Chapter 16The General's Gambit

Poison smog chokes the battlefield. Armour-clad shapes stagger through the miasma—General Vanguard at the head, his battered CelestCore cuirass flickering. Every breath tears like broken glass through his lungs. Every movement stirs more poison into the air. They have minutes, maybe less.

He cannot let it end here. Not for him, not for these Riders. His father’s words cut through the poison haze: “Become the blade that cleaves hope through night.”

He grips his sabres. Counts the forms around him through swirling smog—how many can still fight?

Rider Jiang barely stands, one hand white-knuckled on his halberd, coughing blood. Captain Chen shields the younger Riders Yu and Liu despite the gash soaking his trousers red. “Stay behind me,” Chen rasps. “Promised your parents you’ll see ‘em at Earth Princess Festival.”

Six warriors. Maybe five who can still swing a weapon. Vanguard’s tactical mind counts: seconds until the poison takes them, heartbeats until the Husks close in, breaths before someone falls and doesn’t rise.

Fox spirits yip above. Husks close in. The Rock Guai’s growl rumbles closer—unstoppable, frenzied. The masked assailant’s strategy is clear: wear them down with Husks, then unleash the Guai to finish survivors.

If there are survivors.

“Tiger’s Den Phalanx! NOW!” Vanguard’s command cuts through the choking air. “Tight formation—backs together!”

The Riders close in. Vanguard centres himself in the phalanx as poison bites through torn sleeve, seeping into skin. His vision blurs. Sharpens. The Husks are twenty paces away. Fifteen. Ten.

Sabres up. “Hold the line!”

The Husks surge forward—animated pottery driven by malice. Vanguard’s sabre crumbles one to dust. Next to him, Chen blows another aside with his maces. The formation holds, but barely. Each breath draws fire into lungs. The poison is winning.

Vanguard’s mind refuses defeat. His eyes track movement through the swirling smog. More Husks continue to swarm in. There. High in the trees. The Fox Spirits yip and laugh, untouched by the smog suffocating everything below.

“Let’s see how you yip in this smog.” Vanguard grunts. “Captain Chen! How much qi left in your CelestCore boosters?”

“Are we flying out of this smog, sir?”

“No, we won’t make it.” Vanguard commands. “We stay in this phalanx, and only ignite your Core’s fire.”

“Sir, that’ll drain our reserves—”

“Exactly. Heat rises, takes the poison with it. Ready… ignite!”

The CelestCore armours blaze. Seven warriors become seven small suns. The tiger crest on Vanguard’s chest-plate roars with light. Heat rolls outward. The poison churns, rises, accelerates upward.

The air clears enough. The Riders breathe again.

“Rider Jiang, left flank—your good arm covering our weak side!” Vanguard positions his troops. “Captain Chen, anchor position. Everyone else, stay as low as you can!”

Through the rising smoke, the laughter fades. The Fox Spirits are coughing in pain. The Husks lose coordination.

Through it all, Vanguard tracks the masked figure. The smog clears enough for him to see the Rock Guai’s legs. The assailant, no longer standing on the Rock Guai, lands on the ground to get a clear vision of the Riders. A haunting flute melody shivers through twilight. The Rock Guai’s runestones pulse brighter. The assailant plays another sequence, and the Fox Spirits scatter further, coughing and yipping as they dash to further woods.

But the flute cannot play two melodies at once.

“Half on the Rock Guai! Other half, bring down those Fox Spirits! Make them choose!”

The formation splits. The assailant’s flute wavers, the melody fragmenting. The control slips—movements grow jerky. Another pocket of poison dissipates.

The smog continues to clear. Vanguard gulps breathable air, his mind sharpening.

And as the haze lifts, Vanguard sees what should have been obvious.

The Fox Spirits aren’t looking at the Riders—their eyes flick toward Tiantan. The Rock Guai keeps orienting southeast, driving them back but not finishing them. Herding, not crushing. Delaying, not destroying.

“We’re not meant to hold. Look at their formation—they’re herding us, not crushing us.” Vanguard thinks to himself, the pieces fall into place. “Because they need to keep us busy.”

The Fox Spirits glancing toward Tiantan. The assailant focusing on containment. This elaborate ambush positioned exactly three li from the town.

“The real target is Tiantan. We’re the diversion.”

Vanguard’s mind races. They cannot defeat this force—not depleted, not exhausted. But they don’t need total victory. They need to reach Tiantan.

“Formation Golden Arrow! Breakthrough formation—target the southeastern flank!”

