The Stone Sentinel Ford was not a place for grand, sweeping heroics. It was a transaction, a brutal piece of arithmetic written in cold water and slick stone.
The river here was wide, shallow, and deceitful, its bed a chaos of rounded boulders hidden beneath a churning, grey-green rush. On the northern bank, the Jin had built a low blockhouse of timber and fieldstone, flanked by two earthen archer platforms. It was not a fortress; it was a toll booth. A price to be paid in blood for passage north.
In the pre-dawn gloom, the Song army assembled on the southern bank like a great, shadowy beast rousing itself.
But to Commander Xin's eye, trained on the frontier, the beast moved wrong. Its breath hitched. Its limbs seemed stiff, uncoordinated.
The veteran regiments, the ones whose very silence had been a weapon, were now islands in a sea of nervous motion. Around them, the green troops from the southern garrisons—the "replacements"—fidgeted, checked and re-checked buckles that didn't need checking, their eyes too wide, their whispers too loud. The air, which should have been sharp with focused intent, tasted of stale fear and damp wool.
From a low hill, Yue Fei watched, a statue carved from the night itself. Beside him, Yang Zaixing gave the final, quiet orders to the messengers. The plan was simple, solid. A classic raid, refined over a hundred battles.
The infantry—Yang Zaixing's army—would form a testudo, a great moving shield-wall, and cross at the narrowest point, drawing the Jin fire. Concealed by a smoke screen from the two forward-deployed Fire Chariots, they would close the distance. Once engaged, Niu Gao's cavalry would ford the river a half-mile upstream, where the bank was lower, and sweep down the Jin flank.
It was a good plan. It required timing, discipline, and nerve.
The sun breached the horizon, a bloody slit in the east. A single Song horn blew, a long, mournful note that was swallowed by the river's roar.
The front ranks of the shield wall, a mix of veterans and green troops, stepped into the current. The cold was a physical shock, punching the breath from men's lungs.
The water, thigh-deep, pulled at their legs. The veterans, their faces set in masks of grim endurance, pushed forward, shields locked, a wall of painted leather and determined flesh. The new men among them gasped, stumbled on the hidden stones. The wall's cohesion, that delicate, invisible fabric of trust, began to fray at the edges.
From the blockhouse, a Jin officer barked an order.
The first volley of arrows was a black sigh against the dawn sky. They fell not with a whistle, but with a sound like ripping canvas. Thock-thock-thud-thwack. They hammered into shields, sank into the water, and found flesh. A young soldier two men down from Commander Xin gave a soft, surprised grunt as an arrow punched through the rim of his shield and into his cheek. He didn't scream; he made a wet, bubbling sound and fell sideways, dragging the man next to him off balance. The hole in the wall was momentary, but it was a crack.
"CLOSE UP! FORWARD!" Xin bellowed, his voice raw. The wall lurched onward. But the advance was slow, so slow. The water was a clinging enemy. The new men, terrified of the arrows, of the cold, of the deafening noise, were pushing too close to the veterans, crowding them, making the formation a packed, stumbling mob rather than a moving fortress.
The order for the smoke screen came. The two Fire Chariots, monstrous beetles on the bank, vented their pressurized breath. With a deep, liquid whoosh, twin jets of thick, black, oily smoke billowed out, rolling across the river's surface. The idea was to blind the Jin archers.
The reality was a chaos, delivered to the wrong side.
The wind, capricious and mocking, shifted. Instead of rolling north, the great cloud of smoke swirled, then blew back south, enveloping the advancing Song infantry. One moment they were in clear, cold dawn. The next, they were in a choking, blinding hell.
The world vanished into acrid, stinging grey. Men coughed, retched, their eyes streaming. The shield wall, a thing of visual alignment, disintegrated. Formation was memory. It was every man blind, lost, and alone in the freezing water.
"HOLD THE LINE! HOLD, DAMN YOU!" Xin roared, but his voice was lost in the cacophony of coughs and panicked shouts. He heard the distinct, terrible sound of metal on wood—the Jin, seizing their chance, were launching a sortie from the blockhouse, wading into the smoke to kill the blinded, disoriented Song where they stood.
Upstream, Niu Gao watched the smoke blow backwards and cursed with a creativity that would have shocked a drill sergeant. His force, five thousand cavalry, waited restless in the cover of a willow grove. His new chief scout, a earnest but hopelessly inexperienced young man from a literary family, had reported the ford here "easily passable."
