Eighty paces.
Gongsun Zan felt a sudden spike of bewilderment. At this critical distance, why hadn't the enemy infantry set their spears?
In flat, open terrain, foot soldiers facing a thunderous cavalry charge traditionally had only two viable tactical responses. The first was to array heavy supply wagons on the periphery, creating a makeshift barricade to break the horses' momentum while utilizing bows and crossbows to wither the attackers. If no wagons were available, they had to form a classic shield-and-spear phalanx. The front rank would lock their heavy shields, while the rows behind them would thrust out massive pikes. The bases of those shields and the butts of the long spears would be driven deep into the earth, using the structural integrity of the ground to absorb and disperse the devastating kinetic energy of charging warhorses.
If cavalry recklessly forced their way into such a wall, they would be pierced through by rows of razor-sharp iron points before ever touching a shield. Under normal circumstances, no competent cavalry commander would trade the expensive lives of his riders against stationary foot soldiers in such a manner.
Yet, the infantry block standing directly in his path held only shields. Not a single spear tip was visible.
Could it be that the commander of this unit is completely ignorant of anti-cavalry warfare? Gongsun Zan scoffed internally. No, that makes no sense. With Zhang Xin's legendary tactical acumen, how could he entrust his rear-guard to an incompetent fool?
While iron shields were rigid, the flesh and bone of the men holding them were not. The sheer impact of three thousand high-speed charging warhorses was monumental. Without a bristling wall of pikes to impale the mounts first, relying on raw physical strength and shields alone to halt a cavalry charge was suicide. Even if this mysterious general were a novice, Zhang Xin would have explicitly drilled him on the protocol.
Fifty paces.
Gongsun Zan's vision finally cleared, cutting through the swirling dust. His jaw dropped. This infantry unit didn't just have their spears lowered—they genuinely didn't carry any long pikes at all.
"Hold! Something is wrong!"
A cold sweat broke across Gongsun Zan's brow. Zhang Xin had deliberately left this detachment here to counter Han Fu's pursuing riders. Since Zhang Xin's vanguard consisted entirely of mobile cavalry, slow infantry could never hope to keep pace unless they had been pre-positioned for an explicit purpose. If their purpose was to kill cavalry, and they hadn't brought spears, it meant only one horrifying thing:
They had brought a weapon far more lethal to horses than a spear.
"Pull back! Abort the charge! Turn back now!" Gongsun Zan screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking with sudden panic as he yanked violently on his reins.
Tragically, it was too late.
The kinetic velocity of galloping warhorses was absolute. The distance between the two forces had already shrunk to a critical margin, and the vanguard of the White Horse Volunteers was now less than thirty paces from the iron wall.
The instant the words left Gongsun Zan's mouth, the enemy's front-rank shields did not brace—they slammed flat onto the grass. The soldiers holding them dropped prone to the earth, seamlessly exposing the secondary ranks hidden directly behind them.
Hundreds of massive, heavy military crossbows were already locked, loaded, and aimed directly at the chests of the oncoming riders. The cold, cruel glare of the heavy iron bolts shimmered ruthlessly in the midday sun.
"Release!" Qu Yi roared, his command halberd cutting through the air.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
A deafening, synchronized chorus of iron triggers releasing echoed across the field.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
The first row of half-crouching crossbowmen instantly discharged their volleys, immediately dropping down to draw their stirrups and reload. The second row stepped forward, fired, and cycled. Then the third row...
By the time the third tier had finished pressing their triggers, the elite soldiers of the first row had already fully reloaded their heavy weapons. It was a flawless, terrifying mechanism of continuous death. A dense, unrelenting hail of armor-piercing bolts ripped into the frontline of the White Horse Volunteers, transforming high-speed apex predators into a horrific tangle of tumbling, broken flesh.
Gongsun Zan's battlefield instincts saved his life. He threw his weight backward, forcing his white stallion to violently rear up on its hind legs to act as a living shield.
Puff! Puff! Puff! Puff!
More than ten heavy crossbow bolts slammed directly into the chest and underbelly of his prized mount. The beautiful white beast unleashed a tragic, bubbling shriek and collapsed like a felled tree. Gongsun Zan was thrown violently from the saddle, slamming heavily into the dirt as his vision went entirely blurry, his mind spinning into a daze.
Shaking his head violently to clear the ringing in his ears, Gongsun Zan pushed himself up and looked around. The sight made his blood run cold.
