by E. M. Hardy
Most interesting was how some martial artists fought alongside their jinni partners. If some jinn were gifted in the field of invoking magic, other jinn were gifted in wielding weaponry. The ethereal creatures, each varying shades of color from emerald green to crimson red, helped fight back the ashigaru. They floated near their bonded partners, lashing out with spear and sword at any opening they could find.
Tight teamwork, extensive training, superior chi-control, and the aid of jinn allowed the Imperials to fend off the blood-enchanted weapons… but not for long.
Martin could already see the martial artists falling alongside Imperial regulars. The regular footmen could not tap into the power of the blood-weapons like their samurai counterparts, which meant they moved as fast and struck as hard as regular men of flesh and blood. The sheer lethality of the blood-bound spears, however, more than compensated for the mediocre capabilities of the average Shogunate footman. There were just too many ashigaru bearing down on the Imperials, their blood spears piercing armor and cutting apart weapons.
And that was not even counting the samurai, who were already forming up behind the front lines. Martin spotted the samurai’s distinctive armor moving within the lines of flesh. Once those warriors arrived, they’d be able to effectively engage the martial artists—tying them up so that the regular ashigaru could punch through their Imperial equals. Martin knew first-hand how devastating this tactic could be from back when he first engaged the Shogunates. He was steadily losing walkers to the ashigaru, slowly losing ground, but he still held the line despite being grossly outnumbered. The appearance of the samurai and their superior combat skills, though, turned a gradual loss into sudden defeat.
“Your undead would be of great use now,” General Shen Feng growled out low, as he surveyed the creaking Imperial lines that threatened to burst at any moment. “There are more than enough Shogunate corpses out there for you to raise.” General Bai Yu was so focused on the battle in front of him that he didn’t notice the quiet exchange between Martin and Shen Feng.
“That is no longer an option,” Martin shot back with more heat than he intended. Shen Feng raised a brow, eyeing the nearby walker with suspicion. Martin controlled himself, tamping down his anger at the reminder of what he used to be. “I’ve already dealt with the samurai attempting to take my hill. Give me a few more moments, and my scarabs should be able to resume bombarding the Shogunate lines.” The good general ignored the non-answer, choosing instead to focus back on the battle. Shen Feng had been extremely cooperative after the incident in the Leizhu Swamp, but he still answered to the Empress. Martin planned to explain the changes, tell Shen Feng why he couldn’t raise the dead anymore… but he would do so later, when he had enough walkers and scarabs to repel a possible attack by Imperial forces. Trust was nice and all, he remembered Maharaja Venkati saying, but verified trust was better.
A bright flash of light illuminated the battlefield soon after Martin’s exchange with Shen Feng. Another volley of laser fire cut through the Shogunate formations, this one aimed at the samurai that Martin could pick out from the attacking mob. The Imperials cheered lustily as the ashigaru faltered in their steps. Thanks to the boost from their blood-spears, the Shogunate foot soldiers still held the advantage in terms of raw fighting ability. However, the resumption of laser bombardment rattled them badly enough to curb their bloodlust.
Martin felt this shift as he purified the souls of the dead, helped them let go of their fear and anger in their final moments. Fear and doubt replaced the blind rage of a mob charging headlong into battle. The unity of the attacking force weakened as they saw their elite warriors cook, the red veins on their blood-blades crackle and blacken to the heat. Then the officers took back control, shouting at the footmen to fight harder, fight for their Shogun and the pride of the Taiyo people. The shaken ashigaru turned away from the fallen behind them, focusing instead on the enemies before them.
He remembered how Venkati mentioned being able to read the auras of others around him. The man was even capable of noting the shift in Martin’s own core, when he lost himself in the ecstasy of drinking in souls. Martin attempted to do the same, tried looking at the energies being thrown off by the mass of men and women on the battlefield. He stopped viewing their energies as something to use, to exploit like a power source. Instead, he viewed the energy through the lens of a mandala—a reflection of the emotions roiling up in a person, preventing him or her from achieving peace in the end.
