Since even the Song Clan hadn't expected Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling's Twin Dragons Army to abandon the south and head north, launching a surprise attack with a forced march, Shen Faxing, Li Zitong, and the others certainly hadn't seen it coming either!
They had all assumed that the Twin Dragons Army would join forces with the Song Clan to attack Lin Shihong's Chu. After all, Lin Shihong had just been assassinated, and Chu was in the midst of chaos—a golden opportunity for both the Twin Dragons Army and the Song Clan.
The factions led by Shen Faxing and Li Zitong had even prepared to sit back and watch the tigers fight.
They'd planned to wait three to five months, until the Song Clan, the Twin Dragons Army, and Chu had fought each other to exhaustion, then find the right moment to launch a sneak attack on the Twin Dragons Army's base in Yuhang Commandery. They'd strike at the army's heart while it was still flourishing and teach the Twin Dragons a lesson.
But who could have guessed...
What Li Zitong and Shen Faxing couldn't understand was why Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling had gone mad. Instead of seizing Chu's vast lands south of the Yangtze, they had marched north against them the day after Kou Zhong returned?
And so!
Caught completely off guard, Shen Faxing—the closest to the Twin Dragons Army's base in Yuhang and already a defeated foe of theirs—suffered a crushing blow!
They had no answer for the first sight of the Twin Dragons Army's mechanical planes, which could fly through the air and drop jars of flaming oil. After their camps and key towns were burned several times in succession, Shen Faxing's forces collapsed and fled for hundreds of miles. They lost the important towns along