“Sir, the Rock Guai—”

“Let it follow! We’re not here to win this fight—we’re here to reach the next one!” Vanguard’s sabres point toward the weakest section of their encirclement. “On me! Forward!”

The formation shifts from defensive phalanx to spear-point thrust. They surge forward, pushing through the swarm of Husks like a speeding lance. The masked assailant appears surprised by Vanguard’s quick calculation and command.

Steel meets clay as the Riders cut through Husks like a blade through water. The southeastern flank crumbles before their coordinated assault. For one precious moment, freedom beckons—open path, clear air, the road to Tiantan visible through dissipating smog.

“Why isn’t the masked assailant trailing us?” Vanguard thinks to himself. “Where is he?”

Suddenly, two bombs explode in front of the Riders, poison smoke arcs through the twilight air—darker than before, heavier, trailing tendrils of concentrated poison that promise death rather than delay.

“Halt! Ignite your Cores again!” Vanguard barely gets the word out. Purple-black smog explodes outward, denser than anything the Fox Spirits summoned. The Riders’ brief respite ends. Coughing returns, harsher now. The CelestCore armours flicker, their reserves almost depleted from the previous ignition.

“The smoke is not rising, sir!” Chen’s voice rasps through the renewed choking haze. “We don’t have enough qi left—”

“Hold formation!” Vanguard’s command cuts through desperation. But even he feels the poison clawing deeper, feels his strength waning with their chance of survival. “Keep the heat—”

The masked assailant emerges from the smog like lightning cutting through cloud. Twin batons gleam, crackling with cruel electrical charge. The figure moves with fluid grace that speaks of years training in arts as ancient as the mountains themselves. Headed straight for the Riders.

Vanguard’s twin sabres rise to meet the challenge. “Captain! Keep moving in the phalanx! Get the men through!”

“Sir, we can’t leave you—”

“That’s an order, go!”

The assailant strikes, footwork as light as shadows, and Vanguard understands immediately he faces someone trained by masters, someone who moves with the confidence of an assassin who has never lost a prey. The batons blur through poison-thick air—not wild nor aggressive, but precise like a calligrapher’s brushstrokes. Each movement economical, no wasted energy while Vanguard burns his. Deadly patience wrapped in perfect technique.

Vanguard answers with a rooted mountain stance. His left sabre rises—barely parries the first baton. The impact jolts through his wrists. His right sabre flows into twisting intercept to redirect the second strike, but the third comes from an angle his exhausted arms can’t quite reach—the assailant’s chopping technique excels at impossible angles. His father taught him to read opponents like scrolls, but this one writes in a language half-familiar, half-foreign—elements of quintessential martial arts from the Eastern Yue Kingdom, mixed with something contrived, but deadly nonetheless.

The batons dance close. Vanguard’s left sabre blocks one, his right sweeps at the assailant’s exposed ribs. But the figure twists impossibly, and suddenly inside his guard, lightning thrusting toward his throat.

Vanguard drops backward, armoured boots sliding through dirt. The tiger crest on his chest-plate blazes with renewed light—not from CelestCore reserves, but from sheer will refusing to let his body fall. His sabres cross, catch both batons in a bind that locks them together for one heartbeat. The assailant pushes down relentlessly. Electrical charge surges through the crossed sabres into Vanguard’s arms—muscles spasm involuntarily, smell of singed leather where gauntlets make contact with bare skin. Pain screams up to his shoulders. But the young general’s jaw sets, teeth gritted, refusing to yield.

Behind the grotesque mask, eyes study him. Calculating. Impressed, perhaps.

Then the assailant breaks the bind with a technique that shouldn’t work—shouldn’t be possible. The batons twist in an impossible spiral, wrenching Vanguard’s sabres outward. Before he can recover, the assailant releases the batons—no longer needed at this range.

Bare hands. The assault transforms into lightning-fast palm strikes—the Yue Kingdom’s infamous Thunderclap Styles. The Thunder Chain Palms rain brutal impacts like summer storm, each strike targeting qi meridians with relentless precision. Meridian at right ribs disrupts breath. Pressure point at neck base scrambles coordination. Solar plexus can stop the heart if struck true. Vanguard’s grip weakens. His sabres clatter to earth. His knee buckles.

Vanguard recognizes the transition—the ‘Pressing Forward Method’ from Yue Kingdom arts. First, disarm at medium range. Second, destroy the body’s defenses at close range. Third… his mind refuses to complete the thought, but his body knows: third finishes the kill.

