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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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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.
It was a highly calculated, surgical strike, directly ordered by Lie Fan.
Miles away, standing calmly in the warm, perfectly organized interior of his own central command tent, Lie Fan had been watching the massive tactical map.
The Oriole agents, embedded deep within the nomadic lines, had noted the frantic movement of the tribal banners pulling back toward the command encampment. They had quickly relayed the exact coordinates of the high value target through a rapid sequence of flag signals and mirror flashes that the Han forward observers had caught.
When Sima Yi had confirmed the coordinates of the enemy's main command pavilion, Lie Fan had not hesitated. He commanded his elite artillery units to ruthlessly rain down fire specifically upon the enemy's headquarters.
"Dial in the distance given," Lie Fan had ordered, his voice cold and devoid of any emotion, his eyes fixed on the map. "Concentrate all divisions of the cannons and Hwachas, from one through five. Maximum elevation. Load the incendiary rockets into the Hwachas. I want that specific grid square completely erased from the map."
To his genius advisors, Sima Yi, Xun You, Xu Shu, and Lu Xun, the Emperor explained his reasoning with chilling, pragmatic clarity. He felt that time had been wasted enough on these delaying tactics. The nomads were trying to bleed his army, trying to drag the war out into the deep winter to force a stalemate. They were relying on their fortifications and their deep camps to buy them the illusion of safety.
Lie Fan was not a man who played games of attrition when he held the power of absolute destruction in his hands. He was tired of the grinding infantry melees and the slow, bloody pushback. It was time to completely break the enemy's spirit and end this phase of the war.
"An army without a head is just a mob," Lie Fan had stated, watching the distant flashes of light as his cannons fired. "Let them see that their kings cannot protect them. Let them see that there is nowhere on this earth they can hide from my wrath."
Back in the burning ruins of the nomadic command camp, the devastation was absolute.
The Fuyu King groaned, pushing a burning, splintered beam off his chest. His ornate armor was blackened with soot, and he was bleeding heavily from a shrapnel wound in his shoulder. He crawled through the boiling mud, coughing violently as the thick, sulfurous smoke choked his lungs.
He looked around for the Yuezhi Chieftain, only to find the man's bisected torso lying a dozen paces away, his lower half completely vaporized by a direct cannonball strike. The arrogant, wealthy lord of the western deserts had been erased from the world in the blink of an eye.
The Xiongnu and Xianbei elders who had just been screaming in his face were nowhere to be seen, buried under the burning, collapsed wreckage of the massive pavilion.
The camp around him was a vision of hell. The surviving elite guards were running blindly through the flames, screaming as the incendiary arrows cooked them alive inside their armor. The panicked, deafened warhorses were stampeding through the burning tents, trampling the wounded into the mud.
The Fuyu King stared up at the sky, watching as another volley of screaming rockets arched overhead, preparing to strike the secondary supply camps.
In that moment of absolute, horrifying clarity, the Fuyu King realized the inescapable truth that the Xiongnu and Xianbei had tried to tell him.
The Hengyuan Dynasty was not fighting a war. They were conducting an extermination.
The argument over whether to stay and fight or retreat was completely rendered moot. There was no army left to command. There was no alliance left to uphold.
The command structure of the five tribes had been entirely, surgically decapitated in a single, localized rain of fire. The spirit of the northern hemisphere, forged over thousands of years of harsh survival and martial pride, was broken permanently in the burning mud.
Without their leaders, without their central command, and watching the literal heavens rain fire upon their deepest, most secure camps, the surviving nomadic warriors on the front lines completely lost the will to fight. The localized panic cascaded into a massive, unstoppable rout.
The men dropped their weapons, abandoned their fortifications, and ran or ride their horse blindly into the freezing tundra, entirely leaderless, fractured, and terrified.
And from the south, marching steadily over the crushed ice and burning wreckage, the million man leviathan of the Hengyuan Dynasty continued its relentless advance, the Black Dragon's shadow extending permanently over the conquered earth.
As the relentless Hengyuan soldiers began passing through the smoking, bloody wreckage of the destroyed main encampments that previously belonged to the once-proud five tribes, the true, chilling discipline of Lie Fan's war machine was put on full, horrifying display.
