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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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The men on both sides were exhausted, their muscles screaming, their armor dented and slick with gore. Yet, the war horns continued to wail, and the war drums continued to beat their inexorable, terrifying rhythm. The fate of the northern hemisphere hung in the balance, trapped in the freezing mud, as the armies of the nomadic tribes of the old world and the empire of the new relentlessly tore each other to pieces in a battle that showed absolutely no signs of ending.
The brutal fight between the two sides continued to unfold upon the blood soaked steppes, a relentless, grinding horror that defied all human comprehension. What had begun as a morning of tactical maneuvering and thunderous artillery strikes had completely devolved into a primal, suffocating nightmare of close quarters butchery as the afternoon dragged on.
The relentless fight became even fiercer, the freezing winds carrying the metallic stench of opened veins and the sulfurous bite of black powder across a landscape that had been fundamentally scarred by industrialized slaughter.
The heavy infantry and cavalry clashed in a terrifying, unending crescendo of violence. The nomadic alliance, driven by the sheer, existential panic of extinction, hurled their remaining strength against the Hengyuan lines with a savage, suicidal fury.
Yuezhi cataphracts, their scale mail glistening with the gore of fallen soldiers, drove their massive armored warhorses directly into the impenetrable iron blocks of the imperial heavy infantry. The impacts were deafening, the sickening crunch of heavy timber shields splintering, the squeals of dying beasts, and the wet, tearing sounds of steel lances punching through breastplates.
But for every Hengyuan soldier who fell, trampled into the freezing, bloody slush, the imperial machine instantly replaced him. The second and third ranks of the Hengyuan halberdiers stepped forward over the bodies of their fallen comrades with cold, mechanical precision.
They thrust their heavy, razor sharp polearms upward, hooking the armored Yuezhi riders beneath their arms and violently dragging them from their saddles. Once the nomads hit the mud, they were mercilessly stomped to death by the heavy iron boots of the marching phalanx, or skewered through the visors of their helmets by the short swords of the reserve troops.
The Fuyu infantry, renowned for their incredible physical strength and wielding massive, two handed battle axes, attempted to chop their way through the Han shield walls. They screamed their ancient war cries, swinging their heavy weapons with enough kinetic force to decapitate a horse. But the Hengyuan discipline was absolute.
The shield bearers absorbed the punishing blows, their arms going numb from the concussive force, while the crossbowmen positioned behind them unleashed point blank, devastating volleys of steel tipped bolts directly into the faces of the Fuyu warriors.
Due to the sheer, overwhelming might of the imperial forces, the tide of the battle slowly, inexorably began to turn. The five tribes slowly began to be violently pushed back.
It was not a sudden, chaotic rout, but a methodical, grinding compression. The massive war drums of the Hengyuan Dynasty beat a steady, inexorable rhythm, thump... thump... thump, and with every beat, the million man army took a single, unified step forward. They marched over a carpet of nomadic dead.
The ground they claimed was no longer snow or dirt, it was a slippery, boiling morass of entrails, shattered weapons, and severed limbs. Every inch of territory the five tribes yielded was paid for with rivers of their own blood.
Watching the absolute carnage unfold from their elevated vantage points on a distant, rocky ridge, safely shielded behind layers of their personal elite Kheshig guards, the Fuyu and Yuezhi leaders finally truly knew and understood the absolute fear of the Hengyuan Army.
For the first few hours of the engagement, the outer kings had held onto a shred of their ancestral arrogance. They had believed the Xiongnu and Xianbei warnings to be the exaggerated ravings of defeated men trying to excuse their own incompetence. They had believed that their fresh, heavily armored shock troops and their deep forest stamina would turn the tide.
Now, as they looked down into the valley of death, that arrogance was entirely pulverized, replaced by a cold, mind breaking terror that seized their hearts in an iron grip.
They saw the reality of an enemy that had the deafening cannons and rapid firing Hwachas on their side.