Combat experience races through his muscles even as his body takes punishment. “After the explosive palms comes the Lightning Bolt Burst arm extension—here’s my chance—”

Instinctively, Vanguard follows his knowledge of past battles against Yue—he abandons his martial arts training completely and heads straight into the eye of the storm. Roots his stance despite the pain. Sinks his weight into the earth beneath poisoned air. The incoming palm strikes crash against his armoured body instead of his skull, using armor as shield while the mountain advances. Pain explodes through his leg, but it buys him the half-second he needs.

“When crushed, become like the mountain.” He surges upward, closing the distance to nothing. The assailant’s next strike glances off his shoulder plate. Too close for technique now—too close for anything but raw impact.

Vanguard slams his helmeted forehead into the grotesque mask.

The crack echoes. The assailant staggers, perfect balance finally broken. The left side opens—ribs exposed beneath raised arm—and Vanguard’s gauntlet blazes to life with the ember of his CelestCore reserves. Not a technique. Not a form. Just a desperate armoured fist driven by a decade of training and the absolute refusal to fall before his men do.

The impact lifts the assailant off their feet.

A crack stretches through the mask. The assailant takes two steps back, regains composure, takes a deep breath, and charges toward the young general once more.

Palms meet gauntlets. The general and the masked assailant clash in deadly rhythm, their arms, enchanted with CelestCore plating, singing the ancient song of war. Around them, the Riders struggle forward through poison smog, Husks now returning to press from all sides, the Rock Guai’s massive form blocking their path.

His father’s teaching echoes through the clash: “The superior warrior adapts; the inferior repeats.” Vanguard abandoned elegant dao technique for brutal close combat. The assailant remains locked in the Thunderclap patterns, unable to adapt at this distance. Adaptation versus rigidity. The lesson learned versus the lesson memorized.

“Why’s the poison not affecting him?” Vanguard thought to himself, confounded by the assailant’s steady breaths. His arms burn. His lungs scream. But he does not yield. Cannot yield. He tries to regulate his qi, slowing his breathing like the turtle method to resist poison.

The assailant seems tireless, movements never slowing, never faltering. The attacks keep pressing, driving Vanguard back step by step. The assailant’s fingers flex. Hidden daggers extend from beneath the sleeves—unforgivingly sharp, gleaming with deadly poison. A weapon for close work. For finishing strikes—

The wind changes.

It happens so suddenly that both combatants pause, gauntlet and daggers locked in another bind, eyes scanning toward the impossible. The wind that has been still, that has allowed the poison to settle and suffocate, suddenly surges from the west. The wind meets the Riders’ burning flame, pushing the heat and raising the smog high up to where the Fox Spirits cling.

Fresh air rushes through the woods like a living thing, purposeful, directed, clearing the purple-black smog in great swirling channels.

The poison dissipates—not slowly, not gradually, but in rushing relief. The Riders rejoice as clean air fills their lungs—the first breath that doesn’t burn in what feels like lifetimes.

Vanguard’s eyes sweep across his men. Chen gulping air like a drowning man saved. Young Jiang straightening despite his wounded wrist. Yu and Liu steadying each other. All of them still standing, still breathing, still alive. The knot that has been tightening in his chest since the poison first fell—the terrible weight of leading men who might not survive the next moment—finally loosens.

His father once said fortune favours not the desperate, but those who refuse to yield even in desperation. Perhaps that is why the wind answers now, carrying with it the scent of distant gardens and blessed flowers, as if the very heavens have taken notice of warriors who would not fall. Of men who deserve to see their families again. Of a general who refused to let them become names carved in memorial stone.

“The Celestials smile on those still standing.” Vanguard’s voice carries renewed strength, but also something softer—gratitude that his Riders can hear it at all. “Let’s not disappoint them.”

Around them, the Riders surge forward with renewed vigor. The Fox Spirits that had been regrouping in the distant trees now tumble from their perches, the sudden wind shift catching them unprepared. Some fall yipping and coughing, their control shattered.

“The wind…” The masked assailant’s distorted voice carries surprise. The first emotion Vanguard has heard.

“Poison was clever. Now let’s see if you’re actually skilled.” Vanguard doesn’t question fortune. He presses the advantage, his twin sabres moving with speed renewed. “Riders! Now! Break through now!”

The assailant leaps backward, disengaging from the duel. The masked face turns toward Tiantan, then back to Vanguard. For one moment, warrior recognizes warrior—the acknowledgment of equals meeting on the field of battle, the respect of one who has tested another’s steel and found it true. For warriors also know, only one can walk away from the battle.