The battle was over, but the grim arithmetic of total war had only just begun. The heavily armored imperial infantry, marching in perfectly straight, unbroken lines, stepped over the charred remnants of the nomadic barricades and entered the apocalyptic epicenter of the artillery strike.
The air was thick with the suffocating, toxic miasma of burning hair, scorching leather, and the heavy, sulfurous stench of spent black powder. The pristine white snow of the northern steppes had been entirely eradicated, replaced by a churning, boiling morass of freezing mud and congealing blood.
Amidst this hellish landscape, the Hengyuan soldiers showed absolutely no mercy. There were no cheers of victory, no chaotic looting, and no triumphant songs sung over the bodies of the fallen. They operated with the cold, mechanical efficiency of a reaper's scythe, executing a mandate of absolute extermination.
The imperial infantry meticulously combed through the debris, forming organized search grids that left not a single square inch of the devastated encampment unchecked. Heavy leather boots crunched over the shattered remains of wooden wagons and the twisted, unrecognizable armor of the steppe champions. As they advanced, they ruthlessly killed those enemy warriors who were still alive or groaning in immense pain.
There was to be no quarter given, no prisoners taken from the vanguard of the enemy's resistance. When a Han halberdier found a Xianbei warrior pinned beneath the splintered wheel of a supply cart, desperately coughing up blood and begging for mercy in a broken, guttural dialect, the soldier did not hesitate, nor did he display a shred of emotion.
With a swift, practiced motion, the halberd was driven directly down into the warrior's throat, severing the vocal cords and the spine in a single, brutal thrust.
When they discovered a cluster of badly burned Fuyu heavy infantrymen crawling blindly through the ash, the repeating crossbowmen simply stepped forward, leveled their weapons, and unleashed a volley of steel tipped bolts into the backs of their heads, swiftly executing them to eliminate any future threats.
To the commanders of the Hengyuan Dynasty, a wounded wolf was still a wolf, and the Emperor had decreed that this specific breed of wolf was to be permanently eradicated from the continent. They moved methodically from collapsed tent to collapsed tent, ensuring that every single breath drawn by an enemy combatant was permanently extinguished.
However, while the infantry was busy securing the devastated area and silencing the dying, the logistical arm of the imperial army was already moving in right behind them with frightening speed and organization.
Lie Fan was the supreme architect of an empire, a man who understood that wars were won not just with blood, but with grain, iron, and beasts of burden. He never allowed anything of value to go to waste.
The quartermasters, accompanied by detachments of specialized engineers and laborers, flooded into the smoking ruins. They carefully salvaged whatever usable stuffs they could pry from the frozen, bloody grip of the dead.
They stripped the heavy, high quality winter furs from the bodies of the nomadic chieftains. They broke open the surviving, reinforced timber chests and efficiently gathered all the vital supplies, sacks of cured meats, blocks of dense, calorie rich dried cheese, and heavy skins of fermented mare's milk.
They also focused heavily on the intact weapons. While the Han steel was infinitely superior to the crude iron of the steppes, the sheer volume of nomadic composite bows, bundles of arrows, and heavy maces were highly valuable.
They were quickly bundled together, not to be used by the frontline Hengyuan troops, but to be melted down in the massive field forges to repair their own armor and cast new cannonballs, or to be distributed to the lowest tiers of the auxiliary logistical laborers.
But most importantly, the beastmasters of the Hengyuan cavalry meticulously combed the periphery of the blasted camp, searching for the surviving war horses they could get their hands on. The nomads possessed some of the finest, most resilient equine bloodlines in the world, beasts bred to survive sub zero temperatures and forage for grass beneath thick layers of ice.
Many of these magnificent animals had survived the artillery barrage, though they were deafened, panicked, and wandering aimlessly through the smoke.
The imperial handlers, using specialized calming techniques and heavy ropes, expertly corralled these terrified beasts.
They inspected their teeth, their hooves, and their musculature, separating the prime breeding stock from the pack animals. These thousands of captured horses were an astronomical prize. Efficiently gathering all the spoils of war, the quartermasters immediately gave the massive haul to the imperial logistics division.