From their ridge, they watched in paralyzed horror as a massive, perfectly coordinated flanking maneuver by their proud, elite Yuezhi horse archers was casually, effortlessly wiped from existence. The Yuezhi riders had ridden flawlessly, executing a breathtaking maneuver that would have broken any army of the past four centuries.
But they were met by a synchronized volley from the Black Dragon Cannons. The outer kings watched their proud, elite warriors being effortlessly decimated by explosive fire.
The high explosive shells detonated directly above the charging cavalry, filling the air with a blinding, roaring sphere of orange flame and jagged shrapnel. In the blink of an eye, a thousand of the finest riders the western deserts had ever produced were reduced to a smoking, cratered smear of red meat and shattered armor upon the permafrost.
They watched the Hwachas unleash their screaming payloads, painting the sky black with smoke before raining incendiary death upon the Fuyu infantry lines.
Men who had trained for decades, wearing the thickest armor their blacksmiths could forge, simply melted under the chemical fires, running blindly through the snow while screaming in unimaginable agony before collapsing into charred husks.
Because of this terrifying and traumatizing reality, a deep, primal panic completely overrode the strategic minds of the outer tribal leaders.
The King of the Fuyu, a man whose word was absolute law in the deep northeast, physically trembled. His face, normally flushed with the vitality of a hardened warlord, was ashen and completely devoid of color.
Beside him, the High Chieftain of the Yuezhi gripped the reins of his horse so tightly his knuckles bled against the leather. They were watching the systematic, industrialized extermination of an entire generation of their finest sons.
The Fuyu and Yuezhi chieftains panicked and began to seriously think of retreating. The survival instinct, honed over centuries of nomadic life, screamed at them to flee.
They desperately wanted to pull their surviving forces back, to blow the retreat horns, abandon this cursed valley, and run back to their distant homelands behind the deep forests and the arid deserts where the Emperor's thunder tubes could not reach them.
"Blow the horns," the King of the Fuyu suddenly gasped, turning his horse away from the cliff edge. "Order the vanguard to disengage! We must pull back to the treeline! We are leaving this slaughter!"
But of course, the hardened leaders of the other three tribes, the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan, who were standing beside them on the command ridge, immediately stopped them.
A scarred Xianbei elder leaped forward, grabbing the bridle of the Fuyu King's horse with a desperate, iron grip, refusing to let the animal turn. A battered Xiongnu warlord stepped directly into the path of the Yuezhi Chieftain, his hand dropping to the hilt of his curved blade.
They furiously argued with them, the panicked shouts of the leaders completely isolated from the roar of the battlefield below.
"Are you completely mad?!" the Xianbei elder screamed, spittle flying from his lips as he glared up at the Fuyu King. "You cannot blow the retreat! If you turn your backs on them now, the Han cavalry will run you down like frightened deer! You will break the entire line!"
"Let go of my horse, you one eyed fool!" the Fuyu King roared back, his panic twisting into violent anger. "Look down there! My heavy infantry is being burned to ash! Your war has dragged us into a furnace, and I will not let the last of my bloodline die for your broken pride!"
The Xiongnu warlord shoved the Yuezhi Chieftain backward, telling them to imagine what will happen if they run away now.
"You think distance will save you? You think the snow will hide you?" the Xiongnu leader hissed, his voice vibrating with the absolute, terrifying certainty of a man who had already lost everything. "If we break this alliance now, if you try to flee to your forests, the merciless Han forces will simply hunt you down. Do you not understand what you are dealing with? That demon Emperor does not stop! He will lay his iron roads right up to the borders of your precious homeland! He will drag his cannons through the mud and blow your timber halls into splinters! If we run, they will simply hunt us down one by one until we are all wiped out!"
And so, surrounded by the apocalyptic symphony of dying men and roaring artillery, the fragile nomadic alliance began to fiercely bicker once again internally, the argument violently spilling over as they hastily retreated from the exposed ridge and back right inside their main command tents located deep within the fortified encampment.
