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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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He had not yet seen the Black Dragon Cannons, he only knew the Han armies of fifty years ago. "They rely on their supply lines. They march in slow, heavy blocks. This is our land. The winter is our greatest ally. We will not fight them in a pitched battle. We will use the deep snows to our advantage. We will bleed them in the passes, cut their supply wagons, and watch them starve in their iron armor!"
A Yuezhi warlord, resplendent in polished scale mail, nodded in eager agreement, slamming his fist against his knee. "Our horse archers are rested and our quivers are full! We will ride in the dead of night, strike their camps, and vanish into the blizzards before their slow infantry can even form a shield wall. The Han Emperor thinks his numbers make him invincible, but a million men are just a million mouths to feed when the blizzards hit. We will stretch this war out for years if we must, until his treasury runs dry and his soldiers beg to go home!"
Tactical suggestions immediately began to pour in from the proud chieftains of the newly arrived outer tribes. They spoke of grand flanking maneuvers, of drawing the Han vanguard into hidden ravines, and of utilizing their superior knowledge of the terrain to execute a war of attrition. They spoke with the fiery, untested optimism of men who truly believed that the ancient, unwritten laws of steppe warfare still applied to the world.
But as the arrogant boasting and the grand tactical theories filled the smoky air of the tent, the leaders of the three central tribes, the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, and the Wuhuan, remained deathly silent.
They sat hunched over the fire pit, their faces hollow, their armor scarred, and their eyes reflecting a profound, inescapable trauma. They listened to the Fuyu and Yuezhi chieftains talk about harassing the Han supply lines and fighting a prolonged war, and they felt a sickening, desperate rage boil up within their chests.
Finally, a senior Xianbei warlord, a man who had lost his left arm to a piece of shrapnel just a week prior, could take the arrogant ignorance no longer.
He stood up, kicking a burning log back into the fire pit with his heavy boot, sending a shower of sparks into the air that momentarily silenced the tent.
"You fools," the Xianbei warlord hissed, his voice trembling with a mixture of raw fury and absolute, mind breaking terror. He glared at the Fuyu and Yuezhi leaders with his remaining eye. "You speak of cutting their supply lines? You speak of starving them in the snow? You know absolutely nothing!"
The proud Fuyu chieftain bristled, standing up to defend his honor, his hand dropping to the hilt of his axe. "Watch your tongue, one armed cripple. We rode a thousand miles to save your miserable lives. You will show us the respect we deserve."
"Respect?" a battered Xiongnu elder interrupted, rising to stand beside the Xianbei warlord. The Xiongnu elder's face was horribly burned, the skin on the left side of his jaw melted and fused from the heat of a Hwacha rocket. "We will show you the truth, before your ignorance gets every single one of our remaining sons slaughtered!"
The leaders of the three central tribes that had already brutally faced the Hengyuan vanguard quickly spoke up, their voices overlapping in a desperate, frantic chorus of warnings. They could not allow these newcomers to drag their unified horde into a traditional battle plan that would result in their instant vaporization.
They, of course, told them the terrifying, unvarnished horrors of the Hengyuan Dynasty once again, sparing no gruesome detail.
"You think they rely on wooden carts that get stuck in the mud?" the Xiongnu elder rasped, leaning over the fire. "They have built roads of pure iron over the frozen ground! Massive carriages, carrying tons of grain and powder, roll on iron wheels that do not sink in the snow! They are perfectly fed. Their men wear thick wool that rivals our finest furs. The winter will not starve them, it only hardens the ground for their boots!"
The Xianbei warlord took a step forward, raising his stump to emphasize his point.
"And you speak of riding in the night to harass their camps?" the Xianbei spat, his single eye wide with remembered trauma. "You cannot get within a thousand paces of their lines! They possess weapons forged by demons! They have massive iron tubes mounted on reinforced carriages. When they speak, the earth literally shatters!"
The Wuhuan leader, trembling slightly as the memories washed over him, joined the desperate chorus. "He speaks the truth! It is deafening! The thunder from their cannons knocks horses dead from the sheer sound! They fire solid balls of iron that rip through thirty men in a single heartbeat, turning elite cataphracts into red mist. And when the thunder stops, the sky screams. They have wooden boxes that unleash a rain of fire, hundreds of burning, exploding arrows that fall like a monsoon, setting the very snow ablaze!"
