The world was a thunder of hooves and a blur of dry, golden grass. Young Kuo clung to the saddle, the rhythm of the gallop a hammer beating an anvil in his bones.
This was not the measured, earth-shaking tread of the infantry. This was the wind. The column of Niu Gao's vanguard was a thousand-legged centipede flowing over the northern plains, a creature of dust and focused hunger.
Kuo rode with the other Riding Medics, a small, tense cluster in the chaotic river of men and horses. His world had shrunk to the sway of his mount, the weight of the leather satchel slapping against his thigh, and the cold knot of terror in his gut.
They rode for three days, stopping only to water horses and choke down strips of leathery dried meat. The landscape was an endless, rolling sea of autumn grass, broken by occasional stands of skeletal trees and the crumbling mud-brick walls of abandoned homesteads.
The air smelled of dust, horse sweat, and a vast, empty loneliness. Sly Liu's scouts were ghosts flitting on the horizon, appearing and vanishing to relay whispers to Niu Gao. The general rode at the head of the column, a block of barely-contained fury, his eyes constantly scanning the empty distances.
On the fourth morning, the scouts brought news. A Jin patrol, an iron wedge of heavy cavalry, was moving across their path, two li to the northeast. Niu Gao didn't hesitate. He didn't avoid; he angled the column to intercept. "We break their teeth here," he growled to his captains, "they won't be between us and the depot at White Stone."
Kuo's first sight of the Jin heavy cavalry stole the air from his lungs. They were not men; they were iron monuments on horseback. Their mounts were monstrous Northern beasts, taller at the shoulder than Kuo's own head, their shaggy coats matted. The riders were encased in lamellar from neck to knee, their conical helmets adorned with wolf tails, their faces hidden behind linked mail coifs.
They carried long, heavy lances couched under their arms, and moved as a single, terrifying entity—a steel-plated fist aimed at the heart of the world. The Song cavalry suddenly looked small, disparate, like sparrows before eagles.
Niu Gao's order was a bark that cut through the drumming hooves. The Song light horse archers, wiry men on swift ponies, broke from the column like a swarm of hornets. They didn't form a line; they encircled, a buzzing, chaotic cloud. Their bows sang, a sound like tearing silk. They didn't aim for the riders' armored bodies, but for the gaps—the horses' faces, their legs, the vulnerable armpits. It was a battle of a thousand stings against a single, crushing blow.
The Jin wedge lowered their lances and charged. The earth shook. The sound was a trembling earthquake, a deep, grinding roar of metal and animal fury.
The Song heavy cavalry, under Niu Gao, didn't meet it. They scattered at the last second, a practiced, drilled disintegration that made the Jin charge plunge into empty air. As the wedge slowed, confused, the Song heavies re-formed on its flanks, hacking at the slower, cumbersome Jin horses with axes and heavy sabers. It was a dance of death—the Jin all power and linear force, the Song all agility and opportunistic cruelty.
Kuo watched, mesmerized and sick, from the rear with the other medics. This was the war Lin Wei had prepared him for: the broken limbs, the arterial sprays. He saw a Jin lancer, his horse bristling with arrows like a porcupine, finally break through the skirmish line.
The man's lance took a Song light horseman in the chest, lifting him from the saddle with a wet, cracking sound and throwing him to the ground like a discarded doll. The man landed, his leg bent backwards at a knee that was never meant to bend.
A cold clarity descended on Kuo. The fear was still there, but it was a quiet hum beneath a louder, drilling command: Go.
He kicked his horse forward, ducking low as a stray arrow hissed past his ear. The battle was a roaring chaos around him, a kaleidoscope of screaming horses, shrieking metal, and guttural shouts. He found the fallen horseman. The man's face was the color of chalk, his eyes wide with a shock so profound it looked like wonder. His right leg was a ruin below the knee.
Kuo slid from his saddle, his hands already moving. The world shrank to the space between his bloody fingers. Stabilize the limb. Check for bleeding. He fumbled with the straps of his satchel, his fingers thick and clumsy. He pulled out the two flat pieces of wood, the leather thongs. He forced them around the grotesquely angled leg, above and below the break. The man screamed, a raw, tearing sound. Kuo tied the thongs, pulled them tight, his own breath coming in ragged gasps.
It was crude. It was brutal. It was the only thing between this man and bleeding out in the dirt. He shoved a wad of linen against a shallow gash on the man's arm, tied it with a strip of cloth, pressed a small, hard opium pill into the man's trembling hand. "The column… will circle back… hold on," he stammered, the words feeling meaningless. He left the man a waterskin, then scrambled back onto his horse, his heart trying to claw its way out of his throat.
