East of the River: Home of the Sun Clan sample (Act I) -- T. P. M. Thorne
JavaScript is off/unavailable on your browser. You will not be able to experience this website as it was intended without JavaScript enabled.
Sun Jian looked to his left: Han Dang was ready. He then turned his gaze
rightward: Huang Gai was ready as well. All that was needed was a sign from the
commanders, and Sun Jian was secretly as impatient as everyone else. The
chanting continued and the morale of the enemy built steadily, but the
commanders did nothing. Minutes passed, and the Han coalition’s morale started
to falter as the unified voice of the tens of thousands of Yellow Turbans
filled their minds and hearts with fear and doubt. It seemed to be what Bo Cai
had been waiting for: he ordered a charge, and the Yellow Turban infantry
surged forward. Huangfu Song’s men retreated before the enemy reached them:
that sent shockwaves through the Han forces and led to some desertions.
“Bloody fools!” Cheng Pu
cried. “What sort of plan is this???”
“It isn’t what I was told,”
Sun Jian realised. “Alright, we’ll have
to improvise.”
“Improvise? Sod that: we have to retreat!” Zu Mao said. “We can’t fight an army ten times the size
of ours!”
Zhu Jun’s men were starting to buckle under the pressure of Bo Cai’s
assault: within a short time the entire Han force was retreating, including Sun
Jian’s indignant followers.
The fighting continued, on and off, for many hours: the Yellow Turbans
chased the Han forces ever more southward, despite concerns that there might be
some trap awaiting them. Bo Cai would hear no dissent: he was certain that the
disorganised loyalists had finally become as exhausted as their emperor’s
mandate to govern. The chase continued to the outskirts of a wood, which the
Han forces retreated into.
“We’ll burn them out!” Bo Cai chuckled as he observed the scene. “We’ll
fetch some- …What???”
The front lines were panicking: something was wrong. Bo Cai could not
see or hear the problem at first, since the random chants and murmurings of his
army had deafened him to the whistling of arrows: suddenly, fire was
everywhere, and chants became screams of agony.
Flammable liquids and fats had
been smeared on the roads as the Han had retreated, but the Yellow turbans had
mistaken the slippery terrain for plain mud from recent heavy rain: flaming
arrows ignited the ground and any rebel that they touched, and once the panic
had started to spread, so did the fire. Bo Cai’s vanguard was quickly
decimated, and Bo Cai himself was reported to have fallen during an attempted
retreat. A second force of men caught the retreating Yellow Turbans in a pincer
and increased the fatalities considerably: within an hour, bodies littered the
ground and the Han forces were completely victorious.
“Curse them! Curse them all!”
the Yellow Turban officer Liu Pi cried as he fled the battle with a reduced
contingent and his ally Huang Shao. They were now two of many leaders of the
scattered rebel forces in Yu Province, but the uprising would not regain
Yingchuan.
“Go on, run, you heretics and
bumpkins!” Zhu Jun bellowed as he rode to the front lines to join the
pursuit of the defeated enemy. “Go back
to your hamlets, and reject this unholy nonsense!”
Sun Jian looked at the mass of bodies and groaned painfully.
“A waste, indeed,” Wu Jing agreed.
“They’re retreating… all of them,” Cheng Pu reported as he regrouped
with Sun Jian, Wu Jing and Zu Mao. “Scouts say they’re mostly heading
southward, to Xihua.”
“But this was their grand plan?” Sun Jian exclaimed. “To lure the poor
fools into a fire trap and burn them to death…? A simple battle at Yingchuan
would have been more merciful and sensible than this!”