“You’re fond of pretending to be weaklings,” Rin observed. “Does that always work?”

“Almost every time. The Mugenese are terribly attracted to easy targets.”

“And they never catch on?”

“Not as far as I’ve noticed. See, they’re bullies. Weakness is what they want to see. They’re so convinced that we’re just base, cowardly animals, they won’t stop to question it. They don’t want to believe we can fight back, so they won’t.”

“But we’re not really fighting back,” Rin said. “We’re only annoying them.”

Souji knew that she wasn’t thrilled with this tentative campaign—this sort of half fighting, of provoking from the shadows instead of facing the enemy head-on. It defied every strategic principle she’d ever been taught. She’d been taught to win, and to win conclusively to preempt a later counterattack. Souji, on the other hand, flirted with victory but never took the spoils. He left chess pieces open all over the board, like a dog might bury bones to savor later.

But Souji insisted she was still thinking about war the wrong way.

“You don’t have a conventional army,” he said. “You can’t move into Leiyang and mow them down like you did when you fought for the Republic.”

“Yes, I could,” she said.

“You’re good nine times out of ten, Princess. Then a stray arrow or javelin finds its way into your temple, and your luck’s run out. Don’t take chances. Err on the side of caution.”

“But I hate this constant running—”

“It’s not running. That’s what you don’t get. This is disruption. Think about how your calculations change if you’re on the receiving end. You change your patrol pattern to keep up with the random attacks, but you can’t anticipate when they’ll happen. Your nerves get frayed. You can’t rest or sleep because you’re not sure what’s coming next.”

“So your plan is to annoy them to death,” Kitay said.

“Bad morale is a big weapon,” Souji said. “Don’t underestimate it.”

“I’m not,” Rin said. “But it feels like we’re just constantly retreating.”

“The entire point is that only you have the ability to retreat. They don’t; they’re stuck in the places they’ve occupied because they can’t give them up. Try to wrap your head around this, you two. Your default model of warfare won’t work for you anymore. At Sinegard you’re taught to lead large forces into major battles. But you don’t have that anymore. What you can do is strike against isolated forces, multiple times, and delay their reinforcements. You have to deploy small operational units who have the latitude to make their own calls. And you want to delay head-on battles on the open field for as long as you possibly can.”

“This is all bonkers.” Kitay had the wide-eyed, slightly panicked look on his face he got when his mind was chewing frantically through new concepts. Rin could almost hear the whirring in his brain. “This cuts against everything the Classics ever said about warfare.”

“Not really,” Souji said. “What did Sunzi say was the fundamental theorem of war?”

“Subjugate the enemy without fighting,” Kitay said automatically. “But that doesn’t apply to—”

Souji cut him off. “And what does that mean?”

“It means you pacify an enemy with sheer, overwhelming superiority,” Rin said impatiently. “If not in numbers, then in technology or position. You make him realize his inferiority so he surrenders without fighting. Saves your troops a battle, and keeps the battlefields clean. The only problem is that they aren’t inferior on any plane. So that’s not going to work.”

“But that’s not what Sunzi means.” Souji looked frustratingly smug, like a teacher waiting for a very slow student to arrive at the right answer.

Kitay had lost his patience. “What, was half the text written in invisible ink?”

Souji raised his hands. “Look, I went to Sinegard, too. I know the way your minds work. But they trained you for conventional warfare, and this is not that.”

“Then kindly explain what this is,” Kitay said.

“You can’t concentrate superior force all at once, so you need to do it in little parts. Mobile operations. Night movements. Deception, surprise, all that fun stuff—the stuff we’ve been doing—that’s how you focus your optimal alignment, or whatever bogus word Sunzi calls it.” Souji made a pincer motion with his hands. “You’re like ants swarming an injured rat. You whittle it down with little bites. You never engage in a full-fledged battlefield encounter, you just fucking exhaust them.

“Sinegard’s problem was that it was teaching you to fight an ancient enemy. They saw everything through the Red Emperor’s eyes. But that method of warfare doesn’t work anymore. It didn’t even work against the Mugenese when you had the armies. And what’s more, Sinegard assumed that the enemy would be a conquering force from the outside.” Souji grinned. “They weren’t in the business of teaching rebels.”

Despite her initial skepticism, Rin had to admit that Souji’s tactics worked. And they kept working. The closer they got to Leiyang, the more supplies and intelligence they acquired, all without evidence that the Mugenese at Leiyang knew what was coming. Souji planned his attacks so that even Mugenese survivors wouldn’t be able to report more than ten or twenty sighted troops at once; the full size of their army remained well concealed. And if Rin ever called the fire, she made sure she left no witnesses.

But their luck had to be running out. Souji’s small-scale tactics worked for tiny targets—hamlets where the Mugenese guard numbered no more than fifty men. But Leiyang was one of the largest townships in the province. More and more reports corroborated the fact that their numbers were in the thousands.

You couldn’t fool an army of thousands with skirts and firecrackers. Sooner or later, they’d have to stand face-to-face with their enemy and fight.

Chapter 5

On the twelfth day of their march, after an eternity of navigating winding, treacherous forest footpaths, they reached a vast plain filled with red stalks of sorghum. Against the otherwise overgrown wilderness, the sparse and dying trees that littered the roadside, those neatly cultivated fields stood out like a red flag of warning.

Armies only maintained fields once they’d settled down for permanent occupation. They’d reached the edge of the Beehive.

Rin’s men wanted to move on Leiyang that night. They’d marched at a leisurely pace for the last two days; the forest routes didn’t permit them to go any faster. They had energy, pent up and raging. They wanted blood.

Souji was the only holdout. “You’ve got to contact the local leadership first.”

Rin humored him. “Fine. Where are they?”

“Well.” Souji scratched his ear. “On the inside.”

“Are you mad?”

“The civilians suffer the most from your little liberations,” Souji said. “Or did you not count the casualties at Khudla?”

“Listen, we freed Khudla—”