Legend of The Young Master

Chapter 220: Battle

The King, dressed in golden armor and a mask, could no longer cut every arrow in the air. Heavy shafts rang off his armor—he was leaning forward like a man walking into a storm, but it was as if his heart was singing because this was a great deed of a warrior. He laughed and ran faster.

A trap opened under his feet, and he almost fell—straight down the banks and into a thigh-deep pool. Two peasant Talons stepped to the edge of the pool and loosed arrows at him from a few feet away.

Li Zhuang, who had joined the king's army under the direction of some great master of his cousin, saw the charge falter and blew his horn. Men were falling into something—a line of pits, a hidden trench—

A Qi arrow rang from his breastplate armor, denting it deeply, and then he had an armored fist on the king, pulling him straight out of the muddy pool in one long pull. By his side, his subordinate, angered, threw his short spear across the stream, striking—more by luck than skill—the torso of a peasant, who folded over it and screamed.

The king got his feet under him and ran straight at the dam—the only clear bridge over the stream.

Li Zhuang followed him, and every warrior nearby followed, too. The dam was half in and half out of the water—far from solid, just an animal's hasty assemblage of downed branches and rotten wood. But the king seemed to skim across it, even as Li Zhuang's right leg went into water as cold as ice, and he almost lost his balance, flailing.

The king ran on, across the uneven top of the dam. The first half ran to a rocky island, and then the dam was even worse, the center of its span under water. Yet the king ran across it, his feet kicking up spray in a brilliant display of balance—straight across the dam into the archers pouring shafts at him. One got past his sword to bury itself in his shoulder, and another rang off his chest.

Then he was among them, and his sword moved faster than a dragonfly on a summer's evening.

Li Zhuang was struggling to catch him, breathing like a horse at the end of a long fight and run, soaked, his left leg trapped in mud for a moment. Then Li Zhuang was with the king, through the line of archers. The horns were playing.

He followed the king up the rise to the ridge that dominated the meadow, and more and more warriors crossed behind them. Far off to the left, more warriors had crossed the narrow footbridge on the road, and now the whole line of talon archers was compromised, and they ran again.

But even as they turned to run, the Flying Serpents struck.

Li Zhuang saw the first one—saw the flicker of its shadow and looked up in stunned unbelief, even as the wave of its terror struck him and the Qi warrior with him.

He flowed through the palpable fear, and he refused to let himself pause, although for a moment it was so intense he couldn't breathe. They surged forward even as the carthorse-sized monster killed a dozen of their number in a single flurry of talons and fangs.

There were three of these things.

That was all Li Zhuang could comprehend—that, and that the king was like a fiend, leaping forward at the first Flying Serpent. His sword sliced a wing through at the root, and his back cut flayed a sword's length of scales from the thing's neck.

It whirled to face him, but he was gone, under the flailing neck, and his blade went up into its belly—ripped the thing open from back to front—and was gone again as its intestines fell free.

Li Zhuang followed him to the second one, where it crushed Wang Guozhi, Priest of Liangcheng, to the ground with one blow and ripped his warrior's head from his trunk with its head.

Li Zhuang got his spear up and spiked the head. The serpent hissed, and he lost his balance on the uneven ground, broken with the spiked branches the beavers had left—stumbled and lost his spear, whirled and drew his sword as the head, trailing his spear, went for him. He cut into its snout with every muscle in his body. Its head knocked him flat.

The head reared above him, with his spear and his sword stuck in it, and the king straddled him. Blood leaked from the arrow in his left shoulder, and the man cut one-handed at the monster's neck and severed its head.

The surviving warriors roared their approval, and Li Zhuang got slowly to his feet, drenched by the hot blood of the thing, and dug in its jaw for his sword. He had to kick it off his blade.

The third Flying Serpent was already airborne, leaving a trail of broken warriors behind it, but after leaping into the air, it pivoted and collapsed on the king, bearing him to the ground.

Every warrior still alive in the meadow fell on the Flying Serpent, and blows rained on it like a steel hail—pieces of meat flew free like dust rises from the first fall of rain. The Flying Serpent hunched and tried to rise again into the air, but Li Zhuang slammed his spearhead into its neck. A few feet away, Zhai Jiang hit the thing with a maul and staggered it.

The king struggled from beneath it, staggered to his feet, and rammed his sword to the hilt in its guts before falling to his knees.

The Flying Serpent screamed.

The king fell to the ground, his golden armor all besmirched with the blood of three mighty foes. Zhai Jiang swung his maul up over his head, screamed his defiance, and slammed the lead head into the Flying Serpent's skull, and the beast crumpled atop the king.

A dozen hands scrambled to pull the dead thing off the king, even as trumpets sounded behind them and the mounted army emerged from the tree line.

Li Zhuang ran to the king. He got the king's head on his knee and removed his mask.

To his surprise it was not the king, his mad cousin's eyes met his.

"Am I not the greatest warrior in the empire?" he roared.

His eyes flickered. "Get the arrow out of my chest and bandage me tight," he said. "This is my battle!" Then the light went out of his eyes, and he lost consciousness.

Li Zhuang held his cousin tight while a pair of attendants tried to staunch the flow of blood, stripping his armor. The remnants of the vanguard pressed on.

"He demanded it, this morning," said a voice behind Li Zhuang, and suddenly the attendants were bowing. The King of Tianqin kingdom stood there, in his cousin's Qi armor.

"He said he knew of a plot to kill me, in an ambush—and he wished the honor of taking my place." The king shook his head. "He is truly a great warrior."

Li Zhuang swallowed his thoughts and wondered what his mad cousin had done. And why? because his cousin had no attachment or care about the king unless the master of his cousin's asked him to do something like this.

✶ ✶ ✶

Jianfeng, the leader of Yingmos, watched the king fall. His eyesight was tremendous, and from two ridges away, he and his clan watched the flying serpents fling themselves on the warriors. Of course, he had told them that he would support their attack. He'd told the Talons much the same.

But Luding was doomed, and Jianfeng had no intention of letting his people suffer any more. He turned to his sister. "If the men begin fighting among themselves, well and good—we will feast."

"I see nothing of the sort," Zinni, his cousin, said.

"Nor I," Nianzu, his brother, said.

Behind them stood forty of their kind—enough Yingmo to turn the battle. "Go tell the nomads that the battle is lost," Jianfeng said to his sister.

"It isn't lost unless we flee," his sister insisted. "By demon water—is that your will?"

Jianfeng frowned, deep creases appearing in his jaw. "Luding must die—now, while he is weak. Otherwise, he will hunt us down."

Zinni came close to her brother. "Do not let me believe that this is all the rivalry of two powers," she spat. "I have lost kin—you have lost kin. We were promised a feast, and—"

"We had a feast at Xiang and another on the road." Jianfeng shook his head. "I do not do what I do lightly. Luding must go. We are being—" he flexed the talons on his forefoot, moving each digit in an intricate arc, "—manipulated. By something. I can feel it."

Zinni snorted. "Very well," she said. "I obey. Under protest." And ran off into the trees, as fleet as a deer.

"West," Jianfeng told his brother.

"I can help you," his brother insisted.

"Perhaps. But Zinni cannot lead our clan or fertilize new eggs. And you can." The great head turned. "Obey, brother."