By afternoon, after waiting fruitlessly for Wu Jingfeng and Zhuge Yang to arrive, they simply began the executions.
Great Dragonhead Zhang kept his word. Even those who had survived the hell of the stampede still faced execution: one in every two officers and one in every five soldiers. As for the two generals, whether a tiger's son from a military family or a powerful local magnate, Jia Yue finished each with a single stroke. They had been hanging above the camp gate since early on.
By then, they had also finished counting the men and bodies. More than six thousand government troops had actually survived, including over a thousand wounded... The Exorcising the Dragon Army had, with cruel and unspoken coordination, finished off the wounded on a large scale while clearing the battlefield, so these surviving wounded had mostly been injured in the stampede. Meanwhile, the Exorcising the Dragon Army had lost seven or eight hundred men, mostly during the first hour of fighting.
One could only say that, in warfare with cold steel, when professional armies made no mistakes, the fighting itself really did cause limited casualties. Yet the killing in war was often not caused by combat itself.
Next, Zhang Xing continued to honor his promise. They bandaged wounds among the government troops as best they could and helped set broken bones where possible. Then he ordered these captives, stripped of their armor and even their winter clothing, to carry their lightly and gravely wounded comrades with their bare hands, drag along the equally stripped corpses and severed remains, and head north immediately-including the heads of the two Gentlemen of the Palace Generals.
By this point, it was already nearing evening.
In late October, even at the tail end of the so-called little spring, how could nightfall possibly