Marshal Meng Tian rode his black Manchurian stallion to the edge of the abyss. He did not need to consult a map. He knew precisely where he was. Days ago, this had been the peak of Mount Zagreus, the highest point in the mountain range, the unbreachable granite gatekeeper of the pass into India. Now, it was the rim of a wound in the world.
He dismounted, his heavy leather boots crunching on the strange, alien ground. It was not rock, not soil, not sand. It was a dark, obsidian-like substance, smooth and glassy, that crunched under his weight like brittle sugar. He walked to the very edge and looked down. Below him was a vast, concave bowl, a perfectly smooth crater nearly a mile in diameter, its surface shimmering with a faint, unnatural iridescence under the jungle sun. There was no rubble. There were no ruins. There was no sign that a mountain, a fortress, or an army had ever existed here. There was only the profound, silent, and terrifying absence.
The scale of the power that had done this was inhuman. It was geological. A force that could scoop a mountain from the earth as a child might scoop sand from a beach. The wind that whispered across the glassy expanse below carried a fine, grey dust that settled on his uniform, and he knew, with a cold certainty, that this dust was the final, elemental remains of Fort Invincible and the five thousand British and Indian soldiers who had manned it.
His army, the most powerful conventional force on the planet, was marching past the crater in a great, silent river of men and steel. As each column crested the ridge and saw the impossible sight, a hush would fall. The triumphant marching songs, the bawdy jokes of the soldiers, the rhythmic chanting—it all died in their throats, replaced by a wide-eyed, superstitious awe. They were no longer soldiers marching to conquer a foreign land. They were pilgrims, marching through a landscape that had been personally scarred by the wrath of their god.
Meng Tian stood alone on the rim, feeling the last vestiges of his former, mortal self being burned away by the sight. The man he had been—Meng Tian of the Great Qin, the honorable general who valued courage and strategy, the loyal servant who had viewed his Emperor as the greatest of all men—was gone. That man had been an equal, a trusted subject. Now, he understood the true, terrifying gulf that separated them. He was not an equal. He was not even a servant. He was a tool, a high priest, an executioner whose only function was to cleanse the profane ground his god had already consecrated with divine fire.
A chilling, profound sense of detachment settled over him. His mind, once filled with the intricate, beautiful complexities of strategy and tactics, was now wiped clean, replaced by a single, simple, and brutal imperative. He would not be leading an army into battle. He would be guiding a force of nature, a scythe of human flesh and steel, to reap a harvest that had already been sown by lightning.
Brigadier Alistair Finch-Hatton was a man of impeccable breeding and rigid military doctrine. He commanded His Majesty's 17th Indian Infantry Brigade, the strategic reserve force for the entire Northern Burma front. For weeks, his entire professional existence had been oriented towards a single, unchangeable reality: the impregnability of Fort Invincible. His orders were to hold his position ten miles behind the pass, ready to counter-attack and destroy any small, suicidal Qing units that might somehow, miraculously, slip past the fortress's guns.
The first sign that the universe had ceased to obey the established rules of warfare came not as an order, but as a terrified, incoherent babble over the field telegraph. A series of panicked, fragmented messages from forward observation posts, speaking of a "light in the sky" and a "silent earthquake," before the line had gone dead. Then came the silence. Hours of it. A deep, unnatural quiet from the direction of the pass, where the thunder of the fort's big guns should have been echoing through the valleys.
Now, his carefully laid plans, his maps with their neat lines of defense, his entire strategic worldview, were being rendered utterly meaningless by the terrifying reality pouring through the newly created valley of glass.
He stood on a small hillock, his binoculars pressed to his eyes, and watched the end of his world unfold. Through the shimmering heat haze rising from the vitrified crater, the vanguard of the Qing army was emerging. It was not a cautious, probing advance. It was a flood. Elite cavalry on powerful Mongolian horses fanned out across the valley floor, their pennants snapping in the breeze. Behind them came the armored cars, a dozen, then two dozen, boxy, dust-colored monsters racing down the main road, their heavy machine guns already traversing, seeking targets. They were not advancing; they were pouncing.
"Sir!" his adjutant, a young, fresh-faced captain, shouted over the growing din. "Forward pickets report their line has been broken! Qing cavalry is already moving to outflank our western position! They're bypassing us!"
Finch-Hatton lowered his binoculars, his hand trembling. His brigade, which had been preparing for a long, static siege, was deployed for a defense that no longer had a front. They were strung out, disorganized, and completely, catastrophically, out of position.
The Qing attack was a text-book example of the blitzkrieg tactics the German advisors had been drilling into them, but executed with a ruthless, Asian ferocity. The armored cars did not engage his main force. They raced past them, their machine guns strafing his terrified supply columns, turning ammunition trucks into blazing infernos and mule trains into bloody chaos. They were not fighting his army; they were severing its arteries.
Simultaneously, the Qing cavalry, thousands of them, swept around his flanks with breathtaking speed, their movements guided by signal flags, a silent, deadly tide of horsemen. They were not charging his infantry positions. They were cutting the roads, the telegraph lines, the bridges—every possible line of retreat. The radio in his command tent crackled with a symphony of panic.
"They're behind us! I repeat, enemy cavalry is behind us!"
"Column Alpha is under heavy machine-gun fire! We've lost the ammunition lorries!"
"For God's sake, where is our artillery support?!"
There was no support. His guns were still limbered for travel, their crews desperately trying to deploy them as enemy horsemen galloped towards their positions. The entire British command structure, the pride of the Indian Army, disintegrated into isolated pockets of terrified men in a matter of hours.
From a forward command post set up just inside the crater's rim, Meng Tian directed the slaughter. He stood before his map table, receiving reports from runners and field telegraphs, his face as calm and impassive as if he were directing a peacetime training exercise. He did not issue grand, passionate orders. He spoke in a low, cold monotone, moving unit markers on the map with the detached precision of a surgeon making an incision.
"Third Cavalry Division will complete the encirclement here," he said, his finger tapping a river crossing five miles behind the British lines. "Second Armored car detachment will push directly to the main supply depot at Myitkyina. Burn it. First and Second Infantry Divisions will begin the main assault. I want a pincer movement. Crush them between you."
He was not fighting a battle; he was conducting an annihilation. He used his overwhelming superiority in numbers, mobility, and the sheer psychological shock of his attack to systematically encircle and destroy the fragmented British units one by one. There would be no honorable surrenders. There would be no quarter given. Prisoners were a logistical inconvenience he had no time for. His scythe was sweeping the board clean.
Brigadier Finch-Hatton found himself and the last remnants of his command staff—a dozen officers and their aides—cornered in a small tea plantation, their backs to an impassable river. Their command post was a smoking ruin. Their men were scattered, dead, or dying. The triumphant, alien sound of Qing bugles echoed from the surrounding hills.
A single Qing armored car, its engine a menacing growl, rumbled through the neat rows of tea bushes and came to a halt fifty yards away. The heavy machine gun in its turret swiveled, its black, unblinking eye fixing on the small, pathetic group of men in their sweat-stained khaki uniforms.
The turret hatch opened, and a Qing officer, his face young, hard, and utterly without emotion, rose to his waist. He did not shout a demand for surrender. He simply looked at them, his gaze holding the cold, contemptuous pity one might feel for an insect.
Brigadier Finch-Hatton, a man who had lived his entire life by the King's Regulations, drew his Webley revolver. His hand was perfectly steady. He looked at the faces of his last, doomed officers. He saw not fear, but a kind of grim, fatalistic pride. They would die as British officers.
He raised his pistol, aiming it at the chest of the impassive officer in the armored car.
The world dissolved into a deafening, percussive roar.