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(A/N: my Skyrim have been unblocked so everyone can go read it now, thanks for the patience and sorry for the inconveniences!)
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The revelation struck the tent with the force of a quiet thunderclap. Sima Yi's eyebrows arched minutely, the greatest sign of surprise he ever allowed. Chen Deng and Zang Hong exchanged a look of dawning comprehension. This was not the short term thinking of a warlord, but the long range planning of a true sovereign, a builder of civilizations.
A slow smile spread across Pang Tong's face. "So… the demolition is not an expense. It is the first, necessary step of construction. We are not destroying a wall. We are clearing the site for Your Majesty's new vision."
Lie Fan gave a single, firm nod. "Precisely. Therefore, Zhongda's suggestion aligns perfectly. The damage is irrelevant to my ultimate goal. In fact, it hastens it. We clear the old, inefficient structure to make way for the new."
He turned his full attention back to Sima Yi. "The left flank. Make it disappear. I want a breach so wide Cao Cao will see his doom staring back at him through the dust. I want this siege concluded in three days. Four at the absolute maximum. The race for Chang'An will not be lost dithering over masonry."
The decision was made. It was audacious, brutal, and forward thinking all at once. The orders, once given, spread through the Hengyuan camp not as a call to battle, but as a call to orchestrated destruction.
The night became a frenzy of purposeful activity. Ammunition wagons that had been rationing their loads now ran continuously, a river of stone and iron flowing to the artillery lines.
Engineers checked and re checked their weapons, calculating trajectories for a saturation bombardment the likes of which had only been seen in the war's opening hell.
Across the field, in the broken belly of Tong Pass, the Wei soldiers sensed a change. The sporadic picket fire from Hengyuan archers ceased. An unusual, focused quiet settled over the enemy camp, broken only by the distant, metallic sounds of industry.
It was a silence more threatening than any war drum. Xiahou Dun, his face grim in the torchlight, toured the defenses, his one eye missing nothing. He ordered extra vigilance, but the order felt hollow. What vigilance could stand against what they all felt coming?
Dawn arrived not with a gentle light, but with a single, stark signal from the Hengyuan command platform: Sima Yi's raised white banner.
Then, the world dissolved into sound and fury.
It was not an attack, it was an eradication. Every piece of artillery on the Hengyuan left flank fired in a synchronized, continuous torrent.
The cannonade was not a series of explosions but a single, rolling, cataclysmic ROAR that blotted out all other sensation. The ground trembled incessantly. The air itself became a solid wall of concussion, battering the defenders physically and spiritually.
On the targeted left wall of Tong Pass, there was no longer a battlements, no soldiers, no structure, there was only a continuous, erupting geyser of shattered stone, pulverized masonry, and dense, choking dust. The individual impacts of cannonballs and trebuchet stones were lost in the overarching, godlike wrath of the barrage.
Within Tong Pass, panic of a primal, unstoppable kind took hold. Men dropped their weapons to clutch their heads, screaming soundlessly into the maelstrom. The carefully constructed makeshift barriers were splintered to kindling.
Sections of the wall that had withstood days of punishment simply ceased to exist, slumping inward in great, grinding collapses. The sheer volume of noise and vibration was a weapon in itself, disorienting, nauseating, breaking the will as surely as the stones were breaking.
The bombardment did not cease for what felt like an eternity. It was a deliberate, calculated expenditure of power, a statement written in fire and thunder. When it finally stopped, the sudden silence was a shock almost as violent as the noise had been. It was a ringing, hollow void, heavy with dread.
As the dust and smoke began to reluctantly drift away on the morning breeze, the result of Sima Yi's "suggestion" was revealed.
A yawning, monstrous breach gaped in the left wall of Tong Pass. It was not a clean hole, but a chaotic, sloping avalanche of rubble two hundred feet wide, a crude, brutal ramp leading directly from the battlefield into the heart of the fortress.
The walls on either side leaned drunkenly, stripped and skeletal. Through the dust, one could see the interior courtyards, the stunned faces of surviving defenders, and the pathways leading to the heart of the Pass.
In that ringing, pregnant silence, before any orders could be shouted, Lie Fan moved.
He did not look back to rally his troops. He did not wait for formations. He simply pointed the blade of his halberd, at the heart of the newly made breach, and began to walk forward. His pace was deliberate, inevitable.
Then it quickened to a jog, then a run. It was the terrifying advance of an avalanche given human form. His Yellow Ghost bodyguards and his marshalls, Zhang Liao, Huang Zhong, and Taishi Ci, exploded into motion beside and behind him, not to protect him, but to be part of the tidal wave he had become.
