Mom, that's not what I meant
Mom, that's not what I meant
"Honestly... are these bastards weeds? How the hell do their heads keep growing back no matter how many times we cut them off?"
"You said it. We took that bastard Zhang Jiao's head, yet they show no signs of thinning out."
Moving north, Ji Ling and Xu Rong were cutting down Yellow Turbans again today, same as always.
Unlike before, they were now moving with a massive army exceeding a hundred thousand, and beneath their hands the Yellow Turbans were being swept aside like a mass of locusts before a flame—literally crashing down in droves.
Part of it was the morale drop after Zhang Jiao's death, but more than anything the absence of a leadership core meant the Yellow Turbans could no longer stage the kind of threatening maneuvers they'd managed in the past.
The problem was that, one way or another, their numbers were simply too vast, and the deeper they went into the mountains like this, the more troublesome things became in every way.
Watching the Yellow Turbans scatter into the undergrowth in a frenzy, just like monkeys, Ji Ling let out a small sigh.
"Hah... can't be helped. For now, let's split up here. I'll take the east, so Xu Rong, you take the west."
"Understood. Then we'll meet again shortly."
With that, Xu Rong and the thousand or so soldiers under her command swept the Yellow Turbans along the western ridge to finish the job properly.
With daylight fading, they pursued the Yellow Turbans as fast as they could, but regrettably, a few of the bastards slipped through in the end.
"Tch... this is as far as we go, then."
"Let us turn back for now, Colonel. In this situation, further pursuit is impossible."
"... Hah, it can't be helped. We're returning."
However much of a disorganized rabble the enemy might be, in darkness like this you could easily find yourself in a bad spot.
More than anything, if they got lost out here, they'd be stuck shivering on the ground until sunrise for certain. Xu Rong halted the chase, turned around, and began retracing her steps...
"... Hold on. Which way are we supposed to go right now?"
"Huh? Colonel, you don't know either?"
"... What?"
"..."
The atmosphere chilled in an instant.
In the midst of it, Xu Rong wore a blank expression for a moment, then carefully asked again.
"... Uh... um... everyone? You seriously don't know? This isn't some kind of joke?"
"N-no... we thought you were walking along so confidently..."
"We assumed of course you knew the way..."
"I'm not an owl, you know... you mean you didn't leave markers or anything?"
"Hmm..."
"S-sorry."
"..."
"Haah..."
They'd been shaped up to some degree, but these were guys from Yellow Turban stock, and the training period had been too short—they were full of shortcomings on points like this.
On top of that, Xu Rong herself still didn't have much experience as a commander, so she was equally green when it came to these little details.
Faced with the collaboration of a green commander and green subordinates, Xu Rong let out a heavy sigh thick with pure bewilderment.
In the end, accepting the cold reality that they were stuck until daybreak for sure, she and the soldiers had no choice but to hastily pick spots here and there in the forest and lie down.
At least it was summer, so they weren't shivering from the cold,
but the fact that they had to sleep on the hard ground instead of a soft bed inside camp still stung in plenty of ways.
"Hah..."
"? Where are you going?"
"I can't sleep, so I'll take a quick look around while I'm at it—call it a reconnaissance sweep. You all rest well."
"Ah... yes."
"Be careful, Colonel."
Taking only a few escorts, Xu Rong began checking the surroundings.
Even if it was reconnaissance, she couldn't afford to go too far—not if she wanted to avoid getting lost again.
Making a broad circuit of the camp where her soldiers slept, she did little more than confirm there were no immediate signs of ambush.
But then...
—"... hic... sob... hic..."
"Hm?"
A faint crying sound, suddenly reaching her ears.
Soft but unmistakable...
a sound like a child crying. Xu Rong stopped walking for a moment.
"Colonel? That sound?"
"... Let's go see, for now."
When people heard crying coming out of pitch-black darkness, a lot of them jumped straight to ghosts, but that was a story for the faint-hearted.
It didn't apply to Xu Rong, battle-hardened as she was, or to the escorts standing here.
