Chapter Ninety-Five: Disgusting to the Core

The cannon duel on the imperial road raged from the hour of the Ox to the hour of the Tiger.

Only after both sides had spent their gunpowder and shot did the infantry under Guerrilla General Lu Cheng finally make a circuitous climb up the ridge and, under the cover of their stone-throwing cannon, engage the enemy force that had ambushed them in a savage hand-to-hand struggle.

Both sides believed the other to be bandits, and that gave them a tremendous edge in spirit; even in the fiercest of fighting, neither knew fear.

The battle was hard-fought. In the end, Lu Cheng even climbed the mountain himself to direct the assault. At last, by dint of superior numbers, he completed the encirclement on the ridge, and with two concentrated charges by the three columns of imperial troops, utterly shattered the enemy.

The result was not poor: they seized countless suits of armor and weapons, along with nine medium cannons and three burst barrels reduced to scrap.

Not to mention the capture of the bandit chief, which settled the merit of this sortie.

With that alone, the families of the fallen soldiers would at least be able to wait for the court to issue their pensions.

At the thought, Lu Cheng’s mood brightened. The dressing on his shoulder, struck by a lead ball, seemed no longer painful, and even the surviving hundred-man captain from Jingjia Gully looked a little more pleasing to his eye.

He patted the captain’s shoulder and sighed, “I was mistaken about you before. Liu Chengzong and the riffraff under him were vicious as wolves, with disciplined ranks and no thought of retreat even unto death.

“Your two hundred men survived their attack; that was no small feat.”

The captain vaguely sensed that something was off.

By day in Jingjia Gully, the bandit chief had indeed been fierce, but the bandit soldiers had not been nearly so formidable. Those thieves had scattered at the first blast of the flying-boulder cannon. By rights, under cover of night they should have been even easier to break, not like this, where after being bombarded they only fought harder.

And where in the world had the bandits found so many cannon?

Still, from the tone of the commanding officer, it seemed he did not care about the earlier defeat. For the captain, that was what mattered most.

Reports of casualties came in from the various officers, and Lu Cheng let out a quiet sigh of relief.

Among his own men, even the lightly wounded were already more than a third of the total. Adding the dead from the daytime battle in Jingjia Gully, his losses were nearly half.

This fight had been far more dangerous than he had imagined. It had been won almost entirely by the soldiers’ grit, by gritting their teeth and forcing themselves through it.

Imperial troops slaughtering bandits held a strong moral advantage.

Only with enough morale could they win.

The captured bandit chief kept cursing nonstop. The guerrilla general removed the shoulder armor that had been pressing on his wound and draped a short robe over his right shoulder.

As he walked toward the prisoner, he was still counting on his fingers. There were a little over four hundred bandits; if he tallied the merit properly, quite a few of his men could win official status.

“Liu Chengzong! You’ve got quite the temper, still spitting and cursing after being taken, still calling me a bandit. Have you gone daft from serving at Fish River Fort? Look carefully at who I am!”

Lu Cheng strode over and, with his left hand, seized the bandit chief by the topknot and yanked his head up. The instant he saw the face, he froze.

He pushed the head back down.

He glanced to either side, rubbed his temples in bewilderment, then reached out and jerked the man’s head up again.

No, something was wrong. Why was it still this face?

He knew this face. It was Bao, the battalion commander at Yanshui Pass. The year before, when Lu Cheng had been promoted and held a feast, Bao had even come to drink.

Bao, who had been cursing without pause, also froze. The foul words stuck in his throat and died there; for a moment his mind could not turn the corner, and he could only stare at Lu Cheng in dumb astonishment.

Lu Cheng said in confusion, “Why is it you, you bastard?”

“General Lu? You—how did you go over to the bandits?”

“Your mother went over to the bandits. If you weren’t sitting comfortably at Yanshui Pass, what the hell were you doing hauling cannon up the mountain to blast your grandfather?”

Lu Cheng was beside himself. The fire in his chest clawed up his throat until his head felt ready to burst.

“Bandits, bandits, bandits your mother’s bandits!”

