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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Lie Fan slowly raised his right hand, the polished steel of his gauntlet catching the afternoon sun through the haze of smoke. It was a simple gesture, but it held the weight of hundreds of thousands of lives. He held it high, signaling for the immediate halt of the artillery bombardment and the commencement of the infantry advance.
High above the front lines on the towering wooden command platform, Sima Yi's sharp eyes caught the glint of the Emperor's gauntlet. The strategist's face, usually an unreadable mask of calm calculation, tightened with anticipation.
Sima Yi immediately turned to the signaling corps, slicing his colored command flags through the air with precise, violent motions.
"Signal the halt of the bombardments!" Sima Yi barked, his voice carrying over the din. "Prepare the rhythm for the grand advance!"
The massive war drums, which had been beating a slow, terrifying cadence to time the artillery volleys, abruptly changed their rhythm. The drummers struck a sharp, staccato series of double beats, the universal Hengyuan signal for the siege engines to cease fire.
Instantly, the cannons fell silent after the last round of firing. The trebuchets were locked into place before it could shoot, stopping it from firing the stones. The screeching of the Hwachas died away the last, leaving a sudden, ringing silence in the air that was almost as deafening as the explosions had been.
But that silence lasted for only a heartbeat.
The drummers raised their heavy wooden mallets high and brought them down in a new, driving, relentless rhythm. DOOM DOOM DOOM. DOOM DOOM DOOM. It was the pulse of the Black Dragon, the undeniable command to move forward and consume.
Hearing the drums of the advance, Lie Fan drew his legendary halberd. The heavy blade gleamed with lethal promise as he raised it high above his head, standing up in his stirrups so that the tens of thousands of men behind him could see their Emperor leading from the very front.
"HEAR ME, SOLDIERS OF HENGYUAN!" Lie Fan's voice boomed, projecting with an unnatural force that seemed to cut through the lingering smoke. "TODAY, WE BREAK THE CHAINS OF CHAOS! TODAY, WE END A DECADES OF BLOOD AND SUFFERING! FOR THE UNIFICATION OF THE LAND! FOR THE HENGYUAN DYNASTY! ADVANCE!"
With a roar that rivaled the cannons, Lie Fan dug his heels into Pangu's flanks. The great stallion surged forward, tearing up the earth. Behind him, the vanguard generals, Zhang Liao, Huang Zhong, Taishi Ci, and Dian Wei, spurred their own mounts into a thunderous gallop.
And behind them, a terrifying wave of black iron and absolute discipline moved as one. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, their voices joining together in a single, earth shaking battle cry, "FOR HENGYUAN DYNASTY! FOR YOUR MAJESTY!" followed their Emperor toward the smoking ruins of Chang'An's eastern wall.
But this grand charge did not happen in isolation. The scale of the Hengyuan war machine was continent spanning, its coordination absolute. The sound of the massive war drums on the eastern front was so incredibly loud, carrying so much percussive force, that it rolled across the plains and echoed off the southern foothills.
Stationed at the southern front, Zhang Lu's generals, Zhang Wei and Yang Ang heard the distant, rhythmic thunder of Lie Fan's advance. Understanding the acoustic relay, they immediately ordered their own drummers to match the cadence.
The drums at the southern front erupted, echoing the eastern command, and the zealous infantry of Hanzhong drew their weapons, pouring out of their encampments and rushing toward the southern walls of the capital.
The acoustic chain reaction continued. The booming drums from the southern front carried across the wind to the massive host encamped on the western plains. There, Fa Zheng stood atop a command platform, listening intently. When the rhythm reached his ears, he smiled a cold, calculating smile.
"Your Majesty have made his moves," Fa Zheng declared to Zhang Ren and Yan Yan. "Sound the drums. Do not let the west fall behind the east."
The western drums thundered to life, a rolling crescendo of percussive violence that signaled the final phase of the encirclement. Under the leadership of Fa Zheng and Meng Da, the veteran Shu generals, Meng Huo, and the young generals of Shu, the massive western army surged forward, a tidal wave of shields, spears, and fury crashing toward the western gates.
Inside the city, upon the shattered, blood stained battlements of all three walls, the surviving Wei soldiers forced themselves to stand. They wiped the brick dust and blood from their eyes, their hands trembling as they gripped their spears and bows.
They had endured the apocalyptic bombardments, but as the smoke began to clear, a new, more visceral terror presented itself.
The earth itself seemed to vibrate beneath their boots. They looked out over the parapets and saw the doom of their dynasty approaching.
Loud, terrifying shouts of hundreds of thousands of Hengyuan soldiers surrounded the city of Chang'An, a cacophony of war cries that drowned out the groans of the wounded.
As the Hengyuan army closed in, the true scale of their siege engineering was revealed. Emerging from the ranks of the advancing infantry were the terrifying 'Climbing Tigers', massive, multi tiered ladder engines fitted with heavy wooden foudnation and scaling ladders, armored in wet hides to resist fire.
Alongside them rolled colossal battering rams, their iron capped logs suspended by thick chains within heavily armored, rolling sheds, making their slow, inexorable way toward the splintered city gates.