It took a while, but Martin eventually saw the colors play out. The entire battlefield was bathed in boiling, roiling bubbles of anger and oblivion. Red and black twined together within the teeming mass of flesh, everyone seeking death and destruction. And yet a few colors stood out. Blue islands of detached calm, mainly from the higher-ranked officers analyzing the state of the battle. Some martial artists shared the blue aura of calm disposition, especially the ones directing waves of force to counter the steady stream of Shogunate arrows pouring in. Those injured were wreathed in auras of sizzling red, screaming out pain and alarm. Pale-yellow dictated the auras of those panicking, fleeing their positions before an officer managed to pull them back into the fight. The auras of the dying dimmed until they disappeared altogether, replaced by the floating orb of a departed soul.
Martin wondered: what did Venkati see in him when he wasn’t himself? What colors and emotions did he see when he was lost, wanting nothing more than to drink in souls?
He cut short his musings on auras when the scarabs silently signaled their readiness. Martin scanned the battle for a target, and decided to burn another line of samurai sneaking up to the front lines—along with the officers he could identify screaming orders and encouragement from those doing the dying.
And he also wanted to try something else. Instead of pouring laser fire in a concentrated wave of destruction, he copied the Shogunate strategy of a steadily bombardment of arrows and laid on a steady stream of laser fire: ten scarabs firing every three seconds, each picking a target of opportunity. The damage would not be as sudden or as impressive, but it would keep the pressure on the Shogunates without giving their officers time to reform the men.
Martin watched as the lasers steadily burned away the Shogunate army piecemeal. Better yet, the steady barrage allowed him to adjust targets—burning away officers and samurai as he picked them out. He could already see the results of this gradual, slow-paced utilization of his scarabs. The previously-aggressive ashigaru line began faltering as the officers burned into chunks of meat. Only a handful of samurai managed to make it to the lines at any given time, only to be repulsed when teams of martial artists arrived to reinforce the beleaguered lines.
The auras of the battle shifted as well. The Imperials glowed hot and red after seeing success, actually gaining ground instead of losing it. In the meantime, a haze of dark green began rising from the Shogunate lines. Growing unease, Martin noted, as these men advanced less eagerly than their battle-eager compatriots with their red-and-black auras. The green auras began multiplying as Martin kept up his barrage, eliminating officers and samurai before they could reinforce and reorganize the crumbling ashigaru lines.
It was at that moment when one of Martin’s eyeballs spotted strange movements in the Shogunate camp, nestled safely behind a grove of trees that blocked his scarabs’ line of sight. The Shogun himself, dressed in elaborate armor with gold trimmings and a helmet with rather lengthy horns, stepped up nearer to the combat lines and began handing out orders. He then stood, placing his hands on his hips and glaring at the eyeball floating up high in the sky. Moments later, a few men began raising flags marked with various symbols—signaling flags. The flags traveled down the line as other signalers picked up the same flags, waving them high for other signalers to pick up the message.
Martin noted the shifting auras in the officers that recognized the flags. From a black-green haze of worry to gray shame with shifting notes of white hope. Martin noted officers run around, pass
ing the word. Wherever they went, formations of men began pulling away from the battle. The battle would soon be won, with the Imperials ending up as the victors while the Shogunates slinked off in defeat. It was smart of the Shogun to pull out this early in the fight, realizing that the Shogunate position was untenable. Martin’s scarabs were laying down effective fire, burning down officers and scattering ashigaru formations while he searched for others to cook. Sixty thousand surviving Shogunates would run away and live to fight another day.
While Martin would normally rejoice over ending a battle, this retreat worried more than reassured him.
He got lucky this time, baiting the Shogunates into engaging the Imperial army on an open field right beside an obelisk positioned strategically atop a hill. This scenario was beyond ideal for his scarabs, where they could rain down laser fire with impunity from atop their mound. But what if the Shogunates selected a battlefield far from the obelisks that provided power to his scarabs? What if the Shogunates fought in heavy woodlands that obscured the sightlines of his scarabs? What if the Shogun mixed more horse into his army, giving them more mobility to reach out and strike the scarabs? What if the Order of Rats found some way to neutralize his obelisks, sabotage them on the eve of a big battle?