The entire hundred-man vanguard of his White Horse Volunteers had been utterly erased. Every single man and horse had been riddled with several—some more than ten—heavy bolts. Those fortunate enough to take an iron point through the throat or heart died instantly, spared the agony. But those who survived the initial volley were trapped in a living hell. They could do nothing but watch as their dying mounts pinned them to the earth, helpless as the secondary ranks of their own cavalry, unable to halt their momentum in time, barreled over them.
Losing a hundred men was statistically minor for a three-thousand-strong elite unit. The fatal crisis, however, was structural. When the vanguard abruptly collapsed into a wall of dead weight, the riders following directly behind had no space to maneuver. They crashed violently into the pileup of horse carcasses at full speed, creating a catastrophic chain-reaction derailment.
In an instant, hundreds more riders were flipped from their saddles, their formations shattering into a chaotic heap directly in front of Qu Yi's stationary line. It was only the mid-and-rear echelons of the Volunteers who finally managed to dig their boots in, dragging their mounts to a rigid halt and preventing total self-annihilation. But the three to four hundred riders caught in the front blast radius were already beyond saving.
"Quickly! Protect the Lord! Save General Gongsun!" Yan Gang, one of Gongsun Zan's top lieutenants, screamed from the rear as he witnessed his commander fall.
"Leave it to me!" General Dan Jing bellowed. He vaulted off his horse, drawing his blade as he led dozens of elite Yicong personal guards forward into the fray.
The White Horse Volunteers were light shock cavalry; they carried no heavy shields, leaving them completely naked against Qu Yi's relentless mechanical crossfire. But leaving their lord to be butchered was unthinkable. Turning their dead comrades into makeshift physical shields, Dan Jing and his men pressed forward through the whistling rain of iron bolts, desperate to reach the crash site.
Dan Jing finally dove into the dirt beside Gongsun Zan, hoisting him up by his armpits. "Lord! We must move, quickly—"
Before the sentence could clear his teeth, Dan Jing's body stiffened violently.
Gongsun Zan whipped his head around. A heavy crossbow bolt had driven straight through the side of Dan Jing's neck, the dark, pressurized crimson spilling rapidly down the iron point.
"Dan Jing!" Gongsun Zan shrieked, his heart wrenching.
"Go..." Dan Jing choked out, a final, breathless wheeze escaping his ruined throat before his eyes went glassy and he slumped into the mud.
"No!"
Hysterical with grief, Gongsun Zan was forcibly dragged backward by the remaining Yicong guards, his boots dragging through the dirt.
"Since you've come all this way, don't bother leaving!" Qu Yi sneered from the center of his formation. Seeing the enemy's momentum completely paralyzed, he ordered a temporary cease-fire, drew his heavy steel saber from his hip, and pointed it straight at the disorganized mass of horses.
"Kill!"
The hundred-plus shield-bearers who had been lying prone on the earth leaped to their feet in unison. Drawing their blades, they unleashed a feral war cry and initiated a counter-charge against a cavalry force that still outnumbered them ten to one.
Under normal parameters, a single charging horseman was worth ten foot soldiers. But the White Horse Volunteers' offensive had been brutally thwarted; their mounts were standing entirely stationary, packed together like cattle. A mere few dozen paces offered absolutely zero runway for acceleration.
What was there to fear from a cavalryman who couldn't move?
"Retreat! Fall back! Pull out of the funnel!" Gongsun Zan ordered frantically, the sheer terror of total annihilation finally shattering his pride.
Right on cue, the very earth beneath their hooves began to vibrate with a low, terrifying rhythm.
Having campaigned in the northern frontiers of You Province for his entire adult life, Gongsun Zan was intimately familiar with that specific acoustic signature. This wasn't the chaotic scuffle of disorganized foot soldiers. This was the terrifying, rhythmic thunder of an elite heavy cavalry charge.
Zhang Xin had never intended to flee. After crossing behind Qu Yi's hidden infantry block, his Xuanjia Army had immediately split into two flanking columns. Guided by Qu Yi's flawless, intimate knowledge of the local terrain, they had executed a rapid, invisible detour through the low ravines, launching a synchronized pincer strike from the hidden trails flanking both sides of the main highway.
Dian Wei, Zuo Bao, Guan Yu, and Zhao Yun each spearheaded a column of several hundred heavy riders, slamming like iron meteors into the exposed, stationary flanks of the White Horse Volunteers.
"Guan Yunchang of Hedong is here! Face your death!"
"Zuo Bao of Wei Commandery has arrived!"
"I am Zhao Zilong of Changshan!"
"Taste my halberd!"
