Chapter Eighty-Six: Back and Forth

Ye Pei's single move stunned both sides in an instant.

On the Eastern Army's side, those who had seen Ye Pei before could not help thinking that he had not been this formidable during the Burning Season. Those who had never seen him were simply shocked by the sheer strength of his fighting.

As for the Lin Army, their reaction was even more uniform: nearly everyone stood there in open-mouthed disbelief, staring at Lin Po, who lay motionless on the ground.

After a moment, a burly infantry commander from the Lin Army barked, "Quick, get General Lin back here!"

Only then did the soldiers finally react. Three of them stepped out, exchanging glances, and slowly began to edge this way, all the while stealing glances at Ye Pei.

Ye Pei could not help but shake his head and smile at the sight. Then he reversed his spear in one smooth motion and hurled it. It plunged straight into Lin Po's chest, and the three soldiers instantly froze stiff with fear, not daring to move again.

"My prisoner, and you think you can just carry him off like that?"

"How insolent!" the burly general roared in fury.

Ye Pei laughed. "And what if I do insult you?"

The infantry commander turned purple with rage, seized his war hammer, and strode forward. "Enough of your arrogance! Give me your life!"

Ye Pei leapt down from his warhorse, patted the horse to send it away, then stood where he was and watched the charging infantry general swinging his hammer as he came. He thought to himself, "I refuse to believe some border city infantry commander can have more strength than Yang Tianrui!"

This move also stunned the gathered troops. No one had expected Ye Pei to dismount of his own accord and meet an infantry commander head-on.

The commander was clearly a brute-force type and very confident in his own strength. Seeing Ye Pei neither dodge nor retreat, he was overjoyed. With a howl of wind, his hammer came crashing down toward Ye Pei's head.

As the commander charged in, Ye Pei's inner power had already begun to circulate. When the two were only a single step apart, Ye Pei suddenly reached down with his right hand, drew out the Dark Snow Demon Iron from his waist, and transformed it into the long spear he knew best. He swung it up horizontally to meet that thunderous blow.

A deafening clang rang out. A shockwave almost visible to the eye rippled outward from the point where their weapons met, dust billowed up, and the two figures separated at the first collision.

Before the dust had even settled, the infantry commander, stunned, was driven back seven or eight steps by the impact. Still raising his hammer to steady himself, he saw Ye Pei's spear-bearing figure burst out of the dust. The black spear tip glinted with cold light as it stabbed straight toward him. The commander was horrified and hurriedly swung his hammer to block the thrust, but in Ye Pei's eyes his speed was painfully slow. With a twist of his right wrist, Ye Pei sent the spear curving like a swimming serpent at a bizarre angle, yet still along its original path, and under the commander's terrified gaze it pierced his chest.

"Ye Pei! It's Ye Pei!" Once his weapon appeared, someone in the Lin Army immediately recognized him.

Ye Pei drew out his spear, paid no heed to the corpse on the ground, and pointed the spear tip at the two thousand men opposite him as he laughed aloud. "That's right! Anyone else want to try me?"

The sight filled Dongfang Boyi, who stood at the rear, with such a surge of pride that he itched to draw his sword and hurl the same challenge at those two thousand men himself.

What Ye Pei had not expected was this: the two remaining enemy commanders in the distance exchanged a glance, nodded, then swung their blades and shouted, "Attack!"

At the order, the two thousand men answered with a thunderous cry and came surging forward with their weapons raised.

Ye Pei arched his brows and cursed under his breath. "Those two have no sense of honor..." Then he turned and ran.

Ye Pei was indeed a man of bold and unrestrained spirit, but he was even more a man who acted entirely on impulse. At a time like this, he would not care in the least what sort of impression he had just left on others. If he felt like running, he would turn and run without hesitation.

As he ran, Ye Pei gestured to Liu Ziwen. This signal was common across the battlefield of the Vein Plain: it meant the vanguard was to advance. Ye Pei had reacted on instinct, and only after signaling did he remember that this was the Burning Land, where the other side might not understand it.

But Liu Ziwen nodded all the same, then swept his longsword and shouted, "Vanguard, advance!"

Ye Pei paused, then understood why. "When my father taught me, I think he said this was an ancient method... In that case, it is probably not merely ancient, but something that dates all the way back to the era of the earth veins."

Ye Pei curled his fingers and whistled. Seeing his warhorse rushing toward him together with the vanguard, he raised the corners of his mouth, sprang upward, turned a somersault in midair, twisted his waist, and landed neatly in the saddle. With a fierce cry of "Ride!" he charged back at the head of the line.

For this siege, the allied forces had nearly emptied their camps. Fewer than a thousand men remained behind, while the vanguard numbered around two thousand. Ye Pei and Liu Ziwen had both thought of the same question: according to intelligence, there should be four thousand defenders in Jiazhou City, yet only around two thousand stood before them. It was possible the other two thousand had remained inside the city. But it was just as possible that they were lying in ambush elsewhere. After all, they were fighting away from home, and the enemy could easily use the terrain to set a trap.

At this point, Ye Pei and Jiang Zhongqing had already cut into the enemy ranks, while the other Eastern Army commanders had not advanced into battle alongside the vanguard. Jiang Zhongqing knew only the sword, so he had already abandoned his warhorse. In any case, the soldiers themselves were fighting on foot. Using the strange sword techniques of Star Jade Edge, Jiang Zhongqing moved freely among the enemy ranks, one might even say recklessly. Ye Pei, on the other hand, had no trouble fighting from horseback. His spear swept out, and almost every thrust took a life.

