So what if they simply held position on his flank? Was this nothing more than a pointless endurance contest to test whose horses could run longer?
Zhang Liao never for a moment believed the enemy commander was acting out of foolishness. Quite the opposite. There was something distinctly familiar about the discipline and spacing of this formation, something that tugged at the back of his tactical mind like a half-remembered dream.
A heartbeat later, his eyes snapped wide open. Moving in flawless unison, every rider galloping parallel to his flank raised a longbow and drew it fully to the chest.
Zhang Liao's heart skipped a beat.
The warhorses flew across uneven ground, jarring and bucking with every stride, yet these enemy riders remained utterly steady. They drew their bowstrings with rock solid control, unaffected by the wild motion beneath them. In the next breath, a thick rain of arrows crashed down upon Zhang Liao's vanguard like a sudden, torrential storm.
Nomad horse archery.
Zhang Liao stared in genuine shock. Where in the world had Liu Bei obtained such deadly, disciplined riders?
Drawing a bow on horseback was not especially hard in itself. The real nightmare lay in trying to aim at a moving target while absorbing the violent, bone-rattling jolts of a galloping warhorse.
For the nomadic tribes of the northern steppes, this skill came as naturally as breathing. They were practically born in the saddle, riding from childhood until their lower bodies moved in perfect harmony with the horse's stride. For them, holding the upper body motionless as a stone statue while loosing a deadly arrow required no conscious effort at all.
For the men of the Han, however, such mastery was all but impossible to achieve.
This stark reality explained why, during the ancient Han-Xiongnu Wars, the mighty cavalry of the Han Dynasty had quickly abandoned any attempt to outmatch the nomads at their own game. Instead they invested heavily in heavier armor and devastating close-quarters weapons. They adopted aggressive shock tactics, charging straight into the enemy ranks to unleash brutal point-blank melee slaughter. In doing so, they neutralized the nomads' greatest advantage, their lethal range.
But Zhang Liao had no time to dwell on history. As a seasoned veteran who had survived decades of brutal warfare, he understood better than anyone that even the smallest advantage could decide the final outcome.
To retreat? Never.
How to fight? The solution lay in splitting his force.
After enduring another punishing volley of arrows, Zhang Liao made a swift, decisive call. He ordered his deputy general to peel off fifteen hundred riders from the main body and drive hard to engage the enemy flank. The move would create a pincer formation, each arm reinforcing the other while squeezing the enemy's deadly archers out of position.
This way, if Zhao Yun tried to swallow those fifteen hundred men, Zhang Liao's main force could instantly reinforce them. And if Zhao Yun tried to maintain his distance and continue his skirmish-archery tactics, the detachment could close the gap and ram straight into the enemy's side.
From the distant rear, Zhao Yun watched Zhang Liao's formation split. A faint smile touched his lips. The enemy commander had seen through the first layer of his plan. Good. That was expected. That was accounted for.
Without hesitation, Zhao Yun signaled his riders. They executed a fighting retreat, loosing volley after volley backward as they slowly pulled clear, keeping up a steady rain of death while giving ground.
The enemy shows signs of weakness.
Zhang Liao's spirits surged. He gave the order for a full scale pursuit. In the brief exchange of arrows, he had lost four or five hundred men, a casualty rate he found utterly unacceptable. He still held the advantage in numbers. The enemy was giving ground. The moment had come to press hard and crush them completely.
Advancing and retreating, the two great cavalry forces slowly drew away from the wide open plains of Changbanpo.
As they pushed further north, the terrain began to shift. The endless flat expanse gave way to a corridor pinched between towering mountain slopes and the swift, rushing current of the Han River. Two smaller hills rose directly in the center of this corridor, splitting the already constricted ground into even tighter eastern and western passes.
Zhang Liao led his forces through the western pass while tracking the enemy's rear guard. The space was wide enough to maneuver cavalry, but narrow enough that the mountains on one side and the river on the other made any sudden detour impossible. This was the kind of ground where a pursuing army held every advantage. No hidden ravines. No cliffs for archers to perch on. Just a long, straight run.
Yet something about it bothered him.
He pushed the thought aside. The enemy was retreating. The backs of their riders remained clearly visible in the distance. Letting such a golden opportunity slip through his fingers felt far too bitter to bear.
After one sharp pause, Zhang Liao issued the order to split his force once more. The two columns would march in tight tandem, each covering the other's blind spots, a formation designed to limit damage even if a trap lay hidden ahead.
