Chapter 34
Just as Esthea was spat back out by teleportation time and again, flung to the floor, sent rolling, and left flapping helplessly until she finally let out a furious cry and breathed an enraged blast into the air.
“At last!”
“A character like Lü Bu is too good to use once and then send off!”
“Was his last appearance when he killed Dong Zhuo?”
“Looks like we’re getting another grand battle scene this time!”
Apart from the greedy, top-tier Nureongi, most readers reacted with satisfaction to Lü Bu’s counterattack.
After all, the cliché of a villain who once retired returning powered up for a revenge match was a well-tested one.
Quattro, who was three times faster, had also launched a grand counterattack.
The battle between the bloodline-buffed furry ninja and the bloodline-buffed eye ninja was the same—a clash so stirring that it was hard to tell whether it had even happened in real life.
He had even made an impact-filled entrance by smacking Cao Cao in the back of the head, after Cao Cao had been stacking up dislike points through the Great Filial Piety Fiasco and nearly putting his faction’s very existence at risk.
Those rooting for Cao Cao wondered how he would overcome this life-or-death crisis, while hoping the frustrating suffering would not drag on too long.
Those who hated Cao Cao cheered at the long-awaited arrival of justice, shouting the five words, “Exterminate the Cao Cao clan!”
Thus, Lü Bu had established himself as the novel’s rising star.
Of course, the Liu Bei arc, which had openly begun walking the path of original creation, had contributed greatly to this, especially through its ‘The Imperial Clan Hides Its Bloodline’ segment.
A super-high-performance whitewashing machine that transcended both the Records and the Romance.
Kim Yul had subtly mixed in the image of Lü Bu, a man of both civil and martial talents, from the manga ‘The Phoenix of Flame Sweeps the Plains,’ which had deeply impressed him before his transmigration.
He had also subtly slipped the story of Lü Bu and Diaochan into a side story—something that would never have appeared in the Cao Cao arc—
so Lü Bu could be said to have received an extraordinary amount of support for a villain.
Even.
## ====== ##
“My lord!”
A shadow burst out of the smoke.
It was the sister of an official holding the rank of Sima who had accompanied him to the battlefield.
Her face was blackened with soot, and her armor had melted halfway off, leaving her in a horrifying state, but.
“Get up, my lord! If you fall here, the realm will collapse!”
With unwavering loyalty, she seized Cao Cao by the arm.
Cao Cao groaned from the pain of his wounds, but still rested an arm on her shoulder.
Despite her own injuries, the woman practically dragged Cao Cao along and forcibly hoisted him onto the warhorse he had ridden here.
“Go!”
As if answering her cry, the horse let out a whinny and sprang forward.
Barely managing to steady himself on the saddle,
Cao Cao looked back.
The view of Puyang in flames.
The soldiers’ cries, making no distinction between friend and foe.
Leaving all of it behind,
Cao Cao bit down so hard on his lip that it nearly bled, then turned his head forward again.
There was neither time nor reason to look back.
He had to live.
Only by surviving could he hold a memorial service for the souls of the soldiers who had died in vain.
“Today’s debt…… I will…… certainly……”
Eventually, following the path through the only gate left wide open,
he disappeared into the darkness.
## ====== ##
Even while writing it, Kim Yul kept tilting his head and wondering, ‘Tsk, is this really right?’
After tilting his head once more at the thought that Dian Wei had not been the one who saved him after all, the problematic episode was completed and serialized in the newspaper.
The Cao Cao stock had hit the daily lower limit both within and outside the novel, and was on the verge of being delisted entirely.
“Kya! I knew I could count on you, Lü Bu!”
“This is it!”
“So Liu Bei really was the true protagonist!”
“Exterminate the Cao Cao clan!”
The Cao Cao haters went wild too.
“……Pathetic, Cao Cao……”
“Is this, damn it, supposed to be the protagonist!”
“Seriously, does this bastard run away whenever he gets bored?”
“What is this? He lost again? Now they’ve been completely wiped out!”
The Cao Cao fans, possessed by Gyeon Hwon and inhabited by demons, went wild as well.
In several different senses, Cao Cao was also a superstar.
But unpredictable, outrageous dramas were always destined to draw high ratings, even if people cursed at them.
“The daily reader count has hit a new high……”
“Readers like suffering…… Note to self……”
Kim Yul, who had no choice but to be bound by historical accuracy, was not the only one affected.
Incorrect information also began entering Historie’s database, as she had recently started diligently taking in ‘input’ beside him.
.
.
.
The Lü Bu boom died out as quickly as it had risen.
Was it because the Cao Cao fans’ wails reached the heavens, or because of Kim Yul’s cursed fate, bound to official history?
After losing another soul-level team fight following the Battle of Puyang and nearly throwing everything away for real, he held out for one turn thanks to Yuan Shao’s intervention.
When they fought another soul-level team battle, the difference in overall weight class was already obvious, and a timely locust plague established a tacit truce.
After the new year, Cao Cao beat Lü Bu senseless.
The battle that brought it all to an end was the Battle of Dongmin.
Whether the author had plagiarized his own Caesar episode,
he dug trenches, hid his troops inside them, and then launched a surprise attack that completely tore Lü Bu’s army apart in a rather protagonist-convenient development.
On top of that, Lü Bu fled to the neighboring protagonist’s side—Liu Bei’s—and sought refuge there, a textbook example of the ‘former enemy becomes an ally’ cliché from Liu Bei’s perspective.
- This is practically the universal-trench theory.
- Is the author Ulysses incapable of writing a war scene without putting in trenches?
The critic’s cutting remarks landed, but they did no damage to Kim Yul.