But their slaughter did not last long before it was halted by the two enemy commanders.

And just as their advance was brought to a stop, war drums sounded in unison along both flanks of the battlefield. Dust rose in great clouds, and it was obvious that reinforcements were arriving.

Hearing the commotion, Ye Pei forced back the commander before him with two quick attacks. Looking to both sides, he saw that the incoming forces numbered no fewer than two thousand on each flank.

By that reckoning, the Jiazhou army had at least six thousand men. The allied force on their side, however, numbered only six thousand in total, with a small portion left to guard the camp. Even though their side consisted of elite fighters selected from each tribe, it would be difficult to gain any advantage while fighting from the back foot.

"Hmph..." Ye Pei could not help snorting coldly at that thought, when suddenly a spear tip stabbed toward him from the front.

"During a clash, and you still dare to lose focus?" roared the commander Ye Pei had driven back earlier, thrusting his spear.

Behind him, Liu Ziwen reacted swiftly as well. The central army adjusted direction at once and charged toward the enemy forces attacking from the flanks, preventing them from hemming in the vanguard. Given how few troops they had, there was no real possibility of a counter-encirclement.

Back to Ye Pei.

He tilted his head back at once, arching his body in a backbend over the horse's saddle to avoid the thrust. At the same time, he clamped his legs against the horse's belly. As the warhorse charged ahead, his inner power surged, and he swept out a spear strike, hard, into the commander’s abdomen. But because the power had been gathered too briefly, and because the horse's momentum had not yet fully built up, the blow did not send the man flying.

Ye Pei simply did not withdraw his spear. He spun once in a leap and landed behind his opponent. His left hand shot out, clamped directly onto the man's throat, and with a single exertion of force, the commander’s head drooped limply.

The commander had been fighting cautiously all along, and Ye Pei had not immediately found a way to defeat him quickly. But when Ye Pei allowed himself a moment of distraction and the commander took the initiative, Ye Pei seized the opening and killed him with one blow.

At the rear of the battlefield, Liu Ziwen frowned deeply. He also found the situation troublesome. The eight hundred men of the rear guard could not be withdrawn; they had to remain here to protect Dongfang Boyi and himself. Yet with only two thousand men in the central force, stopping the enemy's four thousand-man pincer attack was truly difficult. Soon enough, the thing he feared most came to pass.

Seeing that they could not encircle the Eastern Army's vanguard, the enemy commanders on both flanks quickly altered their tactics. They turned their full force against the advancing central army, while each side detached five hundred men to attack Liu Ziwen's rear guard. In this way, the rear guard also became unsafe. Under Liu Ziwen's command, the eight hundred men managed to block the enemy's crazed assault of a thousand soldiers, but he and Dongfang Boyi were in grave danger as well.

Still, Liu Ziwen had fought harder battles than this. He knew there was still a point from which the situation could be reversed. While he sent someone hurrying back to camp to summon Yang Tianrui, he kept watch from the hillside over the situation at the vanguard.

Ye Pei naturally noticed it as well. Riding high in the saddle, he looked ahead a few times and immediately saw how desperate the rear situation had become. He shouted, "Zhongqing! Go and protect Dongfang Boyi at once!"

At that moment, Jiang Zhongqing was facing a siege by both a commander and a host of soldiers. That commander was not like the one who had charged straight at Ye Pei with brute force; instead, he was directing his troops to take turns surrounding and attacking Jiang Zhongqing in small groups. For a time, Jiang Zhongqing could not break free.

Hearing Ye Pei's cry, Jiang Zhongqing instantly understood that the rear guard was in danger. He no longer held anything back. Inner power surged through him as he shouted, "A scant moon amid the stars, a chilly autumn wind, frost in countless flecks!" As the sword art left his mouth, his speed suddenly increased. Like a streak of flowing light, he tore through the encirclement. In the blink of an eye, Jiang Zhongqing appeared behind the commander and beheaded him with a single strike. Then he sprang into the air, fully unleashing his lightness technique as his inner power spun wildly, skimming over layer upon layer of soldiers and heading toward the rear guard position.

Ye Pei watched and clicked his tongue. "Those lines for the sword art are actually rather good."

Having said that, he casually slew several soldiers charging at him with a few spear strikes, then bent down and, before their bodies had even fallen, snatched up two spears. With a sweep of his arms, those two spears cut through the autumn wind and, with two crisp cracking sounds like stones shattering, were driven into the five-zhang city wall of Jiazhou.

"Rise!"

With a loud cry, Ye Pei pushed off the horse's head and leapt into the air. Like a startled swallow, he flashed toward the lower of the two spears on the wall. None of the soldiers on the ground could reach him at all. Ye Pei's target was the Jiazhou commander standing high atop the battlements.

This was only possible in the Burning Land. Under a social system of tribal factions, the scale of battle was not large, and with Ye Pei and Jiang Zhongqing's level of skill, they could already act with near-total freedom. Only then would Ye Pei dare choose such a direct strategy, charging straight toward the heart of the enemy to kill their commander and turn the battle around. If this had been a battlefield where armies numbered in the tens of thousands, how could a single man have approached the enemy commander so easily?

"Since I cannot bring my full strength to bear, let me at least taste what it feels like to turn the tide of battle by my own hand."