They pressed forward another twenty miles.
Without warning, the corridor widened into a broad basin, and Zhang Liao pulled his reins.
Blocking the path stood a dense, perfectly formed infantry phalanx of more than a thousand men, deeply entrenched behind a solid wall of heavy tower shields. Zhao Yun's cavalry had wheeled about and reformed their ranks on the flanks, holding their position at a set distance. They did not charge. They did not loose arrows. They simply watched and waited.
Zhang Liao's eyes swept the scene. Something was wrong.
The infantry formation was too calm. No banners wavering. No men shifting their weight nervously. They stood like they had been planted there. The cavalry on the flanks were too still. Too orderly. These were not cornered men preparing for a desperate last stand. These were men who had chosen this ground and were waiting for him to arrive.
His deputy general, commanding the vanguard, studied the enemy array and let out a short laugh. No spears. No pikes. No sharpened stakes. Just tower shields. Standard defensive infantry. The kind that held a line against foot soldiers. Useless against heavy cavalry.
"An infantry block," the deputy said. "No spear wall. No stakes. Just shields. They are trying to stop a cavalry charge with prayers."
He raised his sword. "Free merit, men! Ride them down!"
Zhang Liao's eyes narrowed. He looked past the infantry. Past the cavalry on the flanks. To the low hills behind the formation. Something was there. A faint haze of dust rising from behind the ridge. Dust that should not be there unless something large had recently moved.
Horses? No. Horses would be noisier. This was something else. Something heavy. Something that had been positioned there long before his army arrived.
He looked at the formation again. The tower shields. The calm infantry. The cavalry waiting at a distance instead of bracing for impact.
And then he understood.
Not spears behind the shields. Something worse.
He opened his mouth to scream a command.
It was too late. His deputy had already spurred his horse forward. Fifteen hundred riders thundered after him in full stride. The momentum of the charge had grown too strong to halt without shattering his own army's resolve.
A deep, suffocating chill settled over Zhang Liao's bones, the exact same paralyzing dread he had known when he barely escaped annihilation at the Bailangshan battle
Every instinct screamed the truth.
It is a trap.
They had chosen this ground. Zhao Yun had not been running. He had been leading them here from the very beginning.
---
As the thundering mass of Cao cavalry closed the distance, the great tower shields at the front of the formation suddenly parted.
Stepping through the gaps stood a line of incredibly burly, heavily muscled soldiers. They wore no upper body armor. Their bare chests and arms gleamed with sweat in the cold mountain air. Every man gripped a weapon unlike any the charging riders had ever seen. Long handled blades with absurdly long cutting edges, shafts thick as a man's wrist, the immense weight clear in the way the wielders braced their whole bodies to hold them rock steady.
The Cao vanguard never slowed. Unarmored infantry? No spears to check a charge. No pikes to skewer horses. These men were practically begging to be crushed beneath the hooves of a full gallop.
At the very front of the infantry line, Xi Zhen watched the avalanche of horses thundering straight toward him.
He had gone through the numbers a hundred times. One solid swing. Three seconds to recover and reset. In the middle of a full cavalry charge, three seconds felt like an eternity. If the first strike missed or fell short, if his timing drifted even half a heartbeat off, he would die before he could lift the blade again. The horses would trample him into the earth. The riders would skewer him. The line would shatter.
Three seconds. That was all he needed. That was all he would get.
His mind drifted back to the day General Zhao had summoned him alone to the command tent. The rolled schematic laid out between them. The look in Zhao Yun's eyes held no excitement and no pride, only cold, unshakable certainty.
"I have a new assignment for you," the general had said. "You will keep your duties as deputy. You will ride with the cavalry. You will scout. You will fight alongside the rest. But once every three days, you will report to a separate training ground. You will tell no one where you are going. Not even Zhang Yi."
"General, what is this about?"
"Something that may change the way infantry fights cavalry," Zhao Yun had answered steadily. "Only if we can make it work."
That conversation had taken place two full years ago. Two years of grueling, backbreaking labor that had seeped deep into the very marrow of his bones. The Modao was no ordinary blade a man could simply pick up and swing. It carried an impossible weight. The long shaft, the elongated cutting edge, the sheer dead load required months of relentless conditioning just to hold steady. Learning to swing it with controlled power took years of punishing drill. And after every single blow, the wielder needed three full seconds to recover his stance and reset.
Three seconds.
