So? Did Someone Force You to Become the Heavenly Demon?
Chapter 424 : Guerrilla (3)As Dokgo Ryong walked to Eunuch Cha, his eyes seemed to burn with manic flames.
It was just the reflection of the blazing inferno behind Eunuch Cha, but the half-crazy eunuch was already too far gone with fear to think straight.
To him, those eyes looked like they were the inhuman eyes of the King of Hell staring down at him.
‘I need to run. I need to get out of here. NOW’
With death staring him in the face, Eunuch Cha’s brain went into overdrive.
'That's it! If I blast the fire back with my Sword Force and palm strikes, I'll get burned, but I won't die!'
It was a completely unhinged plan, but his brain had stopped caring. He was already preparing to hurl himself at the wall of flames when Dokgo Ryong beat him to it.
"Die!!"
Dokgo Ryong lunged forward with his greatsword already carving a silver trajectory in the air. Eunuch Cha barely managed to bring his own sword up in time to block, but the force behind the strike crushed down on him like a boulder and nearly buckled his knees.
“Bwahahaha! Let's see you block this one too!!”
Dokgo Ryong fought like a madman who couldn’t give a fuck about defense and just executed his greatsword strikes one after another. And the terrifying thing was, the more he swung, the faster and harder each strike got, like he was feeding off his own momentum.
CLANG!
"Ugh."
Even though the old monster was completely leaving himself open, Eunuch Cha was too terrified to even think about counterattacking.
Each exchange drove him back another step until he finally spun around and threw himself headlong at the wall of fire.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?!"
Dokgo Ryong roared and slashed at the air in rapid succession, sending a volley of Sword Force ripping after him. Eunuch Cha had no choice but to twist and weave through the barrage, cutting down what he couldn't dodge while the flames licked at him from every direction.
As he scrambled to stay alive, blasting back the fire with bursts of palm wind and swatting away the incoming sword force, it was almost absurd how much he looked like a clown dancing alone in an inferno.
But no matter how hard he fought, the fire kept creeping closer and his stamina was slowly running out.
Eventually, his lungs reached their limit, forcing him to gasp for air.
"Hah... hah..."
The moment he gasped for air, scorching heat poured straight down his throat and into his lungs. It was like breathing in a furnace. The pain was so immediate and so vicious that he couldn't stop himself from screaming.
"AAAAAAAARRGH!!"
Dokgo Ryong seized on that moment and swung his greatsword low at his feet. The strike came in clean and fast, and Eunuch Cha's left leg was gone before he could react.
He crashed to the ground. The heat had already cauterized the stump before it could even bleed properly, which somehow made the whole thing worse. The pain was so intense he wanted nothing more than to pass out, but with the fire wrapping around his entire body, the excruciating agony kept him wide awake and forced him to feel every single second of this self-inflicted hell.
He lay there with his mouth hanging open for a scream, but nothing came out. His throat and lungs had burned out completely.
He could only writhe in pain as the fire ate through his skin and organs.
"Tsk. Fitting end for a spineless coward." Dokgo Ryong clicked his tongue at the writhing trash, annoyed that he didn’t get to deal the final blow himself.
After a few more seconds, the trashing eventually stopped and the eunuch’s body went completely still.
Eunuch Cha was nothing but a pile of ash at this point.
Once he was sure his prey was dead, Dokgo Ryong turned around without another thought and headed back to the village.
***
Meanwhile, deep within the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Intelligence from all across the land poured into this place, and the news lately had been anything but welcome.
"Those brainless idiots actually did it!"
was practically shaking with rage at the Central Military Commander and the two eunuchs under him.
To think he’d actually been pleased with their scheme just two days ago.
They had managed to drag things out at Ankang while pushing the situation at Mount Wudang toward mutual destruction.
He’d even smirked when he heard that two pesky martial world thugs had quietly slipped away from Ankang to help the martial artists on Mount Wudang.
As far as the Supreme Eunuch was concerned, the martial artists of the Central Plains were nothing but high-class thugs who deserved to be wiped out without mercy.