The Fuyu and Yuezhi chieftains fell silent, their hands slowly slipping away from their weapons. The absolute, unshakeable terror in the voices of these hardened, veteran warlords was impossible to ignore. This was not the exaggerated boasting of a defeated enemy trying to save face; this was the raw, broken recounting of men who had stared into the abyss.
"We are desperately wanting to remind you, to beg you," the Xiongnu elder pleaded, his voice cracking, looking directly at the proud Fuyu chieftain. "You absolutely cannot be lenient or arrogant in this fight. The tactics of our fathers are useless. If you charge them in the open field, if you attempt to fight them as if they are the Han armies of the past, your men will be slaughtered before they can even draw their bows. Your heavy armor will be shredded like wet paper."
The Xianbei warlord nodded grimly, his gaze sweeping the silent tent.
"We deeply warn you," the Xianbei said, his voice dropping into a deadly, solemn whisper that seemed to chill the very air inside the pavilion. "The current aggressive side of the Han people is not like anything that has ever existed in the history of the world. They are led by their demon like Emperor. I saw him with my own eyes. He rides a beast forged of shadows, and his halberd cuts through iron and bone with a single swing. He is a god of death, and he does not take prisoners on the battlefield."
The Wuhuan leader added the final, crushing nail to the coffin of their arrogance.
"This Hengyuan Dynasty is much, much different, and far more destructive than any Han dynasty army it was in the past," he stated, his voice hollow and defeated. "The Han Emperors of the past wanted us to bow. Thie new Emperor wants us to cease to exist. He is not here for tribute. He is here for our extinction."
The grand command tent descended into a profound, suffocating silence. The crackle of the dung fire was the only sound in the room. The proud, unbloodied chieftains of the Fuyu and the Yuezhi exchanged slow, horrifying glances as the reality of their situation finally set in.
They had not marched to a war of glory. They had marched into a meat grinder.
The strategy of the horde was entirely rewritten in that moment. The arrogance was discarded, replaced by a grim, desperate pragmatism. They realized that they could not fight the Han in the open, and they could not rely on the winter to save them. They had to use every ounce of their combined cunning, every treacherous valley, and every blizzard to try and slow the inevitable advance of the mechanized leviathan.
But even as they bent their heads together to draft a new, desperate plan of survival, the shadow of the Black Dragon loomed over them.
Hundreds of miles away, sitting comfortably in his heated command tent, Lie Fan was waiting. He Was waiting for the horde to be unified. After all, he had given them the time they needed to gather all their strength into a single, massive, undeniable target.
The trap was fully await. The excuse for the war had been secured. When the sun rose, the brief, engineered lull in the fighting would end, and the Hengyuan Dynasty would unleash the apocalyptic storm that would erase the Five Barbarian Tribes from the face of the earth, forever altering the genetic and political history of the world.
Meanwhile, in the end, after agonizing hours of intense, screaming debate that had thoroughly exhausted the lungs and spirits of every chieftain present, the proud representatives of the five tribes finally decided on a unified strategic plan.
The smoke inside the massive command pavilion had grown so thick it stung the eyes, mirroring the suffocating despair that had forced these bitter, historical enemies to sit shoulder to shoulder. They had yelled, they had threatened, and they had nearly drawn steel upon one another, but the horrifying reality of the Hengyuan leviathan waiting just over the southern horizon had finally ground their arrogant pride into dust.
They looked at the rough, hand drawn maps etched into the dirt floor of the tent and collectively came to a grim, undeniable realization. They universally felt that what they were about to agree upon was their absolute best, and perhaps their only, course of action against the overwhelming, industrialized might of the Hengyuan Dynasty.
Every single warlord in the tent, from the heavily armored kings of the Fuyu to the battle scarred elders of the Xiongnu, agreed that facing the Han army in open, head on clashes was nothing short of collective suicide against their devastating cannons and explosive rockets.