That was the true purpose behind the tower shields and the carefully layered formation. The front rank struck. The second rank stepped forward to cover the gap. The third stood ready to brace the line. Without those shields, without the overlapping ranks, the Modao wielders would be butchered during that brief window of recovery.
Every drop of sweat shed. Every muscle torn and rebuilt. Every aching hour spent in secret training. It all led to this single, defining moment.
Xi Zhen's eyes burned bright with effort. He dragged the immense weight of the Modao back, set his left foot firm, and unleashed a roar that tore from his very core.
"ZHANG LIAO! COME AND DIE!"
The entire first rank moved in perfect unison beside him. These men were the most ruthlessly selected warriors under Liu Bei's banner. Every single one possessed the raw strength to lift a fully armored man clear off the ground. They had drilled this exact defensive maneuver at least a hundred times until every motion became instinct.
The Modao was no delicate instrument of precision. It held no elegance. It was a brute force solution to a brutal problem. The sheer dead weight of the blade, multiplied by the wielder's explosive power and the driving momentum of a forward step, unleashed catastrophic destructive force.
The Cao cavalrymen charged in full stride, set to grind the infantry line into the earth, only to meet a blinding arc of flashing steel.
The first Modao strike sheared straight through the lead horse's neck. The blade bit deep, tearing through flesh and bone, and the beast collapsed mid-stride with its head snapped sideways at a grotesque angle. Its rider was hurled forward over the falling body like a stone from a sling.
The second blow took a charging horse across the forelegs. Both limbs severed clean below the knee. The animal pitched forward screaming, and its armored rider was thrown hard into the dirt at full gallop speed. He tumbled with sickening force and never rose again.
The third strike caught a rider full in the torso. The blade punched through his lamellar armor as if it were paper and shattered his ribcage. He was torn clear from his saddle, dead before his body struck the ground.
Not every blow landed true. One Modao wielder swung too early. The edge buried itself deep in a horse's thick shoulder muscle instead of the vulnerable neck. The beast screamed and lurched sideways, crashing hard against the shield wall. The soldier fought to wrench his weapon free, but the horse's thrashing weight held it fast. A Cao rider vaulted from his saddle and drove his sword into the man's exposed back.
The wielder fell. The line buckled at that spot.
But the second rank stepped instantly into the gap. They moved through the blood and chaos, past screaming horses and fallen comrades, and swung their heavy blades in perfect rhythm.
Another horse went down. Another rider was torn from his seat.
The charge was tearing itself apart. Not because every man was being cut down, but because the horses kept falling. Riders were being hurled from their saddles. The crushing momentum that made a cavalry charge unstoppable was being murdered one beast at a time. And cavalry stripped of momentum was nothing more than men on horses. Men on horses trapped in a tangled mass of dead animals and screaming wounded were nothing but sitting targets.
The horrific sight of horses collapsing mid-stride, of armored warriors flung through the air by the sheer force of those terrible blows, shattered the resolve of the trailing Cao riders. These were not the hardened veterans who had survived the Bailangshan campaign alongside Zhang Liao. These men had ridden high on the glory of the miraculous victory at Hefei battle the year before. They had grown accustomed to easy triumphs and had carried arrogant expectations into this battle.
Today, those expectations were being butchered right before their eyes.
The charge ground to a ragged halt. Horses refused to press forward into the wall of falling bodies. Riders hauled hard on their reins, eyes wide with terror. The thunder of hooves dissolved into disarray and panic.
---
I never made a habit of boasting about my sense of timing, but in this exact moment, it proved the most valuable weapon I carried. At the precise heartbeat the Cao vanguard's charge faltered and their formation collapsed into a milling, panicked mess, I raised my spear high.
"Zhang Yi! Xi Zhen! Now! Strike both flanks! Pin them hard against the infantry line!"
Xi Zhen had already handed command of the Modao formation to his second in command. The front rank stood firm. The shield wall held steady. His work with the infantry was done. Now he returned to the place where he belonged, mounted and blade in hand, leading the cavalry strike he had spent two years preparing to deliver.
My elite cavalry, who had held back at a distance, reforming and watching for this exact turn of events, crashed forward like two heavy sledgehammers striking a single anvil. Zhang Yi smashed into their left flank. Xi Zhen slammed into their right. The trapped vanguard, already reeling from the Modao slaughter, found themselves crushed between fresh, determined riders and the unyielding wall of infantry at their backs.