It was not. The riverbed was a hell of sucking mud and deep, unseen holes. The first troop of horses to enter sank to their bellies, panicking, throwing riders. Precious minutes bled away as they fought to extract themselves and find a new crossing point a hundred yards further up. The flanking maneuver, meant to be a swift, decisive strike, was now a bogged-down, frantic struggle. Niu Gao could hear the sounds of the main battle—the screams, the clash of metal—growing more desperate. The hammer was stuck in the mud.
What followed was not a battle. It was a massacre in slow motion. Isolated clumps of Song infantry, veterans and green boys alike, fought brutal, stumbling duels in the chest-deep water. Men slipped on stones and were cut down. Others, turned around in the smoke, fought their own comrades. The Jin sortie, knowing the ground, moved like water-spiders, striking and fading back into the murk.
Commander Xin found himself back-to-back with a veteran sergeant, a man missing two fingers, fending off three Jin soldiers. They fought with the ruthless way of those who have done this too many times. Parry, kill. Shove, stab. But for every veteran holding firm, there were three new soldiers dying in confused terror, their expensive southern armor doing nothing to stop a blade in the kidney or a spear in the throat.
The battle was won by weight, and by the eventual, belated arrival of Niu Gao's cavalry. They finally found a crossing and hit the Jin flank, but the fury of their charge was blunted by fatigue and frustration. They cut down the Jin sortie and overran the blockhouse, but the enemy had already exacted their toll.
The sun was fully up, the smoke dissipated, when the last Jin was killed. The river at the ford ran pink, then red. Bodies lay tangled in the current, snagged on rocks, draped over the riverbank like discarded rags. The sound was the rushing water, undercut by the low, agonized moaning of hundreds of wounded men.
Lin Wei's forward medical station, set up in a copse of trees two hundred paces from the bloodied bank, was overrun in minutes.
The casualties came in a screaming, shivering, bleeding tide. The wounds were a testament to the battle's nature. Not clean sword cuts from a duel, but the ugly, pragmatic injuries of a failed formation: multiple arrow wounds from men who'd dropped their shields, crushing injuries from trampling in the panic, ghastly lacerations from falling on spear points, faces smashed by river stones, and a half-dozen men blue-lipped and still from drowning.
He moved with a cold, frantic efficiency, the system in his mind scrolling a relentless, damning list.
"[Laceration: subclavian artery. Immediate pressure.]"
"[Compound fracture: tib/fib. Splint, morphia.]"
"[Pulmonary edema: near-drowning. Drain, elevate.]"
But behind the clinical directives, another analysis ran, a quiet, seething calculation comparing the intake to projected figures from past, similar engagements. The numbers were skewing wildly, horribly wrong.
He saw a boy, no older than sixteen, with an arrow through his foot, sobbing for his mother. He saw a veteran with a shattered jaw trying to give orders through a mouthful of blood. He worked on a young soldier with a belly wound, his intestines a grey-pink coil in the freezing water. The man's eyes held the same profound, betrayed confusion Lin Wei had seen in Ox Li's hidden cut. Why am I dying here? This wasn't how it was supposed to be.
For hours, it did not stop. The medical teams, their green sashes now spattered crimson, worked until their hands cramped and their minds went numb.
They ran out of clean linen first, then bandages, then the strong wine. They started using strips torn from the dead's clothing, boiling water in helmets over campfires.
As the afternoon light began to fail, the flood of wounded slowed to a trickle. The dead were being pulled from the river. Lin Wei stood, his back against a tree, his arms leaden to the shoulders. He closed his eyes, and the system presented its final, sterile verdict on the Battle of Stone Sentinel Ford.
"[STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT: SONG VICTORY (OBJECTIVE SECURED).]"
"[TACTICAL ANALYSIS: EXECUTION - CATASTROPHIC. COORDINATION FAILURE. UNIT INCOHESION CRITICAL.]"
"[CASUALTY REPORT: 3056. BREAKDOWN: 683 KIA, 2373 WIA (827 CRITICAL).]"
"[PROJECTED CASUALTIES WITH PRE-ROTATION VETERAN COHESION & EXPERIENCED SUPPORT UNITS: 600-720.]"
