Morning mist clung to the dry golden grass of the Yellow-Grass Plains, ten miles north of Silver-Fork Port.
Spread out across three miles of flat prairie stood the terrifying war machine that had kept the northern provinces of Great Yan trembling for twenty years: 100,000 Heavy Armored Cavalry of the Northern Iron-Horse Army.
In the very front stood the elite vanguard spearhead—thirty thousand heavy iron-clad riders divided into fierce strike wings, led by 20,000 First-Line Heavy Lancers. Every rider wore riveted black iron-scale armor over thick sheepskin coats and held a fourteen-foot ironwood lance tipped with spiral steel. Beneath them, tens of thousands of half-demon Blood-Hoof Warhorses pawed the dirt with iron-hard hooves, snorting hot white mist from their nostrils and baring sharp canine teeth like wolves.
In the center of the command mound sat Warlord #3: Duke Tieba.
He was a wide-shouldered, bull-necked man with a jagged scar across his nose and a thick beard braided with gold rings. He wore a suit of blood-red spirit-iron plate armor and sat astride a ten-foot-tall Blood-Hoof Stallion King, resting a hundred-pound, blood-soaked battle axe across his saddle horn.
Beside Duke Tieba sat a thin, yellow-faced Daoist in black skull-embroidered robes riding a pale bone-mule—Daoist Hei-Gu, the personal disciple of the Royal Court’s First Immortal Advisor.