The victory came neither clean nor easy. My riders had spent days in the saddle and their horses were spent. In the first frantic minute of the flank assault, I lost more than two hundred men to desperate Cao warriors fighting for their lives. Zhang Yi took a sword slash across his forearm that split his sleeve open all the way to the elbow. Xi Zhen lost his mount beneath him and fought the rest of the engagement on foot, standing firm in the mud with his dead horse at his back and a sharp blade in his hand.
We held the advantage, but every step forward cost us dearly.
From his vantage on the ridge, Zhang Liao watched the carnage unfold below.
His vanguard was being hacked into isolated, helpless fragments. Surrounded. Dismantled. Those strange long handled blades had shattered the momentum of the charge. Zhao Yun's cavalry had crushed the flanks to seal the trap shut. The vanguard was already lost. They simply had not yet fallen still.
But as Zhang Liao stared hard through the chaos, the fog of battle lifted from his mind and he finally caught a detail he had overlooked in the heat of the clash. A small, terrifying feature fixed to the saddles of Zhao Yun's riders.
Footrests. One on each side.
Under ordinary circumstances, Zhang Liao would have assumed this cavalry unit possessed extravagant wealth, enough to spare extra iron purely to give their riders greater comfort while mounting. But having just witnessed their impossible, rock steady horse archery, a cold, creeping realization settled deep in his bones.
Those footrests were never meant for comfort. They existed solely for stability. They let a rider lock his lower body tight against the horse's motion while keeping his upper body perfectly motionless. That was the secret behind that deadly accurate archery. A simple strip of iron. That was all. And that was everything.
He would carry this insight with him. Once he withdrew to safety, he would craft these double sided footrests for his own riders and test their worth. If his guess proved right, this single piece of metal could rewrite the rules of cavalry warfare forever.
First, though, he had to live through this day.
Down in the valley, the destruction of his trapped vanguard ground on. Slow. Bloody. Unstoppable.
Zhang Liao did not hesitate. He raised his command sword high.
"Sound the retreat."
His officers stared at him in disbelief. "General, the vanguard still holds the line!"
Zhang Liao turned his head. His gaze was cold and unyielding. "The vanguard is already lost. Sound the retreat."
In an infantry engagement, he would have thrown every available man into the fight to rescue his trapped subordinates. But cavalry warfare answered to its own brutal logic. Cavalry fought like wolves, relying entirely on momentum and mobility to strike and survive. The vanguard might appear to be battling on, but Zhang Liao saw the truth clearly. They were prey caught fast in a predator's jaws. Total annihilation was only a matter of time.
He raised his sword once more and gave the order for a full, immediate withdrawal.
Watching Zhang Liao turn his entire force about and break decisively from the field, I felt a faint twist of disappointment mixed with profound relief.
Had he hesitated even a few minutes longer, or thrown his full weight recklessly into the grinder to rescue his trapped men, I remained confident I could have bled his army dry. Yet the cost would have been terrible. My riders were worn thin. The horses were spent and stumbling. Had Zhang Liao committed his full strength instead of only his vanguard, I could not say with certainty whether my line would have held.
Seeing the sheer, ruthless clarity of his decision to withdraw, I could only shake my head in genuine respect. The man lived fully up to his title as General Zhengdong
I set the thought aside, raised my spear, and focused every effort on coordinating my cavalry and Modao infantry to tighten the encirclement and secure the surrender of the surviving Cao troops.
The battle stood clearly won. The war, however, was far from over. Zhang Liao still carried more than three thousand seasoned riders away with him. He had retreated, not broken. He would regroup. He would adapt. And he would return.
But the road south to Jiangling now lay open and clear. For the moment, that was enough.
---
Meanwhile, outside the ruined walls of Lexiang, the battle had already begun.
The two armies slammed into each other like a landslide crashing against bedrock.
Shamoke struck the shield wall first. His rattan armor grated harshly against iron as he drove his spear into the narrow gap between two interlocked shields. The force of the impact jarred his arms all the way to the shoulders. The Wu veterans behind those shields did not give an inch. They braced, locked their formation, and shoved back with the mechanical discipline of men who had stood in this exact stance since before Shamoke was old enough to lift a weapon.
"Push! Push!" Shamoke roared, spitting blood from a cut on his lip. "Break them!"
To his left, Zhang Ni led a wedge of tribal warriors hammering at the shield wall's outer edge. To his right, Ma Zhong anchored the far flank, his men moving in tight, practiced coordination to press the Wu line from the side.
Eight thousand against four thousand. The numbers said this should be over quickly.