The four peerless generals, backed by the absolute cream of the Xuanjia Army, sliced into the packed rows of the Volunteers like a hot knife through tallow. Already disorganized and demoralized, Gongsun Zan's proud unit instantly fractured into a chaotic mob, scattering into the fields as men broke ranks to flee for their lives.
Perched atop a nearby grassy knoll, Zhang Xin rested his hands on his saddle pommel, surrounded by several hundred elite personal guards. A calm, satisfied smile graced his lips as his eyes swept over the magnificent tactical slaughter below.
With this single engagement, Han Fu's coalition had officially lost its only highly mobile, elite strike asset capable of matching his pace. From this exact moment onward, the strategic tempo, logistics, and operational parameters of the Ji Province campaign would be dictated entirely by Zhang Xin.
All Han Fu could do now was crawl back into the massive walls of Ye City and pray. Deprived of cavalry protection, any infantry legions Han Fu dared to march out into the open fields would be hunted down and systematically annihilated the moment they showed their banners.
"Zhang Xin, you peasant brat... Zhang Xin, you absolute demon!"
Trapped in the swirling vortex of the routing army, Gongsun Zan watched his legendary Yicong elite cut down like summer grass, his heart burning with an agonizing mixture of shame, fury, and existential humiliation. The Yellow Turban dregs whom he had spent his entire life looking down upon with visceral disgust were currently, effortlessly crushing his life's work into the dirt.
All his life, Gongsun Zan had genuinely believed that Zhang Xin's meteoric rise to imperial prominence was nothing more than a fluke of luck. He had told himself a thousand times that if the heavens had granted him the exact same structural opportunities, he would have achieved deeds ten times greater than any peasant rebel.
Yet today, Zhang Xin had merely used a textbook bait-and-switch to lead him by the nose into a meat grinder. Looking at the carnage, even if the survivors managed to break the perimeter, barely three out of ten would ever see You Province again.
Realizing that his beautiful, pristine White Horse Volunteers were being thoroughly erased from history on a nameless plain...
"How can I ever face the ancestors of You Province again?!" Gongsun Zan wept bitterly. Driven to utter despair, he unsheathed his ornate ceremonial sword, pressing the cold steel against his own throat.
Clang!
Before he could draw the blade, a powerful, calloused hand clamped around his wrist like an iron vise, completely freezing his movement.
Gongsun Zan snapped his head around, his tear-blurred eyes locking onto a young, burly officer he didn't recognize.
"A temporary tactical setback is nothing to throw your life away over! Why must the Lord despair so deeply?" the young officer bellowed over the roar of battle, his grip unyielding. "I, Zhang Fei, am entirely willing to bleed to the death to cleave a path for your safety! We will live to fight another day, and smash that brat Zhang Xin in the campaigns to come!"
Most men who attempt suicide only possess that desperate, manic courage for a single, fleeting microsecond. Having his momentum violently interrupted by this mountain of a young man, Gongsun Zan's suicidal resolve instantly evaporated, replaced by the primal urge to survive.
"Good! Sublime!" Gongsun Zan nodded frantically, his eyes eagerly scanning the young commander. The man was young, likely no older than twenty-five or twenty-six, but his frame was exceptionally broad, his muscles bulging beneath his armor, and his eyes burned with an intense, martial ferocity. He was an absolute diamond in the rough.
The more Gongsun Zan looked at him, the more his spirits rose. He couldn't help but shout over the din: "What is your name, warrior?"
"This general is Zhang Fei, courtesy name Yide, hailing from Zhuo County!" the young man roared back, slamming his fist against his chestplate.
"Zhang Fei..." Gongsun Zan repeated the name, memorizing it.
"The General is at your disposal!" Zhang Fei cupped his fists.
Gongsun Zan took a deep, stabilizing breath, his eyes hardening. "Follow my lead! We break through their flank!"
"Understood!" Zhang Fei bellowed.
Amidst the fleeing, panicked mob, Gongsun Zan didn't dare mount a conspicuous white stallion again. He quickly dragged a dead scout off a generic, brown-furred regional mount, stripped his ornate silver helmet, and disguised himself as a common grunt. Zhang Fei shielded him with his massive frame, staying glued to his side as they ducked into the dust clouds.
In truth, the White Horse Volunteers didn't earn their legendary moniker because every single animal in the division was white. Out of three thousand riders, only Gongsun Zan himself and his inner circle of roughly a hundred Yicong elite actually rode pure white mounts. The general ranks rode typical bays, chestnuts, and greys.
