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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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He threw the old man back onto the ground and collapsed to his knees in the center of the ruined council room, his hands tearing at his own hair. The deafening, rhythmic booming of the Hengyuan war drums outside the city walls grew louder, a steady, terrifying heartbeat of industrialized death that promised no mercy, no quarter, and no escape.
After King Tarashihiko's desperate, terrifying rage descended upon his trembling court, an oppressive, heavy silence filled the grand, ruined room. The sound of his frantic, ragged breathing echoed off the intricately painted sliding screens, cutting through the stifling atmosphere like a serrated blade. The priceless celadon pottery lay in thousands of jagged, glittering shards across the polished floorboards, a physical manifestation of a kingdom that had just been irrevocably shattered.
Absolutely everyone stayed completely silent. The greatest minds, the fiercest warriors, and the most cunning administrators of the Yamato kingdom kept their heads bowed incredibly low, their faces practically pressed against the woven grass tatami mats. They were too terrified to speak, too paralyzed by the sheer, crushing weight of their impending doom to even look their sovereign in the eye.
The silence stretched on for several agonizing minutes, thick with the unspoken realization that their ancient, isolated world was coming to a violent, fiery end.
Before long, however, the suffocating quiet was finally broken. From the kneeling ranks of the civil officials, several weary, deeply pragmatic noble lords bravely stepped forward. These were not men who wore armor or swung swords, they were the administrators who counted the kingdom's grain, managed the treasuries, and understood the cold, unforgiving mathematics of survival.
Their faces were drawn, pale, and deeply lined with the exhaustion of countless sleepless nights since the mainlanders had first landed on their southern shores.
Bowing deeply until their foreheads touched the cold, wooden floor, they did not offer empty platitudes or false promises of miraculous victories. Instead, they tearfully plead to King Tarashihiko to formally stand down. Their voices shook with a profound, bitter sorrow as they whated to beg him to swallow his immense royal pride and unconditionally surrender to the Hengyuan Army that was currently waiting outside their towering city gates.
The lead noble, a venerable minister whose family had served the Yamato throne for over four generations, raised his tear stained face. His eyes were red, overflowing with the grief of a man watching his homeland burn.
"Your Majesty... please, hear the desperate pleas of your most loyal servants," the lead noble bitterly explained, his voice cracking under the emotional weight of his words. "Our dire situation right now... it is already exactly like a frog being put inside a warm iron cauldron that is slowly, meticulously turned hot by a cunning chef. The frog simply sits there in the tepid water. It cannot change the situation, nor does it try to jump out, because the water initially feels comfortable, even soothing. It lulls itself into a false sense of security, believing that the gentle warmth is natural, until the heat rises to a boil. And by the time the frog finally realizes the mortal danger it is in, it is entirely too late. Its muscles are cooked, its strength is gone, and the water has already turned into a boiling, inescapable trap from which there is no return."
The noble gestured with a trembling hand toward the heavy wooden doors of the council room, pointing toward the unseen enemy outside.
"We are that frog, Your Majesty!" the noble loudly lamented, tears streaming freely down his wrinkled cheeks. "Before, when we still had precious time, when the southern beaches first fell and the enemy was still hundreds of miles away, the civil council begged this court to act. We begged the generals to immediately evacuate the royal family, to take Your Majesty to safety across the northern straits to our allies in Honshu! But no one in the military council agreed. They called us cowards. They said the bamboo forests would slow them down. They said the mountain passes would break them. They believed the warmth of our ancestral defenses would keep us safe."
He slammed his palms against the floorboards in sheer, unadulterated frustration. "And now, look at where our pride has brought us! The water is boiling! With the enemy navy, those terrifying, smoke-breathing iron ships, completely blockading the northern straits, it is already far too late to run. The lid of the cauldron has been slammed shut. The trap is sprung. If we fight now, we do not die with honor, we merely die with absolute futility. We must surrender, Your Majesty, to ensure that the royal bloodline survives the night!"
Hearing what these defeatist, pragmatic nobles said, the proud, armor clad generals were, of course, instantly furious. The very word 'surrender' was a foul curse in their mouths, a total, unforgivable violation of the sacred warrior code they had sworn their lives to uphold.
