Chapter 774: The Order of Pan Chang

"Take the city gate!"

More and more Marine soldiers climbed onto the city wall; the officers issued orders, directing the soldiers to continue the battle.

The soldiers received the order, immediately went down the stairs, and rushed toward the city gate.

Pulling out hand grenades, they were about to throw them into the gate passage.

"Banzai!"

Just at this moment, dozens of Eastern Japanese samurai holding samurai swords suddenly rushed out from the entrance.

These Eastern Japanese samurai widened their eyes, shouted, and brandished their samurai swords to hack at the Marine soldiers.

"Kill!"

The Marine soldiers roared, showing no fear, and raised their rifled muskets with bayonets fixed to charge at the Eastern Japanese samurai.

Sword light flickered, metal clashed; the Marine soldiers worked in pairs, one thrusting upward while the other thrust downward, one moving left while the other moved right.

As an Eastern Japanese samurai slashed over with his samurai sword, one soldier raised his rifle barrel to resist, while the other took the opportunity to thrust, piercing the opponent's chest.

These Eastern Japanese samurai were all guards raised by the Masheng Family, possessing exquisite martial arts.

But facing the Marine soldiers' exquisite bayonet technique, they suddenly felt as if they could not use their martial arts at all.

Although these soldiers' movements were simple and repeated only a few times, every move was fatal.

After just a few breaths of contact, more than ten samurai were killed and fell into pools of blood.

And as more Marine soldiers surged over, the remaining samurai found it even harder to parry and were all killed.

Two Marine soldiers were injured; one had an arm slashed with a wound deep enough to see the bone, and the other had a thigh slashed, bleeding profusely, but soldiers immediately came over to bandage the two and sent them away from the battlefield.

Having killed these samurai hiding at the entrance, the Marine soldiers opened the city gate.

More Marine soldiers surged in from the outside.

While the Nanmen was being taken, the fighting at the other three city gates continued.

The Marine soldiers stepped on the corpses of Eastern Japanese soldiers and fired at the Eastern Japanese soldiers on the east and west city walls.

Attacked from the front and back, and caught in a pincer movement from two sides, the Eastern Japanese soldiers on the east and west walls could suddenly no longer hold their ground.

The artillerymen, in particular, suffered "special attention" from the Marine soldiers, and many artillery pieces were silenced.

Before long, heavy gunfire suddenly erupted outside both city walls simultaneously.

The Marine soldiers at Nan Cheng knew that this was the start of the general offensive.

Shortly after, the dense sound of hand grenade explosions rang out on the east and west city walls.

The Marine soldiers climbed onto the city walls via scaling ladders.

However, the Eastern Japanese were clearly unwilling to let the city wall be conquered by the Yanzhou Army just like that.

Just as the Marines were successively occupying the various city walls, the shouts of "Banzai" inside Changqi City grew louder and more chaotic.

It turned out to be a group of Eastern Japanese soldiers carrying swords and wearing armor, rushing toward every city wall.

"Kill them, kill every single Great Song pig!" In the middle of the Eastern Japanese soldiers, a Masheng Family officer screamed hysterically.

In these years,

The national strength of Dongying had been rising steadily, and the Eastern Japanese nobles all despised Great Song from the bottom of their hearts.

The ambition of Watanabe was their ambition.

Dongying was too small; such narrow land was simply not enough for these Eastern Japanese nobles to divide.

Once, there were two hundred and seventy-six domains in Dongying, with each domain lord governing a piece of land.

To fight for these lands, the domain lords were in constant war.

After Watanabe unified Dongying, he depicted to the domain lords a grand plan for the future of Dongying conquering Gaoli and occupying Great Song.

It was precisely because of this that the domain lords were willing to pledge loyalty to Watanabe, regarding him as the alliance leader, and even handing over their military power.

In the hope of devouring Gaoli and Great Song in the future to obtain greater benefits.

Therefore, in their eyes, Great Song was just cattle and sheep waiting for them to eat.

And now, these cattle and sheep were actually turning around to eat them.

This made them feel ashamed and angry in their hearts, just like being slapped by someone they despised.

Thinking of this, the Masheng Family officer became even more hysterical, "Use your swords to hack them to death, use your mouths to bite through their throats, use your hands to gouge out their eyes, use every method to kill them, let them understand that Dongying is invincible!"

"Banzai!" Urged by the officer, the Eastern Japanese soldiers fell into a frenzy; they shouted one after another and rushed toward the city wall.

However, the frenzy was immediately doused with cold water.

On the city wall, the Marine soldiers' faces were as cold as frost.

Previously, the Marines only had eight thousand men, but after expansion, they reached the current thirty thousand.

Some of these new recruits came from the coast of Jiangbei and had witnessed the cruelty of the Eastern Japanese sea pirates, harboring deep hatred for these Eastern Japanese.

They often talked about these things in the army, so naturally, more soldiers understood the harm Dongying had done to the coast of Great Song over these years.

People in a certain village were strangled and hung on trees.

In another village, people's heads were chopped off and piled up by the seaside as a provocation to the Great Song government.

Once, when encountering a roundup by government troops, the Eastern Japanese sea pirates stripped the women in the village naked and made them walk in front as human shields, so that the government troops were constrained, and in the end, the Eastern Japanese sea pirates escaped triumphantly.

Such instances were too numerous to count.

"Sons of bitches, however many come today, I'll make you all die; fire!" On the South City Wall, a platoon leader roared with red eyes.

His name was Li Bochun, a man from Ningzhou; his entire family died at the hands of Eastern Japanese sea pirates, and only he survived by luck.

This time, attacking Dongying, he vented all the hatred he had accumulated over the years.

When attacking the city, he was the first to climb the scaling ladder and get onto the city wall.

"Bang, bang, bang..."

At his command, the soldiers under his command aimed at these Eastern Japanese soldiers and pulled the triggers.

At the same time, the other soldiers fired one after another; gunfire erupted on the city wall, and flashes of light flickered.

The charging Dongying soldiers were like wheat swept by a gale, falling one after another, layering the ground over and over.

While firing, the soldiers also continuously threw Hand Grenades at the Dongying Army, and flowers of Flame bloomed amidst the Dongying Army.

Each Hand Grenade would kill three or four Dongying soldiers.

In the span of a quarter of an hour, the area within two hundred meters of the city wall was covered in the corpses of Dongying soldiers.

Seeing that no matter how they charged, they could not get close to the city wall, and that their companions were dying in droves before them, these Dongying soldiers' minds cooled down.

As the fanaticism faded, fear surged up from their limbs and bones.

They were not fighting a war; it was more like being slaughtered.

Realizing this, the offensive of the Dongying Army immediately weakened.

Most importantly, more than half of the twenty thousand-plus new recruits were dead or wounded, and their morale had collapsed.

At this moment, Pan Zhang watched these Dongying soldiers with cold eyes, and thinking of Zhou Yi's order, he said to the generals: "Now Changqi City is yours. How they plundered Dongying is how you will plunder them now. Keep ten percent of the spoils you bring back for yourselves, and turn in the rest. How much you can bring back depends on your own abilities."

"Yes." The generals received the order and immediately became excited.

This order was quickly communicated among the generals.

Immediately, the Marine Corps began to attack Changqi City freely, with each Du as a unit.

One Du consists of five hundred men, led by a Capital Leader; this is to prevent soldiers from acting alone and to increase unnecessary casualties.

And five hundred men coordinating with each other is more efficient.

Under Pan Zhang's order, the Marine Corps soldiers were like fierce tigers descending a mountain, pouncing on the remaining Dongying Army.

Once they defeated them, they would have lost their last obstacle.