The world before dawn was a bowl of cold, grey silence. The last of the stars bled away, leaving a sky the color of a week-old bruise.
In the hospital compound, the only sounds were the whisper of the wind over the barricades and the low, pained breathing of a thousand men trying not to scream. The air smelled of turned earth, woodsmoke, and the sharp, coppery scent of fear-sweat.
Lin Wei stood on the inner parapet, a walkway of packed dirt behind the wagon-wall. His hands were still. His mind was a silent, screaming room where a single line of text glowed:
"[DEFENSIVE READINESS: MAXIMAL. COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS OF PERSONNEL: 11%. ESTIMATED TIME TO PERIMETER FAILURE UNDER DETERMINED ASSAULT: 20-45 MINUTES.]"
The numbers were a death sentence, read aloud in the sterile voice of a clerk.
Around him, the defenders were a study in controlled terror. The four hundred infantrymen, green troops from a southern garrison, clutched their spears, their knuckles white.
Behind them, lining the barricade, stood the medics and walking wounded. They held an absurd arsenal: kitchen knives lashed to poles, sharpened stakes, the heavy mallets used to drive surgical tent pegs.
Ox Li stood before the main gate, a mountain of scarred muscle and polished iron. He held not his axe, but a massive, double-headed executioner's blade taken from a Jin armory weeks ago. He did not move. He was a statue of coming violence.
The Jin arrived with the first bloody slit of sun on the horizon. They did not announce themselves with shouts or drums. They coalesced out of the gloom to the northeast, a dark line that thickened into a wall, and then into an army.
They halted just beyond the range of a Song composite bow. A forest of vertical lances, a sea of round shields painted with snarling wolf heads. At their center, a cluster of banners, and before them, on a horse the color of iron slag, sat a man in armor that gleamed dully even in the weak light. Wanyan Wulu. The Iron Prince. He surveyed the pathetic fortifications, the makeshift barricade, the frightened faces peering over the top. He did not smile. He simply raised a hand.
The storm broke.
A deep, resonant BOOM-BOOM-BOOM of massive war drums shattered the silence.
The moment the sound hit, the sky over the compound darkened. A hissing cloud of Jin arrows rose, arched, and fell. The air became a lattice of death. "SHIELDS! DOWN!" Lin Wei roared, his voice raw. Men ducked behind the wagon walls, huddled under anything that would cover them. The arrows fell with a sound like hail on a tile roof—thock-thock-thud—into wood, into earth, and with wet, terrible punctures, into flesh. The first screams began.
Under the arrow-storm, the Jin infantry moved. Not a wild charge, but a steady, lock-step advance. A wedge of heavy troops, shields interlocked, moved toward the eastern stretch of the barricade, the weakest point where the wagons were oldest. Behind them came men with ropes and grapnels, and a team dragging a freshly cut pine trunk—a battering ram.
"EAST WALL! READY!" Ox Li's bellow cut through the din. The green infantry shuffled to meet the threat. Lin Wei grabbed his medical bag and ran along the inner walkway, crouching low. An arrow hissed past his ear and stuck, quivering, in a sack of rice beside him.
The Jin wedge hit the barricade. The sound was a sickening crunch of wood and a unified shout of impact. The wagons shuddered. Grapnels sailed over, claws biting deep into the timber. Ropes went taut. From behind the shield wall, Jin archers picked off any defender who rose to cut the ropes.
"FIRE POTS! NOW!" Lin Wei yelled.
Medics along the wall lifted the ceramic jugs of alcohol-soaked rags, lit the fuses with trembling hands from a sheltered brazier, and hurled them over. They shattered against the locked Jin shields. Fire splashed and clung, spreading over the treated leather and wood. Men screamed, their formation buckling as they beat at the flames. The advance stalled for a precious minute. The stench of burning hair and cooking flesh mixed with the dust.
But there were too many. A grapnel held. A team of Jin soldiers heaved, and with a groaning shriek of tormented nails, a whole section of the eastern wagon-wall tore free and toppled inward, crushing two medics beneath it.
The perimeter was breached.
A roar went up from the Jin. The shield wall dissolved into a flood of individual killers pouring through the gap. The green Song infantry met them. The battle disintegrated into a hundred desperate, shrieking duels in the narrow space. Lin Wei's world collapsed to the three points: the man in front of him, the wound, the next second of life.
He saw a young infantryman take a spear in the belly. He dragged the boy back by his collar, behind the scant cover of an overturned water trough. The boy was gutted, his eyes wide with a horror that was more intellectual than physical.
He knew.
Lin Wei slapped a thick pad of linen on the wound, applying crushing pressure, but the blood welled up hot and relentless around his fingers. It was futile. The boy's hand grabbed his wrist, a surprisingly strong grip. He shook his head once, a tiny motion. His lips formed a word: Go. Lin Wei met his eyes, nodded, released the pressure, and scrambled away as a Jin soldier vaulted the trough, his sword seeking the next target.