They vehemently objected to the cowardly surrender. Several of the most seasoned, battle scarred commanders leapt to their feet, their faces contorted in masks of absolute, venomous outrage. The sharp, metallic shing of steel being drawn echoed through the room as several generals instinctively drew their curved blades halfway from their lacquered scabbards, the polished steel gleaming dangerously in the lantern light.
"You dare speak of surrender in the presence of the King?!" General Katsuro roared, stepping forward and pointing his half drawn blade directly at the weeping minister. "You dare compare the proud warriors of Yamato to a boiling frog?! I should take your head right now for such treasonous cowardice! We are the descendants of the gods, not amphibians waiting to be cooked by bunch of peasants!"
The generals furiously argued that they can still survive this siege. They refused to accept the mathematics of their doom, blinding themselves with the intoxicating, delusional fervor of martial pride.
"We still have tens of thousands of armed men within these walls!" another general shouted, his armor clinking loudly as he slammed his fist against his breastplate. "The walls of the capital are thick! The moats are deep! We insist that we do not need to surrender like beaten dogs! We just need more time! We need the right, opportune moment in the chaos of battle!"
General Katsuro turned to King Tarashihiko, his eyes burning with a desperate, manic intensity. "Give us the order, Your Majesty! Let us launch a massive, coordinated sally out of the front gates! We will charge their lines with everything we have! We will drown their terrible machines in our own blood if we must! In the sheer chaos of our vanguard breaking against their center, we will violently break a hole through their blockade! We will create a gap just large enough, for just long enough, to allow a small, swift boat to carry Your Majesty and the royal family, quietly slipping out through the naval blockade to our allies in Honshu! We will buy your life with ours! That is the Yamato way!"
"You will buy nothing but a mountain of corpses!" the lead noble screamed back, entirely abandoning courtly decorum, his fear of the Hengyuan army completely overpowering his fear of the generals' swords. "They have weapons that burn the ocean! They have cannons that shatter mountains! A cavalry charge against them is not a tactic; it is a mass suicide!"
With tempers flaring to the absolute breaking point and vicious accusations flying back and forth like poisoned arrows, the royal court swiftly descended into another chaotic, shouting round of endless debates once again. The generals roared about honor, blood, and ancestral duty, while the nobles wept and screamed about logic, survival, and the inescapable reality of the iron ships.
The room devolved into a deafening, panicked cacophony, a tragic, pathetic display of a leadership structure that was completely crumbling under the pressure of an industrialized superpower.
But right at this exact time, in the midst of their petty, screaming debate, they were violently, permanently silenced.
Outside the towering, ancient wooden walls of the capital city, the absolute, unyielding wrath of the Hengyuan Dynasty had finally finished its meticulous preparations.
Sitting atop his massive, armor clad warhorse, surrounded by a sea of black and gold banners fluttering in the wind, Zhang Liao stared at the locked gates of the Yamato capital. He had given them the customary hour to send out an emissary of surrender. That hour had just expired.
Zhang Liao's face was a mask of cold, uncompromising granite. He did not feel anger, he only felt the heavy, mechanical necessity of his Emperor's will. He raised his heavy, gauntleted hand high into the air. All along the siege lines, the artillery commanders watched his hand with bated breath.
Zhang Liao swung his hand down in a swift, chopping motion. It was a cold, calculated order that would change the history of the island forever.
"Level it," Zhang Liao commanded softly, his voice entirely devoid of mercy.
What happened next was an event of such apocalyptic magnitude that it defied the comprehension of the ancient world.
The devastating, heavy black powder Cannons, cast from pure iron and lined up wheel to wheel across the plains, erupted in a synchronized, blinding flash of orange fire. The sky darkening Hwachas were triggered, and tens of thousands of rocket propelled explosive arrows shrieked into the heavens simultaneously, leaving a massive, localized cloud of thick gray smoke in their wake.
The massive, armor piercing ballistas snapped with a sound like breaking trees, sending steel tipped bolts the size of small logs tearing through the air. And the towering, creaking trebuchets swung their massive counterweights, hurling colossal boulders and barrels of burning, sticky pitch high over the city walls.
They were simultaneously fired upon the capital.
When these god-like weapons were unleashed and fired directly toward Yamato's capital, the sheer, deafening roar shook the very earth. It was not a sound that could merely be hear, it was a physical, concussive wave of kinetic force that violently slammed into everything in its path.
