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The lead Oriole Agent raised two fingers. The phantoms in the rafters drew their breaths, their muscles coiling like high tension springs. He dropped his hand. The assault was a masterclass in breathless, high stakes violence. The black clad agents dropped silently from the high ceiling, falling like a sudden, localized rain of shadows.
They did not land heavily. They hit the polished wooden floor in synchronized, silent crouches, instantly exploding upward into lethal motion.
The royal guards, despite their fanaticism, were taken completely by surprise by the verticality of the ambush. However, their sheer, primitive warrior instinct kicked in a fraction of a second later. With terrifying, guttural roars of absolute fury, they immediately put up a desperate, bloody fight to protect their sovereign.
"Assassins!" the captain of the guard bellowed, swinging his heavy iron broadsword in a massive, horizontal arc designed to cleave a man in half. "Protect the Divine Queen! Kill them!"
The guards swung their heavy iron swords and thrust their long spears with a reckless, berserker abandon. They did not care if they died, so long as their blades found the intruders. The sacred chamber instantly erupted into a chaotic, dizzying melee of flashing steel and shattering clay pots.
Queen Himiko stumbled backward, dropping a vial of crushed sulfur, her brilliant mind instantly grasping the horrific reality that her inner sanctum had been breached. She lunged toward a massive, sealed bronze urn sitting on a pedestal near the wall, a highly concentrated alchemical explosive that, if ignited, would level the entire chamber, killing the assassins along with herself.
"Stop her!" the lead agent hissed, dodging a massive spear thrust.
The traditional native guards were terrifying in an open field, possessing overwhelming physical strength and reach advantage with their long weapons. However, inside the confined, cluttered space of the sacred chamber, against the absolute pinnacle of mainland covert operatives, they were completely and utterly outmatched in close-quarters combat.
The Oriole Agents did not draw the standard, long steel Dao swords used by the regular infantry. Such weapons were too cumbersome for tight assassinations and would easily clash against the guards' heavy spears.
Instead, they relied on highly advanced deadly covert weapons that were exclusively engineered for and utilized by the Emperor's shadows.
As a towering Yamatai guard thrust his spear directly at the chest of an advancing agent, the agent did not attempt to parry the heavy wooden shaft. With terrifying speed, the agent simply pivoted his torso, allowing the spear tip to whistle harmlessly past his shoulder, stepping deeply into the guard's guard.
The Yamatai warrior sneered, believing the assassin was unarmed, as both of the agent's hands appeared completely empty.
It was a fatal, momentary illusion.
The Oriole Agents flawlessly utilized the lethal "sleeved knife." It was a marvel of modern, miniaturized mainland engineering, a mechanical, spring loaded hidden wrist blade that Lie Fan had ingeniously requested to be manufactured in the years ago and have been used for long time now. Utilizing the vivid, out of this world knowledge of the "Assassin's Creed" weapon design from his past life, Lie Fan had described the mechanics to Liu Ye, who had perfected the metallurgy required to make a high tension spring small enough to fit beneath a forearm bracer.
With a simple, fluid, almost imperceptible flick of their wrists, triggered by a small ring attached to their middle fingers, the mechanism engaged.
Snick. Snick. Snick.
The sharp, metallic sound of high carbon steel snapping into place echoed through the chamber. Razor sharp, ten inch hidden blades shot out violently from under the agents' black silk sleeves, locking rigidly into place just above their knuckles.
The Yamatai guard, his eyes widening in sudden, uncomprehending shock at the blade that had magically appeared from the assassin's empty hand, tried to pull his heavy spear back.
He was far too slow.
With a flurry of lethal, lightning fast strikes, the agent drove the hidden blade directly upward, slipping effortlessly beneath the guard's heavy leather chin strap and piercing cleanly through his throat. Blood sprayed across the ancient bamboo scrolls as the giant collapsed to the floor, grasping at the fatal wound.
The entire chamber became a slaughterhouse of surgical precision. The brutal efficiency of the sleeved knives completely neutralized the guards' reach advantage. The agents danced through the chaotic swings of the heavy iron swords, stepping inside the wide arcs and deploying their hidden blades with devastating, mechanical lethality.
An agent parried a desperate sword slash with his armored bracer, flicked his wrist, and drove his hidden blade into the soft, unarmored armpit of his attacker, severing the brachial artery in a single stroke. Another agent slid across the polished floor, dodging a sweeping spear strike, and drove two hidden blades simultaneously into the back of a guard's knees, bringing the giant down before finishing him with a quick thrust to the base of the skull.