But the news of the crushing defeat at Ankang was a different story entirely.
It meant the imperial army had lost the very troops they needed to wipe out whoever crawled out alive from the war between the Orthodox Faction and the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
"Losing half the army wasn't enough, so they went and got themselves killed on top of it?!"
He wanted to punish Eunuch Gong for the whole debacle, but the man was already dead, so there was nothing to be done.
As far as the Supreme Eunuch knew, the defeat was entirely the result of Eunuch Gong's poor judgment.
That was the story the Central Military Commander and Eunuch Bang, and every single report coming from the front line had agreed on.
What none of them had told him was that Eunuch Bang had betrayed Eunuch Gong and gotten him killed. Nobody wanted to be the one to say something the Supreme Eunuch could use against them, so they'd dumped every bit of the blame on the dead man and called it a day.
"So now I have to bring in the Northern Military Command and the Eastern Military Command as well."
The Western Military Command was already gone. The Central Military Command had taken catastrophic losses. And there hadn't been any good news coming out of the Southern Military Command either. He was running out of options and was seriously contemplating throwing his last two military commands into this war.
"The Japanese pirates aren't worth worrying about, but the barbarians in the north are another matter."
A report that had come in a short while back surfaced in his memory.
A massive nomadic tribe had recently united in the steppes and was constantly sending cavalry squads to sniff around the imperial borders.
‘There’s no way those dirty horse-riding savages could ever lay siege to the Forbidden City. But if this war keeps going poorly, I have no choice but to move the Northern Military Command.’
He was still turning that over in his head when a letter arrived from Sichuan.
It was from Eunuch Cha, describing his plan to massacre civilians and take them hostage in order to flush the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult out of their fortress.
"Hahahahaha. Eunuch Cha is doing his job splendidly.”
He smiled with satisfaction, and then a thought struck him.
‘Why isn't everyone else doing this? How are they all just stupidly bashing their heads against city walls when this is an option!’
Up until now, the imperial armies had been focused on attacking rebel bases because they thought they were only supposed to kill actual combatants.
But Eunuch Cha's letter handed him a beautiful excuse on a silver platter.
If you didn't pick up a weapon and fight the Cult, you were a traitor, too. Which meant they could kill everyone with that justification.
He quickly scribbled some instructions on a scroll and bellowed.
"Guard! Have this delivered to the Commander and the Eunuch with the Central Military Command at once!"
***
A few days later, the letter from the Supreme Eunuch arrived at the Central Military Command's camp, which had pulled back considerably from Ankang following the disastrous siege.
Eunuch Bang and the Commander read it together, and both were visibly moved.
"As expected, the Supreme Eunuch's wisdom truly reaches the heavens!"
"Hahaha! The only one higher than the Supreme Eunuch in all the world is the Emperor himself, so of course it does!"
But the letter didn't just tell them to slaughter peasants. It also contained a full strategic directive for how to carry the war forward.
"We'll need to pull the army back to the rear for now."
The first order was to conscript additional troops from the cities under the Central Military Command's control.
"Then I'll leave you to get the troops in order. I'll be heading to Hubei for a bit."
The second was to form a false alliance with the Central Plains martial artists who had retreated from Wudang.
After the meeting, Eunuch Bang walked out of the tent and set off for Hubei with a handful of the Eastern Depot’s operatives with him.
After several days of travel, they arrived at the camp where the Central Plains martial artists had camped.
"I'm Eunuch Bang Tae-sul of the Eastern Depot. I've come to speak with your leaders. I believe there's a way to win this war against the Demonic Cult."
After a brief screening, a martial artist led him to a hall where four men were waiting.
Sitting inside was Namgung Jin of the famous Namgung Family. Yangmuja of the Mount Heng Sect, Head of the Moyong Family, and the Divine Monk of Shaolin.
The Shaolin Abbot who usually represented Shaolin was still recovering from serious injuries he'd taken from the Wudang Sect Leader, so the Divine Monk stepped into his place.
‘I didn't know the Central Plains was hiding a monster like this.’
