Day Seven: Two Battlefields
The Crown Prince of Wu had believed Princess Ning Luo was barely holding on. That belief lasted until the seventh day. What he saw that morning made him question everything.
The soldiers atop the capital's walls were not the exhausted peasants he had expected. Thousands of lightly armored men and women now stood behind the battlements.
And they were frighteningly accurate. The female archers were the most terrifying.
Their bows were ordinary, roughly one and a half stone bows, nothing remotely comparable to the strongest military weapons of the kingdom.
Yet their arrows behaved as though distance did not exist. Wu soldiers advanced beneath shield walls. The shields rose. The formations tightened.
And arrows still found them. Some slipped through gaps between shields. Others struck exposed necks. Some found the eyes beneath helmets.
Others entered through openings around the face. The archers were not simply shooting into formations. They were choosing individual targets.
Hundreds of meters away. Again and again. The Crown Prince's expression slowly changed. These were not ordinary peasants.
Even Wu's elite archers, men who had trained for years, could not maintain such accuracy under strict battlefield conditions.
Yet Princess Ning Luo's supposedly improvised army was doing it in volleys.
Where had she obtained them?
Yesterday, she had appeared desperate. Her ten thousand man army had charged out and fought as if though she was desperately buying time.
The Crown Prince had believed he was watching a ruler struggling to survive. Now he understood. He had been watching an act.
Princess Ning Luo had deliberately shown weakness.
She had wanted Wu to believe she was barely surviving so that they would spend more time crushing the fortress instead of investigating the capital itself.
And Wu had taken the bait. They had played directly into the Emperor of Yue's hands.
The Crown Prince clenched his teeth. "That woman..." He finally understood what had happened.
Princess Ning Luo had never been trying to win yesterday. She had been trying to make Wu believe she could not win.
And while Wu concentrated all out on destroying the fortress, something had happened inside the capital.
An army had appeared. An army that should not have existed.
By afternoon, the Crown Prince decided to end the matter through brute force. Nearly one hundred thousand soldiers advanced toward the capital.
Siege ladders. Battering rams. Siege towers. Shield walls. Everything moved forward beneath a storm of projectiles.
The Wu army stretched across the battlefield like an enormous tide.
The walls of the capital rose fifteen to twenty meters above the ground, their broad stone surface providing the defenders with a tremendous advantage.
The first shield formations reached the base. Ladders went up. Soldiers began climbing. Then the arrows came.
Thousands of them. The defenders did not fire randomly. Their formations were disciplined. Archers released volleys while infantry waited behind them.
The moment a Wu soldier reached the battlements, spears descended. A ladder was pushed away. Another was overturned.
A shield wall reached the base of the wall and was broken apart by concentrated attacks. Wu soldiers climbed over their fallen comrades only to meet another rank of defenders.
The Crown Prince stared in disbelief. This was not a mob of peasants. These soldiers moved with the discipline of veterans.
Ranks shifted. Archers replaced one another. Infantry filled gaps. Every section of wall seemed to understand what every other section was doing.
The coordination was better than that of many Wu formations.
"How?" The Crown Prince could not understand it.
They had surrounded the capital. No substantial army had crossed their siege lines. No food caravans had entered. Not even a single cart should have been able to reach the city.
Even if Princess Ning Luo had somehow gathered every peasant in the capital, how could she have trained them that well overnight?
A peasant who had never held a bow could barely draw one properly. Yet these people were striking targets at hundreds of meters.
The answer became increasingly obvious. The army had been there all along. The weakness had been an illusion.
Trebuchets continued firing. Boulders sailed through the sky and crashed into the city. But siege weapons were not precision instruments.
Most shots missed. Even those that struck the walls often killed only a handful of soldiers because the defenders had wisely spread themselves across the enormous battlements.
Ballistae were more accurate, but Wu possessed only around a dozen of them. They could not suppress a wall occupied by tens of thousands of defenders.