In nature, without meticulous, multi-generational selective breeding programs, white coats occurred in barely one to five percent of any wild horse herd. This biological rarity made the market price of a pristine white charger astronomically higher than standard warhorses. Even if Gongsun Zan possessed the limitless financial coffers of the imperial treasury, trying to field three thousand identical white warhorses would require him to systematically draft every single white mount across the entire northern nomadic steppes.
Furthermore, white chargers possessed zero biological advantages in terms of speed, endurance, or bone density. On the contrary, their brilliant coloration made them an incredibly high-visibility, flashing target for enemy archers and siege crews on a chaotic battlefield. To make matters worse, their pigment-free skin was highly susceptible to severe sun damage under the summer heat, and the breed was notoriously prone to chronic genetic blindness. They were delicate, high-maintenance status symbols. Outside of royal princes and highborn nobles who demanded them for aesthetic pageantry, no practical military logistical officer would ever intentionally breed them for frontline deployment.
From his elevated observation mound, Zhang Xin could see the ebbs and flows of the battle, but the distance was far too great to distinguish individual human faces through the choking dust. Consequently, he simply directed the flanking maneuvers of his Xuanjia units to converge heavily on the clusters of conspicuous white horses. This oversight allowed the helmetless, mud-covered Gongsun Zan to slip through the dragnet unnoticed.
Before long, the remaining White Horse Volunteers, seeing their banners felled and their comrades slaughtered, threw down their weapons and surrendered en masse.
Seeing the field settled, Zhang Xin nudged his mount forward, riding down the hill. Qu Yi, his armor splattered with enemy blood, marched forward to greet his new lord.
"Lord."
"This historic victory belongs to you, General Qu. You are the undisputed foremost contributor of this day," Zhang Xin said, sliding out of his saddle with a warm, genuine smile. He reached out, gripping Qu Yi's forearms. "Once this campaign concludes, I shall personally draft a formal imperial memorial to the court to secure you a official, permanent Generalship!"
"My profound thanks, Lord!" Qu Yi's eyes flared with intense satisfaction, and he bowed deeply in gratitude.
"A man of your exceptional tactical brilliance was utterly wasted under Han Fu's stagnant administration," Zhang Xin stated, gently pulling him back upright. "Rest assured, General—under my banner, your strategic ambitions will find the limitless horizon they deserve!"
The entire ambush had been a masterpiece of psychological warfare.
Originally, when Zhang Xin received intel that Han Fu was aggressively reinforcing Wei County and Qingyuan while executing a scorched-earth policy, he had immediately discarded his initial plan of dividing his forces for wide-scale territory sweeps. That original strategy had been predicated on the assumption that Han Fu would consolidate all his strength to turtle inside the massive fortifications of Ye City.
Marching straight through Qinghe State was no longer viable; Han Fu's scorched-earth tactics meant the entire region would be flooded with millions of starving, displaced refugees. If Zhang Xin marched his main legions through that sector, the humanitarian crisis alone would completely break his logistics.
The superior alternative was to borrow a highway through Dong Commandery, bypass the logistical trap of Qinghe entirely, and strike straight into the soft underbelly of Wei Commandery. Liyang was the absolute throat of that entire offensive corridor.
However, marching a sovereign army through Dong Commandery required explicit authorization from its ruler, Sun Jian. Fortunately, Zhang Xin and the "Tiger of Jiangdong" shared a bond forged in blood during the coalition wars. The moment Zhang Xin's letter arrived, Sun Jian had issued a characteristically fierce, enthusiastic reply: "March wherever you please across my borders, brother! If your legions run low on grain, send another courier, and my personal granaries will feed your men."
With his diplomatic flank secured, Zhang Xin had huddled with his chief strategist, Xun You, to map out the capture of Liyang. Xun You's initial assessment had been highly conventional: "We should simply execute a standard siege march. Han Fu is currently surrounded by hostile factions; he would never dare risk an international incident by sending an army into Sun Jian's territory to block us. We possess over thirty thousand elite main infantry, and our river navy guarantees an un-cuttable supply line. If Han Fu cowers behind his walls and abandons Liyang, the city falls to us over time. If he panics and sends reinforcements, we simply execute a textbook 'besiege the stronghold to strike the relief army' maneuver. In a pure field engagement, ten Han Fus combined cannot match your blade."
But Zhang Xin had harbored a completely different, highly unorthodox perspective.
He knew a critical piece of historical data that Xun You did not: the general currently commanding the garrison at Liyang was Qu Yi.
In the records of the original timeline, not long after the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition disbanded, Qu Yi had launched a sudden, violent mutiny against Han Fu, choosing to defect to Yuan Shao. That meant Qu Yi's baseline psychological loyalty to Han Fu was effectively zero.
