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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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This was not just another border skirmish. This was the final stroke of the brush on the map of the continent. They were marching to unify the land under the Hengyuan banner, to permanently erase the chaotic, bloody lines drawn by decades of warlord ambition, and to lay claim to a vast, new western territory in the name of Emperor Lie Fan. The absolute pacification of the realm was no longer a distant dream, it was waiting for them at the top of the plateau.
High above the advancing sea of black armor, the atmosphere within the hastily constructed stone barricades of the League was entirely different. It was a suffocating nightmare of freezing desperation.
Within a crude, wind battered command tent staked precariously near the primary access ravine, the three remaining lords of the northwest, Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu, huddled around a meager, smoking brazier. Their fine silk robes were torn and stained with dirt, their faces were hollow, their lips cracked and blue from the oxygen deprived altitude and the biting cold.
The ground beneath their boots trembled faintly, a rhythmic vibration carrying the terrifying news of the Hengyuan advance.
"They are coming," Mang Xing whispered, his voice trembling as he stared blindly into the dying embers. "The drums. They don't stop. They never stop."
"Then let them come," Lu Kan snarled, though the bravado in his voice was thin and brittle, betrayed by the frantic, terrified darting of his eyes. He gripped the hilt of his sword until his knuckles turned white. "We hold the high ground. The ravines are too narrow for their massive formations. We will bleed them on the ice. We drop the boulders, we fire the ballistas, and we make them pay for every single step!"
Yang Qiu looked up from the table, his expression a mask of grim, absolute despair. "Bleed them? With what, Lu Kan? Our men are starving. Yan Xing and Cheng Li took half our supplies when they drove their daggers into our backs. The morale is entirely shattered. We are not fighting to win anymore. We are simply fighting because we have nowhere left to run."
The brutal, unvarnished truth hung heavily in the freezing tent.
In another era, under different circumstances, warlords facing such overwhelming odds might have raised a white flag, offered tribute, and begged to retain their titles as vassals to the conquering power.
But surrender was an absolute impossibility for the three lords of the League, because they knew exactly who they were fighting.
The news of what Emperor Lie Fan had done to the Cao clan had reached even the deepest corners of the western mountains. The Black Dragon did not leave the roots of rebellion alive to sprout again. He had forced the greatest warlord of the central plains, his sons, his uncles, and his nephews to drink poisoned tea in a silent, sterile massacre. Lie Fan's geopolitical pragmatism was a terrifying, uncompromising machine.
"If we surrender, we die," Lu Kan stated, his voice dropping to a hollow, haunted whisper, articulating the nightmare that kept them all awake. "They will smile, they will accept our swords, and then they will hand us the porcelain cups. They will execute our wives. They will murder our sons to ensure no heir ever claims this plateau again."
Mang Xing let out a ragged, agonizing breath. "There is no mercy in the east. Only the grave."
"Then we fight to the bitter end," Yang Qiu finalized, drawing his sword and resting the cold steel against his lap. "If fate demands that our bloodlines end on this frozen rock, then we ensure that the snow runs red with Hengyuan blood before we fall. We do not kneel. We die with our swords in our hands."
Driven by the primal, terrifying instinct to protect their families from the executioner's poison, the three lords refused to capitulate. They rallied their starving, freezing soldiers, utilizing the absolute terror of the Hengyuan reputation to whip their remaining men into a frenzy of suicidal defiance.
But even in their absolute desperation, the three lords had attempted one final, wild gambit.
Days before the Hengyuan army began its ascent, Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu had pooled their remaining, substantial treasuries. They loaded heavy, iron-bound chests with raw gold, flawless jade, and bolts of priceless silk.
They selected their most silver tongued diplomats, mounted them on the hardiest, most sure footed mountain ponies, and sent them riding desperately westward and northward, deep into the uncharted territories beyond the Qinghai Plateau.
Their mission: to beg for salvation from the fierce, nomadic western tribes and the small, independent desert kingdoms that bordered the great wastes.
The emissaries rode through blinding blizzards and treacherous passes, presenting themselves before the tents of tribal chieftains and minor kings. They opened the chests, letting the gold spill onto the woven rugs, and promised unimaginable riches, prime grazing lands, and permanent alliances if the tribes would only ride to their aid and strike the Hengyuan flanks.
But the tribal kings of the west were not fools. They were harsh, pragmatic survivors who understood the brutal mathematics of war.
The Qiang chieftains listened to the desperate pleas, looked at the gold, and then laughed in the faces of the emissaries. They had traded with the merchants of the central plains, they had heard the terrifying rumors of a unified empire capable of fielding hundreds of thousands of heavily armored soldiers and demonic, fire breathing cannons.
To attack Hengyuan for a few chests of gold was suicide. They politely declined, keeping the gold as a "tax" for safe passage, and sent the emissaries away.
The Di tribal leaders flatly refused to even meet with the ambassadors. They ordered their camps to be struck and moved their people deeper into the northern steppes, wanting absolutely nothing to do with the apocalyptic violence about to erupt on the plateau.
Not many answered the call. The reputation of Emperor Lie Fan, the conqueror of Cao Cao and Yuan Shao, projected a massive, terrifying shadow that paralyzed the western borders.
However, in the darkest, most opportunistic corners of the badlands, a few isolated mercenary bands and greedy minor chieftains accepted the coin.
These were men who possessed no loyalty, no honor, and absolutely no intention of fighting a pitched battle against the Black Dragon's vanguard. They gathered a few thousand lightly armored, highly mobile desert cavalry and rode eastward toward the Qinghai Plateau.