Still, the Crown Prince continued. His army numbered roughly three hundred thousand. Losing twenty thousand seemed insignificant.
So he ordered another assault. And another. The battlefield became a slaughterhouse.
Before many Wu soldiers even reached the wall, they were cut down by arrows. Those who reached the base were also encountered with infantry.
Those who reached the ladders were encountered with spears. Those who reached the battlements encountered disciplined formations that refused to give ground.
Twelve siege towers were eventually pushed forward. One after another, they caught fire. The flames climbed their wooden frames.
Soldiers jumped from burning platforms. None successfully established a foothold on the wall.
By late evening, the Crown Prince's army had suffered roughly forty thousand casualties. Yet the capital still stood.
The gates remained closed. The walls remained in enemy hands. And Princess Ning Luo's army remained there.
Waiting.
The Crown Prince of Wu finally ordered a retreat. But he had not surrendered. He looked toward the darkening walls. Night would change everything.
The accuracy of those terrifying archers would diminish in pitch darkness. The enormous numerical advantage of Wu would become more useful.
Tomorrow morning would be another assault. And perhaps tonight, under cover of darkness, he could attempt another.
He had not yet realized that the capital was becoming a graveyard for every assumption he had made.
Back at the Jin Mansion at almost the same time, another defeat was smoothly unfolding. Elder Zhoung had finally stopped attacking.
For nearly the entire sixth day and into the seventh, he had maintained relentless pressure against the Jin Mansion.
Small contingents. Shield formations. Ladders. Battering rams. Crossbowmen. Another group. Then another. He had tried to exhaust Jin Mulan's remaining soldiers.
Instead, he had discovered something he could not explain. They refused to break. The arrival of Luo He had transformed them.
The approximately twenty-five hundred remaining defenders fought as though they had been replaced by an entirely different army.
Elder Zhoung finally understood. There would be no surrender. Not unless every last defender died.
His face was grim as he looked toward the fortress. His campaign had become a nightmare. His first campaign had been destroyed by Jin Sang's fleet.
That defeat, at least, had an explanation. Jin Sang possessed genuine naval strength. Battle ships. Heavy weapons. A battlefield advantage.
Elder Zhoung could accept that.
But this?
This was different. He had possessed overwhelming numerical superiority. He had begun with roughly forty-two thousand troops against only a few thousand defenders.
At one point, the difference had approached ten to one. And yet the castle still stood. His soldiers had repeatedly attacked.
They had climbed the walls. They had formed shield walls. They had advanced under cover of crossbows. They had attempted to exhaust the defenders through constant harassment.
And they had failed. Miserably. The cost had been catastrophic. Roughly twenty seven thousand of his men had now been lost.
Only around fifteen thousand remained from the force that had once originally surrounded the fortress.
Meanwhile, Jin Mulan's small army still possessed roughly twenty-five hundred soldiers.
Twenty-five hundred. Against an army that had once numbered close to twenty thousand.
Elder Zhoung stared at the fortress in silence. He had never experienced such humiliation. It was not merely a tactical defeat. It was psychological.
His army had possessed the numbers. It had possessed the surrounding territory. It had possessed the initiative. It had possessed every conventional advantage.
Yet the Jin soldiers had refused to surrender. And Elder Zhoung finally understood the most frightening part.
Those soldiers were no longer fighting merely because Jin Mulan commanded them. They were fighting because Luo He had given them something they considered worth dying for.
Their home. Their families. Their lord. Their future. Elder Zhoung had spent two days trying to break their bodies. Luo He had spent years building their will.
And now the difference was visible on the battlefield. The seventh day was coming to an end. Two battlefields had produced two completely different nightmares.
At the capital, the Crown Prince of Wu was discovering that Princess Ning Luo had never been as weak as she appeared.
At the Jin Mansion, Elder Zhoung was discovering that Luo He's army had never been as fragile as it looked.
And neither commander yet understood how much worse the eighth day would become. And it was all thanks to one man just twenty-one years old and had the brains to outsmart an empire.