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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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Cao Pi paced frantically across the polished wooden floorboards, his footsteps echoing sharply in the vast, silent room. His hands were clasped tightly behind his back, his knuckles white. The heavy, ceremonial armor he wore felt like a lead weight pressing down on his chest.
Seated around a massive, intricately carved map table in the center of the hall were the surviving pillars of the state's intellect, Xun Yu, Guo Jia, Xi Zhicai, Jia Kui, Cheng Yu, Tian Feng, and Xu You.
They were staring at the topographical representations of the palace grounds, their brilliant minds running thousands of tactical simulations, trying to find a mathematical miracle that could reverse the apocalypse unfolding outside.
Suddenly, the heavy double doors of the Great Hall were thrown open.
A palace runner stumbled into the room. He was a horrifying sight. His helmet was gone, his armor was slick with fresh blood, and his face was a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. He fell to his knees before the prince, his chest heaving so violently he could barely speak.
"Your Highness!" the runner gasped, coughing up a mouthful of dust and blood onto the pristine floorboards. "The... the wall! The inner fortress wall has fallen!"
The silence in the Great Hall was absolute, heavy, and profound.
Cao Pi stopped his pacing, his entire body going rigid. He stared at the kneeling messenger, his breathing suddenly turning shallow and rapid. "Fallen? What do you mean fallen? Marshal Xiahou Dun have swore he would hold the line!"
"The line is broken, Your Highness!" the runner cried out, tears of panic streaming down his soot-stained face. "The Hengyuan generals... they are monsters! They swarmed the battlements alongside their soldiers. Our generals and men could not hold them back. It was a slaughter!"
Xun Yu stood up so quickly his heavy wooden chair scraped loudly against the floor. His usually immaculate face was stark white. "And the generals? Marshal Xiahou Dun? General Xu Huang? The other generals?"
The runner swallowed hard, his eyes darting wildly. "Marshal Xiahou Dun, General Xu Huang, and General Zhang He managed to fight their way to the stairs. They are currently falling back to the main palace courtyard with whatever survivors they could rally. But... but the others, my Lords..."
"Speak!" Cao Pi demanded, his voice cracking with a high pitched edge of pure panic.
"General Gao Lan... General Yu Jin... General Pang De... General Cao Xiu... General Cao Chun..." The runner listed the names like a tolling funeral bell. "They are gone, Your Highness. Overwhelmed and captured by the Hengyuan vanguard. The enemy holds the high ground entirely. They are preparing to breach the palace gates as we speak!"
The news detonated within the Great Hall, a psychological devastating blow that instantly shattered whatever fragile hope the advisors had been clinging to.
To lose the wall was a tactical disaster, to lose almost the entirety of their elite command structure in a matter of minutes was a strategic death sentence.
The Wei defensive line was no longer just in danger, it was functionally annihilated. Even with Xiahou Dun's ferocious leadership, the handful of terrified survivors falling back to the courtyard could not possibly hold off the combined, euphoric might of the Hengyuan army.
Cao Pi took a stumbling step backward, his legs suddenly feeling weak. He looked at the vast, empty hall, feeling the suffocating weight of history crashing down upon him. He was the ruler of Wei, and his kingdom was measuring its remaining lifespan in minutes.
"No... no, this cannot be," Cao Pi muttered, his voice trembling. He spun around, slamming his hands down onto the map table, his eyes wide and frantic as he looked at the seven greatest minds in the north.
"Help me!" Cao Pi pleaded, the facade of the stoic prince vanishing entirely, revealing the terrified young man underneath. "All of you are the masters of strategy! You are my father's greatest weapons! Rack your brains! How do we turn this around? What is the maneuver? What is the stratagem that saves us?!"
The advisors looked at each other, their faces grim and hollow. There was no magical stratagem. There was no hidden reserve of troops, no brilliant flanking maneuver, no diplomatic trick that could stop a hundred thousand victorious, blood drunk soldiers led by martial gods who were currently kicking down their front door.
Xi Zhicai closed his eyes, shaking his head slowly. Cheng Yu scowled, his pragmatic mind accepting the inevitable reality of defeat. Xun Yu looked down at his hands, his heart breaking for the dynasty he had spent his life trying to preserve.
But Guo Jia, leaning heavily against the edge of the table, did not look down.
"There is no stratagem to turn this around, Your Highness," Guo Jia said, his voice a raspy whisper that somehow commanded the absolute attention of the room. "The battle for Chang'an is lost. The city is gone. The army is broken."
Cao Pi stared at him, his mouth opening and closing in shock. "Then... then what do we do? Do we just surrender? Do we offer our necks to Lie Fan's halberd?"
"No," Guo Jia said smoothly, stepping away from the table. The sheer audacity of his intellect was shining through the haze of his illness. "We do not surrender. We survive. But to survive, we must accept that Chang'an is no longer our capital. It is our pyre."
Guo Jia walked to the edge of the map, pointing his finger at the intricately carved wooden blocks representing the imperial palace and the inner fortress.
"Lie Fan wants a pristine capital," Guo Jia explained, his voice turning ice cold. "He wants to inherit the glory of the Han. He wants to sit on the Dragon Throne untouched. We deny him that victory. We deny him everything."
Guo Jia turned to face the terrified prince. "Your Highness, I propose a final, absolute maneuver. We gather the immediate royal family, the Emperor, and a small, elite retinue of our fastest cavalry. We secretly abandon the Great Hall and retreat through the hidden northern tunnels leading out toward the mountains."