As these mercenaries arrived at the rear of the League's fortifications, Lu Kan and Mang Xing attempted to integrate them into the defensive lines. But the mercenaries refused to take positions in the brutal, freezing chokepoints.
They lingered in the rear, near the League's remaining baggage trains and supply caches. They sharpened their curved blades and watched the approaching Hengyuan army with calculating, entirely selfish eyes.
They had come to the roof of the world for one reason only, to wait for the exact moment the defensive lines broke, loot the remaining wealth of the three lords in the chaos, and flee back into the desert before the Hengyuan heavy infantry could catch them.
They expected to get rich, and they absolutely refused to die in vain for a doomed alliance. The three lords had bought numbers, but they had purchased exactly zero loyalty.
The freezing silence of the Qinghai Plateau was finally, violently shattered by the roaring thunder of the Black Dragon Cannons.
Positioned at the very base of the primary access ravines, where the incline was still manageable for the heavy artillery carriages, the Hengyuan engineering corps unleashed hell. The explosive shells arced high into the thin mountain air, whistling like falling stars before slamming into the massive, improvised stone barricades the League had erected across the canyon throats.
BOOM. The explosions were magnified a hundredfold by the narrow, echoing walls of the ravines. The concussive force shattered the icy cliff faces, sending massive, lethal cascades of jagged rock and frozen earth raining down upon the defenders. The stone barricades splintered into deadly shrapnel, instantly obliterating the frontline spearmen of Lu Kan's remaining loyalists.
Before the smoke could even clear, the true nightmare began.
"CHARGE!"
The battle cry of Guan Yu tore through the canyon, a sound so fierce and resonant it seemed to vibrate the very frost on the rocks.
From the thick, gray smoke of the cannon fire emerged the God of War, mounted on his magnificent steed, the Green Dragon Crescent Blade spinning in his hands like a propeller of absolute death. Behind him, roaring with a blood curdling intensity, came Zhang Fei, his serpent spear thrusting forward, leading a massive, heavily armored tidal wave of elite Hengyuan dismounted cavalry and heavy infantry.
They crashed into the shattered remains of the barricades like a hammer striking an anvil.
The fierce battle began with an intensity that defied the freezing temperatures. The fighting was brutally close quarters, a grinding, horrific melee of shield against shield, sword against spear, taking place on steep, treacherous inclines slick with black ice and fresh blood.
The defenders, driven by the absolute terror of the executioner's poison, fought with a savage, cornered animal desperation. They thrust their spears blindly into the pressing mass of black armor, screaming as Guan Yu's blade cleaved through their wooden shields and iron helmets as if they were made of paper.
Zhang Fei was a whirlwind of violence, physically hurling enemy soldiers off the sheer cliff edges with the sheer, brute strength of his spear thrusts.
"Hold the line! Push them back down the ice!" Yang Qiu screamed, his voice cracking as he stood atop a secondary ridge, desperately trying to rally his freezing, terrified men.
But the Hengyuan infantry, fueled by their double rations and an unbreakable discipline, simply absorbed the desperate strikes and stepped over the bodies of the fallen, pushing the line relentlessly, inexorably upward.
While the deafening, horrific slaughter of the frontal assault consumed the entire attention and the remaining reserves of the three lords, the flawless, multi pronged strategy designed by Chen Deng and Fa Zheng was silently executing in the shadows.
Miles away from the echoing cannons, in the quiet, frozen valleys of Qilian, General Zhang Wei and General Yang Ang moved their specialized Hanzhong mountain troops with lethal, silent precision.
Accustomed to the treacherous footing of high altitudes, they bypassed the frantic, disorganized patrols of Mang Xing's sentries. They did not attack the fortified caves. Instead, they moved like phantoms, rapidly establishing a brutal, impenetrable perimeter of overlapping crossbow lines and spiked barricades entirely surrounding the hidden freshwater springs.
The trap was set. When the desperate, thirsty survivors of the League retreated from the front lines to seek water, they would find only a wall of iron bolts waiting for them.
And simultaneously, at the base of the most treacherous, invisible geographic anomaly on the plateau, the jagged, sheer cliff face known as the Serpent's Spine, the ultimate strike force prepared to ascend.
Yue Jin and Pang De stood at the bottom of the black-ice precipice, looking straight up into the freezing, pre dawn darkness. Behind them stood a specialized, hand picked strike force of light, unarmored mountain infantry. They carried no heavy shields, no iron breastplates. They were equipped only with short swords, climbing axes, and coils of thick hemp rope.
They were the ghosts of Wei, and they had been unleashed.
"It is a sheer drop," Yue Jin muttered, his breath pluming in the freezing air, his eyes tracing the impossibly steep, slick rock face. "One slip, and a man falls a thousand feet into the dark."
Pang De gripped his climbing axe, a fierce, predatory grin spreading across his weathered face. He looked at the former vanguard commander of Cao Cao, his eyes burning with the unyielding hunger to prove their worth to the Black Dragon.
"Then we do not slip, Wenqian," Pang De growled, driving his axe deep into a fissure in the freezing rock. "We climb. We bypass their barricades. We burn their command tents, and we carve our new names into the history of this empire."
With a synchronized, silent nod, the two legendary generals began to pull themselves up the sheer, freezing cliff face, leading their men into the dark.
The plateau was surrounded. The front doors were being battered down by the God of War, the water was choked off, and the assassins were scaling the back walls. The three lords of the League fought with the desperate, thrashing fury of men who knew they were already dead, their blood freezing to the rocks as the Hengyuan Dynasty reached out to permanently close its iron grip around the roof of the world.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0