To begin with, there were countless pieces of military history that could not stand if the trench meta were excluded.
Even the German mustache and the brown-bear mustache had been born from trenches.
And the deed in which the righteous young Adolf shot and killed the legendary mass murderer Hitler took place in a bunker modeled after a trench.
Prophets were meant to suffer.
* * *
“Hmm, Author Ulysses? Doesn’t this have a slight historical-accuracy problem?”
Recently,
Chloe had been frantically trying to find some way to give Kim Yul advice about his work.
The reason was simple.
“No author has ever dared treat me like this before!”
To begin with, she was the noble young lady first in line to inherit House Wispelaud, and a pampered young lady who had not yet evolved into a full-blown bastard.
Even if she lost a hundred times, she wanted to win once at the very end and land a triumphant, ‘Hey, you’re weak as shit.’
It was an elf-adjacent line of thinking from somewhere below Esthea.
Of course, this was not the first time.
“What’s the problem now?”
Kim Yul casually retorted while picking his ear with his pinky.
It was such insolence that, if Zhuge Liang had seen it, he would have smacked Kim Yul on the head with his white feather fan and called him worse than Wei Yan.
But no matter how much the newspaper company’s capital came from Chloe’s pocket, Kim Yul was the one who had recently taken responsibility for its profits.
So, while deliberately turning a slightly blind eye to her outrageous behavior,
“I mean the ‘Yuan Gate Shooting’ episode! The one where Lü Bu mediates between Ji Ling and Liu Bei!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Anyone can hit a target from a hundred and fifty paces with their eyes closed. Betting on that lacks a certain degree of realism!”
At that,
Kim Yul merely blinked.
“Liu Bei is even a noble high elf! He should have no trouble hitting from two hundred paces, not just a hundred and fifty, so why does Ji Ling agree so readily?”
The instant Chloe, feeling as though Kim Yul had finally yielded to her argument, followed up with a smug smile,
Whirrr──
“?”
Ignoring Chloe’s reaction as she took the bait, Kim Yul calmly picked up the die that had fallen to the floor.
“Then shall we make a bet? Under the same conditions, if you hit even once out of five shots, I’ll revise the story.”
Kim Yul curled the corners of his lips into a smile that made anyone looking at him want to slap him.
It was the very embodiment, in both body and face, of ‘Scared?’
“Hmph! How dare you doubt the great archery of a noble elf? I shall stake my family’s honor and show you properly!”
Chloe took the bait completely.
* * *
The next day.
At the Wispelaud ducal family’s ranch on the outskirts of the imperial capital.
“Hehehe…… Even after holding it again after all this time, it still has the same familiar feel as yesterday……”
Chloe warmed up her shoulders, repeatedly drawing the bowstring in the air with a twang.
“Ahem, ahem…… Author, why did you do this?”
“Ugh, that elf woman is really getting on my nerves.”
Gilford and Kim Yul whispered to each other, having been summoned as referees.
“Wow!”
“Why am I here…….”
Even Esthea, who had flown over to crack the whip for more back-to-back updates only to get completely hooked by the entertaining story, and Historie, who had been dragged along as a buy-one-get-one-free bonus, were present.
With the competitors, referee, and spectators all gathered,
Chloe nocked an arrow in order to prove why she possessed noble high-elf blood.
What? Hit a target from a hundred and fifty paces away?
Even I could do that after taking three years off!
A favorable wind blew in and gently puffed up her meager lungs, fanning her confidence.
And.
The arrow split the wind.
“……”
“……”
“Wow! She’s freaking terrible at shooting!”
“Pfft.”
A tactful silence, an innocent laugh, and an openly undisguised snicker drifted through the crowd.
They said no arrow was afraid to leave the string for fear of breaking,
but there was an arrow that, afraid to hit the target, lowered its head early and buried itself in the ground.
Fifty paces plus a hundred made a hundred and fifty.
The little arrow Chloe shot fell miserably before it could cover even the remaining fifty paces after a hundred had been subtracted from a hundred and fifty.
Of course.
“Huh? Wha—? This can’t be happening, desuwa?”
So dumbfounded that even the Wispelaud family’s characteristic dialect had latched onto the end of her words, Chloe nocked another arrow on the string, this time with solemn determination, but.
Thunk.
“You couldn’t hit the tip of a spear, but you hit the tip of the arrow perfectly.”
Just as Kim Yul observed,
her second arrow grazed the end of the first arrow, which was stuck in the ground.
It was a feat of such miraculous skill that she could be called Lü Bu of the fifty-pace range.
“Is the distance wrong, desuwa?”
Chloe’s next choice was denial of reality.
She began walking it out one step at a time to check whether this really was a hundred and fifty paces, and whether she was being manipulated somehow.
“Do you need to use the bathroom? The way you’re walking is—”
“Shut up, desuwa!”
She had walked normally at first, but once it really began to seem like a hundred and fifty paces, she put on an entire spectacle of shamefully shortening her stride bit by bit, just as Kim Yul had described.
“Phew, walking it myself has made it perfectly clear……!”
Having once again filled herself with baseless confidence, she fired one arrow, two arrows, three arrows.
Chloe capped it all off by slamming all three arrows into the ground around fifty meters away.
Now, with not even enough strength left to let out an ohohoho laugh, Chloe flopped down and stared blankly at the ground.
A shadow fell over her.
When she looked up, there stood──
“You’ve lost the bet, haven’t you?”
Kim Yul stood there with a wicked smile curling at the corners of his mouth.
The instant Chloe met that smile,
she felt a strange sensation of her entire body heating up even as a chill ran through her.