A tense cease Part I

(From Qin Shi Huang’s perspective)

“Pull!”, “Release!” the captains shouted, their voices mixed in with the disorganized dance that was the battlefield. It had been four days already since our so-called victory over the Huns in that first clash, but since then, the skirmishes had only escalated.

There was no more pepper-spray gas, but only a batch of that green fire, which we were saving in case the savages tried something overt again.

On the third day of the siege, the Huns had somehow infiltrated our city and succeeded in sabotaging all but one of the giant bows—or ballistae, as I was informed, they were called by Shixian—on the rooftops. They hadn’t had time to do anything else other than look at the disarmed catapults when one of the guards saw them and sounded the alarm. They had been deftly dealt with, but they had still managed to cripple our defenses.