Chapter 34
By the time Esthea had been bounced back by spatial transfer over and over, dumped onto the floor, and rolled and flailed around until she finally let out an anguished roar and spewed a breath of pent-up frustration into the air.
“At last!”
“A character like Lü Bu would be a waste to use only once and then send off-stage!”
“Was his last appearance when he killed Dong Zhuo?”
“Looks like we’re getting another grand battle scene this time!”
Except for the greedy top-grade Nureongi, most readers responded very favorably to Lü Bu’s counterattack.
It’s a fairly tried-and-true cliché for a villain who once got taken out to power up and come back for a revenge match.
Three-times-faster Quattro also launched a grand counterattack.
That battle between a bloodline-buffed furry ninja and a bloodline-buffed eyeball ninja was so grand it was hard to even tell whether the fight had been real.
What’s more, it was an impact-filled entrance that nearly threatened the very survival of the faction, landing a blow to Cao Cao’s back of the head while he was racking up anti-fan points with his absurd filial-piety spectacle.
Those rooting for Cao Cao wanted to know how he would get through such a life-or-death crisis, and hoped the frustrating stretch wouldn’t drag on too long.
Those who hated Cao Cao cheered at the five words, “Purge the Cao Cao faction!”
And before long, he had established himself as the novel’s rising star.
Of course, a big part of that came from the Liu Bei arc, which had already begun openly taking the route of original creation, especially the “royal bloodline hidden” segment.
An overpowered whitewashing machine that surpassed both the official history and the Romance.
He subtly blended in the image of the all-round Lü Bu from the manga The Flaming Phoenix Sweeps the Fields, which Kim Yul had been deeply impressed by before traveling.
Thanks to slyly slipping in the Lü Bu and Diao Chan story as a side story that would never have appeared in the Cao Cao part, as well.
You could say the villain had received an awful lot of favorable treatment.
Even more so.
## ====== ##
“My lord!”
A shadow burst out of the smoke.
It was the sister of Sima Gwanjik, who had accompanied him on the battlefield.
Her face was blackened, and her armor was a grotesque half-melted wreck, but.
“Get up, my lord! If you fall here, the world will collapse!”
She grabbed Cao Cao’s arm with unwavering loyalty.
Cao Cao groaned in pain from his wounds, yet leaned an arm on his sister’s shoulder.
Ignoring her own injuries, the sister practically dragged Cao Cao and forced him up onto the warhorse he had ridden in on.
“Go!”
As if answering the sister’s cry, the horse neighed and sprang forward.
Barely steadying himself in the saddle,
Cao Cao looked back.
The burning panorama of Puyang City.
The battle cries of soldiers who made no distinction between friend and foe.
Leaving all of it behind.
Cao Cao bit down on his lip until it nearly bled, then turned his head forward again.
He had neither the time nor the reason to look back.
He had to live.
Only by surviving could he hold rites for the souls of the soldiers who had died in vain.
“Today’s debt... I will definitely...”
Before long, he rode along the only gate still wide open.
And vanished into the darkness.
## ====== ##
Even while writing it, he had tilted his head and thought, “Tsk, is this really right?”
And when the troublesome episode, completed with one more head tilt at the thought that it hadn’t been Dian Wei who saved him after all, was serialized in the newspaper,
Cao Cao coin plunged both in-universe and out, to the point of being on the verge of delisting.
“Kya! I knew I could count on you, Lü Bu!”
“Now that’s what I’m talking about!”
“As expected, the true protagonist was Liu Bei!”
“Purge the Cao Cao faction!”
The Cao Cao haters went wild too.
“...How ugly, Cao Cao...”
“Is this damn thing really the protagonist?!”
“What, does this bastard run away whenever he gets bored?”
“What are you saying? He lost again? He’s been wiped out completely now!”
Even the Cao Cao stans, possessed by Gyeon Hwon and riddled with demons, went wild.
In many senses, Cao Cao was a superstar too.
But as a rule, a trashy drama you can’t predict in advance may get cursed at, yet still draw high ratings.
“Daily readership has hit a new high...”
“Readers like misery... noted...”
Of course, Kim Yul, who had no choice but to stay bound by historical accuracy,
and the database of Historie beside him, which had recently started taking in a lot of “input,” began receiving wrong information.
.
.
.
The Lü Bu boom died out as quickly as it had risen.
Was it because the wails of Cao Cao’s fans reached the heavens, or because it was the cursed fate of Kim Yul, who was chained to the historical record?
After the Battle of Puyang, he lost once more in a soul-level team fight, nearly ruined everything for real, and only held on for one turn thanks to a Yuan Shao assist.
Even if they fought another soul-level team battle, the class gap was already obvious, and after a timely locust infestation led to an implicit truce,
Once the year turned, Cao Cao beat Lü Bu down like a dog.
The final flourish was the Battle of Dongmin.
Whether the author was self-plagiarizing the Caesar episode or not,
a somewhat protagonist-friendly development followed, in which they dug trenches, hid their troops, and then launched a surprise attack that tore Lü Bu’s army apart.
What’s more, Lü Bu even fled to the neighboring protagonist Liu Bei’s place and took shelter there, giving Liu Bei the classic “enemy becomes ally” cliché.
- This is basically trench omnipotence theory.
- Is the writer named Ulysses incapable of writing battle scenes unless he puts in trenches?
The critic’s sharp jab landed, but it did Kim Yul no damage.
That was also because there were many war histories that simply could not have come about if trench meta were ruled out from the start.