They crossed the shattered ground, now littered with fresh debris from the wall, and ascended the rubble ramp. Lie Fan moved with preternatural grace over the unstable footing, his enhanced senses and strength making the treacherous slope a mere pathway. At the crest, a knot of Wei soldiers, perhaps the bravest or most stunned, had gathered, a last, thin shield wall forming amidst the ruins.
They lasted for less than a heartbeat. Lie Fan's halberd moved in a blur. A sweep shattered shields and bones. A reverse stroke cleared a crimson path. He stepped through the wreckage of men and metal, not as a conqueror breaking a line, but as a force of nature passing through a minor obstruction.
His guards and generals poured through the gap he created, their war cries now filling the silence, turning the breach from a scar into a flooded artery of Hengyuan steel.
Inside the command tent of Wei, buried in the heart of the shuddering fortress, the air was thick with the smell of dust, fear, and cold ink. The report from the front line struck the assembled strategists not as news, but as a verdict.
"Your Majesty… the left wall… it is gone," the soldier gasped, his uniform white with powdered stone, a fine tremor running through him. "The enemy's thunder weapons… they concentrated all their fire. They… they have made a breach wider than ten city gates. Emperor Lie Fan himself leads the assault through it!"
The words landed in the silence like dropped stones. Xun Yu's normally composed face went pale. Guo Jia's breath hitched. Xi Zhicai, Jia Kui, Cheng Yu, Tian Feng, and Xu You, all of them, minds honed on decades of conventional warfare, found their understanding of the world cracking.
Walls fell to starvation, to mining, to relentless battering over months. They could comprehend Hongnong, its walls were lesser.
But Tong Pass? This was the bedrock of their defensive philosophy, the unyielding shield of the heartland. For it to be simply… erased in a single morning by impersonal, distant fury… it was an offense against history, against the very logic of war.
Cao Cao did not speak at first. He stood behind the heavy oak table, his knuckles white where they pressed against the scarred wood. The map before him, with its neat lines and markers, now seemed a childish fantasy.
His breathing was a controlled, furious rhythm, in and out through flared nostrils. His face, usually a mask of cunning or fierce resolve, was a scowl of pure, impotent rage. This was not a defeat by guile or valor, it was an obliteration by a force that seemed to operate on different rules entirely.
He slammed a fist down onto the map, making the inkwells jump. "The condition on the walls. Tell me everything."
The soldier swallowed. "Chaos, Your Majesty. Absolute chaos. General Xiahou Dun is a pillar, he is trying to rally, to plug the gaps with men, but… the breach is not a gap. It is a road. He is also enforcing your order, keeping Generals Xiahou Yuan, Zhang He, and the others from rushing to the point of greatest danger. He knows Lie Fan and his champions are there. He seeks to preserve our commanders."
A flicker of grim satisfaction touched Cao Cao's eyes. Good. Dun understands. We cannot lose the pillars. But the satisfaction was swallowed instantly by the scale of the disaster. He nodded, a stiff, mechanical motion. "Xiahou Dun has done all that any man could."
It was Guo Jia who broke the stunned silence, his voice thin but razor sharp, cutting through the fog of disbelief. "Your Majesty. The calculus is now brutally simple. We cannot hold Tong Pass. The question is no longer if we lose it, but for how long we can make Lie Fan buy it."
He paused, drawing a wheezing breath, his intellect burning bright despite the sickness consuming him. "Every hour we force him to fight in that breach, every soldier of his we make bleed for a yard of rubble, is an hour bought for the western garrisons on the road to Chang'An. It is an hour for Chang'An's granaries to be filled a little more, for its walls to be manned by one more desperate man. We must turn the breach into a meat grinder. We must sacrifice regiments, if necessary, to trade our blood for his time. It is the only currency we have left."
The words hung in the dusty air, cold and absolute. It was a strategy of despair, a general ordering his men to die not for victory, but for the privilege of delaying defeat elsewhere. Tian Feng looked sick. Cheng Yu closed his eyes.
Xu You's usual smirk was utterly absent. Xun Yu's jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek. But one by one, reluctantly or with grim acceptance, they nodded. Guo Jia was right. There was no elegant counterstroke, no hidden valley of ambush. There was only the brutal arithmetic of attrition.
Cao Cao's shoulders sagged, not in defeat, but in the acceptance of a horrific burden. The sigh that escaped him seemed to leech the remaining warmth from the room. "So be it," he said, the words flat, final. "That is the course. We extend the time. We make the cost of this rubble so high he hesitates before the next wall. Issue the orders. Every available man not essential to holding other sections is to be thrown into the left breach. Contain the flood. Slow the tide."
The orders flew from the tent, carried by ashen faced messengers. Across the interior of Tong Pass, reserve units, men who had been resting, tending siege engines, guarding stores, were roused and formed into grim, hurried columns. They were not sent to reinforce the walls, but to march directly into the maw of the beast, towards the roaring chaos emanating from the left flank.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0