“Turmoil”: Battle for the Han Empire sample -- TPMThorne.com

“Don’t come this way!” the bandit leader cried. “There’s-!”
The leader suddenly fell silent; Dian Wei had lunged at him as he threw orders at his men and plunged his halberd blade into the top of the man’s head.
“Run, lads, run! Run, or we’re dead!” another bandit cried.
Dian Wei tore the halberd from the head of his latest victim and started toward the self-appointed replacement leader, screaming, “YOU ALL DIE TODAY!”
Yue Jin and Xiahou Dun arrived, but their participation was not required; the morale of the bandits was utterly broken, and most of them were dropping their weapons and fleeing.
“I’ll pursue!” Xiahou Dun’s subordinate, Han Hao, declared.
“I’ll join you!” Cao Xiu said.
“You left none for me!” Xiahou Dun complained as he looked at the gore-laden Dian Wei, who started to laugh.
“Then I’ll go with Cao Xiu and Han Hao!” Xiahou Dun decided. “I want my share of enemy heads too!”
“…I wonder if Lord Cao will count that mess as one head or two,” the short, stocky Yue Jin said as he stared at the mangled corpse of the bandit leader.

Cao Cao and Xun Gongda rode into the town an hour later, after every last bandit had been repelled; the armed villagers cheered and waved their improvised weapons above their heads while the old and young alike tried to offer gifts of food.
“We are here so that you might keep your food, people!” Cao Cao bellowed. “We will take no gifts!”
“Heaven bless you, Governor!” one elderly woman cried.
“…I wonder if am now as popular as Zhang Miao was in these parts,” Cao Cao murmured. “That… is all I ask.”
“Pardon, Lord Cao…?” Xun Gongda prompted.

“…I… was asking a selfish question of the Heavens,” Cao Cao replied. “What matters, Gongda, is that we have made our intentions clear. Now we shall see what our enemies will decide to do; if they have any sense, they’ll go back to Bing Province with their rat’s tails between their legs. If they stay, then I’ll show no mercy… because these incursions have to end, once and for all.”
“It won’t take long for this to get back to Yufuluo,” Xun Gongda chortled. “Such danger… will surely make him think again.”

Word of Cao Cao’s advance reached the ears of the rebel coalition leadership in northwest Yan, who immediately gathered on a wooded hill to the northwest of Fengqiu to discuss their strategy for meeting the threat: the two overall commanders were the Xiongnu warrior Yufuluo and ‘Fixed Gaze’, a senior member of the ‘Black Mountain Bandits’.
The tall, fierce-faced Yufuluo was the chieftain of an exiled Southern Xiongnu tribe: he had been the Han’s chosen ‘Chanyu’, or king, of all of the Southern Xiongnu peoples, but the other chieftains rejected him as a ‘Han puppet’, cast him and his followers out and appointed an alternative. Yufuluo requested military assistance from the Han government, but it had all occurred at a time of great upheaval: the ‘Ten’-led court disintegrated and its replacement - the regime led by Dong Zhuo - was not about to assist Yufuluo when it had problems of its own. Yufuluo briefly joined Yuan Shao’s Eastern Pass Coalition, but he quickly tired of the inaction, imprisoned his assigned collaborator Zhang Yang and tried to seize Bing Province for himself.

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