- Imperial Palace Martial Arts 3 — Driving Mongroe Back
While Soun traded blows for several exchanges, Gyeongpil agonized.
Should he break off to help crush the enemy vanguard completely, clean up the line, then return and strike this man together.
Or should he attack from behind right now, at Soun’s side.
There was no real way to defeat Mongroe.
Even if the two of them fought together, they still would not win.
If they relocated the fight, they could at least save their lives.
But then the Scholar would die.
No matter how he turned it over, no sharp solution appeared.
Worse, if Soun started to collapse, everything would end.
Gyeongpil did not even understand how Soun was managing to hold Mongroe off, but it was astonishing.
Soun was murmuring under his breath like someone reciting a sutra, lifting and snapping his blade up, then driving forward with the shaft like a spear.
Even so, it would only last a moment.
Gyeongpil shouted for the Second Company commander.
“Jeonghyeon! We kill this one first!”
“Jeonghyeon!”
Calling the boy’s name, he swung the broken crescent saber like a windmill and struck at Mongroe’s back.
With the fury of the wounded poured into that cut, Mongroe could not afford to dismiss him.
Mongroe turned, parried Gyeongpil with ease, and charged back toward Soun.
Soun was swinging as if he were dreaming.
He was only a fourteen-year-old boy.
Mongroe flinched at the strange martial art, but then pressed in with raw, inborn strength.
Soun gave ground, and Gyeongpil was forced back by that power as well.
Just then Jeonghyeon rushed in, braced his spearhead, and stabbed wildly—messy, chaotic thrusts.
He shook the point up, down, left, and right, stabbing in broken angles so no one could tell where the strike would land.
Mongroe’s blade had to chase it, and his horse startled and stepped back.
Gyeongpil and Soun, pushed off a moment earlier, lunged back in and joined the pressure.
The White Dragon troops were driving the enemy down from the ridge.
Soon, only four riders remained on the crest.
Mongroe felt the disadvantage at last.
All three were beneath him in skill—yet if he could not land a clean first hit on any one of them, he could not break the pattern.
He shoved one back, the other two surged in.
He shoved again, and another blade arrived.
If it were fighting on foot, it would have been different.
But these were riders who handled their mounts like ghosts.
For Mongroe, it was maddening.
Seeing a gap, he knocked aside the three attacks in a rush, wheeled his horse, and fled down the slope.
As he went, he slashed at the backs of White Dragon riders who were still pushing the line, dropping two men, and then vanished into his own mass of troops.
“Fall back! Fall back!”
No one fell back.
Momentum cannot be stopped in an instant.
Gyeongpil snatched the horn from Sosam’s belt and blew it.
Bwooo—
Only then did the White Dragon riders rein their horses in.
The barbarians followed Mongroe down, then began climbing back up.
“What are you doing? Draw your bows!”
Gyeongpil’s mouth was spitting curses without pause.
He had just died and returned.
It was only natural.
“Draw your bows, draw your bows! Shoot them all!”
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The fight was so violent that his words came out chopped and thin.
Still, everyone understood.
At Gyeongpil’s command, the men shouted and rode down the slope.
They loosed arrows into the enemy backs as they descended and climbed.
Soun, stupidly, was still sitting there with his sword in hand.
After loosing three or four shafts each, the White Dragon riders turned and climbed back up the ridge.
The barbarians, still mounted, twisted their bodies and fired backward in return.
A dozen or more White Dragon men tumbled from their saddles.
Across the soft, shallow valley, arrows rained from both ridges.
Gyeongpil climbed to the crest shaped like a dragon’s head and re-formed the line.
Thankfully, the enemy withdrew.
The force approaching from below did not climb up.
Soun finally sheathed his sword.
Was his family blade some kind of divine weapon.
He had blocked Mongroe’s massive ring-pommel saber with that thin blade—
and the edge showed not even a single chip.
Then he looked down at his hands.
His wrists were trembling.
Maybe it was backlash from forcing too much strength—
starting at his fingertips, the shaking climbed his whole arm until he could not even hold the reins.
He grabbed his right hand with his left.
The tremor would not stop.
As he stared at his shaking hand, Sosam rode up.
“You did well, Scholar!”
Gyeongpil came as well.
“You did well. Thank you.”
“You really did.”
Soldiers know.
They know who saved their lives.
Soun stared blankly at his hands and at the enemy’s retreating backs.
Gyeongpil was sincerely grateful—to Soun, and to Jeonghyeon as well.
Grateful enough that he wanted to grab them and hold them.
“We return. Return!”
The White Dragon riders turned their horses.
Not long after, they met Yi Hui’s main force charging in to reinforce them.
When Yi Hui saw they were alive, he let out a breath of relief.
And then he heard—
about Soun’s martial feat.
He received the report of that situation: a moment where they might have died—no, might have been annihilated.
