Cavalrybane: the boss and the talisman share one name

The short answer

Two unrelated things carry this name:

If you searched “Cavalrybane” after seeing it in a Jing Ye setup, you want the accessory — he opens the fight on horseback, and this is the only accessory in the game that scales specifically against mounted enemies.

If you searched it because it appeared in a boss list, that is the Pengzhen boss, which has nothing to do with the forest and drops a weapon instead.

The accessory: exact location

From the Trail of Cages bell in Crimson Forest, enter the cave to the right of the road, work the crank that lowers Quick Hand Zhang’s cage, then drop to the ledge underneath it. The chest is there.

It sits directly on the route to freeing Zhang, so there is no separate trip — if you are doing the Wily Hare questline anyway, this costs you nothing.

The boss: what it actually is

Cavalrybane sits in the main story under Town of Death / Pengzhen. Two things trip people up:

1. It is not in Crimson Forest. The accessory is. The boss is two regions later.
2. The drop is a weapon, not the talisman. Armybreaker, a two-handed weapon whose switch-in or blue glint parry gives a short forward rush.

Nothing about the boss fight uses the accessory, and nothing about the accessory requires killing the boss. The overlap is the name and nothing else.

Telling them apart in conversation

The Chinese naming is cleaner than the English here: the boss is 斩骑, the accessory is 斩骑符. The suffix does the disambiguating for you.

Notes

• The 25% is mounted-only. It does nothing against anything on foot.
• Armybreaker’s value is positional. It is one of the few weapons that changes your movement rather than your damage.
• Do not confuse it with the Shieldbreaker Talisman — the other Crimson Forest accessory that matters for Jing Ye. That one is +50% shield damage and covers phase 2.

Related

• Jing Ye — the fight the accessory is placed for
• Iron Fiend and Jade Dancer — the other name that means two things
• All bosses