Book 10: Chapter 53: Leadership

General Mo Kegong stood in the early morning light and scowled into the distance from the top of the city wall. He knew that the spirit beasts were out there. He’d expected them to launch an attack already, but it hadn’t come. Turning from the at least temporarily unthreatening countryside beyond the walls, he walked with a measured pace. He knew that he should be sitting in a room in the palace. It’s what the other generals were doing, but he had no patience for that kind of thing. He’d earned his rank, not inherited it, and earned it by virtue of hard-won skill and years of leadership on the battlefield. Although there had been considerably less of that kind of experience in the last twenty years. He’d gotten a little soft in those years. He wasn’t alone in that. He’d been lulled like many others by sustained peace.

However, he hadn’t lost all of what had made him a good leader. He knew both how important and how fragile morale could be. Especially in those terrible hours of waiting

before

a battle came. Once the violence descended, men had little chance to be eaten by their thoughts since they were too busy surviving. When there was nothing to do but wait, though, thoughts could twist and snarl inside of soldiers, robbing them of hope, of courage, and of the will to live. That was often made worse by the absence of their supposed leaders. He knew in his head that what the other generals were doing was often important, but it was the men at the front who did the fighting. It was those brave and too often doomed souls that secured victory.

Seeing

their generals walk among them seemed to impart some kind of strength.

So, that was what he did. He strode among them. He’d already walked for miles on those walls, as the dull ache in his legs reminded him. He would walk for miles more before he was done. He remembered a time when walking that far would have been nothing to him. Yes, he had let peace make him

far

too soft. He walked past a cultivator and did his best to hide his discomfort. The woman glanced at him and offered a shallow nod of respect. He offered a much deeper nod in return, which rankled him a little.

He had mixed feelings about having women stationed on these walls. While women weren’t outright forbidden from entering the army, it was heavily frowned on by just about everyone. That made them exceedingly rare, and the ones who did join almost always did so because they had no family, no options, or both. Of course, cultivators were a different matter. He suspected that the woman he’d just passed could probably kill fifty times her weight in mortal soldiers before she even started to get winded. That made her very valuable in a fight against spirit beasts, but she also didn’t answer to him. She answered to her sect and, ultimately, he supposed she answered to Judgment’s Gale.

Like the rest of us

, he thought, although with markedly less bitterness than he might have only a few days ago.

Mo Kegong had not thought much of Lu Sen the first time he’d seen him. He’d barely looked old enough to have ever even been with a woman, although that meant little when it came to cultivators. Still, he knew that he wasn’t the only one who struggled to avoid letting appearances influence opinions. If not for the man’s imposing size, it would have been almost inevitable for people to dismiss him out of hand. He just didn’t look like a leader ought to look. Of course, there were all those stories floating around about him, but who knew how many of those stories were true? Every cultivator seemed to imagine themselves a walking myth.

After that display the day before, though, Mo Kegong had been forced to revise his opinion. They had all been warned that their glorious new leader was going to do

something

to disrupt the plans of the spirit beasts. The details had been sparse to the point of nonexistence, which had frustrated the general to no end. When that

something

had finally arrived, though, he’d thought his heart might stop in his chest. Cultivators were a rarity on the battlefield. He’d always assumed that it meant that most of them weren’t as powerful as the stories made them out to be. He was utterly baffled by what Lu Sen had done. He’d never seen the like before. There almost

had

to be a name for anything that terrifying, but he hadn’t heard anyone use one. In that moment, he became very, very glad that cultivators chose not to participate in most mortal conflicts. He also started to understand just how and why that boy had been chosen to lead. Lu Sen was an

army

in his own right.

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“General!” shouted someone as they raced up to him.

“Yes? What is it?” demanded Mo Kegong.

The young man stood in front of him, chest heaving for air, but still tried to choke out some words.

“For the gods’ sake. Breathe. Then speak,” ordered the general.

The young man allowed himself a handful of deep breaths before he spoke in a rush.

“The cultivators are reporting movement, sir. At the edge of the forests.”

Mo Kegong’s eyes snapped to the mangled edges of the forest that marked the transition into the wilds, but he saw nothing. He wasn’t sure why he’d ever thought he would see something. It was miles and miles away. He’d heard a rumor that someone was working on some kind of far-seeing device using

glass

of all things, but he’d never seen one. How he wished that he’d learned one way or the other if that craftsman and device had a foundation in fact. He could have used his influence to get some money or assistance directed to such a project. A far-seeing device would be impossibly valuable now. It wasn’t that he doubted the cultivators’ words. They had zero reason to lie about something like that. It would have just been so useful to get a better look at the enemy before they arrived at the walls.

As he thought that, though, his eyes did discern something near the forest. He found himself standing transfixed as the edge of the forest seemed to expand outward. He knew that couldn’t be the case, but he wasn’t sure what was happening. It took several minutes before he finally understood what he was witnessing. As a child, Mo Kegong had once watched what seemed like an impossible number of ants swarm over the carcass of a dead animal he’d stumbled across just outside his village. He’d never learned what kind of animal it was because the ants formed a black blanket over the corpse. With his gaze firmly fixed in the distance, he realized that he was witnessing something much the same. Spirit beasts were swarming across the land.

He had believed that Lu Sen had been exaggerating the numbers to make everyone more pliant and willing to follow his directions. Seeing the evidence with his own eyes, he wondered why the cultivator had come here at all. It would have been safer and wiser to abandon the capital to its fate. Watching that undulating mass grow slowly but surely closer, the general’s stomach felt like it wanted to reject the small breakfast he’d eaten earlier. His bowels felt alarmingly loose. Yet, he knew his duty. More importantly, he knew his duty to the men and women on the wall.

“Well,” he roared, making several nearby soldiers flinch, “it seems that the foolish beasts have decided not to accept Lord Lu’s gracious invitation to leave yesterday.”

That brought on a few forced and muted chuckles. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“It seems that they need us to ask them to leave as well. Except, we don’t

ask

uninvited guests to leave, do we?”

There was a smattering of raised voices saying, “No.”

“What was that?” he bellowed.

“No!” came a much stronger response.

“I’m not that young, you damned spearmen! I don’t hear very well anymore!”

“No!”

That final cry of defiance came at him in an explosion of noise he could feel in his feet.

That’s more like it

, he thought.

“I think those spirit beasts look old. They look tired. We should take pity on them and send them to their next lives!”

That brought on another wordless cry that was equal parts denial of reality and courage. The fight ahead would be as ugly as battles got. There were a lot more of the enemy than there were people to fight them. As long as they could hold the high ground and the cultivators could keep doing their part, there might be a slim chance some people would get out of this mess alive. Again, he kept all of those grim thoughts off his face. Instead, he gave the people around a bright, bloodthirsty smile.

“Raise the warning flags,” he ordered. “Let everyone know that we’re about to get a little exercise.”