He rode on, a scavenger of pain in the harvest of violence. He saw a Jin rider, his magnificent horse dead, pinning his leg. The man was alive, struggling, babbling in a language of panic and pain. He saw Kuo, and for a split second, their eyes met—enemy recognizing enemy, human recognizing human in agony.
Kuo reined in, the conflict a physical pain. Your duty is to the man beside you. The voice was Lin Wei's, clear and certain.
But this man wasn't beside him. He was the reason they were all here. As Kuo hesitated, a Song light horseman galloped past. The rider took in the scene—Kuo stopped, the pinned Jin soldier. Without breaking stride, without a change of expression, the rider leaned down from his saddle. There was a flash of steel, a wet, precise sound, and a line of crimson opened across the Jin soldier's throat.
The rider galloped on, already nocking another arrow. The act was so casual, so utterly devoid of malice or ceremony, that it was more horrifying than any battle rage. It was pest control. Kuo stared, frozen, as the light left the Jin soldier's eyes, the babbling replaced by a final, wet sigh. The first war crime he witnessed wasn't a frenzy; it was policy. Efficient, unthinking, and absolute.
The Jin patrol, bloodied and frustrated, broke off, retreating north. The Song column, panting and exultant, re-formed. Niu Gao didn't pause. "White Stone! Before they warn it!" And the centipede flowed on, leaving the dead and the dying in its churned wake.
They took White Stone as the sun bled into the western hills. The village was a cluster of packed-earth homes behind a low wall, guarding a Jin granary depot. The surprise was near-total. The small garrison died fighting at the gate, brave and futile.
Then came the grey, grinding work. Niu Gao stood in the village square, his voice a whip-crack. "Grain. Weapons. Tools. Leather. Nails. Load the wagons. What the wagons cannot carry, the men carry. What the men cannot carry, BURN. This village feeds the army at Yancheng. It is a Jin weapon. Break it."
The soldiers moved with a grim, methodical efficiency. This wasn't wanton looting; it was systematic denervation. They emptied the granary, the Jin quartermaster's store, the blacksmith's shed. Then they moved into the villagers' own storage pits, their winter seed grain, their hoarded salt and oil. An old man, his face a map of wrinkles and sun, threw himself in front of a soldier dragging a sack of millet from his home. "That is my family's life! For the winter!" he wailed.
The soldier, a young man with tired eyes, didn't curse or hit him. He simply shoved the old man aside with a grunt. "Your winter is a Jin soldier's spring," he muttered, not meeting the old man's eyes, and hauled the sack towards a waiting wagon. The cruelty was in the action, not the intent. It was the instinct of survival, and the numbers were brutally clear: a starving village here might mean a weakened Jin battalion there, which might mean a hundred fewer Song deaths at the siege of Yancheng. The villagers' wails were the sound of that, a chorus of despair that filled the smoky air.
Kuo was ordered to tend to a few villagers caught in the brief fight. He cleaned a burn on a woman's hand where a cooking pot had spilled. He stitched a shallow cut on a boy's arm from flying splinters. They flinched from his touch, their eyes wide with a terror that was for him, for the green cord on his shoulder, for the uniform he wore. He was part of the tempest that had shattered their world. His medicines were a bitter joke.
As the column finally pulled out, White Stone glowing like an angry coal in the twilight, Kuo rode in a numb silence. The wind carried the scent of smoke and roasted grain. His medical satchel was lighter. He had used his supplies. But it felt immeasurably heavier. It now held the weight of the splinted leg, the memory of the slit throat, the sound of the old man's weeping, and the feel of the boy's flinch.
He rode next to the veteran light horseman who had cut the Jin soldier's throat. The man, called Lao, chewed on a stalk of grass, his face serene.
"The old man… his grain…" Kuo ventured, the words ash in his mouth.
Lao spat. "His grain in a Jin belly becomes Jin shit on a Song shield at Yancheng," he said, his voice flat. "You save our boys, Kuo. That's your work. Their boys, their grain… that's the war's work. The war doesn't have a conscience. Don't you grow one either. It'll get you killed, or it'll break you." He glanced at Kuo. "You did good back there. Quick with the splint. He might live."
The praise felt like a condemnation. The column pushed on into the deepening dusk, a shadow swallowed by the vast, uncaring plain. Young Kuo looked at his hands, stained with dirt and other men's blood. They no longer trembled. They were steady, cold.
The righteous cause of the Generalissimo was a tale told around campfires a world away. Here, in the forge of the hammer, there was only the fire, the anvil, and the relentless, deafening beat. And he was just another piece of metal, being shaped into something hard, and sharp, and terribly, terribly useful.