RBCT Chapter 1159 - 1100. The League of Northwestern Lords Defeated
Chapter 1159 - 1100. The League of Northwestern Lords Defeated
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(A/N: Don’t forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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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.
The relentless assault upon the Qinghai Plateau did not just test the physical endurance of the League’s defenders, it fundamentally shattered their psychological reality. The Hengyuan war machine, operating with a cold, industrialized efficiency that the northwestern warlords had never before encountered, pressed upward against the icy barricades with the unstoppable momentum of a rising tide.
Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu had built their defenses to withstand the chaotic, disorganized skirmishes of rival desert tribes and ambitious local warlords. They had relied on the natural, freezing chokepoints of the plateau, believing the sheer cliffs and sub-zero temperatures would serve as their ultimate shield.
But they had not anticipated the sheer, terrifying discipline of Emperor Lie Fan’s armies. They had not anticipated the Black Dragon Cannons continuously raining explosive death upon their stone walls, reducing generations of masonry to lethal, flying shrapnel.
As Guan Yu and Zhang Fei pushed the frontal assault, hacking through the splintered barricades with monstrous, unrelenting force, the defensive lines began to buckle, tear, and finally disintegrate.
The slaughter was absolute. The loyalist soldiers of the three lords, starving and freezing in their ragged armor, found themselves being butchered left and right. There was no tactical brilliance to their defense anymore; it was merely a desperate, flailing struggle to survive the next descending halberd or the next volley of heavy crossbow bolts.
The freezing mountain air was choked with the metallic tang of blood, the thick, acrid smoke of black powder, and the horrific, echoing screams of men being crushed under the iron-shod boots of the Hengyuan heavy infantry.
Morale, already hanging by a frayed thread following the betrayals of Yan Xing and Cheng Li, plummeted into an abyssal void.
The defenders looked to their left and saw their brothers being cleaved in twain by the God of War, they looked to their right and saw Zhang Fei physically hurling their commanders off the sheer precipices. When the realization finally set in that the mountain would not save them, the remaining shreds of their discipline vanished.
"Drop your weapons! Our side have lost!" a captain in Lu Kan’s vanguard screamed, throwing his shattered wooden shield into the blood-stained snow and falling to his knees, his hands clasped behind his head.
His surrender triggered a massive, cascading wave of capitulation across the frontline. Hundreds of freezing, battered soldiers threw down their spears and swords, dropping to the ice and begging the Hengyuan infantry for the mercy of the Black Dragon.
But not all chose to kneel. Driven entirely by the primal, blinding terror of the slaughter, thousands of others decided to flee. They broke ranks, abandoning their posts and deserting their armies, scrambling blindly up the icy goat paths and retreating into the freezing, unforgiving wilderness of the plateau.
They threw away their heavy armor to run faster, condemning themselves to a slow, agonizing death by exposure in the high altitude blizzards, choosing the freezing mercy of the elements over the certain death promised by the advancing Hengyuan halberds.
With the defenders either kneeling in the snow or fleeing into the clouds, the last, formidable line of defenses guarding the primary access roads completely collapsed. The heavy wooden gates of the inner mountain passes were shattered into kindling, entirely cleared away by the advancing imperial tide.
This total collapse allowed the Hengyuan vanguard generals, riding the crest of the bloody wave, to push their forces directly into the plateau’s inner sanctum. Their objective was absolute and unyielding: capture the three lords of the League, alongside their families, and extinguish the final embers of resistance.
Miles away from the shattered front gates, deep within the isolated, stone hewn fortress that served as the final command center for the League, the atmosphere was a suffocating cocktail of panic and impending doom.
The fortress, carved directly into the living rock of the plateau, offered no warmth. The braziers had burned low, the supply of wood having been exhausted days ago.
Inside the central command hall, Lu Kan paced back and forth across the freezing stone floor like a trapped, neurotic predator. His footsteps echoed hollowly against the vaulted ceilings. His silk robes were rumpled, his hair unkempt, and his eyes wild with the frantic, helpless energy of a man watching his entire world burn down around him.
Nearby, Mang Xing and Yang Qiu stood over a massive, scarred wooden table, furiously barking orders at the handful of loyal, terrified messengers and lieutenants that remained.
