Yang Ge and his three brothers acted according to plan, driving the Sue clan's thousand-odd defeated soldiers into a valley, then herding over a thousand troops of the Auxiliary Army in after them. They sealed both ends of the valley and let the two sides slaughter each other.
By any reasonable reckoning, over a thousand well-trained, fully armed professional soldiers, even after losing their will to fight and fleeing in blind panic, should never have been held off by a thousand-odd rabble who could barely hold their swords steady.
Unfortunately, the Seventy-Two Braves were openly tipping the scales from the sidelines, continually breaking up the Sue soldiers' organized counterattacks and crushing their morale whenever it began to recover, while creating opportunities for the Auxiliary Army and boosting its spirits...
Little by little, the Auxiliary Army suppressed the Sue clan's defeated troops, fighting with ever greater ferocity and brutality. The beastlike howls of "Monkey Gie" echoing over the hills and the corpses littering the slopes left even the watching Seventy-Two Braves deeply uncomfortable, with the uncanny feeling that they had unleashed a savage beast with their own hands.
Standing on a hilltop overlooking the entire battlefield, Yang Ge keenly sensed that mood and called a halt to the blood-maddened Auxiliary Army at the appropriate moment.
But when Zhou Fu directed seven members of the Embroidered Uniform Guard to sound the retreat, he received no instant obedience. Instead, a band of blood-maddened Auxiliary Army troops raised their swords and charged at them, screaming.
At the sight, Yang Ge pointed toward the Auxiliary Army troops baring their teeth at Zhou Fu. Hundreds of broken weapons instantly rose from the battlefield and gathered into a raging torrent of metal, surging among those snarling troops and piercing back and forth through them, throwing up great