Inside the royal palace, the screaming argument between the generals and the nobles was instantly extinguished, swallowed entirely by the thunder of a thousand cannons.
That is the terrifying, soul crushing first time King Tarashihiko and his panicked council actually heard and physically felt the brutal, unapologetic shockwaves of the weapons they had previously only heard about from the weeping, fleeing survivors' reports.
The physical impact on the grand council room was instantaneous and utterly devastating. The sheer acoustic violence of the bombardment felt as though a massive, invisible fist had punched the side of the palace. The heavy, centuries old wooden palace walls trembled violently, groaning and splintering under the invisible pressure of the concussive blasts.
Dust, dried mud, and sharp wooden splinters rained down from the ornately painted ceiling, dusting the royal court in a layer of gray ash. The delicate, beautifully painted paper sliding screens that lined the room instantly blew inward, torn to absolute shreds by the shockwave. The heavy iron lanterns hanging from the rafters swung wildly, several of them crashing to the floor and spilling burning oil onto the tatami mats.
The proud generals, who mere seconds ago had been boasting of their willingness to charge the enemy lines, were physically thrown to the floor, their hands instinctively flying to cover their ears as the continuous, rolling thunder of the explosions threatened to rupture their eardrums. The weeping nobles huddled together, screaming in absolute, primal terror as the world around them seemingly began to end.
And then, cutting through the mechanical roar of the cannons and the shrieking of the rockets, came a sound far more horrifying, the agonizing, collective screams of the city's defenders. The cries of thousands of men burning to death from the Hwacha rockets, the shrieks of samurai being crushed by falling stone from the trebuchets, and the panicked wails of civilians echoed through the halls, a chorus of absolute despair.
King Tarashihiko did not cower on the floor. Driven by a morbid need to witness the end of his world, he slowly pushed himself up. His royal robes were covered in dust, his crown sitting slightly askew on his head. With heavy, trembling steps, he stumbled out of the ruined council room and made his way toward the grand balcony overlooking the city.
The wind whipping through the shattered balcony doors tasted of sulfur, burning wood, and copper blood. When King Tarashihiko stumbled to the edge of the wooden railing and looked out over his beloved capital, what he saw was an apocalyptic devastation that completely shattered his mind.
The mighty, ancient wooden walls of the capital, walls that had stood strong against rival clans for hundreds of years, were simply gone. The heavy iron cannonballs had pulverized the timber into a million flying splinters, leaving massive, gaping, smoking holes in the city's defenses. The watchtowers had been completely toppled by the trebuchet boulders, crushing the archers stationed within them.
Beyond the shattered walls, a sea of raging fires had instantly consumed the outer districts. The Hwacha rockets had blanketed the city in explosive, unquenchable fire, turning the tightly packed wooden houses and thatched roofs into a sprawling, roaring inferno. Plumes of thick, black smoke choked the sky, completely blotting out the sun and casting a hellish, orange glow over the dying city.
He could see the tiny, distant figures of his elite, armor clad samurai attempting to rush the breaches in the walls, desperately trying to hold the line. But before they could even cross the rubble, they were simply erased from existence by a secondary, rolling volley of cannon fire. The sheer, effortless ease with which the Hengyuan artillery was slaughtering his people was not a battle; it was an industrialized extermination.
Seeing the shattered walls, the raging fires just outside his palace, and the absolute, god like supremacy of the enemy waiting in the plains beyond, his spirit completely, irreversibly broke. The pride of a king, the arrogance of an isolated ruler, and the hope of a man all died simultaneously within his chest.
His legs gave out completely. King Tarashihiko goes down heavily on his knees right there on the ash covered balcony. He did not weep. He did not scream. He simply stared blankly into the roaring fires of his burning capital, consumed by an absolute, paralyzing despair. The realization that he was utterly powerless, that his entire civilization was nothing more than dry kindling before the fire of Emperor Hongyi, hollowed him out.
Slowly, heavily, the King turned his head away from the balcony and looked back into the council room. The generals and nobles had managed to crawl to their feet, looking at their monarch with wide, terrified eyes, waiting for a command, waiting for a miracle that would never come. With a hollow, dead, and utterly defeated voice that carried absolutely no trace of his former royal arrogance, he then says to his trembling attendants standing near the doorway.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0