Day Eight: The Night Raid
The eighteen Grandmasters entered the capital beneath the cover of darkness.
They had expected confusion. They had expected sleeping soldiers, scattered patrols, and perhaps a few palace guards who would be unable to stop them.
Instead, they walked directly into a nightmare. The Crown Prince of Wu had greatly misunderstood the raw strength of the people defending the capital .
The four people he had marked as the heart of the defense were not merely ordinary Grandmasters.
Wu Shan had once stood at the Divine realm. The other two Human Sovereign Banners' elite commanders had also once possessed a Transcendent level cultivator body.
Their bodies had been destroyed long ago, and what remained were merely captured bodies capable of supporting Grandmaster level strength.
Their cultivation realm was therefore no longer comparable to their former heights. But cultivation realm was not the only thing that mattered.
Their understanding of martial arts remained. Their experience remained.
So too did the techniques they had forged through lifetimes of combat.
These were techniques that would take ordinary Grandmasters few decades to comprehend. Within the same realm, they were monsters.
And these three commanders were far from alone. Princess Ning Luo herself was a genuine Grandmaster and a well versed fighter. She was not comparable to the monsters standing beside her.
But she was still considerably stronger than the average Grandmaster. Then there were the palace's remaining experts.
Four Grandmasters from the Black Mang Tower had remained inside the capital. The palace eunuchs and guards contributed another few experts.
Eunuch Baiyi, one of the palace eunuchs, was himself a Grandmaster, while the commander of the palace guard was one such other Grandmaster.
Altogether, roughly eleven Grandmasters remained within the capital. Most of the strongest experts of the Yue Kingdom had already departed with the Emperor.
But the Crown Prince of Wu had failed to realize that the remaining eleven were more than enough.
Because Grandmasters were not equal. A pinnacle Grandmaster could fight several ordinary Grandmasters simultaneously.
A first-level Grandmaster might barely survive against another first-level expert.
A second-level Grandmaster was stronger still. The gap between the realms became even more terrifying at the upper limits.
The eighteen Wu Grandmasters were powerful. But most were merely ordinary Grandmasters. The defenders possessed several pinnacle-level monsters.
That difference became apparent almost immediately. The first Grandmaster entered through a darkened section of the palace grounds. He never reached his target.
An arrow passed through his throat. The sound was almost too quiet to notice. Sister Xia stood hundreds of meters away. Her bow was already drawn again.
She released another arrow. Another Grandmaster barely managed to deflect it.
The third arrow came before he could recover. He fell. Sister Xia did not pursue him. She simply moved. Another position.
Another arrow. Another target. She always understood the advantage of distance better than anyone on the battlefield.
The Grandmasters had entered the capital expecting close combat. Instead, several of them were being hunted. Four would eventually die beneath Sister Xia's arrows.
Her bow transformed the battlefield into an execution ground. Wu Shan was equally terrifying. He carried a massive halberd, and the weapon's reach gave him an enormous advantage.
Specially against his opponents who needed to approach him. Two of the Wu Kingdom's Grandmasters attacked him together.
They expected numbers to compensate for the difference in strength. They were wrong.
Wu Shan's halberd swept through the darkness. One man was forced backward.
The second tried to circle around him. Wu Shan rotated with the movement, his weapon following like a wall of steel. Neither could approach.
A moment later, one Grandmaster was struck across the chest. The other tried desperately to retreat. Then his halberd followed. Two bodies fell.
Wu Shan had not even reached his limit.
The cavalry commander fought differently.
He carried a saber rather than a long weapon, but his fighting style reflected years of commanding cavalry.
He did not exchange blows. He killed. Every movement was designed to reach a vital point as quickly as possible. Throat.
Heart. Eyes. Armpit. Groin. Any opening became a death sentence.
He moved like a cavalryman charging through an enemy formation. There was no prolonged duel. There was only the first opening and the killing blow.
Two Grandmasters died beneath his saber.
Princess Ning Luo fought beside them. She was not as overwhelming as Wu Shan or Sister Xia.
But she was still an very well accomplished Grandmaster. She understood the terrain.
She understood her own limitations. Most importantly, she did not attempt to fight the strongest opponents alone.
She coordinated with the palace defenders and used the chaos of the night to isolate individual enemies. Several Grandmasters attempted to reach her.