The fanatical royal guard, elite warriors who had trained their entire lives to protect the Shaman Queen, were systematically butchered in less than two minutes. They fell in pools of their own blood among the shattered alchemical vials, their heavy iron weapons proving completely useless against the technological and martial superiority of the mainland shadows.
As the last guard fell, gargling blood onto the wooden floor, Queen Himiko finally reached the heavy bronze urn. She pulled a striking flint from her sash, her hands trembling not with fear, but with a fierce defiance. She raised the flint, preparing to strike the spark that would ignite the gas and bring the chamber down upon them all.
"I will not be a trophy for your demon sovereign!" Himiko screamed, her voice filled with a desperate, furious pride, ready to embrace the flames.
But a shadow moved faster than her hand.
The lead Oriole Agent, closing the distance with a terrifying burst of speed, slammed into her. He did not strike her with the blade, his strict, absolute orders from Sima Yi echoed in his mind. Alive and unharmed.
He grabbed her wrist with an iron grip, violently twisting her hand and forcing her to drop the striking flint, which clattered harmlessly across the wooden floor. In the same fluid motion, he swept her legs out from under her, pinning her to the floor amidst the scattered, glowing minerals.
Snick.
The agent deployed his hidden blade, resting the cold, razor sharp steel gently against the soft skin of the Queen's throat.
Himiko froze, her chest heaving as she stared up into the emotionless, black silk mask of the assassin. She felt the cold steel of a weapon she could not comprehend, wielded by a man who had bypassed a fortress she believed to be invincible. For the first time in her life, the brilliant Shaman Queen realized she had been completely outmaneuvered.
"The Dragon Throne requires your presence," the lead agent whispered in Yamatai's language, his voice devoid of any inflection.
The brutal efficiency of the sleeved knives had rapidly neutralized the elite royal guard, finally allowing the shadowy agents to successfully corner, subdue, and capture the brilliant Shaman Queen before she could ignite any more of her alchemical explosives.
Two other agents moved in quickly, securing her wrists with heavy silk ropes, carefully ensuring they did not break any bones or draw blood. They pulled the defiant, captive queen to her feet.
Outside, the deafening roar of Zhang Liao's artillery continued to pound the lower walls, shaking the very foundations of the palace. The Yamatai army was still fighting a desperate, bloody defense on the palisades, entirely unaware that their spiritual and intellectual core had just been ripped from their chest.
The lead agent looked at the captured Shaman Queen, then signaled to the shadows. "We have the prize. Move to the extraction point."
The trap had snapped shut flawlessly. The empire had come for the mind of Shikoku, and they were leaving with it.
Immediately after neutralizing the royal guards with a terrifying, mechanical efficiency, the elite Oriole Agents did not waste a single second lingering in the slaughterhouse they had just created.
The heavy, metallic tang of blood was already mixing with the sharp scent of raw sulfur in the sacred chamber, a grim testament to the clash of two entirely different eras of warfare. The young Queen Himiko, her brilliant mind still reeling from the impossible speed and lethality of the mainland assassins, found herself swiftly and ruthlessly bound.
The agents worked in perfect, wordless synchronicity. Heavy, reinforced silk ropes, designed specifically to hold a human target without breaking bones or severing circulation, were looped around her wrists and pulled taut, pinning her arms securely behind her back.
Another agent smoothly slipped a rough cloth gag between her teeth, tying it tightly behind her head to silence the furious, desperate incantations she attempted to scream at them. A thick, suffocating black canvas hood was yanked down over her head, instantly plunging the Shaman Queen into a terrifying, disorienting darkness.
She was hoisted effortlessly over the broad, armored shoulder of the largest agent in the squad. Moving like absolute phantoms, the black clad operatives slipped out of the inner sanctum through the very high altitude ventilation shafts they had used to enter. They emerged onto the sloped, wooden tiled roof of the central palace, exposed to the freezing, biting mountain winds that whipped across the jagged peaks of Shikoku.
Below them, the deafening roar of the Hengyuan artillery continued its relentless bombardment against the lower palisades. The entire mountain seemed to vibrate with the concussive force of solid iron cannonballs shattering ancient cedar trunks.
The Yamatai army was fully engaged, their archers firing blindly into the misty darkness, their commanders screaming frantic orders to hold the outer rings. Zhang Liao's aggressive, sustained frontal assault was performing its role flawlessly, drawing the entire optical and martial focus of the fortress outward, leaving the high rear cliffs completely unguarded.
The Oriole Agents began their descent. They were carrying a struggling, royal captive, yet they moved across the steep, treacherous cliff faces with a terrifying, unnatural grace. They utilized hidden, ancient goat paths that hugged the sheer granite walls, their velvet-wrapped boots finding purchase on the loose scree and damp moss where a normal soldier would have plummeted to his death.