"[EFFICIENCY LOSS: 463%. PRIMARY CAUSAL FACTORS: POOR SMOKE DEPLOYMENT (WIND), RECRUIT PANIC, CAVALRY DELAY (SCOUT ERROR).]"
Four hundred and sixty-three percent less efficient. The number hung in his mind, a epitaph carved in ice for the men cooling in the river mud. This was the victory the Logistical Oversight Commission had bought. A ford paid for with five times the blood it was worth.
In the command tent, the air was thick with the smell of damp wool, blood, and a fury so profound it had no sound. Niu Gao stood like a thundercloud, water still dripping from his armor. "My scouts," he snarled, the words barely intelligible. "They gave me a map drawn by a blind poet! We wallowed in shit while our boys were butchered!"
Yang Zaixing's report was terse. "The ford is ours. The blockhouse is burned. The cost…" He did not finish. He placed the preliminary tally on the table. The number of casualties seemed to glow in the lamplight.
Commander Xin, his face a mask of river mud and another man's blood, said nothing. He stared at the map, at the simple black line denoting the river. He saw the faces of the veterans from his old battalion unit—the ones who had been rotated away. He saw where they would have stood in the shield wall, holding the line, steadying the new men. They weren't there. And so the line had broken.
Yue Fei stood at the head of the table. He had not taken off his helmet. He looked at the number. He looked at his generals—the furious, the grim, the broken.
The greatest military mind of his age saw the equation with perfect, agonizing clarity. The perfect, balanced weapon he had forged had been taken from his hands, replaced with a clumsy, rusted tool. And he had been forced to watch as it was used to bludgeon its way to a win, splintering itself in the process.
His loyalty to the throne was the core of him, the iron rod of his spine. It was the reason his mother had tattooed the characters on his back. And now, that same loyalty had compelled him to obey the orders that had made this day's slaughter inevitable. The conflict in his eyes was a silent, tectonic shifting. He did not speak. He simply gave a single, minute nod, a general accepting a report. The victory. The cost. He accepted it all. The weight of it seemed to press him down into the very earth.
As the generals filed out into the twilight, the silence in the tent was heavier than any defeat. The ford was won. The road north was open. And the army that would march down it was a wounded, demoralized ghost of what it had been just a month before.
Lin Wei was cleaning his instruments in a basin of pink-tinged water when Sly Liu found him. The thief's usual insouciance was gone, scraped away by a cold fear. He didn't speak. He just jerked his head towards the deeper darkness beyond the medical tents.
In the lee of a supply wagon, Liu's words came in a frantic whisper. "The Commission's hounds, Doc. Not just clerks. Soldiers. They've been asking questions in Willow Market. They found the warehouse. The one with the sulphur. The linen. They're moving at dawn to seize it all. To arrest the merchant. My man got word out just before they locked the town down."
Lin Wei's hands, scrubbing at a stubborn bloodstain on a scalpel, went still. The sulphur was for purifying the camp's water supply, which was already turning foul. The linen was for the hundreds of new wounded shivering in the tents behind him. Without it, gangrene and fever would finish what the Jin arrows had started.
"If they get the shipment, we're cut off," Liu hissed. "And if they interrogate the merchant… he has names. He knows the routes. He knows me."
In the dark, Lin Wei's mind, exhausted from hours of triage, shifted gears with a cold, metallic click. The battlefield of wounds and sepsis was receding. A new battlefield emerged, one of shadows, secrets, and knives in the dark. The directive, which had been tallying the dead, wiped its slate clean and presented a new, stark imperative.
"[IMMEDIATE THREAT: COVERT SUPPLY CHAIN COMPROMISE.]"
"[ASSETS AT RISK: MEDICAL SUPPLIES (CRITICAL), PERSONNEL (Sly Liu, NETWORK).]"
"[REQUIRED ACTION: SANITIZE OR RETRIEVE ASSETS BEFORE DAWN.]"
"[MISSION PARAMETERS: DENIABILITY ABSOLUTE. HOSTILE FORCES: IMPERIAL COMMISSION SECURITY.]"
He looked from the bloody scalpel in his hand to Sly Liu's terrified face in the gloom. The arithmetic was simple, brutal, and left no room for the healer's hesitations. The Ford of Broken Men had been a disaster. The night's work would be a crime. He gave a single, sharp nod.
"Get Ox Li. And Young Kuo. Meet me at the eastern picket line. One hour. Bring rope, and a cart that can't be traced."