The messenger from Commander Xin arrived on the morning of the second day, his face grey with dust and fear.
He didn't dismount so much as fall from his saddle, thrusting the sealed scroll at Captain Guo with a trembling hand before collapsing.
Guo broke the seal, his eyes scanning the stark characters. The officers around him fell silent, watching his face. He did not curse. He did not react. He simply finished reading, lowered the scroll, and looked at the expectant faces.
"The orders are unchanged," he said, his voice a flat, dead thing. "We are the anvil. We hold the ridge. The survival of Xiangyang depends on it. We are to hold for four more days."
The silence that followed was heavier than any explosion. It was the silence of men doing the math. Twenty-three dead on the first day. Four more days. The numbers didn't add up to survival.
The Jin, as if sensing the shift in resolve, changed their tactics. The massive, costly assaults ceased. In their place came a relentless, grinding pressure.
Small groups of skirmishers would scuttle up the slopes, unleashing volleys of arrows before melting away. Drums would sound in the night, forcing the defenders to stand-to for hours, only for nothing to happen. It was a war of attrition, waged not just against their bodies, but against their minds.
In the aid station, the character of the wounds changed. Lin Wei's world became a study in slow decay. The clean, horrific gashes of the first day were replaced by the festering wounds of the third. Men who had taken minor arrow grazes now burned with fever, their skin hot and tight. The stench of pus and gangrene began to overpower the smell of blood.
His system's alerts were a constant, silent scream of depletion.
"[Medical Supplies: Antiseptics - CRITICAL. Clean Bandages - DEPLETED. Poppy extract - 10% REMAINING.]"
"[Personnel Status: Cumulative Fatigue - CRITICAL. Morale - COLLAPSING.]"
He watched a young soldier from the Fifth die not from a Jin sword, but from a fever born of a filth-caked scratch on his arm. There was nothing Lin Wei could do.
He had run out of the strong wine days ago. Now they were boiling water and using vinegar, and it wasn't enough. He performed an amputation on a man with a gangrenous foot, the surgery conducted with tools cleaned in boiling water and little else. He knew the man would likely die of infection anyway. The work felt futile, a desperate pantomime of healing in the face of inevitable rot.
Young Kuo moved through the nightmare in a daze. The sharp fear of the first day had been sanded down into a numb, grinding horror.
He bandaged wounds, applied tourniquets, and carried men, his actions robotic. He no longer saw the faces of the wounded, only the wounds themselves—a problem to be solved, a leak to be stopped. He found a man sobbing, not from pain, but from sheer exhaustion, his mind broken by the constant drumming and the lack of sleep.
Kuo had no comfort to offer. He simply sat with him until the sobbing subsided into shivers, then moved on to the next.
Ox Li's immense strength, once a weapon, was now a burden. There were no glorious charges, no Jin to smash. His duty was the dead. He carried the bloated, stiffened bodies to a growing pit on the reverse slope, a task that chipped away at his spirit with each trip.
The frustration was a physical pain. He saw the despair in the men's eyes, felt the weight of the pointless days, and one afternoon, he walked away from the grisly work detail, found a large boulder, and beat his fists against it until his knuckles were raw and bloody, roaring his fury into the uncaring sky.
The crisis came to a head when Sly Liu approached Lin Wei, his face grim. "The vinegar is gone, Doc. We're down to washing rags in the stream. The same stream the Jin are pissing in upstream." It was the most dire news yet. Without even basic disinfectant, the aid station would become a mortuary.
It was in this moment of absolute low that a flicker of hope, cruel and fleeting, appeared. A scuffle broke out near the perimeter. A young Jin scout, little more than a boy, was dragged before Captain Guo, his arm bleeding from a gash. He was terrified, babbling in his own language.
Lin Wei stepped forward. He ignored the glares of the soldiers. He looked at the boy, then at the wound. He pointed to his medical kit, then to the boy. Guo gave a curt nod.
As Lin Wei cleaned and bound the boy's arm with a strip of clean cloth—a precious commodity—the boy's terror subsided slightly. He stared at Lin Wei with wide, confused eyes. One of the penal soldiers, a man who'd traded with northern tribes, roughly translated.
"The boy says... he says their food is bad. Spoiled grain. Their commander is angry. He wants the ridge taken yesterday. They are... they are tired, too."
The translation spread through the defenders in whispers. They are tired, too.
The enemy was no longer a faceless, inexorable force. They were hungry, tired men under the lash of a desperate commander.
The battle was no longer about courage. It was a perverse race to see which army would disintegrate first from exhaustion, disease, and despair.
That evening, as a cold drizzle began to fall, turning the trenches to mud, Lin Wei found Captain Guo staring out at the Jin campfires twinkling in the distance.
"Two more days," Guo said, his voice raspy. He didn't sound hopeful. He stated it as a geological fact, like the existence of the ridge itself.
"The wound fever is setting in," Lin Wei replied, his tone equally flat. "I have no medicine left to fight it. The rain will bring lung sickness. Tomorrow... tomorrow will be worse."
Guo was silent for a long moment, watching the distant fires. Then he turned to look at Lin Wei, his face etched with a grim resolve that had been forged in the three days of hell.
"Then we will have a worse day," he said. It was not a platitude. It was a simple acknowledgment of their shared fate. "But we will have it together."
The grinding days had stripped them of everything—hope, comfort, the illusion of victory. All that remained was the unspoken bond between the commander and the doctor, and the grim determination to outlast the enemy, hour by bloody hour.