Chapter 89: *checks watch*
Three captures in, and Meng Huo finally shows up with an army. This time he's wearing rhino hide for armor and riding an ox, which is way badass.
Zhuge Liang plays defense for a while until the Man troops start nodding off. At that point, he retreats in the middle of the night, leaving lanterns lit in his forts to fool the Man into thinking he's still there.
When Meng Huo finds out about the disappearance, he sees that they left supply wagons behind, and he realizes, aha, they must be getting attacked by Wu or Wei, and had to pull out quickly. Here's our chance to strike them in the rear!
You can see where this is going. Of course he walks into a trap, and is captured for the fourth time.
Zhuge Liang tells him, hey, if you're not going to submit this time around, I'm really going to have to behead you, your call here. To which Meng Huo responds, actually, if you release me now, I'll avenge all four of my previous defeats in one go!
Which, uh, is a terrible argument to get yourself released, saying you'll open a can of whoop ass on your captor if he unties you. But obviously Zhuge Liang has turned this war into an amusing little game, so he lets the king go.
Meng Huo retreats even deeper into the jungle, then cuts off access to the main road. There's a side road Shu could take, but all the water along it is lethal to drink, and there's a miasma that poisons the air, so it seems like they're kind of dicked if they go that way.
Fortunately, there's a handy temple nearby for Zhuge Liang to pray at, and a mountain spirit shows up and tells him how to survive the side road. So there's that problem dealt with with no effort.
Then when the Shu army gets through the jungle, some Man troops just tie up Meng Huo and hand him over to Zhuge Liang anyway, because the strategist has just been treating them so kindly every time he captures them.
So this is time number five for Meng Huo. But once again, he blames his own men for his capture, and he says he won't submit unless Zhuge Liang can come capture him in the deepest parts of the jungle.
And so we drag this out into another chapter.