The grain would feed the soldiers, the furs would warm the scouts, and the horses would pull the artillery. The defeated enemy was literally being broken down and consumed to further fuel their massive advancing army, turning the Hengyuan leviathan into a self sustaining engine of conquest that grew stronger with every camp it destroyed.
The absolute destruction of the grand five tribe alliance was truly devastating. It was a singular, cataclysmic event that cleanly and violently severed the timeline of human history.
For thousands of years, the nomadic tribes had held the ultimate tactical advantage over the sedentary agricultural empires of the south. They had been the undisputed masters of the open plains, utilizing their mobility and their harsh environment to raid, pillage, and extort tribute from the Han people.
But on this blood soaked day, that dynamic was violently reversed. The overwhelming firepower, the industrialized logistics, and the ruthless, omniscient intellect of Lie Fan had orchestrated a catastrophic defeat that shattered their steppe dominance forever. The era of the horse archer had ended in the deafening roar of black powder.
Far beyond the smoking, corpse choked valleys of the battlefield, the scattered, fleeing warriors of the five tribes ran for their lives.
The rout was absolute and devoid of any martial honor. Men who had proudly boasted of their ancestors' conquests just hours prior were now reduced to weeping, terrified animals fleeing from a forest fire.
Whether they were desperately running on foot through knee deep, freezing snowdrifts because their mounts had been killed, or fleeing on the backs of terrified, exhausted horses, their minds were entirely consumed by a singular, blinding panic.
The psychological trauma inflicted by the Hwachas and the Black Dragon Cannons was unprecedented. In their panic stricken minds, every sudden crack of shifting ice sounded like the terrifying boom of Han artillery. Every dark shadow cast by the setting northern sun looked like the emotionless, masked visage of a Yellow Ghost Bodyguard waiting to sever their heads.
They did not stop to rest. They did not stop to eat. They rode and ran until their horses foamed at the mouth and collapsed, their hearts bursting from the strain, leaving the riders to scramble out of the saddles and continue the agonizing trek on foot, their lungs burning and their extremities succumbing to severe frostbite.
Eventually, over the course of several agonizing days and weeks, the fragmented, hollow eyed survivors returned back to each of their respective tribal homelands.
The remnants of the Fuyu dragged themselves back into the deep, snow-laden pine forests of the northeast, their heavy armor discarded miles ago in a desperate bid for speed.
The surviving Yuezhi riders stumbled out of the freezing blizzards and back into the arid, unforgiving western deserts, their once gleaming scale mail rusted and stained with the blood of their slaughtered kin. The broken fragments of the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and Wuhuan limped back to their hidden, sprawling winter encampments scattered across the vast, central northern plains.
Once they arrived, collapsing into the snow before the horrified eyes of their people, the true weight of the apocalypse was delivered.
They breathlessly informed their elders and their families of the apocalyptic horrors of what had just happened on the battlefield against the Han cannons. In the dimly lit, freezing tents, surrounded by weeping women, wide eyed children, and ancient shamans, the survivors painted a picture of absolute hell.
"They are not men!" a young, traumatized Xianbei rider wept, clutching the knees of his tribal elder, his eyes staring blankly at the tent wall. "They have captured the thunder from the sky! They point bronze tubes at us, and the earth vanishes! A thousand men, the bravest of our clan, turned to bloody mist in the blink of an eye! The sky rained fire, burning the snow, cooking our brothers alive!"
In the grand halls of the Fuyu, a wounded warlord lay bleeding on a timber table, gasping out his final warning to the remaining lords. "Our heavy infantry... our great axes... they meant nothing. We could not even reach their lines. The Han Emperor commands the very elements. We marched into a furnace."
Hearing the disastrous, incomprehensible news, of course, a massive, uncontrollable panic instantly settles deep into the hearts of each of the tribes. The stories spread through the encampments like a virulent plague, mutating and growing more terrifying with every whispered retelling.
The women began to wail, tearing their clothes and cutting their own cheeks in the traditional displays of mourning, realizing that their husbands, brothers, and sons would never return from the southern borders. They were completely terrified since they had just lost a staggeringly large amount of their best, most capable warriors in a single crushing blow. It was not just a military defeat, it was a devastating demographic collapse.
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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