The King's Mate - Part 1: Banyue

Chapter 9

Notes:

!!!!! PLEASE READ !!!!!

Okay so... I know I said I wasn't gonna upload these chapters for long time yet, but heck if so many people's opinion differ I'll listen.
I'm not brave enough to against such a majority.
But! I just don't think it's fair to people who really have to deal with the war much more personally than most, so I'll do it like this:

I'll post the whole chapter the way I wrote it last year and I'm not making any changes to the original version.
However, after the chapter is done, there will be 2! lines, and under those lines I'll put the summary version of the chapter which has already been here for the previous months.
So, if you don't want to read anything too closely related to war, you can skip the chapter, and just read the summary version at the end in order to keep up with what's happening at least a little bit, despite the overarching content.

I'll also put this explanation in all the notes for chapter 7 to 11, and I won't add anything else so you can just skip those notes if you're here for the whole thing.

Personally, I still think it's too soon but I hope this way works for everyone, somehow x.x

Chapter Text

It was still a good while before dawn, but their campsite was already bustling. According to their plan, they had crossbow wielders and archers spread out for 20 li along the border to former Xian Le, who were still hidden by the forest.

If their information was correct, the lookouts should swap around sunrise, which was when they would attack. After all, if the lookouts of both shifts were killed, it would give them quite a lot of time before anyone would notice. And since they would attack all of the watchtowers at the same time, nobody should be able to set off a warning signal either. It was really fortunate that Xie Lian knew the terrain so well, and remembered where exactly this tricky mountain pass was located.

It was this exact location that had always caused his father, and later Xie Lian himself, quite a headache, because it was a difficult area to defend in case of an attack. There were steep mountains on Xian Le territory, and a thick forest on WuYong territory, which was in theory a very good border. However, there was a mountain pass with the width of about 20 li, that could easily be used to invade the country.

Of course they had attempted to build watchtowers on the side of the mountains as well, but the attempt had failed, because those mountains were simply too steep to build on. Even less fortunate, or well, it was fortunate now, Xie Lian figured, was the fact that the pass got wider the deeper it went into Xian Le. Back when Xie Lian still lived there, they had argued many times if it was necessary to build more watchtowers on their side of that pass, but when news about the idea had spread, the townspeople, who lived in quite the big settlement located right at the mouth of the crevice, had argued that they were perfectly capable to deal with intruders.

In the end, they had compromised on settling the soldiers of a military group there permanently, expanding the town and its protection, just in case. At the very least, one of them should definitely be able to set a signal off in the worst case scenario.