the Yellow Heaven... The ideal of saving the people... So vainly...'
Where had it all gone wrong?
The decision to absorb bandit gangs from all over to grow their strength?
The reckless push to launch the uprising early out of concern for his elder brother's health?
Or... the attempt to defy the court and change the world by force of arms?
But whatever the cause, Zhang Bao could no longer deny the truth.
They had failed.
The yellow heaven that was meant to blanket the azure sky would never come...
*
The Yellow Turban host was being swept away so utterly that its enormous scale seemed meaningless.
Yet one person among them stood out.
Yuan Shao was riding hard, searching through the enemy ranks.
'He was definitely here somewhere... A man wearing unusually conspicuous armor...'
Probably one of the enemy commanders.
Their leader Zhang Jiao was certain to be at the main camp, so circumstantially the man was most likely his younger brother, Zhang Bao.
Determined to take his head, Yuan Shao was leading her personal guard and tearing through the enemy lines with all her might, but their progress was frustratingly slow for a number of reasons.
For a start, Yuan Shao's own martial ability was not particularly outstanding, and even her personal soldiers still lacked real combat experience in many respects.
A stark contrast to her younger brother Yuan Shu, who already possessed elite troops and exceptional commanders.
Feeling a private pang of regret, Yuan Shao found herself missing the faces of two subordinates who seemed especially dear today.
'Of all times for both of them to catch a chill... They should arrive soon enough, but... will there even be anything left for them to do by then?'
Hoping that some work would remain even after those two arrived, Yuan Shao did the best she could for the moment: combing the area as if picking lice.
And then...
"!"
"Hey! You came, Benchu?"
"... Mengde."
Cao Cao raised a hand lightly in greeting, a relaxed smile on her face amidst the chaos.
Watching her stand beside Xiahou Dun, Yuan Shao found herself thinking that her friend's face seemed particularly annoying today.
And with good reason. Right before her eyes...
"Hrk... Y-you bastards... stay back!"
Yellow Turbans collapsed on the ground, their yellow headbands soaked in blood.
And among them, holding a torch and clad in ornate armor.
Zhang Bao.
It seemed Xiahou Dun had already settled the matter.
He was still breathing, but with his sword shattered and nothing left in his hands but a single torch, he had almost no capacity left to resist.
The fact that she had belatedly found the man she'd been hunting, and under these circumstances, made Yuan Shao frown.
All that remained was for Cao Cao to take his head and deliver it to Yuan Shu.
Just as Yuan Shao was sinking into deep disappointment...
"Here. You can take it."
"... What?"
"He's the one you were looking for, isn't he? You can take his head if you want."
"!..."
Cao Cao smiled, extending the kindness.
A question flared in Yuan Shao's mind.
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? You're the one who slotted me in here when I was originally supposed to go elsewhere, remember? It's repayment."
"That... that is... true... but..."
"Just take it. You've met your little brother again after so long. Shouldn't you give him a gift, even like this?"
"... Thank you."
Cao Cao seemed sloppy on the surface, but she had a surprisingly meticulous nature and never left a debt unpaid.
Having known her as a friend for a long time, Yuan Shao was well aware of this. She offered a brief thanks and then stepped forward slowly.
Unaware of the strange smile playing at the corner of Cao Cao's lips as she watched Yuan Shao's back.
Just then...
"The Azure Heaven Is Dead!!! The Yellow Heaven Shall Rise!!! In the Jiazi Year!!! Great Fortune Will Come to All Under Heaven!!!"
"?"
"Eh?"
Zhang Bao suddenly began to scream at the top of his lungs.
Yuan Shao stopped mid-step at the ominous sight.
And then, Zhang Bao thrust the torch in his hand straight into his own chest.
"Hrk!"
"This... this bastard."
Flames began to consume Zhang Bao's chest.
The cloth garments beneath his armor and his body caught fire with startling speed, and so too did the old, worn book he had kept tucked inside his robes.
"Tch... a stubborn one. He'd rather die than fall into our hands, is that it?"
"... It's fine. We only need the head anyway."
And so Zhang Bao met his end, his body half-charred.
Before the expressionless eyes of Yuan Shao, pitch-black ash began to scatter on the wind.
A divine artifact containing the power to twist the principles of Heaven.
The Essential Arts of Great Peace...
completely turned to ash and vanished from this world.
Had Yuan Shu known, he would have beaten the ground in regret.
But the two, who had no way of knowing, simply took Zhang Bao's head and left.
*
The large-scale government offensive was enough to completely annihilate the Yellow Turbans.
The morale artificially boosted by sorcery plummeted straight into the ground,
and above all, with even the leader who was supposed to guide them gone, the fate of an army that had been a disorganized rabble from the start was obvious.
In the end, the battle was cleanly concluded in less than half a day.