Martin watched as the Shogun walked defiantly out in the open, glaring at the eyeballs up in the sky and practically daring Martin to blast him down with laser fire. He considered the Shogun’s sheltered position behind the trees. A single scarab might not be able to pierce through the trees of the forest. Not even a dozen could manage that. But a thousand? He would waste a hell of a lot of energy burning through all that wood, but maybe he could cut a hole through the trees. All one thousand scarabs pointed their crystals at the Shogun, preparing to vaporize him, when something else caught his eye.
There, behind the gleaming armor with its gold trimmings and long-horned helmet, mounted up an elderly man dressed in the simple armor of an ashigaru footman. He shaved his long, distinctively wispy beard, let the tight bun on his head loose in a wild spray of gray hair, and covered his face in soot. The lenses of four hovering eyeballs confirmed to Martin, however, that this fleeing man was indeed Inagaki Nobumoto—or Ye Heng as he was previously known in the Ren Empire.
The former Sage’s disguise was perfect, to be honest. Martin saw the Shogun and his Daimyo cronies huddling behind the safety of the trees, which was the only reason why he didn’t bathe them in hot light. The Shogun entered and exited his command tent multiple times, passing on orders remotely. He would not have noticed the discrepancy if not for his experiments with reading auras.
The Shogun gave off a steely-blue aura of cold, calculating detachment, though his aura was also tinged with a shade of red bloodlust. Whoever stood in the armor gave off a greenish-yellow aura, fear and anxiety washing over him despite his outward bravado. The dirty, unkempt old man exuded the same aura as the Shogun, the same steely-blue glow he remembered. He was the only one in the rear camp who still possessed the blue aura of detached calm, even as the rest of the Daimyo and camp followers reeked with yellow fear and gray despair.
This caused Martin to examine the old man more closely, noticing the details of his face as well as the ring of samurai discreetly surrounding and protecting him from afar.
Martin swore softly, knowing that he would only have one shot before the disguised Shogun rode away from the battle, hid behind a nearby hill where his scarabs would no longer be able to touch him. He gave the orders, and his thousand scarabs all focused their crystals in the general direction of the elderly footman. They trusted in Martin’s directions, in the eyeballs that fed the man’s location relative to other landmarks in the area, and poured all their power at the designated target.
Thick trunks instantly turning to ash wherever the concentrated beam of light hit them, the surrounding wood bursting into flames from the condensed heat. Ten trees, twenty trees, thirty trees—the concentrated beam pierced through them all on their quest to reach their target. Numerous beams split off, striking nothing more than wood and dirt. However, one beam managed to find its target. The beam that slammed into Inagaki Nobumoto was a faint echo of itself, an insignificant speck of light compared to the sheer firepower that it first started out as.
And yet, that tiny speck was enough to reduce a man to nothing more than a burning mass of flesh. Inagaki Nobumoto, previously known as Sage Ye Heng, ceased to exist that day, and the Shogunate along with him. The remaining Daimyo oversaw the orderly retreat of sixty thousand men from the battle, but these men were no longer united under the banner of the Shogun. No, they were now men who wanted nothing more than to return to the Isles of Taiyo, hounded all the way by Imperial troops nipping at their heels. The Shogunates held out on the port city of Yan Bao, taking shelter within its walls as the Imperials surrounded them and dug in. They waited for resupply and evacuation from the Isles of Taiyo, which should have been sending supplies and reinforcements any day now.
But that day never came, for an upstart Daimyo by the name of Ishida Nagatoshi was too busy taking over the undefended Isles of Taiyo. His bushi and their ghurka allies hopped between the islands, overwhelming the garrisons. Stripped by the Shogun of all their fighting men, the various territories did not have the force to defend themselves—much less bring provisions to the stranded Shogunate army. The Imperial generals were thinking about assaulting the walls of Yan Bao, but settled down for a long siege when Martin finally revealed Ishida’s role in retaking the Isles.
