Chapter 59: Idle Chit-Chat
Ma Chao continues kicking Cao Cao's army around for a bit. Also at one point he duels Xu Chu, who had decided to fight without a shirt on that day for some reason. Rule of Cool, I suppose.
Eventually, Cao Cao finally gets some men set up to establish a pincer defense, and that kind of scares Ma Chao and Han Sui, and it's getting toward winter anyway. So when Cao Cao offers a temporary cease-fire, they're like, well, that's not the worst idea. But also they don't trust Cao Cao, so they decide to take turns watching him.
The next day, Cao Cao rides out by himself, unarmed, and asks Han Sui out for a chat. He doesn't seem to have an agenda; they just end up having a pleasant little reminisce about the good old days when they were working in the Han courts.
Ma Chao gets a little suspicious of this.
The next day, Cao Cao sends Han Sui a letter that has bits whited-out and written over. When Ma Chao hears that the letter is from Cao Cao, he demands to see it, and it clearly looks like Han Sui doctored it to hide secrets.
Han Sui tells him, nooo, it's not like that! Look, I'll meet Cao Cao for a chat again tomorrow, and you can jump out of the bushes and kill him, and it'll be fine. But when they rock up the next day, one of Cao Cao's generals meets Han Sui and says, hey, Cao Cao's real happy about that thing you told him last night.
So Ma Chao loses all trust in Han Sui. At this point, Han Sui's advisors are like, eh, guess you should actually defect to Cao Cao then. He does just that, and the two of them team up to attack Ma Chao, who cuts off Han Sui's hand in the battle.
However, that's really his only victory; ultimately Ma Chao ends up fleeing, and Cao Cao quashes the rebellion.