With that, the nature of the siege of Chang'An shifted drastically. The impersonal, mechanical slaughter of the artillery phase ended, replaced by the intimate, brutal reality of hand to hand combat.
The air was suddenly filled with the sharp, distinct sounds of weapons whistling through the air, the thud of thousands of arrows impacting heavy wooden shields, and the metallic crash of steel meeting steel as the Hengyuan vanguard reached the base of the walls.
Nowhere was the fighting more intense, more furiously contested, or more terrifying than on the eastern wall, for it was here that the Emperor of Hengyuan had chosen to personally break the Wei defenders.
The Climbing Tigers reached the outer moat, their heavy wooden wheels grinding over the hastily constructed earthworks and fascines that the Hengyuan engineers had thrown down to bridge the gaps.
As the massive siege towers slammed against the stone masonry of the eastern wall, their heavy wooden drawbridges dropped with a resounding crash, biting deep into the parapets.
Lie Fan did not wait for the infantry to secure a bridgehead. He had dismounted from Pangu just outside the moat, trusting the great beast to his squires, and had scaled the interior ladders of the largest Climbing Tiger with the speed and agility of a predator.
As the drawbridge fell, Lie Fan was the first man to cross the threshold into the teeth of the Wei defense. He was a terrifying vision in his bespoke black and gold armor, his face a mask of cold, martial focus.
"Hold the line! Kill him! Kill the Emperor!" a Wei captain screamed, his voice cracking with panic as he recognized the demonic figure of Lie Fan stepping onto the battlements. A dozen Wei spearmen, driven by sheer desperation, thrust their weapons forward in a synchronized wall of steel points.
Lie Fan did not slow down. He stepped into the deadly arc, his heavy halberd becoming a blur of motion. With a single, devastating horizontal sweep, he shattered the wooden shafts of six spears, the sheer kinetic force of his blow sending the Wei soldiers stumbling backward.
On the backswing, the curved blade of the halberd bit through armor and bone, instantly cutting down three men and opening a bloody clearing on the crowded wall.
But Lie Fan was not fighting alone. He was surrounded by the most lethal retinue on the continent.
At his immediate flank, moving like a shadow cast by the Emperor himself, was Zhang Mancheng. The Yellow Ghost Bodyguard was an absolute master of defensive combat, his eyes constantly scanning for threats that slipped past Lie Fan's offensive whirlwind.
A Wei archer raised his bow from a nearby watchtower, aiming a poisoned shaft at Lie Fan's exposed neck. Before the bowstring could even snap forward, Zhang Mancheng had thrown a perfectly balanced throwing knife, burying it to the hilt in the archer's throat.
When a pair of Wei swordsmen tried to rush Lie Fan from the side, Zhang Mancheng intercepted them, his twin short swords flashing in a blinding flurry of parries and lethal ripostes, leaving both men bleeding out on the stone before they could even complete their swing.
To Lie Fan's right, the vanguard exploded onto the wall in the form of Dian Wei. The massive, heavily muscled warrior did not rely on elegant technique, he was a force of pure, unstoppable blunt trauma.
Wielding his twin iron halberds, each weighing more than a normal man could comfortably lift, Dian Wei roared like a wounded tiger.
He crashed into a tightly packed shield wall of Wei defenders, physically smashing the heavy wooden shields to splinters with brute strength. Men were thrown into the air, their ribs crushed by the sheer impact of his blows. Dian Wei was a walking battering ram, clearing a path of devastation that allowed the Hengyuan infantry pouring out of the Climbing Tiger to gain a solid foothold.
On Lie Fan's left, the combat was a display of breathtaking, fluid lethality. Taishi Ci danced through the chaotic melee, his twin rod hammers weaving a web of steel.
He moved with a grace that belied the slaughter he was committing, ducking under wild spear thrusts and spinning to deliver precise, shattering strikes. Where Dian Wei pulverized, Taishi Ci dissected.
He found the gaps in the Wei armor, under the arm, at the back of the knee, at the unprotected throat, striking with blinding speed and moving on before the bodies even hit the floor.
Pushing forward past the initial bridgehead, Zhang Liao was a relentless offensive machine. The young general fought with a manic, joyous intensity, his heavy cavalry saber rising and falling in sweeping, devastating arcs.
He led a wedge of heavily armored Hengyuan shock troops directly toward the stairs leading down to the inner courtyards, intent on securing the gatehouse from the inside.
"Do not let them breathe! Push them back to the stairs!" Zhang Liao shouted, parrying a desperate sword thrust and driving his armored boot into his attacker's chest, sending the man tumbling over the edge of the wall to fall screaming into the city below.
Zhang Liao's presence was magnetic, the Hengyuan soldiers rallied behind his aggressive, unyielding push, expanding the perimeter around the siege towers inch by bloody inch.
And watching over them all, providing lethal overwatch from the raised platform of the Climbing Tiger, was the veteran Huang Zhong. Even in the close quarters chaos of a wall assault, the old tiger's aim was absolute perfection. He stood with his massive composite bow drawn back to his ear, his sharp eyes picking out priority targets amidst the swirling melee.
Thwip. Thwip. Thwip. Every time a Wei officer tried to rally a broken formation, an arrow with white fletching suddenly appeared in his eye socket.
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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