The bulk of the enemy host, which had numbered three hundred thousand, either scattered in all directions or were taken prisoner.
The dead were surprisingly few, because the moment the chieftains vanished and the tide turned, most threw down their weapons and surrendered without meaningful resistance.
Though the battle itself ended quickly, controlling and sorting so many people was no easy task.
By the time the mop-up was roughly finished, the sun had already set.
"Huu... it's done. Done... I'm so sick of Yellow Turban yellow headbands now, I practically retch just looking at them."
"You said it, my lord. I never imagined sorting prisoners would be harder than the battle itself."
The prisoner classification was even more difficult than what we'd faced with the previous two-hundred-thousand-strong army.
Thank goodness our forces were about half the enemy's size this time, otherwise we might have been up all night sorting them out, or some other incident might have erupted.
Relieved to have crossed one great mountain with this victory, I spoke to the two who had worked so hard.
"You've both done well. Other subordinates will take over tonight's guard, so you two go back and rest."
"Yes, then I shall take my leave."
"See you tomorrow, my lord!"
After sending off Ji Ling and Xu Rong, who had worked so hard today,
I too felt the fatigue and stretched my body out on the bed.
It was only after I lay down that it truly began to sink in.
In the whirlwind of events, I hadn't been able to dwell on it much at the time.
But the fact that the great Yellow Turban Rebellion itself was over began to stir a deep excitement within me at this moment.
Though this was not the complete and final end of the Yellow Turbans.
Even after Chieftain Zhang Jiao died and the force disintegrated, Yellow Turban remnants would persist for years to come across the world of the Three Kingdoms, surfacing just when people thought they had been forgotten.
The most famous example: the Qing Province troops under Cao Cao, an elite force originally formed from Yellow Turban remnants.
We had pulled out the deepest root, but the Han court would probably have to continue a tedious fight against them for a long time, like weeds sprouting endlessly in the yard.
But well... that's something to think about later.
What mattered now was that I had personally smashed the early boss of the Three Kingdoms faster than in the Original Timeline.
It was more than just the sense of achievement from an accomplished feat.
It brought me a purely genuine, profoundly human satisfaction in knowing that I was able to save many people.
The Yellow Turbans had flown a grand and noble banner of righteousness, but what the bastards had actually done, true to the name 'bandit,' was the work of a large-scale robber gang—nothing more, nothing less.
They rose up because they couldn't endure the tyranny of the officials?
The Yellow Turbans were the very ones who inflicted even greater suffering on the common people than those officials had.
Having witnessed with my own eyes the common folk who had shed tears of blood because of those bastards, I knew that was an undeniable fact.
The situation in Ji Province was reportedly a little better under Zhang Jiao's control, but that changed nothing about the fundamental fact that the organization was built on robber gangs who exploited the people.
In reality, the fact that Zhang Jiao could not stop the atrocities of his uncontrollable Yellow Turbans, thereby inviting his own ruin, is an inexcusable truth.
However noble the founding ideology, if the outcome is a trash fire, it means nothing.
And my judgment was that the bastards were already rotten beyond redemption the moment they waged war over that so-called righteousness, costing countless lives in the process.
I'd annihilated Zhang Jiao and his Yellow Turbans.
And so I felt purely happy, knowing I had been able, however meagerly, to help innocent people.
At the same time, I thought that since I'd scaled this great mountain, I would be able to stretch my legs out and enjoy the peaceful life I'd been aiming for, at least for a good while.
In that relaxed mood, I slowly closed my increasingly heavy eyelids.
But then...
"Gonglu..."
"?!"
A voice reached me just as I seemed to have drifted off for a moment.
A little startled, I rose from my bed.
Turning my head to look to the side,
what met my eyes was...
"Ah... Benchu? What brings you here..."
Yuan Shao, sitting beside me and staring straight at my face.
Her lapis-blue eyes, shining like Liu Li's, shifted as she held something out to me.
"This... a gift."
"A gift? Ah..."
Something heavy sat inside a box.
The moment I confirmed it was Zhang Bao's head, a smile tugged at my lips.
"I was actually worried he might've escaped. To think you'd personally bring me his head like this. Thank you very much, Benchu."
I expressed my gratitude, genuinely thankful that she had so cleanly dealt with a man who, in the Original Timeline, had fled and sought to rise again.
"Yes... be very grateful."
With those words, Yuan Shao showed a quiet smile.
Knowing her usual expressionless face, I could tell she was in a very good mood right now.
Whether it was simple joy from the wine of victory, or something grander brewing in the mind of a woman who would later aspire to all under Heaven, I couldn't be sure.
Just then.
"Say... Gonglu. What will you do next?"
"Next... you mean?"
Yuan Shao's expression turned meaningful.
Her next words made me recognize the reality on a different front.