Chapter Eighty-Seven: Turning the Tables

On a battlefield of this scale, men like Ye Pei and Jiang Zhongqing had enormous room to play to their strengths. Against ordinary soldiers, lightness skills could almost be called invincible.

Like a great hawk, Ye Pei scaled the wall by using two spears thrust into the stone. The soldiers below could only stare helplessly. They had no way to strike him. They could not simply hurl their own weapons; whether they could hit him was one thing, but afterward it would become a matter of gambling with their own lives. As for picking up stones and throwing them at him... that would be laughable.

On the wall, the garrison commander of Jiazhou City, Wang Yancheng, was also stunned by the sight. In the Flame Lands, because internal power was so difficult to cultivate, the masters there relied almost entirely on physical techniques. People like Lin Yukong and the others, though they had trained their inner power for many years, still possessed little strength in it and had not achieved much in terms of martial refinement.

For example, men like Feng Tanyang and Yang Tianrui did possess some lightness skills, but certain movements still required the support of inner power to perform. Yet Ye Pei, simply by borrowing force from the spears, had leaped more than twenty feet into the air. To ordinary people of the Flame Lands, such a feat was almost beyond imagination. If they knew that this was, in truth, still rather easy for him, who knew what they would think.

Stunned though he was, Wang Yancheng’s eyes flashed with fire as he gave the order to loose arrows. In an instant, the guards on the wall drew their bows and shot at Ye Pei.

Ye Pei, seeing this, tapped rapidly along the wall with the tips of his feet. As he wall-ran upward, he kept changing direction, while the long spear in his hand occasionally flicked away several incoming arrows. In the blink of an eye, he forced his way through the arrowstorm and reached the battlements.

He was gambling as well. From the reports he had seen, the enemy force coming from the rear battlefield far exceeded the numbers stationed in Jiazhou City. Such information was rarely wrong before a war even began, so there was a strong chance the other side had called for reinforcements. Ye Pei was betting that, in such a short time, they would not have been able to bring in enough help and that Jiazhou City was now hollow.

When he reached the wall and saw that the outer and inner walls were separated by a vacant camp with no soldiers in sight, a faint smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. He knew he had guessed right.

Commander Wang Yancheng took up his heavy blade from a soldier’s hands. "Ye Pei! Do not think that just because you have reached the wall, you can save the battle! I, Wang Yancheng of Jiazhou, am no empty name!"

Ye Pei planted the butt of his spear against the ground and laughed. "General Wang? I have been in the Flame Lands for so long, and I have never even heard your name. If your name is unknown, then of course you are not an empty reputation."

Wang Yancheng flew into a rage. "Ignorant boy! Today, even if the city is short of troops, with my two hundred elite soldiers, and with your spear being better suited to one-on-one combat than group battle, killing you will be as easy as crushing an insect!"

Ye Pei glanced at the two hundred soldiers surrounding him front and back and burst into loud laughter. "Hahaha—Wang Yancheng, have you not even seen the difference between inner power and physical martial skill? Have you never seen what I, Ye Pei, am capable of?"

As he spoke, the black metal in Ye Pei’s hand slowly transformed into a massive black blade.

"If a master of physical technique can fight through an army seven times in and seven times out, then a cultivator of inner power, once fully unleashed, can sweep away dry weeds and rotten wood!"

Wang Yancheng was not wrong: Ye Pei’s spear did indeed have very little room to shine under these conditions. But it was not the only weapon he knew.

Knowing too many weapons had hindered his further progress, yet at moments like this, it became one more hidden card.

Before his words had even faded, Ye Pei had already closed his eyes. His inner power began to circulate at full strength. Around him, one could almost see colorless radiance flowing, tugging the air into an unnatural current. On the great blade in his hand, that change was even more obvious.

"Move! All of you, move!"

Though he did not know what Ye Pei was doing, Wang Yancheng understood one thing: once Ye Pei finished preparing and struck first, their chances of victory would be slim. His confidence, already shaken by Ye Pei’s earlier display of absolute composure, had almost been cut away entirely. Even with an overwhelming numerical advantage, he still decided to attack at once.

But it was already too late. Or rather, there had never been a proper moment for him to succeed.

The Art of Finality had an innate and extraordinary advantage in the circulation of inner power. Ye Pei’s speed in drawing upon it had always been astonishingly fast. As for why he stood there with his eyes shut for so long, he was in truth merely considering a more imposing way to begin. He was not worried about a sneak attack. With his inner power running at full strength, his awareness of his surroundings was keen to the extreme; ambushes were nearly impossible.

The moment the soldiers rushed in on command, Ye Pei suddenly opened his eyes. The fire in those pupils blazed like the sun, and the soldiers, already tense with fear, felt their hearts seize under that scorching gaze. Their collective assault faltered in that instant.

Ye Pei’s lips curved upward. He swung the great blade and, without bothering with anyone else, charged straight at Wang Yancheng.

"This feeling... is truly exhilarating!"