Bao was no clay doll without temper, and with his force nearly wiped out in the fighting, he immediately thrust out his neck and shouted back at Lu Cheng.

Two middle-ranking officers, one standing and one kneeling, traded curses at each other, and the soldiers around them suffered for it. They were exhausted and half asleep, wanting nothing more than a place to lie down and close their eyes.

After a long while, the two men cooled down, retraced the day’s events, and finally reached the same conclusion.

They had been played.

Cunning.

Too cunning.

So cunning that Lu Cheng felt his spirit sag. During all that cannon exchange, Liu Chengzong must already have fled dozens of li to the south.

With more than two hundred wounded men, there was no hope of catching him no matter how long they chased.

“Bandits need sleep too, and the troops are worn out. We’ll go first to your Yanshui Pass.”

Lu Cheng and Bao could hardly stand the sight of each other now, but there was truly no other choice. Ten li ahead lay Yanshui Pass, and his men needed a proper place to rest.

He ordered the garrison at Yanshui Pass to be unbound and said, “Clean up the bodies. We’ll sleep inside the pass. Tomorrow, the wounded will stay behind there, and the rest of you will continue with me in pursuit of that thief.”

Unlike Lu Cheng, who was so furious he seemed ready to grind his teeth to powder, Bao was utterly defeated.

Most of his soldiers had perished in the battle, and he still had no idea how to report this disaster to the court. For the moment, he could only obey Lu Cheng.

Looking back at the battered remnants under the night sky, while they collected the corpses and stood beside the dozen-odd cannons and their drooping comrades, Bao cursed every foul word he could think of in his heart.

He had come out of the pass full of zeal, hoping to win some merit and persuade the superiors to allocate more grain and supplies. Who could have imagined such an ending?

Back when Bao was still an ordinary foot soldier, he had thought the most disgusting thing in the world was unpaid wages.

Later he learned that many things were even more disgusting than unpaid wages, such as no army grain, or having your merits reported without receiving any reward.

Only now did he truly understand what it felt like when disgust opened the door for itself.

Fighting their own side, losing, being taken prisoner, and worst of all, firing first.

All the foulness had come together at once.

The soldiers, after an all-night stretch without sleep, after marching and fighting, still had to haul seventeen cannons and more than three hundred corpses; in an entire hour, they managed only a little over two miles.

By the time they reached Yanshui Pass, the horizon had already begun to pale.

As they neared the gate, staring at the pass in the darkness like some vast beast lying coiled there, Lu Cheng’s heart gave a sudden, inexplicable jolt.

He said to Bao, “Those bandits wouldn’t have taken Yanshui Pass while the two of us were fighting, would they?”

Bao shot him a white-eyed glare. So this general still thought the night’s troubles were not disgusting enough.

Then again, thinking it through, he too was afraid of that possibility. If Yanshui Pass had also been lost, he might as well just slit his own throat before the gate.

“Well then, send two men ahead to see whether the ones on the wall are ours.”

Soon after, the scout returned with a sour look and reported, “General, Li Laosi and the others from the artillery unit are up on the wall. They asked me how their younger brother is doing.”

“Ah.”

Bao let out a long sigh and waved for his men to open the pass. Only then did he tell the guerrilla general, “Li Laosi’s younger brother was also in the artillery. He was killed by your men.”

What could Lu Cheng say? He said nothing.

At last his heart eased. The long day had been an ordeal for anyone’s spirit.

He wanted only a clean bed and a chance to sleep for two hours.

After walking another few hundred paces, they could already make out figures on the battlements, and suddenly they realized the gate had not been opened.

Someone on the wall shouted, “General Lu, you’ve had a hard journey!”

“Your men are quite considerate…” Lu Cheng had said only half of it when he suddenly froze. “How do they know I’m here?”

The man on the battlements drew his blade and swept it forward, his voice rolling down from afar into Lu Cheng’s ears.

“Liu Chengzong is here, waiting long enough. This road goes no farther!”

Amid the thunderous roar, fire burst upon the battlements.

Four general cannons exploded one after another atop the wall. The shells screamed as they slammed through the battle line, plowing out four blood-soaked lanes strewn with shattered limbs.