When his eyes met the Divine Monk's, Eunuch Bang nearly bowed his head without thinking. The feeling was uncomfortably close to what he felt standing in front of the Supreme Eunuch.
"We have been informed of your arrival. You say you have a way to deal with those Demonic Cult bastards?"
The Divine Monk's voice was an unpleasant noise, but Eunuch Bang nodded steadily.
Judging by the expressions on Yangmuja's face, Namgung Jin's face, and the Head of the Moyong Family's face, they found the sound just as grating, or maybe they were just sick of him acting like he was the leader of the entire Orthodox Faction.
"The Imperial Family is also having a nightmare of a time dealing with these rebels. And the primary reason we are struggling is that the enemy has holed themselves up in highly defensible terrain.”
As Eunuch Bang spoke, they watched him expectantly.
"So we came up with a plan to draw them out."
"Oh? What kind of plan?"
"We bypass the place they're holed up in entirely and go after the civilians who've sided with the Demonic Cult first. Why bother fighting them on their terms?"
"You mean attacking people who haven't trained in martial arts?" Asked the Head of the Moyong Family.
Eunuch Bang shook his head. “They may not practice martial arts, but since they aid the rebels, are they not traitors themselves?”
The Divine Monk nodded slowly at that. "Indeed. If they have chosen to serve the demons, then they are nothing but demons themselves."
Slaughtering helpless peasants just to bait the Demonic Cultists out of their mountain fortresses was not the kind of plan any of them would have entertained under normal circumstances. But they'd all lost people they cared about in the fighting and none of that seemed to matter anymore at this point.
"But you didn't come all the way out here just to tell us that one thing, correct?"
Eunuch Bang swallowed once at Divine Monk’s gaze and answered. "I came in person because slaughtering peasants isn't going to win us the war. I am aware that in the last battle, the Divine Monk was forced to retreat due to a coordinated attack by the Cult Leader and his five masters.”
The moment he finished that sentence, the Divine Monk's oppressive aura bore down heavily upon him.
Eunuch Bang scrambled to keep talking. "B-but look at it from another angle! If they only had two or three masters, the Divine Monk would have had no trouble wiping them out, yes? We can make that happen."
That got everyone's attention.
This was the third point from the Supreme Eunuch's letter, and Eunuch Bang laid it out plainly.
"We're planning to divide the imperial forces into multiple smaller units operating simultaneously. We will hit multiple rebel towns and cities simultaneously across multiple fronts. If we do that, they'll have no choice but to split up and respond in kind."
It was a shift from large-scale sieges to a distributed guerrilla campaign. The Divine Monk’s eyes lit up as he realized where this was going.
“So, you wish for me to come with your troops and eliminate whatever fiends come chasing after them?”
“Indeed. If the enemy deploys a large group of masters like before, you may simply withdraw, but if they dispatch only a few, we ask that you eliminate them.”
The Demonic Cult had an unfair advantage when it came to the sheer number of supreme martial artists who had reached the legendary Realm of Truth. That was why even a powerhouse like the Divine Monk struggled to win the war, even with the entire Orthodox Faction backing him.
But if they forced the Demonic Cult into a series of scattered guerrilla fights, that numbers advantage would vanish.
"Hahaha! If it is to sweep those demons from this earth, this monk is happy to join your campaign."
Hearing the monk's agreement, Eunuch Bang forced down a smirk.
‘Everything is going according to the Supreme Eunuch's will.’
This wasn't purely about destroying the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult.
In guerrilla warfare, controlling which troops went where was everything, and with so many powerful enemy fighters to track and counter, the job of gathering intelligence, predicting enemy movements, and repositioning friendly forces accordingly would naturally fall to the imperial side.
‘And while you're busy killing Demonic Cult bastards, I'll be whittling your numbers down right alongside them.’
The ordinary soldiers who'd die in the process weren't even a footnote in Eunuch Bang's scheme.
"Then I look forward to working together."
"Amitabha. As do we."
Thus, that marked the day when the Orthodox Faction officially joined hands with the Imperial Family.
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