While Zhang Xin hadn't initially understood why this timeline's Qu Yi hadn't made his move yet, a quick assessment of current politics revealed the answer: Yuan Shao's reputation was currently in the gutter. In the original history, Qu Yi defected because Han Fu was incompetent and Yuan Shao was viewed as the ultimate aristocratic savior of the realm. But in this timeline, during the Battle of Mengjin, Yuan Shao's military performance had been pathetic—his thirty-thousand-strong grand army had been utterly dismantled by Zhang Liao's ten thousand defenders, and his family name was ruined.
Currently, the two lords ruling Jizhou were essentially two different flavors of garbage. Qu Yi, being a fiercely proud warrior, simply hadn't been willing to endure the historical infamy of betraying his lord just to jump from one political cesspool into another.
This man is ripe for recruitment, Zhang Xin had concluded.
Acting on this realization, he had handed the slow-moving main infantry vanguard over to Xun You's operational control. Meanwhile, he personally took command of five thousand elite riders—comprising the Xuanjia Army, alongside elements of the Three Thousand Camp, the Five Military Camp, and You Province auxiliary horsemen. They conducted a brutal, non-stop day-and-night forced march, driving straight like an arrow for Liyang.
The moment his horses reached the perimeter of the city, Zhang Xin didn't deploy a single siege engine. Instead, he simply dispatched a lone courier to deliver a private scroll to Qu Yi's command chamber. The parchment contained a single, powerful sentence:
"I desire to take your hand, General, and together carve our names into a grand enterprise that shall outlast the centuries."
Qu Yi was an immensely arrogant, status-conscious commander. A standard, bureaucratic letter demanding unconditional surrender would have insulted his pride and driven him to fight to the death. But Zhang Xin's words were grand, treating him as an equal partner in destiny rather than a defeated dog.
It worked flawlessly. Qu Yi had thrown open the gates and surrendered the strategic key of Liyang without a single drop of blood being spilled.
It was only after a long night of drinking and private conversation that Zhang Xin finally understood the deeper roots of Qu Yi's psychology—and why his defection had been so instantaneous.
Qu Yi was actually a native son of Pingyuan!
Decades ago, shortly after Emperor Liu Hong had ascended the imperial throne, the Qu clan of Pingyuan had somehow run afoul of the court's corrupt eunuch factions. To avoid a brutal summary execution of their entire lineage, the family had been forced to abandon their ancestral lands, migrating across the empire to embed themselves within the lawless, blood-soaked borderlands of Liang Province.
Qu Yi had been born with the blood of Pingyuan in his veins, but his childhood had been forged entirely in the crucible of the western frontiers. Living among the nomadic Qiang tribes from a young age, he had masterfully synthesized their brutal, high-efficiency anti-cavalry tactics into his own military repertoire.
When Emperor Liu Hong finally passed away, a homesick Qu Yi desired to return to his ancestral roots. Gathering his extended family and a private retinue of eight hundred highly trained household retainers, he had journeyed back to the heartland.
By the time his convoy reached the borders of Jizhou, the empire had fractured into the coalition wars against Dong Zhuo, and Han Fu was frantically recruiting regional muscle. Eager to establish a legendary military legacy for his returned family name, Qu Yi had pledged his eight hundred elite veterans to Han Fu's banner.
Tragically, Han Fu was a short-sighted bureaucrat. He refused to grant Qu Yi a proper, independent Military Commission, insulting him with a meager, mid-tier Assistant Official title. Worse still, throughout the entire historic campaign against Dong Zhuo, Han Fu had displayed monumental cowardice—refusing to deploy a single soldier to the front lines, content to sit safely in the rear acting as a glorified grain transport clerk for Ye City.
That display had permanently broken Qu Yi's respect for the man. As the months rolled on, his disgust for Han Fu's structural incompetence had hardened into bitter resentment. The man was simply not a true lord.
But as Qu Yi had surveyed the geopolitical landscape of Jizhou, his options were depressing. Who else was there to turn to? With no superior alternative, he had simply checked out emotionally, garrisoning Liyang with a cynical, day-by-day survival mentality.
Until the Marquis of Xuanwei arrived at his gates.
A single sentence—"create a grand enterprise together"—had acted like oil poured onto the dormant, freezing embers of Qu Yi's ambition, igniting a roaring fire in his chest. Combined with Zhang Xin's pristine, terrifying reputation for absolute battlefield invincibility, the choice was obvious.
Against such a lord, at such a pivotal moment in history... when else would the heavens ever grant him a better master to serve?