Deng Zhong

Deng Ai's son, given five thousand troops with Shi Zuan and hidden in Block Valley with orders not to betray their presence - the trap Jiang Wei walks into on the Shanggui road. Rewarded with a title of lordship when his father's services are memorialised.

The chapter's surprise: 'a youthful-looking leader riding in advance with his spear ready to thrust. He looked scarcely more than twenty years of age, his face was smooth as if powdered, and his lips were crimson' — and he fights Jiang Wei to a standstill for 'near half a hundred bouts' with neither gaining an opening. Ducks Jiang Wei's arrow flat against the saddle, then loses his spear when Jiang Wei catches the shaft under his arm and has to ride back to his own line. Jiang Wei is astonished to learn he has been fighting the son, not the father, and Deng Ai's shout — 'Jiang Wei, you fool, do not pursue my son when I, Deng Ai, am here!' — is how he finds out. Later sent in to reinforce Sima Wang inside Changcheng.

One of the two flank attacks on the Shu left camp, ten thousand men each, timed to coincide with Zheng Lun coming up out of the tunnel behind it.

Left to hold Houxia when his father goes north to relieve Qishan, with orders that leave no discretion: 'Hold this place most carefully. Let them challenge as they may, do not go out.'

Talks his father out of an open breach with Zhong Hui - 'if you cannot suffer small things, you may upset the grand policy of the state' - then leads the three thousand road-openers over the Yinping mountains with axes and boring tools, and is found weeping with them at the impassable precipice. Later routed at Mianzhu by his own terror of a wooden statue: 'If Zhuge Liang is still alive, that is the end of us!' Badly wounded in the second battle.

Killed beside his father at Mianzhu, both of them unarmed and just out of the prison carts: 'His soldiers fell upon the son, Deng Zhong, and slew him also, and thus father and son met death in the same place.'