The numbers were wrong.
Han Dang's personal retainers were no ordinary soldiers. They were the elite of the elite. Men who had shed blood under Sun Jian's banner. Men whose fathers had carried spears for the Sun family before Sun Quan had even been born. The first wave of tribal warriors crashed against the wall and shattered like water against stone. Men screamed. Spears snapped. Bodies piled high in the mud, and the Wu veterans simply stepped over the fallen and held their ground.
Han Dang stood at the heart of his formation, blade in hand, shouting orders in a voice like grinding iron.
"Left flank, hold! Right flank, step forward! Center, push! You are the men of Sun Wu! You kill!"
His voice was raw. His arms burned with every swing. His knees throbbed with the dull, deep ache that always came when the weather turned cold. Yet he stood firm. And around him, four thousand seasoned warriors stood with him.
The first hour settled into a brutal stalemate.
Shamoke threw wave after wave at the shield wall. Each assault broke against the iron line. Each attack left more of his men dead on the field. Every gap they tried to exploit was sealed before they could pour through.
"Damn these old bastards!" Shamoke snarled, yanking his spear free from a fallen Wu soldier's chest.
Zhang Ni appeared at his side, breathing hard, his blade streaked with blood. "They are not fighting to win. They are fighting to avoid losing."
"Then we grind them down," Shamoke said. "We rotate. Fresh men every quarter hour. They cannot do the same."
It was ugly. It was slow. It was the kind of bloody, grinding work that made poets turn away in disgust. But it was the only way forward.
By the third hour, the shield wall began to thin.
Han Dang's veterans were dying, not in glorious charges, but one death at a time. A man taken through a gap in the shields by a hidden spear. A man dragged down by three enemies swarming his legs. The faces behind the shields were getting older, bloodier. Three men died. Two more stepped into their places. The formation held, but barely.
Shamoke watched Han Dang through the chaos. The old man's shoulders had begun to sag. His breathing was heavier. The gaps in his shield line widened every time Shamoke threw another wave at the same spot.
"General!" one of Han Dang's captains shouted, blood streaming down his face. "The left flank is collapsing! We must pull back!"
Han Dang turned to look at the man. His eyes were flat. Dead. The eyes of a man who had already made his peace with the end.
"We do not pull back. Not one step. Not one inch. The men of Sun Wu do not run."
The captain swallowed hard, nodded, and returned to his place to die alongside his comrades.
Han Dang turned back to the front and raised his sword high. "All men! Advance!"
Against all reason, the Wu veterans stepped forward. Straight into the teeth of the tribal horde, shields locked tight, blades leveled, in a slow, grinding, suicidal advance that caught Shamoke's warriors completely off guard and drove them back ten full paces.
Shamoke staggered, nearly knocked off balance by the sudden counter-thrust. "These old men have lost their minds!"
Ma Zhong appeared at his shoulder, calm as always. "Cornered wolves bite harder."
"Then we stop giving them room to bite," Shamoke growled. "Zhang Ni! Ma Zhong! Squeeze both flanks! Do not let them breathe!"
The fifth hour brought the sun high and blazing down with brutal force. Men were dying of exhaustion as often as they were falling to blades.
Shamoke rotated his warriors in steady shifts, bringing fresh troops forward every twenty minutes. His fresh warriors were not necessarily stronger. They were simply less exhausted. Han Dang had no such luxury. He had started with four thousand men and that was all he would ever have. Every warrior who fell was a loss he could never replace.
The shield wall had long since ceased to be a solid line. It had fractured into isolated clusters of Wu veterans standing back to back, encircled by enemies, fighting in every direction at once. The formation had shattered, but the men holding it had not.
Han Dang bled from three separate wounds. A spear graze across his ribs. A sword cut down his forearm. A deep bruise the size of a fist on his thigh where a mace had struck home. His left arm hung lower than before. His breathing had become ragged, audible even across the distance between them.
Shamoke watched him and felt something twist in his chest. He had faced this man at Hanshou. Had crossed blades with him. Had barely survived that duel. And now he was watching him die by inches, refusing to fall, refusing to yield. This was not just any enemy. This was Han Dang. The only man in the entire Jiangdong army worth respecting.
Because this old man was going to die here today. They both knew it. The only question left was how many more lives Shamoke would have to claim before the end came.
The seventh hour arrived. The sun dipped low toward the horizon, stretching long shadows across the field like grasping fingers.
Han Dang's four thousand had dwindled to two thousand. Then to fifteen hundred. Then to barely a thousand.