In a stroke of dark, poetic irony, the agents utilized the dense, lingering yellow green smoke from Yamatai's own catastrophic alchemical explosions earlier in the day. The toxic clouds, which Himiko had so brilliantly engineered to incinerate the Hengyuan vanguard, now clung heavily to the jagged mountainside, perfectly masking the escape of her captors.
The agents slipped through the noxious fog like ghosts, completely bypassing the heavily armed outer patrols of the fortress, descending into the deep, forested valleys below without triggering a single alarm.
Back inside the sprawling wooden fortress, the chaotic din of battle masked the silence of the inner sanctum for several crucial hours. It wasn't until the moon hung high and cold in the night sky that the high priests, accompanied by the heavily armed changing of the guard, finally retreated from the command parapets to enter the royal chambers to check on their sovereign and receive her divine guidance for the next phase of the defense.
A senior high priest, his face smeared with soot and his robes stained with the ash of the bombardment, pushed open the heavy, sliding wooden doors of the sacred chamber. He called out to the Shaman Queen, expecting to find her standing over her elemental maps, mixing the volatile powders that would deliver them from the mainland demons.
Instead, he was met with a sight that instantly shattered his sanity.
When the Yamatai side finally noticed what had happened, it was already far, far too late. The sacred chamber was a graveyard. The high priest fell to his knees, his horrific, high pitched scream tearing through the smoky air.
The pristine tatami mats were soaked in vast, cooling pools of dark blood. The elite royal guards, the towering, tattooed giants who were believed to be invincible, blessed by the sun goddess herself, were lying dead across the floor. The priests and the new guards stared in uncomprehending horror at the fatal wounds.
There were no massive gashes from heavy swords, no crushing blows from maces. Each giant had been felled by impossible, razor thin cuts across their throats, armpits, and the backs of their knees. It was a surgical, terrifyingly precise butchery that spoke of a martial supremacy the islanders could not even begin to fathom.
And at the center of the carnage, the massive bronze urn of alchemical explosive sat entirely untouched, while their divine Queen was completely gone without a single trace. There were no signs of a struggle dragging her out the doors, no breaches in the walls. She had simply vanished, plucked from the most secure, heavily guarded room on the entire island by invisible hands.
The horrifying news could not be contained. It spread like a rampant wildfire through the sprawling compound, carried on the frantic, terrified whispers of the servants and the panicked shouts of the priests.
"The Shaman Queen is gone. The gods have abandoned us. The demons walk through walls."
Immediately, the fragile, fear driven internal leadership of the Yamatai completely fell apart. The centralized authority that had held the desperate defenders together evaporated the moment they realized their spiritual anchor had been severed. A massive, catastrophic emergency council was hastily called in the central, torch lit courtyard of the fortress.
Thousands of exhausted, terrified Yamatai warriors crowded around the perimeter, watching as the warlords, clan chieftains, and high priests frantically pointed fingers at one another, their voices cracking with panic and raw despair. The sheer existential terror of the Hengyuan siege, combined with the impossible kidnapping of their living deity, pushed the defenders past the breaking point of human rationality.
Almost instantly, two deeply opposed, violently passionate sides emerged within the courtyard, splitting the Yamatai leadership right down the middle.
One fanatical faction, led by the bloodied commanders of the outer palisades and the younger, more zealous priests, fiercely clutched the hilts of their iron swords. They were weeping openly, screaming of ancestral honor and divine retribution.
"Our honor is ash!" a heavily tattooed warlord roared, stepping into the center of the courtyard and drawing his blade. "The demons have stolen the Sun! We cannot cower behind these burning walls while they defile the Divine Queen! We must immediately gather every single warrior, open the shattered gates, abandon this fortress, and launch a suicidal, all out charge down the mountain! We will crash into the enemies camps and fight to the bitter, bloody end! We will save her, or we will die with our swords in our hands to join the ancestors!"
A roar of desperate, fanatic approval went up from his supporters, warriors willing to throw their lives away in a glorious, futile blaze of glory.
However, the other, more pragmatic faction, consisting of the older clan elders, the seasoned logistical commanders, and the priests who had actually seen the surgically slaughtered bodies in the royal chamber, desperately argued against this madness.
An aging chieftain, leaning heavily on his wooden staff, stepped forward to confront the fanatic. "And what will your swords do against their thunder?!" he screamed back, his voice trembling with sheer terror. "We must immediately raise the white flag! We must unconditionally surrender and beg the demons for mercy!"
"Coward!" the fanatic spat. "You would kneel to the demons who stole her?!"