The Shogunate army found itself stranded on the mainland, bereft of leadership and supplies while the former Shogun’s cronies began squabbling for power. Some wanted to rush out and die in a blaze of glory. Others wanted to sit still and wait for aid from the home islands. A few began thinking about surrendering, though they kept their opinions to themselves. None were able to stand up and retake control.
That was because the Shogun had been too absorbed with surrounding himself with loyal but talentless fops. Those who posed a threat were executed outright. If they were too influential to kill, they were simply exiled with Ishida’s meager army. Inagaki made sure that none of his flunkies could challenge his rule, so he purposely provoked them to constantly be at each other’s throats. The system worked while he was still alive, since he dispensed rewards and punishments while his cronies butted heads against one another.
With the Shogun dead, those loyal but incompetent fools eventually turned on one another. Factions rose up within the Shogunate army, each with divided loyalties. One thing was for sure, however: the defiant cries of “death before dishonor” dwindled as hunger, despair, and disunity started taking their toll.
The Shogunates held out in Yan Bao for a few weeks. The Imperials captured a few thousand deserters over the course of the siege. A group of twenty thousand die-hard fanatics rushed out of the walls, white bands tied to their heads, waists, and shoulders as they charged into Imperial pikes, arrows, and magics. They gave no mercy, expected no mercy. The Imperials obliged, and the charging Shogunates died to the man. After that display of misguided courage and determination, the remaining Shogunates hoisted a white flag, signaling their surrender after throwing the last Daimyo crying for ‘death before dishonor’ over the city’s walls. The construction of an obelisk within full view of the city’s walls and the subsequent assembly of thousands of scarabs may have played a role in convincing them to surrender sooner rather than later.
This wasn’t the end, however, for the Empire finally ran out of luck: the Khanate Horde was already on its way to the Imperial Throne…
Chapter 21
…or at least part of the feared Khanate Horde.
“Just three khans?” quipped Lian Lin, the newly-appointed General of the Black Turtle. “That’s a good sign, for it means that the seventeen others aren’t joining in with this raid.”
“But why? I thought the khans turned against the Empire.”
The general huffed, shaking her head. “And let
’s be thankful they’re turning on one another instead of on us. We should, in fact, be grateful that only three hordes are assaulting us right when we’re wrapping up the eastern campaign.”
“Yes, but how many troops do you have to oppose a war party of that size?”
“Two thousand horse, a thousand foot,” responded Lian Lin with a sardonic smile.
“And then one thousand walkers on my end, with another thousand freshly-baked ones on the way. We’re still clearly outnumbered here,” Martin blandly exclaimed to the overly-optimistic general standing beside his walker. His eyeballs watched as the force of Khanate horsemen trotted toward his northernmost obelisk. He made out three distinct banners, signaling three khans leading their respective hordes out on a raid. Five thousand mounted warriors per khan, meaning fifteen thousand invaders coming from the Grass Seas. Three times that number in spare mounts for a total of sixty thousand horses. They would no doubt leave behind small units to demolish the obelisks dotting the landscape even as the bulk of their army marched south, toward Imperial lands.
“Dealing with fifteen thousand riders is still better than dealing with a hundred thousand riders rumbling our way,” replied the woman, grinning even as she used her right arm to clutch the empty sleeve of her missing left arm.
The woman had been one of General Bai Yu’s most promising officers in the eastern campaign against the Taiyo Shogunate, with her regiment successfully stalling the advancing armies time and time again. A samurai’s blood-arrow had managed to find her, blowing off an arm with the sheer force of impact. Her grit and determination shone through despite her horrendous injury, organizing an orderly retreat before passing out from her injury. Both Shen Feng and Bai Yu endorsed her promotion after the healers fixed her up, granting her command of the northern garrison to defend the Empire’s borders against the rebelling khans.