So the assailant raises the flute.

The melody that emerges carries none of the earlier control or precision—this note screams rage, commands absolute destruction.

The Rock Guai’s runestones answer. Light blazes from each stone, intensifying until they cast sharp shadows through the clearing smog. The enhancement spreads like wildfire across its rocky hide—fissures glowing molten orange, steam hissing from joints, the creature’s eyes igniting with unnatural awakening.

Its massive head swivels toward the Riders.

Vanguard’s tactical mind calculates in fractions of heartbeats: depleted qi reserves, exhausted men, no time to scatter, nowhere to hide. “Again! Tiger’s Den Formation! Brace for—”

The Rock Guai charges.

Earth explodes beneath its weight. Trees shatter like kindling. The distance between them—thirty chi, twenty, ten—vanishes with terrifying speed. The Riders lock shields, plant feet, pour the last dregs of their CelestCore energy into defensive wards that glow pale and inadequate against tons of enhanced stone bearing down—

The ground convulses.

Not from the Rock Guai, but from something deeper, something vast stirring in the bones of the world itself. The tremor rolls through the forest with authority that stops even the enhanced yaoguai mid-stride. Ancient power speaks, and everything listens.

The Rock Guai’s runestones flicker. Once. Twice. Then dim to their normal glow, the enhancement draining away like water through cupped hands.

The Fox Spirits scatter immediately, yipping in terror as they flee deeper into the western woods. The Husks crumble where they stand, their animating qi dissipating into the twilight air, the ground littered with their empty carapaces. Even the Rock Guai turns, confusion evident in its movements as it lumbers away from the Riders, away from battle, following some command only it can hear.

“No! We’re not finished.” The masked assailant’s distorted voice carries frustration despite its control.

But the earthquake speaks again—briefer this time, yet unmistakable in its meaning. A command from power that brooks no argument.

The assailant’s shoulders tense. Behind the grotesque mask, those eyes burn with frustration as they sweep across the battlefield—the Riders catching their breath, Vanguard watching with wary readiness.

“We’ll finish this another time, General.” The assailant’s distorted voice carries promise. “I look forward to our next meet.”

Then the figure leaps onto the retreating Rock Guai’s back with the ease of long practice, and the twilight woods swallow them whole. The Fox Spirits’ distant yipping fades. The Husks’ dust settles onto blood-stained earth. Silence reclaims the battlefield, heavy with the weight of combat survived but not concluded.

Vanguard remains ready, sabres still raised, until he’s certain the retreat is genuine. Only then does he allow himself to lower his guard. His arms tremble—exhaustion, adrenaline, poison’s lingering bite. Around him, his Riders stand in similar states of barely-controlled collapse.

“Sir…” Chen’s voice carries equal parts relief and concern. “That earthquake. What was that?”

“Something old.” Vanguard’s eyes scan the western woods where their enemies vanished. But even as he speaks, unease settles in his gut. The earthquake felt wrong—not natural, not random. Purposeful. As if something beneath the earth had called the nightmares home.

His gaze snaps toward the valley. Through the settling dusk and dissipating poison smog, he sees Tiantan’s lights—the warm glow of homes preparing evening meals, families gathering, a town that is unaware of deadly yaoguais nearby.

Then, in the distance—he hears the faint echoing yips and three towering Rock Guais tramping through the woods.

“No.” Vanguard’s words come out strangled.

His mind races through tactical assessment with crystal clarity sharpened by horror. They were ambushed three li from the town. Led by a mysterious masked assailant from Yue Kingdom. The overly elaborate ambush. The yaoguais withdrew after a sudden earthquake.

“Tiantan…” He realises the real attack has already begun.

“Sir?” Chen follows his gaze. Sees what Vanguard sees.

“To Tiantan! NOW!” Vanguard’s command cuts through his Riders’ exhaustion with the whip-crack of urgency.

“Why do we want to go to a cursed town?” Jiang asks, exhausted. “Also… my wrist is bleeding.”

“We’re all bleeding, little girl!” Chen grunts. “You heard the general, kiddos. Let’s go!”

They run. Seven warriors with battered divine armour, wounded bodies, poison still burning in their lungs—they run because that’s what the Imperial Elite Riders do. Because their homes need them. Because somewhere in that town, people they’ve sworn to protect are fighting for their lives.

The western woods blur past. The twilight deepens toward full night. And with every step, Vanguard prays they reach Tiantan before the nightmare consumes it whole.