"And the palace? The inner fortress?" Tian Feng asked, his eyes widening in dawning horror as he realized where Guo Jia's mind was going.
"We burn it," Guo Jia said simply.
The words hung in the air, heavy and blasphemous.
"We order the remaining loyalists to spread oil and pitch throughout the inner fortress, through the 9libraries, through the throne room, through the ancestral halls," Guo Jia continued, his eyes gleaming with a manic, desperate brilliance. "As we escape through the northern tunnels, we ignite it all. The entire complex will become an inescapable inferno. The fire will create an absolute, impenetrable thermal barrier that even Lie Fan's monsters cannot cross. It will buy us the hours we need to vanish into the northern wilderness, to regroup, to find an allied warlord, or to disappear entirely. We abandon Chang'An, but we ensure that Lie Fan inherits nothing but ash and bone."
A profound, horrified silence gripped the Great Hall. It was a plan of breathtaking cruelty and absolute scorched earth pragmatism. It was the logic of a cornered serpent, willing to gnaw off its own tail to escape the trap.
Xun Yu looked at Guo Jia as if he had never seen the man before, his deep reverence for the Han institutions warring with the cold reality of survival. Cheng Yu nodded slowly, a dark appreciation for the sheer ruthlessness of the plan forming in his eyes.
But Cao Pi stared at Guo Jia with absolute, unadulterated horror.
"Burn it?" Cao Pi whispered, his voice trembling. He took a step toward the strategist, shaking his head vehemently. "Burn the imperial palace? Burn the ancestral shrines? Are you insane, Fengxiao?!"
"It is the only logical path to survival, Your Highness," Guo Jia insisted, coughing again. "Stones can be rebuilt. A dynasty cannot be resurrected from the executioner's block."
"No!" Cao Pi shouted, his voice echoing off the high, painted ceiling. The prince's pride, his fear, and his deep-seated filial piety violently collided. "I will not do it! I will not be remembered by history as the second coming of Dong Zhuo! I will not be the prince who burned the ancient capital to the ground like a coward fleeing in the night!"
Cao Pi gestured wildly toward the heavy doors leading deeper into the palace. "And what of my father?! He is lying in a coma in the medical pavilion! We cannot move him quickly! The jostling of a frantic, subterranean escape would kill him instantly! You are asking me to either burn my own father alive in his bed, or murder him on the road just to save my own skin! I decline! I absolutely decline!"
"Your Highness, emotion is a luxury we no longer possess!" Guo Jia snapped back, his voice rising in desperate urgency. "If we stay here, Lie Fan will not just kill the Emperor, he will execute the entire bloodline! He will wipe the name Cao from the annals of history! The fire is our only shield!"
"I said no!" Cao Pi roared, his face flushed with panicked fury, slamming his fist onto the map table. "There must be another way! We barricade the Great Hall! We hold the doors! We negotiate terms! We—"
Cao Pi's frantic, desperate rambling was violently cut short.
From outside the heavy, iron reinforced oak doors of the Great Hall, a sound erupted that froze the blood in their veins.
It was a sound of splintering wood, snapping iron, and the terrified, gargling screams of the last Royal Guards being slaughtered in the antechamber.
The furious debate between the prince and his advisors instantly evaporated. They turned slowly, staring at the massive, ornate doors that served as the final barrier between them and the apocalypse.
BOOM.
A colossal impact struck the doors from the outside, bowing the thick oak inward. Dust rained down from the ancient, painted ceiling. The hinges groaned in agonizing protest.
BOOM.
A second impact, heavier than the first, shattered the heavy iron locking bar holding the doors shut. The wood began to splinter, revealing the terrifying, flashing steel of heavy axes and halberds biting through the gaps.
Guo Jia closed his eyes, letting out a long, shuddering sigh of absolute defeat. The time for brilliant strategies and scorched earth escapes had run out.
With a final, deafening crash, the massive doors of the Great Hall were violently kicked inward, tearing free from their hinges and slamming onto the polished floorboards in a cloud of dust and splinters.
Standing in the breached doorway, silhouetted against the smoke and the flickering fires of the dying palace, was the nightmare made flesh.
Zhang Liao, Dian Wei, Taishi Ci, and Guan Yu stepped over the ruined doors and into the Great Hall, their armor dripping with fresh blood, their weapons drawn and ready.
Behind them, an endless swarm of black armored Hengyuan elite infantry poured into the antechamber, their eyes locking onto the terrified remnants of the Wei court.
The Hengyuan generals had broken through the final gate. They had arrived. And as they spread out, surrounding the young prince and his advisors.
For a fraction of a second, absolute paralysis gripped the Wei court. But as the towering shadow of Dian Wei fell across the intricately carved map table, survival instincts violently overrode the shock.
With a sharp, metallic hiss that echoed like a scream in the vast hall, Cao Pi drew his ceremonial sword.
The blade, forged by master smiths and etched with the serpentine dragons of the Han, trembled slightly in his grasp. Cao Pi's knuckles were bone white.
He was not a warrior, his hands were Callused from writing poetry and gripping calligraphy brushes, not from the brutal, bone jarring impact of the battlefield. Yet, as he stared down the monsters who had broken his father's empire, a sudden, desperate fire ignited in his chest. He would not die cowering under a table.
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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