The world dissolved into a screaming, metallic liquid. The arrival of Niu Gao's cavalry did not bring salvation; it brought a different order of chaos. The neat, brutal pressure of the siege on the hospital compound exploded outwards.
Jin soldiers, who a moment before had been the hunters, now found themselves caught between the anvil of the desperate defenders and the hammer of a thousand screaming horsemen descending from the dawn.
Order evaporated. It was a melee, a vast, churning butcher's yard where banners meant nothing and survival was a matter of inches and instinct.
Lin Wei's world shrunk to a ten-pace circle of blood-slicked mud. He was no longer a commander. He was a primal function: find the wound, stop the bleeding, move. The system in his mind was a frantic, scrolling ticker of trauma:
"[Laceration: femoral artery. Apply direct pressure.]"
"[Puncture: lower lung. Seal wound. Evacuate.]"
"[Amputation: traumatic, below knee. Tourniquet. Opium.]"
He operated in a crouching run, his medical bag a weight he barely felt.
He found a Song infantryman pinned under a dead Jin horse, his leg shattered. As Lin Wei knelt to assess, a Jin skirmisher, separated from his unit, lunged at them with a short stabbing spear.
There was no time for fear. Lin Wei's body moved on a fusion of memory and the system's cold logic. He didn't rise to meet the charge; he dropped lower, letting the spear hiss over his head. As the man's weight carried him forward, off-balance, Lin Wei came up inside his guard.
His left hand grabbed the man's spear arm, his right—holding not a weapon, but a long, steel wound probe—drove upwards, not for the heart, but in a sharp, precise jab under the rim of the man's leather armor, into the soft triangle of the supraclavicular fossa. It was the spot for a subclavian line.
The steel point found the subclavian artery. The Jin soldier made a wet, gurgling sound, his eyes wide with surprise, and collapsed, bright arterial blood fountaining in short, weakening spurts. Lin Wei didn't watch him die. He was already turning back to the pinned soldier, slicing through trousers to expose the mess of bone and meat below the knee.
He saved the soldier, applied a tourniquet, and dragged him behind a pile of corpses. As he straightened, a fleeing Jin horseman rode down a young medic—a boy who had joined from a liberated village, who had a gift for compounding poultices.
The horse's hoof caught him in the back with a sound like a green branch snapping. Lin Wei reached him as the last light faded from his eyes. Rage, white and absolute, flooded the cold clinical space in his mind. He stood up, a bloody probe in one hand, a scalpel flashed into the other from his belt. He was a healer standing in a river of death, and the river was rising.
It was then that he saw the vortex of violence at the center of the swirling fight. A space had cleared around two men. On one side, Ox Li. He was a force of mangled nature. Blood streamed from the gash on his scalp, painting half his face into a crimson mask. His armor was broken in a dozen places. He breathed in ragged, roaring gulps, his executioner's blade held low, its edge notched and dark.
Facing him was Wanyan Wulu, the Iron Prince. He was Ox Li's antithesis. Where Ox was mountainous and brutal, Wulu was a sculpture of lethal elegance. His armor was blued steel, etched with fine, coiling serpents, fitted to his lean, powerful frame like a second skin.
His helmet was a fierce, snarling wolf's head, the gilt fangs framing a face of cold, arrogant beauty, now contorted with fury. He held a zhanmadao, a long, slightly curved single-handed sword, its surface a swirling pattern of star-metal, light on his fingers. He moved with a panther's grace, untouched, unblemished by the mud and gore around him.
They clashed. It was not a duel of skill, but a collision of worlds. Ox Li swung his massive blade in a great, sweeping arc meant to cleave horse and man. Wulu did not block. He flowed inside the arc, his own blade a silver flicker that scored a deep line across Ox Li's armored side.
Ox Li grunted, twisted, and brought the pommel of his own weapon around in a shocking, backhand blow that caught Wulu's helmet with a deafening clang. The Jin prince staggered, the beautiful wolf's head dented.
They separated, circled. Wulu attacked now, a blur of precision. Thrust to the throat, deflected by a sweep of Ox's vambrace. A low cut at the legs, leapt over. He was probing, searching for the weakness behind the brute strength. He found it. As Ox Li heaved his blade for another crushing overhead strike, Wulu darted forward, inside the killing arc.
His sword, held reversed in a master's grip, slammed its hilt into Ox Li's wounded side, then whipped around in the same motion, the blade aiming for the big man's exposed neck.
There was no honor. There was survival. Lin Wei was already moving. He didn't shout, didn't throw a weapon. He acted as a surgeon creating a distraction.
As Wulu committed to the beheading strike, Lin Wei, from ten feet away, hurled not a knife, but a heavy glass bottle of distilled alcohol he'd snatched from his bag. It wasn't aimed at the prince. It was aimed at the ground between them.