In truth, this was Ye Pei’s first real full-force strike. Earlier, when he had faced Feng Tanyang and wanted to unleash all his inner power, his reserves had already been nearly exhausted. Now, with abundant energy circulating through him, he only felt his abilities rise across the board. His senses sharpened; his strength and speed both surpassed his usual level.

When Ye Pei swept out his first blade, carrying overwhelming inner power, there was faintly an invisible crescent of force extending beyond the edge. In that instant, the seven or eight soldiers directly facing him all burst blood from their chests and bellies and fell at once.

With that strike, both Ye Pei and the Jiazhou soldiers in front of him had the fire in their eyes burn brighter.

At the rear of the army:

Liu Ziwen saw Ye Pei and Jiang Zhongqing splitting up and felt much of his worry ease. "According to General Tianrui’s description, these two boys are both extremely formidable in battle. And that Ye Pei boy...," he said, watching Ye Pei climb the wall through the rain of arrows, "that move is truly impressive. I’m almost reluctant to let him go..."

Jiang Zhongqing’s figure flashed toward the rear ranks like a streak of sword light, so swift that no one seemed able to catch him. It was not merely that he was fast; anyone who tried to stop him died. Before long, Jiang Zhongqing had already reached Eastward Boyi.

Eastward Boyi did not look panicked. Mounted high on his warhorse and holding a long sword, he personally cut down the occasional soldier who broke through the defenses. His martial skill was not strong, but against ordinary troops there was still not much of a problem.

"Young Lord Eastward, please rest assured. I have returned specifically to protect you!" Jiang Zhongqing casually killed two enemy soldiers and shielded Eastward Boyi behind him.

"Young Hero Jiang, why not go help the rear formation instead? Only the occasional man has broken through here, so it is still manageable. If the rear line breaks in a moment, then that will be the real danger."

Jiang Zhongqing considered it briefly, then nodded and charged forward to join the rear force in resisting the enemy assault.

In this way, the situation was temporarily stabilized, though no true reversal had yet been achieved. The front ranks were more or less evenly matched; the center was outnumbered and the situation there was grim; and at the rear, Jiang Zhongqing’s arrival had at least begun to show signs of turning defeat into victory.

Then, all at once, a thunderous shout rang out across the open plain before the city.

"Commander Wang Yancheng’s head is here!"

At that cry, everyone on the battlefield halted and looked toward the source. There, atop the wall and above a mountain of corpses and blood, Ye Pei was holding up a man’s head by the hair. It could still be vaguely recognized as that of the Jiazhou commander Wang Yancheng.

While the entire battlefield stood dumbstruck, Ye Pei flicked the head away with his right hand and roared, "Victory belongs to Eastward!"

Those two cries from the wall had both been driven by inner power, allowing them to travel so far that every person could hear them.

Below, the morale of the Eastward coalition soared at once. They shouted in unison, "Victory belongs to Eastward!"

The morale of the Jiazhou army, by contrast, fell sharply. Their commander was dead; when the dragon has no head, how much more so for these ordinary soldiers.

"Ha—"

Ye Pei gave a long cry, and the great blade in his hand turned back into a spear. Spreading his arms, he leaped down from the wall. Like a hawk in flight, he crossed the air and plunged straight toward the central battlefield, where his side had been at a clear disadvantage.

Even though the central ranks had held no real advantage before, the killing of the enemy commander and Ye Pei’s personal arrival as reinforcements immediately reversed the balance of morale. With the overall fighting strength of the center also rising substantially, the situation on the field changed dramatically.

"Everyone, get out of the way!"

From behind came another fierce shout. Ye Pei turned and saw that, under Jiang Zhongqing’s command, the entire rear force had fallen back several paces. Then Jiang Zhongqing sprang into the air. "One Thread of Heaven, Ten Thousand Swords Like Falling Stars!"

The rain of razor-sharp sword light overhead seemed even denser than when he had used the technique some time before. Lin Hezhi could withstand that blow, but the ordinary soldiers could not. One streak of sword light often cut down two or three men before gradually fading. When Jiang Zhongqing’s ultimate strike finally vanished, the battlefield was left with another seventy or eighty corpses, their bodies mangled and broken.

That sight drew one battle cry after another from the Eastward coalition. After fighting for so long, their exhausted bodies seemed to fill with strength once more, and they surged forward again with weapons raised...

"Hahahaha..."

Ye Pei flicked his spear to shake off the blood. Though in truth, the blood on his body was probably never going to wash clean.

"How satisfying!" He helped Jiang Zhongqing, who was somewhat weakened from overexertion, back to his feet and laughed. "This is the kind of victory I have yearned for since I was a child!"

Although the final battle of the Flamewatch campaign also ended in victory for the coalition, Ye Pei had not felt the joy of a great triumph then. He had lost his father and been torn away from his family and friends, cast into the Flame Lands. But this first battle against the Lin clan—this reversal of encirclement, achieved almost entirely through his own and Jiang Zhongqing’s desperate counterattack, and this ultimate victory—made his blood surge with excitement from the depths of his bones.

That time, he had personally tasted the bleak sorrow of war’s smoke and fire. This time, he had truly felt the magnificence of armored horses and flashing spears.