Yuzhang Prefecture
"Kill!"
Blades, spears, swords, and shields crashed together, sending blood spraying. Thrusts, slashes, chops, and stabs crisscrossed, and every so often someone fell screaming, collapsing onto the ground and soaking the earth in an instant.
The space before them cleared as the rebel army withdrew once more.
Commanding Officer Ma Shi panted. Corpses littered the battlements before him, and flowing blood soaked the bricks and seeped down through them. Below the walls, the bodies had piled into a small slope.
"How many more times can we hold out like this?" Ma Shi looked around. His personal guards had originally numbered over a hundred; now half had fallen, and every surviving man bore wounds.
"But there's nothing else we can do."
It would have been a lie to say he felt no fear at all, but after fighting this far, could he still surrender?
Not to mention the family behind him.
Ma Shi needed only to close his eyes to see those seventy-odd severed heads, large and small. The moment Shi Mingshi, the commander defending Lü Pass, betrayed the court, it had acted without hesitation, confiscating his property and executing his entire clan.
Old men, women, and children not yet ten years old had all been slaughtered, their heads hung up as a warning along the frontier.
Nor was that all. Guo Zhenyi of Golden Wave Prefecture had abandoned his city and fled in terror upon hearing that the enemy was coming. He had escaped barely a hundred li before the Imperial City Office arrested him. Without even a trial, they stripped off his official robes, dragged him into the street, and executed him on the spot, hanging up his head as a warning along the frontier.
Meanwhile, when Prefect Lin Daoshen of Luling Prefecture and Yang Minglu led