The sprawling command pavilion, meant to be the center of their unified resistance, devolved into a chaotic, screaming chamber of despair and mutual recrimination.
The heavy leather flaps were closed, but they could still feel the rhythmic, earth shaking vibrations of the Hengyuan cannons detonating miles away, a constant, terrifying reminder of the approaching doom.
The Fuyu and Yuezhi leaders screamed that the daily casualties and losses are just too much for their tribes to handle.
"We lost four thousand heavy lancers in a single hour!" the Yuezhi Chieftain bellowed, throwing his heavy iron helmet onto the dirt floor of the tent. "Four thousand men who took a lifetime to train, erased by invisible thunder! We cannot fight a war of attrition against an enemy that does not bleed! They kill us from a mile away! If we stay here for another three days, there will be no Yuezhi left to return to the western deserts! I am pulling my riders out!"
The King of the Fuyu slammed his fists onto the wooden council table, splitting the timber down the middle. "He is right! This is not a battle, it is an execution! You dragged us here with promises that our combined numbers could hold the passes, but your promises are ashes! I will not sacrifice my kingdom to buy you time!"
While the outer kings panicked, the central tribes argued back with a desperate, venomous fury. They knew that the moment the Fuyu and Yuezhi pulled their forces out, the Han army would easily encircle the remaining survivors and slaughter them to the last man.
The Wuhuan leader stepped forward, his face contorted in a mask of absolute rage, arguing that if they break the alliance and stop now, then everything they have sacrificed will be for absolutely nothing.
"You cowards!" the Wuhuan leader spat, pointing a trembling, bloodstained finger at the outer kings. "You came here to fight, and now you weep when the blood flows? If you leave now, the Han will roll over our flanks! If we run, everything we have donez the fortifications we built, the traps we laid, the freezing nights we endured, will be turned to dust! Especially the countless deaths of our brave warriors whose blood has already soaked the earth!"
"My sons are dead out there!" a Xiongnu elder screamed, tears cutting tracks through the soot and grime on his face. "My brothers are dead! Tens of thousands of our finest warriors have thrown themselves into the fire to buy us this ground! If you abandon the line, you spit on their graves! You render their sacrifice meaningless! We stand together, or we die together!"
The command tent was a powder keg of terror and fury.
Hands rested on the hilts of swords, and bodyguards stepped forward, their eyes darting nervously. The alliance was on the absolute brink of a violent, bloody implosion. The Fuyu and Yuezhi leaders were mere seconds away from ordering their men to turn their weapons on the Xiongnu to carve a bloody path of retreat toward the north.
Then, right in the middle of their bitter, screaming argument, the universe itself seemed to end.
Suddenly, their main command encampments were violently bombarded.
There was no warning. No scouts screaming an alarm. Just a terrifying, high pitched shrieking sound that tore through the freezing air above the tent, followed by a localized, apocalyptic roar.
The Hengyuan army had unleashed a devastating, localized rain of Hwacha arrows and heavy Cannon fire directly upon their position.
The massive leather command pavilion was instantly shredded. A high explosive shell from a Black Dragon Cannon detonated less than fifty yards away, the concussive shockwave violently tearing the heavy tent poles from the earth and ripping the thick animal hides to ribbons.
The warlords inside were violently thrown to the ground, deafened, bleeding from their ears and noses as the sheer kinetic force of the blast sucked the oxygen from their lungs.
Before they could even attempt to stand, the sky rained fire.
Hundreds of rocket propelled incendiary arrows slammed into the surrounding command encampment. The elite Kheshig guards stationed outside the tent were instantly incinerated, their agonizing screams cutting through the ringing silence in the chieftains' ears.
The snow instantly melted into boiling mud as the highly combustible chemicals ignited the surrounding supply wagons, the horse corrals, and the remaining command tents. This sudden, earth shattering artillery bombardment was not a random misfire, nor was it a blind volley into the deep camps.
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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