Chapter 89 - Nightmare on the Battlefield (2)

The nomad soldiers were visible in tightly packed ranks, already prepared to march. Their charge would mark the start of the decisive battle.

Dong Bongsu laboriously lifted the sword resting across his shoulder and held it upright at his side. With that, his preparations were complete.

CLOP-CLOP.

Someone rode up behind him. Dong Bongsu did not bother turning around.

“What will you do?”

Adjutant Dang, just as he had expected. Lee Jasong had probably sent him.

“Well. I’m weighing which side offers more, and which will be easier.”

Adjutant Dang took this to mean he was looking for the side with more weak enemies. Even to his eyes, Dong Bongsu looked utterly exhausted by the repeated battles. Frankly, he was in no condition to fight.

“Do as you see fit. If we win this war, the credit will be entirely yours.”

Dong Bongsu gave a faint snort of laughter.

Credit? What was that supposed to be?

To Dong Bongsu, taking part in this battle was itself the reward. Not that Adjutant Dang or Lee Jasong would understand.

Dong Bongsu stroked Kaiji’s head. There was no response. He liked that all the better.

“Once the battle is over, I should see whether I can change that name, ‘Divine Beast 1.’ You’d prefer that too, wouldn’t you? Even if no one acknowledges you, you ought to have a name, at least.”

He roughly tousled the soft silver fur on Kaiji’s head, saying things Adjutant Dang could not understand. The adjutant made no effort to understand, either. Dong Bongsu was already an unfathomable man to him.

Having said everything he had come to say, Adjutant Dang turned his horse around.

Then Dong Bongsu’s quiet voice stopped him.

“Before you go, cut this rope for me.”

Adjutant Dang reined in his horse, dismounted, and approached the trebuchet on foot. Experience had already taught him that his horse would refuse to come this way because of Kaiji.

“You’re quite something, insisting on fighting to the last. You needn’t keep fighting if you’re exhausted.”

“You’ve grown talkative.”

“... Very well. May fortune favor you in battle.”

Fortune in battle? Who needed that? Battles were not fought with luck. Victory came through brains and skill, and when those were not enough, one had to wait for the right moment.

That moment had come. If he did not fight now, he would die.

“Cut it. There’s no time.”

Adjutant Dang briefly shook his head, then brought his sword down on the taut hauling rope.

With that, Dong Bongsu’s final ear hunt would bring the grand finale.

“Warriors of the great steppes! Let’s wipe them out!”

That was Salakat’s speech to rally his troops. Perhaps out of admiration for Timur Khan, it was just as short and forceful as the khan’s.

“Raaah!”

Spurred on by his words, twenty thousand nomad cavalrymen raised a roar that echoed far into the distance. Perhaps they heard it, for tension spread through Lee Jasong’s entire expeditionary army, deployed before Guishui Fortress.

RUMBLE.

Salakat led the charge toward the rear of the northern expeditionary army. Thick clouds of sand and dust rose beneath the twenty-thousand-strong force. At the same moment, the nomad soldiers inside Guishui Fortress poured out through its gates, like streams of river water flowing out to join the sea.

The expeditionary army’s cavalry charged out to meet Salakat’s ten-thousand-man divisions, apparently prepared for this very situation. Though Salakat had more cavalry, the enemy force included archers and shield-bearers, giving it a far superior mix of troops.

“Show that worthless Central Plains trash what our blades can—!”

Salakat had opened his mouth again to steady any soldiers who might waver, but he never finished.

Something sailed through the air.

A strange thing had flown over from ahead and vanished toward the rear of his divisions. It certainly was not a bird. Yet it was unmistakably flying.

“That’s...!”

At a glance, it looked like a dog. But it was far too enormous to be one. As far as Salakat knew, no dog that size existed. No, there was one—but it was not a dog, and it could not fly.

He had not imagined it.

Several nearby deputy commanders had clearly seen it too. Their heads had unmistakably tilted skyward, however briefly. But there was no way to discover what it had been now. All the horses had gathered speed; they could not stop. If he so much as eased his reins at the wrong moment, the horses behind would trample him to death, leaving scarcely a recognizable body.

“Hyah!”

Instead, Salakat lashed his horse even harder.

Whatever had flown to the rear, there was only one of it. What could one do alone?

That was his first mistake.

CRASH!

Salakat’s vanguard finally collided with the expeditionary army’s rear cavalry.

THUD! THUD-THUD!

“Aaaargh!”

Heads flew, and severed limbs twitched. One after another, they fell to the ground, where they were trampled and burst apart. Death followed death.

“What are you doing, you sons of bitches! Fill those gaps! Do you all want to fucking die? Huh?”

