Chapter 407: Rain of Shot

"Duang!"

"Duang!"

Amid several thunderous reports, five Folangji cannons fired in succession, each loosing roughly thirty pieces of grapeshot. Over a hundred lead balls the size of copper coins swept over the heads of the pike formation like a gale, scything toward the charging Qing cavalry with the kinetic force to destroy all in their path.

The dozens of Qing cavalrymen at the very front, still some twenty-odd paces short of crashing into the Ming formation, struck as if against a stone wall—men and horses alike were riddled into sieves by the streaking hail of shot. Great clouds of blood mist filled the air, and a nauseating stench of gore drifted abroad.

The moment the Qing horse was spotted preparing to charge, the Company Commander of the left artillery battery gave the order, and all five Folangji cannons had their projectiles switched to grapeshot.

Unlike the tiger-crouch cannon's shorter-ranged grapeshot of stones and broken porcelain, the Folangji's grapeshot consisted entirely of lead balls far larger than musket balls, each weighing roughly two to three qian. This even weight greatly extended the grapeshot's range, and its lethality was all the more appalling.

The first chamber was spent; one loader swiftly withdrew it while another in the blink of an eye slotted a fresh chamber into the breech. The gunner at once touched the chamber's touchhole with a red-hot iron prong, and in an instant the second chamber's grapeshot blasted forth.

The five hundred Qing cavalrymen who had driven their mounts to full gallop suffered a devastating blow—the broad, sweeping coverage of the grapeshot turned every living thing that tried to pass through into a corpse.

War-horse after war-horse at full stride crashed down with mournful whinnies. Within the twenty-to-forty-pace span before the Ming pike formation, corpses littered the ground in an instant, severed limbs scattered everywhere, blood and shredded flesh coating the earth.

One had to admit the Mongols were a people raised in the saddle. Seeing their kinsmen ahead mowed down by the hail of shot, the hundred-odd riders following in the rear ranks threw their waists, legs, and arms into the effort, wrenching their charging mounts around in a hard turn. Curving past the corpses of their own kind, they galloped back along both flanks to their own lines.

Greleng watched several hundred of his men fall beneath the hail of shot in the blink of an eye, and his heart ached as if stabbed by a blade.

His face dark, he raised a hand to halt the second wave of five hundred riders poised to launch. After loudly ordering the men to dismount and rest while awaiting orders, he rode with several guards toward Abatai's central command.

"Beile Raoyu, this way of fighting won't do! The Ming cannons truly cannot be withstood! My first company of five hundred riders charged, and before we even got close, more than half were dead! The flank simply cannot be broken! We must think of another way!"

Though Abatai, owing to the distance, could not make out the course of the battle on the right wing, the unceasing cannon fire told him something was amiss. Now, seeing Greleng's frantic, exasperated look, he already suspected the outcome of this small engagement boded ill.

"How many cannons have the Ming placed on the two flanks? How can a cavalry charge fear Ming cannon? How many men and horses can a single ball kill? Why such heavy losses?"

Abatai asked, somewhat puzzled.

In his traditional understanding, Ming cannon were indeed mighty, but their firing intervals were long and their kill zones small. So long as one weathered a few volleys, the horse could break into the Ming infantry lines and quickly rout them.

But Greleng said five hundred riders had lost more than half in a single charge—this he found hard to fathom.

"The Ming cannons can fire not only great balls—now they've switched to shot the size of musket balls, and one blast looses a great many of them! However brave we Mongol riders may be, we cannot withstand shot falling like rain! Beile, I saw it with my own eyes—only by advancing head-on and closing to grapple with the Ming infantry can their cannon be kept from firing again!"

Greleng urged with firm conviction.

He dreaded that Abatai, ignorant of the true cause, would order him to charge again—a few more such rushes and his clansmen would be utterly crippled.

"Very well! Send men with my orders—leave two thousand horse on each flank to act as circumstances dictate, and bring the rest to the center to muster and await orders! They are nothing but rats who rely on firearms! Once we close to melee, they are ours to cut down! This Beile will show you how the warriors of the Eight Banners break the enemy!"