They had too many deaths on their hands already to be afraid of something like ghosts...
Following the sound, they reached a spot.
And what was happening there
was more than enough to make Xu Rong and everyone present furrow their brows in disgust.
"What the hell is that Yellow Turban bastard doing—?"
"C-Colonel?!"
Xu Rong dashed forward without an instant's hesitation.
And.
—THUNK!!!!
The greatsword in her hand punched clean through the chest of the Yellow Turban who'd been about to violate a very young girl.
"GUH-HACK!!!"
With a gruesome shriek, the bastard crumpled to the ground.
Xu Rong had cut down countless Yellow Turbans, but she'd never felt as foul as she did now.
They'd sunk so low they were trying to rape a girl who barely had all her baby teeth in.
That such trash had once spouted grand pronouncements about peace in the realm or whatever was simply staggering.
"Honestly..."
"We're seeing all kinds of filthy scum today."
"You said it."
Every time the furious Xu Rong drove her sword down, her subordinates scowled and added a word.
Feeling exactly as they said—like she'd stepped in dung—she yanked her blade back out,
then turned her eyes to the girl who'd nearly suffered something horrifying at the hands of a beast worse than an animal.
She'd taken a huge psychological shock, so Xu Rong figured she ought to offer a little comfort at least.
But...
"M-Mother!!"
"???"
"Huh?!"
A sudden, innocent cry of "Mother" rang out.
At the same instant, the tiny girl practically crashed into her arms, and Xu Rong found herself flustered.
"M-Mo... ther?"
"C-Colonel, surely you didn't..."
"No, no... that's not it. Quit it with the weird ideas."
This kid was dropping an unexpected bomb on a maiden who hadn't even married, let alone had children.
Thoroughly rattled, Xu Rong gave an order to get the situation under control.
"F-first... light some torches. I need to check on the child's condition."
"Uh... understood."
Torches began to flare to life along with a surge of helpless discomfort.
Right after that, Xu Rong took in the sight of the young girl nestled in her arms...
or rather, now that she looked properly, the child was so small it was hard to call her even a young girl.
She looked bigger because she was carrying a baby wrapped in a sling on her back, but the girl herself was only about three or four years old.
Feeling her anger toward the piece of garbage who'd tried to violate a child this young deepen still further,
Xu Rong first put on a smile so she wouldn't frighten the girl, and spoke.
But.
"Are you all right? Are you hurt anywh—"
"Y-you're... not... Mother...?"
"Hm?"
"Waaaah..."
"! W-wait..."
"WAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
"..."
Her smile went completely to waste as the little girl began to bawl her eyes out.
Xu Rong, who could swing a blade with a grin in front of tens of thousands of Yellow Turbans, had absolutely no idea what to do in the face of this unforeseen crisis.
*
A government office located in the central part of Ji Province.
The Governor and the other officials had been massacred by the Yellow Turbans, leaving the place empty,
and right now we were using it as a base of operations for our posting.
In a back office deeper inside the building,
I found myself frowning at Ji Ling's report.
"What? Xu Rong still isn't back?"
"Yeah. Thing is... it looks like she lost her way when it got dark."
"Tch. This is why I said to come back the moment it started getting dark..."
By the looks of it, she'd kept fighting without paying attention and lost her way in the forest when the sun set.
Just as in the original timeline, her martial ability and military administration were outstanding, but it seemed she still needed a bit more time before the smaller details of command matured. I clicked my tongue softly.
"What should we do? Go and find her?"
"That'd be reckless. Blundering into the mountains at this hour would only add to the chaos. Can't do anything but wait for sunrise and send out a search party then."
However good a sense of direction some people had, the thought of throwing tens of thousands of soldiers—not just one or two—into the mountains at this hour was profoundly unappealing.
The risk of accidents in the dark was high,
and more than anything, the odds of someone like Xu Rong falling prey to a bunch of routed remnants were minuscule to begin with.
Something similar had happened in the past, so there was no need to rush at this hour.