They no longer fought in formation. They fought in small, tight knots of three to five men, standing shoulder to shoulder, ringed by enemies. The tribal warriors pressed in slowly and carefully, knowing full well that cornered veterans were the most dangerous foes of all.
Han Dang stood alone now. His personal guard had fallen one by one around him. Men he had trained from boyhood. Men he had led through decades of war. All gone. All dead.
He stood in a circle of corpses, his blade dripping red, his armor split and shattered, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps. Blood streamed down his face from a gash above his left eye. His shield arm hung useless at his side, the bone cracked clean through.
Yet he stood.
Shamoke pushed through the ring of warriors surrounding the old general. Zhang Ni stepped forward to follow, but Shamoke raised a hand to hold him back.
"This one is mine," Shamoke said.
Zhang Ni hesitated. Ma Zhong gave a single, solemn nod. Both men withdrew a few paces to give him space.
Shamoke stepped into the circle of trampled mud and fallen men. The old warrior looked at him with eyes that held no fear and no hatred, only a bone-deep exhaustion and a flicker of something that might have been relief.
"So," Han Dang rasped, his voice barely more than a whisper. Yet the sword in his hand was still raised. "We meet again, Chief of the Wuxi."
"We do." Shamoke raised his spear. "Back in Hanshou, I told you that you were a tough old bastard. I meant it."
Han Dang's cracked lips twitched. A hint of a smile. "And I told you that you shall not advance a single step. I meant that too."
"You held the line longer than anyone expected. But here we are."
"Here we are." Han Dang's grip tightened on his blade. "Come then, boy. Let us finish this."
Shamoke charged.
Han Dang met him head on. The old man's blade caught Shamoke's spear shaft and deflected the blow aside, though the force of the impact sent a sharp shock through his shattered arm. He grunted and staggered, but his legs held firm.
They exchanged three blows. Four. Five. Each strike came slower than the last. Each demanded more than the man had left to give. Han Dang's technique remained flawless, the product of decades of constant drill, but his body was failing him. His legs buckled. His vision blurred. His lungs burned for air that would not come.
On the sixth exchange, Shamoke feinted low.
Han Dang saw the feint. He knew it was a feint. But his body reacted before his mind could stop it. His sword dropped. His chest opened.
The spear came.
The iron tip punched through his armor, shattered the lamellar plates, and buried itself deep in his chest. Han Dang looked down at the spear protruding from his heart, then back up at Shamoke.
He did not scream. Did not curse. He simply let out a long, slow breath.
"Sun Jian," Han Dang whispered. "I kept my oath."
His knees gave way. He crumpled forward. Shamoke caught him gently and lowered him to the mud. The old man's eyes glazed over, fixed on the empty sky above.
Shamoke knelt beside the body and slowly closed Han Dang's eyes.
Around them, the battlefield fell into a heavy, respectful stillness. The last of Han Dang's retainers had stopped fighting. Not because they surrendered, but because there was no one left to fight. Every single one was either dead or too badly wounded to lift a weapon.
Shamoke stood up. His own shoulder bled freely from a deep gash taken during the final melee. Every muscle in his body screamed for rest.
He looked at the ragged survivors clustered around their general's body. Men who could barely stand. Men with missing fingers, broken arms, spear wounds leaking through makeshift bandages. And yet they stood. Around Han Dang's body. Like a wall that refused to fall even after the battle was over.
"You are all good, brave men," Shamoke called out. "I have no wish to kill you. Lay down your arms and go."
One of the surviving officers, a man with a broken nose and a sword cut across his cheek, looked ready to raise his blade again. His knuckles whitened on the hilt. His jaw clenched. For a long moment, he stared at Shamoke with pure, undiluted hatred.
Then he looked at Han Dang's body.
His sword slipped from his fingers and landed in the mud.
One by one, the others followed. The bloodied weapons dropped into the dirt, the sound of each one striking the earth echoing across the stillness.
Shamoke blinked, genuinely surprised. "You will not return to Jiangdong?"
Zhang Ni stepped forward and clapped a hand to Shamoke's uninjured shoulder. He turned to address the defeated men in a clear, steady voice. "Rest here in Lexiang and tend to your wounds. Once the siege at Jiangling is resolved, you may choose your own path freely, whether to return home or remain where you are. We have no reason to chain men who have already laid down their weapons."
The surviving officers exchanged weary glances and bowed their heads in acceptance.