Chapter Forty-Four - Glorious Gank

Whoever had ever told her that war was glorious was a big fat liar.

Actually, now that she thought about it, it was unlikely that anyone had ever actually said that to her directly, but she was certain she'd read it somewhere.

She was back on the wall, which was impressive. It meant that they still had a wall to be back on.

The wall was currently pitted with holes and massive dents. One of the towers had crumpled like a stack of books being shoved over, and even now there was a small fire raging within Yu Xiang that the locals were working to cover in sand and their precious water.

Fortunately, it was mostly contained to one of the residential areas. She wasn't sure what she'd do if the fire had been in the artisan quarters.

Wait, no, this was worse because people lived there. It was just hard to think that way when arrows were currently worth as much as civilians. Fenfang rubbed at her face until a press on her shoulder reminded her that she wasn't alone. "Thanks, Mem," she said.

"Mem thinks you're doing very goodly," Mem said.

"Mhm. Thanks Mem," she said. At least she had one friend around here. Even if that friend was a giant mantis woman of questionable intelligence, she was at least loyal.

The Battle of Yu Xiang, which was what she was going to name this in her auto-biography (assuming she lived long enough to write one) was going... well, it was going. She'd make sure to skip some of the less entertaining parts in that biography.

The ditches and long trenches dug in front of the city had collapsed in a few areas, but Seventeen and his cadet-officers had undead redigging them at the moment. Some siegeworks from the enemy remained scattered on the field as well, broken and discarded after their last advance had failed.

The first major battle had taken place the morning prior, and it had been a bloodbath.

First, the enemy marched up to the ridge and reformed their lines. That had taken a surprisingly long time, but they did so right on the outer edge of where her own army could reach with bows and ballista. The trebuchets in the city could fling rocks that far without issue, but the rate of fire wasn't all that great, and the enemy had cultivators.

Cultivators were more than capable of knocking a rock out of the air if they wanted to, and that's what they ended up doing.

Then the lines advanced.

She'd been on the wall then, chewing her nails into nubs as she watched row after row of troops marching to kill her. If they weren't under siege, she might have considered a speedy escape, but since that wasn't an option...

She had stood resolute, far enough from anyone important so that they couldn't see the way her knees were knocking together.

Then the first set of traps was sprung, and the battle turned messy.

It was impossible for her to follow everything while it was going on, even though each move on the battlefield did look like it was taking ages to occur from way back on the walls.

First, a false tunnel was collapsed under the feet of the frontmost line of enemy troops. It created a small ditch that they tripped into, one lined with jagged rocks and filled with a few scrambling undead.

The entire battleline juttered to a stop, and even from the wall she could hear sergeants screaming for order.

Then their undead had rushed out over their first wall and across the battlefield. They were intercepted, of course. Thousands of arrows rained down on the charge and the enemy cultivators unleashed dangerous techniques to wipe the charge out. Some of it still reached though, and they carved a dent into the enemy formation.

After that, the enemy pulled back and tried again.

This time, they approached in large rectangles. A few cultivators stationed with each formation to deter the rocks still being flung at them. This formation did better, crossing the field and reaching their first palisade wall.

The wall had gaps.

Fenfang hadn't been sure why Seventeen had left those, but she assumed the undead knew what he was doing, and it seemed like he did, because behind those gaps were a maze of walled off passages that split the enemy apart and pushed some deeper into their side and others away from any allies that could assist them.

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The battle started anew, this time fought in much tighter quarters where the undead weren't going to be picked off by arrows from afar and where the long spears the enemy carried weren't nearly as useful.

Behind the first line of trenches and short palisade walls was another open space, then a second set.

The soldiers that eventually made it through tried to regroup in that open space, but they were prime targets for the undead archers who had moved back.

Fenfang wasn't sure where Seventeen had acquired explosives, but he had, and they were going off with regularity within the defences even as more soldiers were being pushed into the meat grinder.

The next row of defences were mostly made up of ditches with platforms and short towers above them and walls of dirt. Crossing these was basically impossible. The ditches were three times as deep as she was tall, and they crawled with undead at the bottom.

And so the army had pulled back for the moment to prepare.

She was reluctantly impressed by how quickly they took apart their first set of walls and built temporary bridges and ladders to cross the ditches, all while being pelted with arrows and stones larger than a grown man.

Her impressedness wore thin when the army pushed to try and cross the second line of defence.

The bridges weren't very sturdy. Any sort of ghostly undead could take them down from below, pitching the soldiers on the improvised siegeworks into the ditch where they never returned.

It was about this time that some cultivators decided to forge ahead. They could leap over the ditches without issue and they charged to strike at the large packs of undead archers arrayed before their final lines of defence.

Which was about when Seventeen sprung another trap. The mantis sisters.

The cultivators were not prepared to have to face dozens of ravenous, kill-hungry mantises that jumped off the walls of Yu Xiang, spread their surprisingly large wings, and came gliding down onto their formations scythe-arms first.

It was, almost a massacre. It would have been perfect if it had been one, but some more senior cultivators showed up, smacked some of the weaker sisters around, and rallied the rest into a fighting retreat just before some of their larger undead abominations reached them.

The cultivators retreating signalled the same for the rest of the soldiers, and there was a mass exodus as men hightailed it back to the ridge, encouraged by volleys of arrows and a few scampering undead who chased the stranglers down.

The battle ended with a field covered in corpses.

It seemed very impressive, and she noted that the people from the city watching it had been proud of the defence.

Seventeen was less so.

He confided in her that it hadn't been nearly enough. They'd barely decimated the enemy, and had lost a third of their weaker undead to do that. As it turned out, the average undead wasn't impressive compared to the average soldier, and even with proper defensive structures giving them a massive advantage, that disparity in strength was quite difficult to overcome.

Fortunately, the decimated enemy had left them with heaps of spare parts. By the time the sun rose again the next morning, their undead army was back to the same numbers it had had the day before, with an additional contingent of undead zombies in the enemy's colours stationed right at the front.

The enemy returned with better siege equipment. They set up their own ballista and catapults, mobile towers, and long bridges with cart wheels on the sides. They were ready this time.

The Second Battle of Yu Xiang was underway even now, and Fenfang was very much worried that she'd become a historical footnote.

Maybe they'd call her the 'week long empress?'

Wait, no, she'd need to last a couple more days for that. Damn.

Things were a little bit dire. Moreso because the enemy wasn't turning tail and running. She suspected that Seventeen was the blame for that. The constant whittling of the enemy's forces on the road, the attacks, had basically told them that if they ran, they'd be hounded the whole time.

Now the soldiers down below knew that they'd either win here, or die trying, and it was really giving them a lot of extra pep.

She looked at her nails, searching for something to chew on, but she found nothing.

"Master... where are you?"

***