At Salakat’s profanity-laced shouts, the nomad cavalry continually filled the gaps opening in the front ranks.

The fighting was fierce, but both sides were elite troops. Neither could easily overwhelm the other.

In particular, the many archers stationed deep within the expeditionary army’s formation made it difficult for Salakat to peel his cavalry off to the side. Moreover, some of the infantry who occasionally emerged from behind carried leg-severing hooks. Each low sweep of these great scythes, their blades mounted in reverse, mercilessly sliced through horses’ ankles. The riders of the crippled horses fell to the ground, and soon their heads followed.

The northern expeditionary army had clearly been assembled to fight the cavalry of the steppes rather than to conduct a siege.

But Salakat’s cavalry divisions were no pushovers, either. They might not equal the Gray Wolf Corps, but they were warriors renowned throughout the north in their own right.

His soldiers held their ground and kept pressing Lee Jasong’s forces. On the opposite side, Timur Khan’s main army was probably slaughtering the expeditionary troops like mad.

Anyone watching the fierce struggle from the sky would have judged Timur Khan and Salakat to have the advantage. At least, so far.

‘Yes. Keep pushing like this, and we win! They may outnumber us, but we have them trapped between us! We need only hold, and the khan will surely annihilate them all!’

That was his second mistake.

“Aaaargh! Aieee!”

Screams of every kind threw the battle line into turmoil as countless men died. Naturally, the line grew thinner and shorter.

Yet strangely, screams were coming from somewhere other than the front. The fighting should have been taking place only ahead, where Salakat stood. But those sounds...

‘What is it? From behind?’

Salakat hurled a dagger into the crown of a hook-wielding infantryman who was coming to sever his beloved mount’s ankles, then looked back. Something was definitely wrong. Many of the cavalrymen who should have been using their mobility to sweep around the enemy infantry’s flanks were still tied down in the rear.

“Go to the rear and find out what’s happening.”

He sent back a deputy commander who had been fighting fiercely at his side. The battle had become a close-quarters melee, and the lines had spread wide, so it was not particularly difficult for a single horse to withdraw.

‘Could it be that thing from earlier? But the battle has already turned in our favor.’

That was Salakat’s third mistake.

He resumed swinging his saber with all his strength.

Had that served as a signal?

Suddenly, the soldiers holding the enemy center rapidly pulled back. Salakat and many of his thousand-man commanders pursued them deep into the enemy formation. He had judged there was no danger of encirclement anyway, and believed he could withdraw his troops if necessary.

That was his fourth blunder, and it sealed the fate of his twenty thousand cavalrymen.

As Salakat and his thousand-man commanders drove swiftly into the enemy ranks, the northern expeditionary army’s formation suddenly reversed.

Troops that had hung back in the rear rapidly fanned out to either side, beginning to circle around Salakat’s cavalry. Lee Jasong’s forces had overwhelmingly superior numbers to begin with. Unless the nomad cavalry pulled back, there was no escaping the formation closing around them like a round rush cushion. What had been a one-to-one engagement became two against three, or three against four—a crescent formation that overwhelmingly favored the northern expeditionary army.

“Aaaargh! Aagh!”

In an instant, Salakat’s entire force was compressed. Belatedly, he tried to pull back and restore his lines. But his nomad soldiers were already too worked up to control.

“Damn it! We’ve walked into a trap!”

In the end, Salakat tried to make his way to the rear alone, but the bodies of men and horses left scarcely anywhere to put a foot.

He stood on his saddle, then kicked off hard from his horse’s back, soaring toward the rear of the encirclement. His obstructed view naturally opened up. At last, Salakat could see exactly what was happening at the rear of his divisions.

Someone was there.

A man whose long fringe streamed like blades as he tore through the allied ranks like a storm. A man riding a gray wolf that looked like Kaiji.

No one could stop him. The centurion Salakat had sent seemed to have been dead for some time already. Worse, the man was deliberately seeking out deputy commanders and other officers, concentrating his slaughter on them.

TAP-TAP.

Salakat landed at the rear of the battlefield. Now he could sense the man’s presence simply by standing there. The man was in that hellish place where blood was flung and sprayed like sand.

THUD-THUD-THUD! GRRRR!

At the very point through which his divisions needed to escape, cavalrymen’s corpses were constantly being hurled into the air.

“Were we the ones surrounded...?”

A single man was throwing the entire rear of two ten-thousand-man cavalry divisions—twenty thousand horsemen—into chaos.

The man had certainly appeared to be wounded in places, yet he had never seemed as though he would die.

“I had it all wrong...”

Salakat finally understood how the battle was unfolding. But it was already too late.