Their string of small victories had intoxicated them.
That had been the real mistake.
Soun still rode like a man with his spirit knocked loose, letting the horse sway where it wanted, mindlessly following the back of the rider ahead.
After fighting with everything he had, emptiness arrived.
An empty head.
Empty thoughts.
Everything that once felt necessary now looked pointless.
Being alive—
and the many affectionate acts that make up living, and the objects of that attachment—
all of it looked suddenly futile.
Meaningless.
Why did people live like that.
Everything he once held precious looked hollow in a single blink.
It was the face of someone hollowed out.
Back at the rear camp, Soun collapsed and fell asleep.
They shook him and told him to eat, but he could not get up.
The battle was reported to Yi Hui and to Jin Mugwang.
Along with the details—that the enemy force was not small—Soun’s feat was reported as well.
They could no longer pretend they could rely on the White Dragon unit alone.
The enemy numbers were steadily swelling.
The raiders returning to the steppe were being blocked by the Northern Route Army, and each day more and more troops piled in behind them.
Now, they had to fight together with the infantry-shield formations.
Even if only one tribe attacked in earnest, one or two White Dragon companies could not suppress them.
The White Dragon troops were well organized, strong in group cavalry fighting—
but the true problem was the number of horses, and the commanders.
The absence of top-tier commanders was obvious.
It was not that Gyeongpil lacked ability.
He was more than good enough to command an entire wing.
The problem was Mongroe and the other tribal leaders.
Each tribe had sent its strongest force—
a chieftain’s son, or the tribe’s greatest warrior leading the band.
They realized, painfully, that only someone with martial power on Yi Hui’s level could match that.
They had taken in troops, opened reclaimed fields, raised a force—
and they had done that well.
But commanders were a different matter.
You cannot raise commanders through training alone.
Training can win small fights.
But battles involving hundreds or more inevitably hinge on a commander’s leadership and personal force.
“Right. Then we go in ourselves.
We can’t keep demanding sacrifice from the White Dragon unit alone.”
Gyeongpil shook his head.
“I apologize. I did not do my utmost. We did not win.
It shames me that my failure has even brought us to this meeting.
We will fight to the end.”
Jin Mugwang knew Gyeongpil well.
He knew what the man had done and how he had fought.
They had to accept the reality: two companies could have been wiped out.
“No. You did what you could.
I value you for bringing the troops back alive.
The problem is that the enemy refuses to come where we want them.
We sent the White Dragon unit to lure them, and instead you nearly died.
If we move the infantry-shield formations out onto open ground, they will be ground under enemy hooves.
But we cannot simply wait here forever.
They are waiting for the forces returning from Henan and Hubei.
The river has not thawed yet.
His Majesty kept us here at the cost of tremendous devastation across the continent for one reason—annihilation.
Now speak.
Each of you, lay out your strategy.”
Until the direction was decided, Jin Mugwang listened freely and asked for opinions.
Once it was decided, he listened to no one.
So you had to speak when he told you to speak.
Yi Hui stepped forward first.
“I propose dividing our forces in two.
Give me the infantry-shield formations and the archer units to cover the White Dragon cavalry, and I will strike the enemy.
We will chase them down and annihilate them one by one.”
Yu Junghyeon objected.
He commanded the main army’s center, including the archers.
“The infantry-shield formations cannot march long distances.
If they move, they will be detected and isolated.
Without cavalry support, isolated infantry-shields are doomed—annihilation.
Advancing the infantry-shields into the basin means sacrificing them.
I oppose it.
We must wait here.
Even if the enemy numbers grow, we can use this terrain advantage and annihilate them.”
“That only holds if they come here,” Yi Hui answered.
“If they don’t move, we can’t do it.”
“They must move,” Yu Junghyeon said.
“When the river thaws, they lose the road home.”
“If they refuse to move and keep fortifying over there, our supplies break first.
We will be isolated too.
Gat’rip has been waiting for this argument to begin.”
As their arguments crossed, Jin Mugwang listened in silence, thinking deeply.
The raiders who had once been rushing back to cross the river had stopped.
They had begun to fortify.
They built palisades and lived as though returning did not matter.
If the Han army moved to strike that fortified camp, the enemy would slip through the gap.
Even a pass turned into a killing ground becomes an empty road when no soldiers stand in it.
The barbarians must return.
Yet they were acting as though they did not have to.
Should that be read as desperation.
Or as proof that they truly had another way.
Across the whole continent, there were only a handful of chokepoints that could stop them.
This was the best.
They had sealed the pass with the barbarians in front of them, but if provisioning failed, the blockade would collapse at once.
That was what grain was.
The raiders, after plundering the continent, would have ample food.
The council dragged on.
No conclusion emerged.
Jin Mugwang did not declare an answer.
He simply let his officers argue, and listened—long enough to hear every angle.