The old ways of steppe warfare, the glorious, thundering cavalry charges, the sweeping flanking maneuvers, and the rain of composite arrows, had been rendered entirely obsolete by the Black Dragon's iron tubes and black powder.
To ride into the open field against Lie Fan's vanguard was to invite a massacre so complete it would leave no one alive to even sing the funeral dirges.
So, their strategy was entirely rewritten, abandoning centuries of aggressive raiding tradition for a doctrine of desperate, grueling survival. They decided on using the same delaying tactics as they had occasionally utilized in the past when facing overwhelming odds, but magnified to an unprecedented, continent spanning scale.
The five tribes committed to aggressively building sturdy fortifications across the frozen plains, utilizing the treacherous, unforgiving terrain of the deep north to drastically slow down the Han's relentless, mechanized advance.
The nomadic commanders, men who had spent their entire lives treating the open grass as their kingdom, now spoke of digging deep trenches into the permafrost. They planned to fell thousands of ancient pines in the northern forests to construct heavy timber barricades across the narrow mountain passes.
They would use the freezing temperatures to their advantage, pouring water over earthen ramparts in the dead of night to create sheer, unscalable walls of solid ice that would shatter the wooden wheels of the Han artillery wagons. They would turn every river crossing, every rocky gorge, and every snowy valley into a fortress of misery.
The grim, bloody mathematics of their plan was simple. By aggressively defending these choke points and bleeding the imperial army for every single mile of frozen ground, the battered three central tribes, the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, and the Wuhuan, could buy enough precious time to properly recuperate their shattered strength. They needed weeks to heal their wounded, breed their remaining horses, and forge new weapons from scavenged iron.
More importantly, this grueling war of attrition would allow them to wait for the final, most desperate remnants of their people. As the Fuyu and Yuezhi deployed their fresh warriors to man these icy fortifications, fast riding messengers were dispatched even further into the frozen abyss.
They eagerly awaited those allied, semi feral clans living in the deep far north, the reindeer herders of the deep Siberian forests, the ice fishers of the frozen lakes, and the lost, wandering tribes of the tundra, to answer the frantic call and send their fierce, hardened warriors down as reinforcements. It was a massive, desperate gathering of every single human being who did not bow to the Dragon Throne.
In the future, centuries after the snow had been permanently stained red, this monumental and utterly desperate gathering would be vividly remembered in the history books of the empire as the Grand Stand of the Five Barbarian Tribes Against the Hengyuan Dynasty.
On the other hand, hundreds of miles away in the heavily fortified, warmly lit confines of the central imperial encampment, the illusion of nomadic secrecy was being thoroughly dismantled.
The moment Lie Fan received the confirmed news from the shadows, the atmosphere in his command tent crystallized into a terrifying, lethal focus. A high ranking operative of the Orioles, having ridden through the night on a relayed sequence of the fastest imperial horses, knelt before the map table and delivered the hyper classified intelligence.
Lie Fan unrolled the dark parchment, reading the exact details of the grand nomadic council. The Orioles had not missed a single word.
They had documented the arrival of the Fuyu and Yuezhi kings, they had recorded the bitter arguments within the tribal pavilion, and they had mapped the exact locations where the five tribes planned to construct their desperate ice and timber fortifications.
Lie Fan successfully received the detailed, incredibly comprehensive reports of the desperate alliance movement being done by the Xianbei, Xiongnu, and Wuhuan, alongside their newly acquired foreign allies.
Reading the reports, taking in the full, magnificent scope of the geopolitical trap that had just snapped shut, Lie Fan just smiled. It was a cold, calculating smile that did not reach his dark eyes, a smile that held the promise of an impending, absolute slaughter.
He looked up from the parchment, his gaze sweeping over the brilliant minds gathered around his command table. He looked at Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, and tossed the intelligence report onto the center of the map.
"The bait has been swallowed. The hook is set deeply in their throats," Lie Fan said to his advisors, his voice vibrating with a quiet, terrifying satisfaction. "The Fuyu and the Yuezhi have officially crossed the threshold of war. They have allied with our enemies, and they are preparing to bleed our soldiers in the snow."
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0