Right away, the very German moustache and the brown-bear-mountain moustache were born from trenches.
The righteous young Adolf shooting dead the notorious mass murderer Hitler was also an operation carried out from a bunker modeled after a trench.
Prophets were supposed to suffer, after all.
* * *
“Hmm, Mr. Ulysses? This is a little off in terms of historical accuracy, desuwa?”
Recently,
Chloe had been desperate to find any excuse to lecture Kim Yul about his work.
The reason was simple.
- You are the first writer who has ever dared to treat me like this!
From the start, she was a noble young lady first in line to inherit House Wispelaud, still just a spoiled brat and not yet evolved into a full-blown little bastard.
Even if she lost a hundred times, at the very end she still wanted to snatch one win and stick in a “Hey, you’re a scrub, aren’t you?” line.
It was an elf-like way of thinking, beneath even Esthea’s level.
Of course, this wasn’t the first time.
“What’s the problem now?”
Kim Yul casually shot back while picking his ear with his pinky.
It was the kind of insolence that would have had Zhuge Liang smacking him over the head with a white feather fan, saying he was even worse than Wei Yan!
But no matter that the newspaper’s capital came from Chloe’s pockets, Kim Yul had been the one responsible for its recent profits.
So he looked the other way, just a little.
“I-I mean the episode called ‘Original-Text Historical Drama,’ desuwa! The one where Lü Bu mediates between Ji Ling and Liu Bei!”
“How is that a problem?”
“One hundred and fifty paces is a distance anyone could hit with their eyes closed, desuwa. Making that a bet is a little unrealistic!”
At those words,
Kim Yul just blinked.
“What’s more, Liu Bei is a noble high elf! He could probably hit even two hundred paces, not just one hundred and fifty, so Ji Ling agreeing this easily is just too much, desuwa!”
The moment Chloe, feeling as if that reaction meant he had finally yielded to her words, flashed a triumphant smile and followed up.
Whirr──
“?”
Ignoring Chloe’s provocation, Kim Yul nonchalantly picked up the die that had fallen to the floor.
“Then shall we make it a bet? Under the same conditions, if you hit even one shot out of five, I’ll revise the plot.”
Kim Yul curled the sort of smile at the corners of his mouth that made you want to smack him on the spot.
It was the very embodiment of a full-body, full-face “You chicken?”
“Hmph! You dare doubt the great archery of a noble elf, desuwa? I’ll show you properly, on my family’s honor!”
Chloe had been properly provoked.
* * *
The next day.
On the outskirts of the imperial capital, at the Wispelaud ducal house’s ranch.
“Heh heh... even after holding it again after so long, this nostalgic feel is just like yesterday...”
Chloe loosened her shoulders while drawing the bowstring sharply through the air.
“Ahem, ahem... Writer-nim. Why did you do that?”
“Tch, that elf bitch was getting on my nerves.”
Gilford, who had been summoned as the referee, whispered with Kim Yul.
“Waaah!”
“Why am I...”
Even Esthea, who had flown in to crack the serial-update whip and then got completely hooked by a story that sounded fun, and Historie, dragged along as a buy-one-get-one bonus item, too.
With the player, the referee, and the spectators all gathered there.
To prove why she was of noble high-elf blood, Chloe placed an arrow against the bowstring.
What? Hit a target from 150 paces away?
Even I could do that after taking three years off!
A favorable wind blew, puffing up her meager chest just a little and inflating her confidence.
And then.
The arrow split the wind.
“......”
“......”
“Wow! You can’t shoot for shit!”
“Khh...”
A tactful silence, a naive cheer, and mockery that made no attempt to hide itself drifted through the crowd.
Though they say there’s no arrow so afraid of breaking that it won’t leave the bowstring,
there were arrows that, afraid of hitting the target, lowered their heads early and buried themselves in the ground instead.
Fifty paces plus one hundred paces makes one hundred and fifty paces.
Chloe’s little arrow fell a hundred paces short of one hundred and fifty and crashed miserably, not even making it to fifty.
Of course.
“Huh? Eh? That can’t be right, desuwa?”
Even Chloe herself was dumbfounded, and with the Wispelaud family’s peculiar dialect clinging to the end of her words, she solemnly nocked another arrow to the string.
Tap.
“You may not have hit the mark, but you hit the tip of the arrow perfectly.”
Just as Kim Yul had said.
Her second arrow grazed the tail end of the first arrow buried in the ground.
It was a skill so marvelously bizarre you could call her a fifty-pace Lü Bu.
“This distance is strange, desuwa?”
Chloe’s next choice was denial.
She started walking it off step by step herself, checking whether this really was 150 paces and whether she was being manipulated.
“Do you urgently need the restroom? The way you’re walking──”
“Shut up, desuwa!”
At first she walked normally, but once it seemed she was really approaching one hundred and fifty paces, she put on a disgraceful display of shrinking her stride little by little, exactly as Kim Yul had put it.
“Hah, after walking it myself, I’ve confirmed it for sure...!”
With her baseless confidence replenished once again, she took one step, two steps, three steps.
Chloe then capped it off with the bizarre feat of slamming all three arrows into the area around the 50-meter mark.
With even the strength to go “ohoho” gone now, Chloe flopped down with a hollow gaze and stared at the ground endlessly, and above her head,
a shadow fell over her.
When she raised her head, there was──
“You lost the bet, didn’t you?”
Kim Yul had a wicked smile curled at the corners of his mouth.
The moment she met that smile.
Chloe felt, for some reason, as if a chill were running through her whole body.