Having suffered two consecutive defeats, however minor, Abatai could plainly sense the Qing army's morale dipping somewhat. To rally the troops, he deliberately raised his voice, hoping to restore in the Eight Banner soldiers their old confidence and courage—the spirit with which a few dozen men had once shattered Ming armies of several thousand.

Approaching noon, the Mongol cavalry from both flanks had all been recalled to the vicinity of the central command.

A long, drawn-out horn call sounded, and the main Qing force in the center began to advance slowly.

At the very front of the center column, Han booi bondservants pushed over a hundred shield-carts to clear the way. A thousand skilled Qing archers followed along both sides of the carts, while five hundred of the fiercest Qing soldiers took the middle, ready to press in and hack open a breach once the archers had thrown the Ming formation into disorder. The remaining mass of the Qing army hung back, waiting for the chance to sweep in for the kill.

Seeing that the Qing attack formation deployed from two li away was not especially broad, at Zhou Yuji's command the Ming musketeer squares on the front line swiftly shifted formation—from four squares into two large ones, each six ranks deep with six hundred men per rank, while the remaining four hundred formed a single rank at the very rear.

The moment the entire Qing force was seen to move, Sun Chuanting gave the order, and the four red barbarian cannons that had rested long on the city wall fired one after another, their targets the shield-carts pushed by the booi bondservants at the very front.

The first ball landed squarely amid the dense cluster of shield-carts. After utterly smashing one cart packed with sandbags, it continued forward like a beast unleashed, tearing madly ahead until it had shredded three more shield-carts and left a dozen-odd dead and wounded booi in its wake before finally coming to rest.

The booi pushing the carts felt overwhelming terror, yet a sliver of hope lingered in their hearts.

The cannon's killing power was great, true, but the ball would not necessarily land on one's own head. So long as the dead and wounded were not oneself, the thing to do was sprint hard, shove the cart to the Ming line, then turn and run straight back.

Driven by such thinking, without even waiting for the Qing overseers to shout and threaten, and heedless of the successive balls flying in to kill and maim, the booi—save for the few dozen shield-carts already destroyed—strained with all their might and trotted the remaining seventy or eighty carts forward. In a matter of moments they had pushed them to within forty or fifty paces of the Ming line.

Setting down the carts, the booi turned and fled back like rabbits chased by hounds, sprinting at full hundred-meter-dash speed.

What struck the Qing as strange was that, apart from the single volley from the four red barbarian cannons, the guns behind the Ming front-line formation seemed to have gone collectively silent, firing not a shot at the advancing Qing troops.

Once the Han booi had cleared the wide open space ahead, the Qing archers nocked arrows and strode swiftly forward, gathering beneath the banners of their respective niru captains to form five small squares and shoot down the Ming troops a few dozen paces away.

The five hundred Qing vanguard slowed their pace, ready to launch their charge once the archers ahead had loosed eight volleys.

Just as the dispersed Qing troops began to cluster and before their formation had taken shape, a shrill, short trumpet blast rang out, and the ten Folangji cannons behind the trench in the center shattered the battlefield's silence almost simultaneously.

A distance of under two hundred paces was crossed in an instant by shot flying at high speed. The cannon thunder had barely died and the smoke had not yet spread when ten balls came howling in on the wind.

Apart from four balls that, misjudged for range, flew over the heads of the Qing archers, the remaining six all struck the Qing troops still forming up. Unbroken screams rose to the heavens as several dozen Qing soldiers collapsed and did not rise.

Before the Qing could react, the swiftly reloaded Folangji fired a second round.

With the aim corrected, this time only two balls smashed into the shield-carts at the front; the other eight again struck the Qing ranks that had not yet scattered. The same screams and the same scene played out once more—two volleys had claimed the lives of nearly a hundred Qing soldiers.

"Scatter! Scatter!"

At the shout of the jalan captain, the repeatedly battered Qing troops did not lose their composure but fanned out in all directions, front and back, left and right, to reduce the mass casualties that clustered formations invited from the shot.