Instead, they found themselves being fully surrounded in all directions. The battle rapidly stopped resembling an organised assassination. It became a hunt.
The eighteen intruders had entered the capital believing themselves to be hunters.
They soon became the hunted. The four pinnacle-level defenders were devastating when combined with the other experts.
The Black Mang Tower Grandmasters attacked from unexpected angles. Palace guards blocked escape routes. The eunuchs moved through the shadows.
The Human Sovereign Banner elite troop commanders killed without hesitation. The battlefield became increasingly chaotic. Six Wu Grandmasters eventually managed to escape.
They abandoned the assassination entirely and fled the capital before the defenders could surround them. Three others were captured.
Princess Ning Luo personally defeated those three. She had opportunities to kill them. She did not. Instead, she struck them unconscious, ordered them bound, and had them imprisoned.
She had no desire to waste potentially valuable prisoners. Baiyi was less merciful.
The palace eunuch personally killed one of the invading Grandmasters.
The Human Sovereign Banner elite troop commanders showed even less hesitation.
They had been created for war. They did not hesitate when a killing blow presented itself.
By the time the fighting ended, the eighteen Grandmasters had suffered a devastating defeat. Six had escaped. Three had been captured. Nine had been killed.
Four of those deaths belonged to Sister Xia. Two belonged to Wu Shang. Two were killed by the cavalry commander. One was killed by Baiyi.
The remaining three Grandmasters had been captured and defeated by Princess Ning Luo herself. The Crown Prince of Wu had sent eighteen Grandmasters into the capital for the assassination.
He had expected them to cut off the head of the fortress. Instead, half of them were dead, several were prisoners, and the remainder had fled.
Not a single member of the capital's true leadership had been assassinated.
Princess Ning Luo remained alive. The three Human Sovereign Banner elite troop commanders remained alive. The Yue's command structure remained intact.
And more importantly, the defenders had learned something. The Wu army could not break them through numbers. It could not break them through siege weapons.
And now it could not even assassinate their leadership. The Crown Prince of Wu's plan had failed completely. He had tried to cut off the head of the snake. Instead, the snake had bitten back.
Day Nine: Keeping Up The Pressure
The ninth day passed without any major assault. The Crown Prince of Wu continued bombarding the capital of the Yue Kingdom with his siege weapons.
Great boulders were hurled over the walls, crashing into buildings and sending clouds of dust through the empty streets. But Princess Ning Luo barely reacted.
Nearly all civilians living near the walls had already been evacuated. For roughly three hundred meters behind the defensive line, the city had been almost completely cleared of people.
The boulders were destroying abandoned buildings. They were causing property damage, but very few people remained in the affected districts.
The Crown Prince of Wu continued anyway. Perhaps he wanted to remind the defenders that his army was still there. Perhaps he simply could not accept that his enormous army had been unable to break through.
But the truth was becoming increasingly obvious. The Wu army had started the campaign with nearly 360,000 soldiers. Now, only around 220,000 remained.
And most importantly, the majority of those remaining soldiers were not elite warriors. The Crown Prince of Wu had already lost the war he had expected to win. He simply had not yet accepted it.
His greatest humiliation, however, was sitting inside his own command tent. The Crown Prince of Yue had once been treated as a fellow royal.
Now he was a prisoner. He was confined to the Wu camp, still wearing his dragon robes, but stripped of everything that those robes represented.
He raged inside his tent, destroying whatever he could reach. Normally, whenever the Crown Prince of Yue became frustrated, he would vent his anger upon the women who are surrounding him.
Now he had no such outlet. His position had fallen dramatically. He had gone from crown prince to prisoner. The Crown Prince of Wu no longer treated him as a royal equal or even as a political partner.
He was simply a captive whose food was provided because keeping him alive was useful. The ninth day therefore passed quietly. Princess Ning Luo held the capital.
The Wu army remained outside.
And far away, Luo He was planning the final attack. His spies had already provided him with the information he needed.
The roughly two hundred thousand ordinary troops surrounding the capital were not true elite soldiers. Most were inexperienced recruits and young men with little to none battlefield discipline.
They were precisely the sort of troops who would break first once surrounded. Luo He therefore reached a simple conclusion.