"Pull the archers back from the southern ridge! Consolidate them at the inner courtyard!" Mang Xing roared, his voice hoarse from shouting, his thick hands slamming against the table. "Barricade the iron doors! Use the heavy oak tables, use the stone statues, use whatever you can lift!"
"And what of the families?!" Yang Qiu demanded, his face pale and drawn, grabbing a lieutenant by the collar of his armor. "Have they been secured?!"
"Yes, my Lord!" the lieutenant gasped, trembling violently. "The women and children have all been moved to the deepest subterranean vault! We have placed the heaviest iron locks on the doors and stationed your personal honor guard outside! It is the safest room in the entire fortress!"
Yang Qiu released the man, stepping back and running a shaking hand over his face. "Good. If we fall, the stone might at least buy them enough time for the Emperor’s generals to cool their blood. They cannot be caught in the crossfire."
But the illusion of safety was about to be violently shattered.
The heavy, muffled sounds of fighting, the clash of steel, the screams of dying men, and the rhythmic, terrifying thud of marching boots, had been echoing distantly up the mountain for hours. Now, however, those sounds had arrived directly at the gates of the fortress.
The Hengyuan soldiers, spearheaded by the most lethal, highly motivated commanders in the imperial army, had bypassed the outer maze of the plateau entirely. The assault upon the fortress commenced with a terrifying, coordinated ferocity. The heavy wooden doors of the citadel groaned, splintered, and finally exploded inward under the sheer, kinetic impact of a localized battering ram.
A messenger, bleeding profusely from a deep gash across his forehead, stumbled into the command hall and collapsed onto the stone floor.
"My Lords!" the messenger choked out, coughing up blood. "The gates are breached! The outer courtyards have fallen! They are pouring into the corridors!"
Lu Kan stopped pacing. He slowly drew his sword, the metallic sching ringing out with absolute finality. The neurotic panic that had gripped him for days suddenly vanished, replaced by the cold, hollow clarity of a man who has finally run out of options.
"So it ends here," Lu Kan murmured, his knuckles turning white around the hilt of his blade.
Mang Xing and Yang Qiu drew their own weapons, their faces setting into grim, uncompromising masks of defiance. There was not a single, fleeting thought of surrender passing through their minds. They knew the brutal, uncompromising political mathematics of the era.
They had defied the Emperor, they had bled his armies, and they had allied with his enemies. To surrender now would only guarantee a humiliating, public execution or a silent cup of poison.
"We do not kneel," Yang Qiu stated, his voice dropping to a low, lethal register. "We make them pay for this stone in blood."
The heavy oak doors of their command hall suddenly shuddered under a massive impact. A second later, the heavy locking bar snapped like a dry twig, and the doors were violently kicked open, slamming against the stone walls with a deafening crash.
Stepping through the threshold, illuminated by the flickering light of the corridor torches, were not common Hengyuan spearmen.
The ones who had forced their way into the absolute heart of the fortress were the ghosts of the old world.
Yue Jin, Pang De, Zhang He, Xu Huang, Gao Lan, Li Dian, and Yu Jin stepped into the room. Their armor was battered, scarred, and covered in a mixture of black mud and freezing blood from their impossible, horrific ascent up the Serpent’s Spine and their subsequent butchery of the rear guard.
They breathed heavily, the thin mountain air pluming from their mouths, but their eyes burned with an intense, unyielding, and terrifying hunger. They had scaled a mountain of ice in the dark, bypassed an entire army, and now, they had cornered their prey.
Seeing the legendary former Wei generals standing in their doorway, serving as the vanguard executioners for the Emperor who had destroyed Cao Cao, a wave of profound, surreal horror washed over the three lords of the League.
But horror quickly transmuted into pure, suicidal rage.
"Die, you Imperial dogs!" Mang Xing roared, raising his heavy broadsword high above his head.
With a synchronized, desperate battle cry, Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu, alongside the final two dozen fiercely loyal elite guards remaining in the hall, charged headlong toward the doorway. They threw themselves into combat, intending to drag as many of the Emperor’s new champions down into the yellow springs with them as possible.
