Chapter 105: I'll Make These Events Fit My Narrative Somehow
Having discovered that Wei Yan has burnt the plank bridges that represent the easy way home, Yang Yi and company will have to resort to taking perilous side passes through the mountains. Whatever Wei Yan is up to, he has a head start.
Trying to bolster their authority amidst this power vacuum, both men write letters to Liu Shan, who coincidentally receives them at the same time. Wei Yan's letter informs him that Yang Yi is defying command and retreating, or could even be preparing to march on the Shu capital to seize power for himself. On the other hand, Yang Yi states that Wei Yan has gone rogue, impeding the progress of the army and threatening to take control of it himself.
Liu Shan and his court decide Wei Yan must be full of shit because Zhuge Liang never liked him. Of course. Obviously that's why he'd made Wei Yan his top general. But then Liu Shan figures, eh, maybe I'll just send a guy to bring them both in and we can sort it out after, that seems like a leader-ly thing to do. So he does that.
Meanwhile, Yang Yi and Jiang Wei are able to clear the mountain passes ahead of schedule, and they send a contingent of troops to go meet Wei Yan, which they're easily able to do since he wasn't paying attention thinking they'd never get here so fast. As the armies meet, Yang Yi's stand-in tells Wei Yan's soldiers to take their paycheck and go home instead of being branded rebels. These soldiers agree that going home and not getting stabbed in war sounds pretty good to them, so a bunch of Wei Yan's troops disband immediately. The fact that Wei Yan then gets angry and starts cutting down his own fleeing troops doesn't inspire much confidence, either.
When all's said and done, the only soldiers still under Wei Yan's banner are those led by Ma Dai; he's Ma Chao's nephew and has been around almost as long as Ma Chao was, but he never did anything super-cool enough to make me want to include him with our regular characters. Unfortunately, Ma Dai is only in command of three hundred men, and Wei Yan recognizes that his options for survival are looking pretty limited, so he floats the idea of putting in a job application with Wei.
Ma Dai tells him, that's a dumb idea, you're cool enough to not accept orders from people anymore. Instead, why don't we take our measly three hundred troops and go conquer the entire kingdom of Hanzhong for ourselves instead? And then go on to overrun Shu and so on and so forth, you know how it goes.
Wei Yan agrees that this is the play, so he and Ma Dai go to Hanzhong in northeast Shu. There, he immediately besieges the city in which Yang Yi and Jiang Wei have garrisoned themselves with ten times as many troops as Wei Yan has. I'm really harping on the numbers here because from what we've been given in the text, there should be no way Yang Yi is getting starved out here. The math is in his favor.
Aaaand yet he decides he has to go read the email he got from Zhuge Liang a few days ago titled DO NOT OPEN UNTIL WEI YAN REBELS.
Armed with plot contrivance, Yang Yi then rides out to meet with Wei Yan and tells him, you know, Zhuge Liang was right about you, he knew you'd pull this sort of stunt someday. But Wei Yan is riding high; he laughs and says, you know, I was always 30% worried about Zhuge Liang and how cunning he was, never could be too sure where I stood with him. But now I'm 0% worried because I show up here with a handful of guys and you're ready to surrender the city to me! Conquering Shu will be a piece of cake!
But Yang Yi stops him and says, hang on, it's not quite that simple. I'm not just going to hand over the city like nothing. What if, say, you shouted "Who dares slay me?" three times as loud as you can? If you did that, it'd probably be so impressive that we'd have to go ahead and make you king on the spot.
Wei Yan doesn't say "well that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard". Instead, what he does say—really loudly and clearly—is "WHO DARES SLAY ME?"
...Loudly and clearly enough for Zhuge Liang's sleeper agent Ma Dai to recognize the activation phrase and strike Wei Yan down on the spot.
The remaining Shu officers get together and have a laugh about how Ma Dai was planted and told to kill Wei Yan when he uttered that phrase. Not, you know, when Wei Yan turned his men against the Shu army. That wasn't the time. It specifically had to be when he said that incredibly dumb phrase. Okay.
And this is doubly stupid because Wei Yan was really just conflicted about what Shu ought to be doing, and if Zhuge Liang had actually set clear instructions Wei Yan probably would have respected them. Instead of just saying "I'm passing you over for promotion, Yang Yi is your new boss, have fun with that, bye."
Obviously, the guy who Liu Shan dispatched earlier to resolve everything diplomatically shows up right at this point. Everyone shrugs and says, well, probably for the best this way.
With all that wrapped up, Liu Shan then gets a text alert that Wu has started gathering troops along their border. They hadn't said they were going to do this, so he sends a message to Wu asking if everything's copacetic. Sun Quan goes, oh, bro, we're so copacetic. We'd just heard that you lost Zhuge Liang, and got worried that Wei might try something shady against you, so we put some troops in place in case you needed backup, just to let you know that we're still tight.
It's real cute. It's also completely irrelevant because Cao Rui is too busy performing inventory management on his numerous wives and building extravagant facilities for himself to even think about attacking right now.
But, while he's busy with all that, he gets a text alert of his own.
Because Gongsun Yuan in the northeast has declared himself King of Yan... and the surprise fourth kingdom declares war on Wei.