"I would save what is left of our people!" the elder countered passionately, gesturing wildly toward the royal chambers above. "Do you not understand what has happened tonight?! Our supposedly untouchable god-queen was effortlessly captured from the most secure, heavily guarded room on this entire island! They bypassed thousands of our warriors, bypassed our traps, and slaughtered the elite guard without making a sound! It absolutely proves just how impossibly powerful, otherworldly, and unstoppable our enemy truly is! If we charge down that mountain, we will not save her. We will just be butchered by their iron wepaons, and Yamatai will be erased from the earth forever!"
The elder's terrifying logic struck a nerve, but in an atmosphere poisoned by panic and absolute despair, logic was entirely useless. The fanatics saw surrender as the ultimate blasphemy against their captured Queen. The pragmatists saw a suicidal charge as the final nail in their civilization's coffin.
Due to this irreconcilable, deeply emotional ideological split, the ultimate taboo was broken.
"Better to die than kneel!" the fanatical warlord shrieked, and in a flash of blind, unthinking rage, he lunged forward, driving his heavy iron sword directly through the chest of the aging pragmatic chieftain.
The elder collapsed to the dirt, choking on his own blood, and the entire fortress plunged into sheer, unadulterated madness.
A vicious, bloody infighting instantly broke out right in the middle of the fortress courtyard. Swords were drawn against brothers. Clan rivalries that had been suppressed by Himiko's iron will violently resurfaced.
Torches were thrown wildly into the crowded supply tents, igniting the canvas and sending massive plumes of black smoke into the night sky. The remaining Yamatai defenders, utterly broken by the loss of their queen and the terror of the siege, began mercilessly slaughtering each other in a frenzied, apocalyptic dance of panic and despair.
The sickening sounds of clashing steel, the wet thuds of bodies falling into the mud, and the agonizing, high pitched screaming of a civilization tearing out its own throat echoed loudly down the dark mountain slopes.
Far below, at the base of the mountain, the rhythmic thunder of the Hengyuan artillery had paused. Zhang Liao stood at the edge of his heavily fortified command perimeter, the cold mountain wind whipping his dark cape around his massive, armored shoulders. He looked up toward the jagged peaks.
Through the dense fog and the lingering alchemical smoke, he could see the sudden, erratic blooming of orange fires within the Yamatai fortress. More importantly, his seasoned, battle-hardened ears caught the unmistakable, chaotic tenor of the screams echoing down the gorge.
It was not the coordinated, rhythmic roaring of an army repelling an assault. It was the high, hysterical pitch of a riot. It was the sound of an army breaking itself from the inside out.
Zhang Liao's hard, granite like features shifted. A cold, predatory smile slowly spread across his face.
The Oriole Agents had succeeded. The psychological decapitation of Yamatai was complete.
Wasting not a single second of this absolute, golden opportunity, the Supreme Commander did not wait for the morning sun. He turned to his signaling officers, his voice cutting through the freezing air like a whip.
"Sound the general advance! Force the entire resting vanguard up the slopes immediately! The enemy has opened their own throat; we are just going in to let them bleed!"
A deafening, earth-shaking roar of massive bronze war horns instantly shattered the quiet of the Hengyuan camps. Tens of thousands of heavily armored Hengyuan infantrymen, who had been resting in perfectly organized reserves, surged forward. They marched in rigid, terrifyingly disciplined blocks, their steel lamellar armor clinking in a mechanized, unstoppable rhythm.
They marched up the steep, winding mountain paths, completely ignoring the fatigue in their legs. When they reached the upper perimeter, they found the massive wooden gates of the Yamatai fortress already shattered by the artillery and left completely undefended by the rioting natives.
With a final, thunderous battle cry, the Hengyuan army forcefully breached the stronghold.
They poured into the sprawling courtyards like a tidal wave of dark steel. What they found inside was a pathetic, tragic slaughterhouse. The Yamatai forces were already actively bleeding each other out, too busy butchering their own brothers over ideological differences to mount any cohesive defense against the true enemy.
The Hengyuan army did not join the chaotic melee, they simply crushed it. Marching in locked shield walls, extending their long, heavy halberds, they effortlessly swept through the courtyards. They brutally quelled the Yamatai infighting with overwhelming steel and absolute, unforgiving discipline.
Any native warrior who raised a weapon, regardless of which faction they belonged to, was systematically cut down. Within mere hours, the chaotic resistance was completely suffocated. The surviving natives, exhausted, bleeding, and utterly broken in spirit, dropped their weapons and fell to their knees in the bloody mud, surrendering to the mechanical might of the Black Dragon. The impenetrable mountain fortress of Yamatai was completely secured.
______________________________
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