He moved like a ghost through the chaos, a healer in a slaughterhouse. He bound a slashed arm, yanked a man with a leg wound behind a supply cart. He saw a young medic—the girl who had been sharpening stakes, her name was Mei—standing frozen as a Jin soldier charged her.
She held her scalpel before her like a holy symbol. The soldier batted it aside and ran her through with a casual, thrusting motion. She looked down at the blade in her chest, her face a mask of pure, uncomprehending surprise, and then folded to the ground. The soldier stepped over her, already hunting his next kill.
The retreat was a fighting rout. The compound was overrun. The defenders fell back, step by bloody step, toward the heart—the great central surgical tent and the command post. The directive screamed updates:
"[PERIMETER BREACHED. DEFENSIVE PHASE TERMINATED. PERSONNEL: 38% EFFECTIVE. GROUND: 65% LOST.]"
The Jin, sensing the end, pushed harder. They weren't just killing soldiers now. They burst into the peripheral recovery tents. The sounds that emerged were not the clash of arms, but short, wet cries and the thick, chopping sounds of butchery. They were killing the wounded in their beds.
Rage, cold and absolute, washed through Lin Wei's terror. This was not war. This was sacrilege.
He found himself running not away, but toward a tent where screams erupted. He burst inside. A Jin soldier was standing over a patient, his sword raised. Lin Wei didn't think. He launched himself, not as a fighter, but as a projectile. He hit the man low, driving his shoulder into his kidneys. They went down in a tangle. The soldier was stronger, heavier. He rolled, pinning Lin Wei, his hands going for his throat.
Lin Wei's hand found the scalpel in his belt. He didn't stab. He drew. A single, precise, lateral slash across the exposed throat where the helmet's leather aventail met the skin. It was the motion he used to make an incision for a tracheotomy. The soldier's eyes bulged. A hot gout of blood soaked Lin Wei's chest and face.
The man thrashed once and went still. Lin Wei lay there for a second, the metallic taste of the man's life in his mouth, the weight of the corpse on him. Then he shoved it aside, vomited once, and staggered to his feet.
He stumbled out of the tent. The scene was hell's final antechamber. Maybe thirty defenders were left, backs to the great surgical tent, forming a ragged, bleeding half-circle. Ox Li stood at the center, a demon carved from blood and fury.
He'd lost his helmet. A deep gash on his scalp painted half his face crimson. But he still stood, he still swung the massive blade, and Jin soldiers died in arcs around him.
Lin Wei pushed through to stand beside him. The Jin tightened the circle, a noose of steel and hatred. He could see Wanyan Wulu now, closer, observing the final squeeze with the detached interest of a man watching dogs fight. The directive's final calculation burned:
"[PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL: <1%. ESTIMATED TIME TO ANNIHILATION: 3 MINUTES.]"
Lin Wei drew a breath. This was it. He would die here, in the mud, covered in blood, having failed. He opened his mouth to give the order for a final, screaming charge—to die on their feet, blades in hand.
But the order never came.
A new sound cut through the din. Not the deep boom of Jin drums. A sharper, brighter, more urgent sound. Horns. Song cavalry horns. But they did not come from the west, from the direction of Yang Zaixing's siege camp. They came from the east, from the belly of the rising sun itself, from the rear of the Jin army.
The sound was followed by a trembling in the earth. A deep, growing thunder that was not the synchronized tread of infantry, but the chaotic, world-ending roar of ten thousand hooves hammering the plain at a full, desperate gallop.
On the eastern horizon, a line appeared. Not the ordered ranks of the Jin, but a flowing, boiling, dust-churning tide of motion. At its tip, a banner snapped in the wind of its own passage—a field of crude green, emblazoned with the snarling, tusked head of a wild boar.
Niu Gao.
The Jin assault on the compound froze. The triumphant roars died in their throats. Officers turned, their shouts changing from commands to cries of alarm. The noose around the hospital slackened, confusion rippling through the Iron Prince's perfect ranks.
Lin Wei stood, blood dripping from his chin, and stared past the bewildered faces of the enemy. He watched the dust cloud of vengeance descend upon the army that had come to erase him from the earth. The directive in his mind, which had been a scroll of death, flickered. The numbers, static for so long, began to change. They tumbled upward, not in a trickle, but in a flood.
"[EXTERNAL CAVALRY CONTACT DETECTED. SOURCE: FRIENDLY. JIN FORCE REACTION: DISORIENTED. TACTICAL ADVANTAGE SHIFTING.]"
"[PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL RECALCULATING…]"
"[15%…]"
"[33%…]"
"[58%…]"
"[71%…]"
The hammer had not swung for the anvil. It had swung for the other hammer. And it had arrived in the last second of the last breath of the world.