But the fight did not last long.
The sheer, overwhelming disparity in martial skill was instantly, brutally apparent. The three lords of the League were seasoned commanders, men who had fought tribal skirmishes and border wars, but they were not apex predators. They could not contend with the men who had served as the very vanguard of the central plains.
Xu Huang stepped forward, effortlessly sidestepping a frantic thrust from one of the loyalist guards. With a single, devastating, horizontal swing of his massive battle-axe, he cleaved through the guard’s armor and sent him flying across the room.
Zhang He moved like a phantom, his elegant, fluid strikes bypassing the desperate parries of the defenders, disarming three men in a matter of seconds.
Pang De, his eyes locked entirely upon Yang Qiu, advanced with the terrifying, unstoppable momentum of a landslide. Yang Qiu swung his sword with all his might, aiming for Pang De’s neck. The desert wolf simply raised his heavy gauntlet, catching the flat of the blade and wrenching it out of the warlord’s grip with a brutal twist of his wrist. Before Yang Qiu could react, Pang De drove the heavy pommel of his own sword directly into the warlord’s breastplate, dropping him to the stone floor, gasping for air.
Yue Jin and Li Dian moved in perfect, seamless synchronization, dismantling Lu Kan and Mang Xing’s frantic assaults. Yue Jin’s aggressive, rapid fire strikes overwhelmed Lu Kan’s defenses, while Li Dian swept Mang Xing’s legs out from under him with the haft of his polearm.
The loyalist soldiers, fighting with admirable but ultimately futile bravery, were systematically dismantled. They were nothing compared to the elite, battle hardened Hengyuan veterans that poured into the room directly behind the Wei generals. Within a span of less than two minutes, the clash of steel ceased entirely.
The fight ended as quickly and violently as it had begun.
The last two dozen defenders lay dead or groaning on the freezing stone. Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu were disarmed, beaten down, and violently forced to their knees in the center of their own command hall.
Heavy, coarse hemp ropes were swiftly produced by the Hengyuan soldiers, binding the warlords’ wrists tightly behind their backs.
"Secure the perimeter!" Yu Jin commanded sharply, wiping a streak of blood from his cheek. He turned to a captain of the elite infantry. "Locate the subterranean vault. Capture their families. Use caution, and do not harm the women and children. Move them to a secure, heavily guarded sector of the fortress and keep them under strict, absolute imprisonment until the strategists decree their fate."
"At once, General!" the captain saluted, immediately taking a contingent of men deeper into the citadel to secure the bloodlines.
With the fortress secured and the warlords kneeling in defeat, the heavy, rhythmic footsteps of the high command echoed down the stone corridor.
Chen Deng, Fa Zheng, Meng Da, and Zang Hong strode into the command hall. They did not wear the heavy, blood spattered armor of the vanguard, they wore the immaculate, flowing robes of imperial authority. Their expressions were calm, aristocratic, and utterly devoid of pity.
But they did not enter alone.
Walking just a half step behind the four Hengyuan strategists, dressed in the fine silk robes of newly appointed imperial governors, were Yan Xing and Cheng Li.
The moment the three kneeling lords of the League looked up and saw their former allies standing in the doorway, breathing the same air as their conquerors, the air in the room seemed to ignite. The sheer, unadulterated venom and hatred that erupted from Lu Kan, Mang Xing, and Yang Qiu was palpable.
Lu Kan strained violently against his heavy hemp ropes, his face contorting into a mask of pure, rabid fury. He spat a thick wad of bloody saliva directly onto the stone floor, inches from Yan Xing’s polished boots.
"Traitors! Cowards! Soulless, backstabbing dogs!" Lu Kan shrieked, launching into a frantic, furious tirade, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings. "You sold us to the butcher! You swore a blood oath to the League! We broke bread together! We bled together! And you betrayed us for a handful of gold and a silken leash!"
Mang Xing joined the chorus of absolute hatred, glaring venomously at Cheng Li. "You absolute pieces of filth! You led their cavalry into our rear! My men died looking over their shoulders, thinking you were coming to save them! May your ancestors curse your names! May the heavens strike you down and let your bloodlines rot in the yellow springs for all eternity!"
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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