The bottle shattered at Wulu's feet, drenching his boots and the mud in pure, reeking spirits. The sudden explosion of glass and the unfamiliar, shocking smell caused the prince's perfect strike to hitch, just for a fraction of a second. His head turned, a micro-glance of sheer, incredulous annoyance at this bizarre, un-martial interruption.
It was all Ox Li needed. He didn't try to recover his own swing. He dropped his massive blade, let it fall into the mud. And as Wulu's killing stroke completed its arc, cutting a deep, awful groove across Ox Li's collarbone instead of his neck, Ox Li's two hands, each the size of a roasting platter, shot out.
One clamped onto the wrist of Wulu's sword arm with a crunch of breaking vambrace. The other seized the prince by the throat, under the rim of the beautiful, dented helmet.
For a second, the two titans stood locked, a grotesque parody of an embrace. Wulu's eyes, inches from Ox Li's bloody face, were wide, not with fear, but with a kind of offended fury. Ox Li's face held no expression at all. Then he squeezed, and twisted.
The sound was a wet, conclusive pop, like a giant green bamboo stalk breaking. Wulu's body went limp. Ox Li held him for a second longer, then dropped him to the mud like a discarded sack. The light faded from the eyes of the Iron Prince, extinguished not by a noble warrior's strike, but by the brutal, pragmatic strength of a convict who had survived a hundred hells.
Ox Li swayed, then fell to one knee, his hand going to the dreadful wound on his side. The fight went out of the Jin soldiers who witnessed it. Their prince, their invincible symbol, was dead in the mud, killed by a monster. A great, shuddering wail went up from their ranks, and the cohesion of the relief army shattered completely.
From the raised observation platform of Yang Zaixing's command post, Censor Zhao watched the distant carnage at the hospital through a long, jade-handled eyeglass. He saw the cavalry hit, the melee, the tiny, vivid moment of the duel.
He saw the Jin banner, the one with the silver serpent on a black field, waver, and then fall, disappearing into the churning mass. He did not need to see the body to know what it meant.
He slowly panned the glass to the walls of Yancheng. For an hour, the city had been still, a silent audience to the drama on the plain. But as Wulu's banner fell, a change came over the fortress.
It was not a sound he heard first, but a stillness that deepened. Then, movement. Figures on the walls, not running to man the defenses, but gathering, pointing. A collective sagging, as if the very stones of the ramparts had lost their will.
He watched as, with a slowness that was itself a form of screaming, the great iron-banded gates of Yancheng's main sally port began to creak inward. Not a fighting sortie. A delegation. Elders in plain robes. A Jin officer, his armor stripped of its rank insignia, carrying not a banner of war, but a simple white sheet tied to a spear. They walked out onto the blood-soaked plain between the city and the Song lines, towards Yang Zaixing's position.
The city was surrendering. Not to a prolonged starvation, not to a final, heroic assault, but to the sight of their last hope being strangled in the mud a mile away.
A slow, cold smile touched Censor Zhao's lips. He lowered the eyeglass and turned to the scribe who stood, as ever, at his elbow, ink-stone ready.
"The report," Zhao said, his voice a dry, satisfied whisper. "Final addendum on the Yancheng action."
The scribe dipped his brush.
Zhao began, his eyes gazing out at the victorious, grieving plain.
"While the surrender of the city is a welcome development, it is crucial to contextualize its manner. The garrison's will broke not under the relentless, honorable pressure of General Yang's disciplined siegecraft, but upon witnessing the disorder and gratuitous barbarity of the engagement on the plain. The command of General Niu, ever volatile, precipitated a general melee, sacrificing Song lives in a reckless display. The so-called 'Field Hospital,' by virtue of its conspicuous and poorly defensible positioning, became a vortex for this chaos, its defenders—medical personnel and wounded alike—slaughtered in shocking numbers due to this lack of foresight."
He paused, watching the white flag bob closer.
"The enemy commander, Prince Wulu, fell not in a structured engagement, but in a ragged brawl, his death owed more to the brute intervention of a convict enforcer than to any military stratagem. This victory, therefore, however tactically significant, is spiritually hollow. It speaks not of the uplifted, righteous might of the Imperial Song, but of the ascendance of its most base, ungovernable, and merciless elements. The price of Yancheng, etched in the blood of healers and the disgrace of a brawl, will be a stain upon the campaign's honor, and a dangerous precedent for campaigns to come."
He gave a slight nod. The scribe's brush flew, capturing the poison, transforming a hard-won, complex victory into a parable of corruption and doom.
The truth of the battle—the sacrifice, the desperation, the saved lives, the broken prince—was already being buried under the elegant, murderous calligraphy of politics. The war for the empire's soul was being lost in a command tent, even as it was won on the field outside.