"Well, let's leave the Xu Rong matter at that. How're the Yellow Turban bastards looking these days?"
"Don't get me started. They swarmed in like ants again today—just sick of it. I mean, Zhang Jiao's dead, so what's so great that they keep up the Yellow Turban act?"
Ji Ling vented her irritation and complaints.
Just as she said, even though their ringleader Zhang Jiao had been killed,
even though the punitive force we were leading was literally massacring Yellow Turbans as we went,
the whole Han dynasty—Ji Province included—was still wracked by outbreaks of Yellow Turban unrest.
We'd clearly chopped off the snake's head, yet the thing was still squirming vigorously. At a glance, it didn't make sense.
I smiled wryly,
took a sip from the cup of sweet honey water beside me, and gave an answer to Ji Ling's frustration.
"When you think about it, it's an obvious result."
"Huh? How so?"
"Because from the start, those bastards weren't one big snake—they were dozens of little bugs grouped together."
"Ah..."
They'd risen up under Zhang Jiao and the Yellow Turban banner, but the Yellow Turbans had been built from the very beginning on a strong cell-structure character.
The connections between cells were extremely loose, and naturally the communication networks for passing along news were pathetically flimsy as well.
And that weak linkage was now, conversely, acting to minimize the shock from Zhang Jiao's head getting lopped off at this stage.
"On top of that, with the organization so rickety, word spreading is bound to be slow too. Even here in Ji Province, there's still probably a ton of bastards who don't even know Zhang Jiao is dead."
"Oh... now that you mention it, some of them are still raising swords and shouting about Zhang Jiao. So it wasn't just for revenge?"
"More like they're just yelling his name out of habit, not knowing he's dead."
This was the ancient Han dynasty era—no internet, no TV or radio, not even newspapers. The speed that news traveled was abysmally slow.
The court had begun announcing Zhang Jiao's death through the various offices, but even so, unless you were exceptionally sharp about how news moved, Yellow Turbans holed up in the mountains barely two months after his death weren't going to find out easily.
And even if they did know,
most Yellow Turbans would react with basically, "So what, who cares?"
These were, after all, Yellow Turbans who'd just thrown a wrapper on themselves—in reality they were nothing more than bandits.
The boss is dead?
Does the head office folding mean every franchise with the same name has to shut down too?
In a world without copyright law, just keep doing business the same as always and that's that.
And when those franchises had a sign that read "Kimbap Heaven" but the reality ranged from Kimbap Hell, Kimbap Niflheim, Kimbap Tartarus, to Kimbap Bottomless Pit—with contents that had nothing in common—there was even less need to say anything.
"So that means... all the trouble we went through to kill Zhang Jiao didn't really mean much?"
"No, that's not it. I told you. Those bastards are like bugs with big numbers. Even if it didn't kill them instantly, without a center they won't be as threatening as they used to be."
Although they were maintaining their overall forces, now that the people who could serve as a focal point were gone,
it had become almost impossible for the Yellow Turbans to gather hundreds of thousands in one place like before.
Even if their total numbers were in the hundreds of thousands, the ones actually fighting us directly were at most a few hundred to a few thousand.
A force of barely that size had clear limits in combat effectiveness, so with our army exceeding a hundred thousand, there was no need to hurry—we could simply trample them down methodically step by step.
"I see... that's why lately they've been moving in isolated pockets. I thought it was because the bastards finally lost their courage."
Ji Ling's expression said it made sense now.
Once I'd cleared up my subordinate's curiosity, I felt the fatigue pressing in and spoke to her.
"Anyway, let's call it a night. Go get some rest. We'll need to head out early tomorrow morning to find Xu Rong."
"Got it. Then you rest well too, my lord..."
"General!"
"Mother..."
Just when we were about to turn in, a subordinate's clamorous voice rang out.
I instantly sensed that something obnoxious had happened, and with a scowl I asked,
"What's all this racket? At this late hour."
"Th-the thing is... there's a strange woman who appeared outside and is causing a commotion..."
"What?"