Chapter 231: Asking for Trouble

Once everyone in the rear army had passed through that crossroads that had inexplicably made Modaboluo's heart pound with dread, the king of the Indian Shahi dynasty let out a quiet sigh of relief. Now they were safe; there was certainly no ambush.

Because by normal procedure, even if one meant to spring an ambush, one would strike directly at the middle, cutting the enemy force in two, doing everything possible to create chaos and force the enemy to flee to either side, then chase and strike them from behind.

No one would ever set an ambush by letting everyone pass through and then following behind them. That was not an ambush; that was asking for trouble.

"Do not press a returning army." When men are blocked at both ends, an army fighting for its life will often explode with tremendous fighting strength.

But today, events went precisely beyond Modaboluo's understanding. He had just set his heart back in his belly when he heard terrified screams rising from the rear army.

A lookout standing on the back of a war elephant waved the red flag that signaled danger and bellowed at Modaboluo.

"Enemy! Armored! Very many!"

"Hmph!" Modaboluo snorted coldly. Though he did not know where these men had come from — by ordinary reasoning, Prince Sadide should not have had such boldness.

Still, Modaboluo was not flustered. Men who could not even time an ambush properly — how much fighting strength could they have? Besides, he had thirty thousand men!

"Rear army becomes the front! The baggage train moves aside! Notify General Jia'ermohe at once and have him send men back to reinforce us!" Modaboluo commanded with composure even as he deployed his forces.

Seeing the king so composed, the rear army gradually settled down as well. A flash of blades, and those conscripted Vaishya and Shudra commoners who were shouting wildly were cut down on the spot.

The thick smell of blood rose. Watching the bloodstains on their own men's blades, the commoners in charge of the baggage quickly and tremblingly moved aside, clearing a path for the warriors coming up from the front.

Seeing everything in such good order, Modaboluo smugly stroked his beard. With such brave warriors defending him, what ambush was there to fear?

But he was immediately dumbfounded, and the soldiers who had cut down a few Shudras and stepped forward were stunned as well.

No wonder the commoners had screamed in terror just now. What appeared across from them was no savage barbarian army like orc-kind, but a force entirely clad in blue-black armor, long bows in hand, close-combat weapons planted at their feet, silent and terrible as rock.

He glanced at his own side's motley assortment of weapons and bows of every shape, and more importantly, they wore no armor — not only because iron armor was scarce, but also because one did not wear armor on the march.

The Shahi dynasty soldiers who had rushed to the front looked at one another, beads of sweat the size of beans dripping from their foreheads.

They froze, but the others behind who could not see clearly did not freeze. The war drums boomed on and on, and the front-rank soldiers, shoved forward by those behind, could only howl once and begin their charge.

"Front rank, kneel! Second and third ranks, fire!"

"Fourth and fifth ranks, fire!"

The Fengtian Army's brave warriors stood ten men to a rank, five ranks making fifty men. The front rank carried crossbows, the four ranks behind carried bows — exactly one squad per rotation — and under their officers' command they carried out saturation fire as rapidly as machines.

Normally a squad of soldiers would, under the squad leader's command, loose four volleys in an arc, and after four volleys they would charge out with long weapons and close for hand-to-hand combat.

Then the squad behind would follow right up, and another round would begin, until the enemy was broken.

A skyful of arrows came streaking in. In this valley path just wide enough for a little more than ten men, the Shahi dynasty soldiers had nowhere to dodge; they could only take it with flesh and blood.

Their wooden shields could not stop the Fengtian Army's stiff bows at all, and the front rank was crossbow bolts besides, even the divine-arm bows with their extremely fast rate of fire.

At first the soldiers in front could still charge under their officers' direction, and the archers could still trade a few shots.

But the charging soldiers were almost all wiped out before they got halfway, and the archers trading shots fared even worse — with no armor to cover them at all, it was a completely one-sided slaughter.

"Dong! Dong!" Two drumbeats sounded — the signal to advance.

"Ten paces, march!" All the Fengtian Army squad leaders shouted at once. Two thousand men, divided into four great formations twenty paces apart, chanted the cadence together and advanced ten paces.

"Bows and crossbows, fire!" Yan Jin, commanding the Flying Tiger Unit at the front, shouted.

The soldiers who had just advanced ten paces and forced the Shahi army back stopped in place again, and another skyful of arrows streaked out. The Shahi infantry, who had not even put on armor, collapsed in swathes one after another.

It was that cruel, that mechanical. There was no need to charge at all. In this narrow valley road, the Fengtian Army's soldiers needed only their stiff bows and crossbows to slaughter the unarmored Shahi infantry until blood ran like a river.

One side fought more smoothly the longer it went on; the other grew more terrified by the moment. The Shahi soldiers and the conscripted laborers had all mixed together now.

Everywhere were figures wailing in terror and desperately shoving backward. They pressed together with the soldiers being forced forward, becoming the finest targets for the arrows.

"Mula! Mula!" Like the terrible cry of some ancient beast rising from the depths of the earth, several blue-gray war elephants suddenly appeared before everyone's eyes.

It was as tall as a thatched cottage, and its long, cylindrical trunk looked like no normal animal's. What normal animal had a nose grown to resemble a mule's member?

And its tusks, painted in strange colors, gave off a purple-black gleam, exceptionally chilling.

Its head, chest, and belly were all covered in a layer of iron armor, and on its back it carried a saddle-frame the size of a small house. In the middle sat a brawny driver whose face was painted like a Buddhist temple guardian, and on either side was an archer.

A fanatical light flashed in the driver's eyes. He suddenly leaned down, took out a halberd-like implement, and struck it repeatedly beside the elephant's ear.

The originally plodding war elephant suddenly seemed to go berserk, and with the thudding of its footsteps came a sensation as if the very earth and mountains were shaking.

The elephant was not slow. When it ran, it could reach five or six times the speed of a human, and with its own tonnage and armor, it was a tank of the cold-weapon age.

What the driver had just struck the war elephant with was the traditional Indian elephant-training tool, the elephant hook. In truth, though an elephant's hide looks thick and tough, the skin behind its ears is delicate and sensitive.

Striking the tender flesh behind the elephant's ear with this tool, similar to an ancient Chinese iron halberd, could inflict unbearable pain on the elephant.

Combined with reinforcement and training from birth, once it received such harm, the war elephant would form a conditioned reflex — charge forward. Only by charging forward would the driver stop hurting it with the elephant hook.

But today, the first to suffer were the Shahi soldiers huddled in terror at the front.

On this mountain road, the left side was a cliff seven or eight meters deep, with a river valley below. A road this narrow left no room to scatter, and the arrows flying from the other side gave no time for it either.

So under Modaboluo's cold command, while several hundred men still stood in between, the war elephants began their charge directly.

Those Shahi soldiers huddled at the front were trampled over in despair by the elephants coming up from behind.

The several-ton monsters easily crushed those frail humans beneath their feet. Many soldiers, to avoid being trampled to death by the elephants, could only slide down the slope of the cliff.

But almost none survived. One could only say that compared to being trampled into pulp by the elephants, they at least managed to leave behind a somewhat more intact corpse.

For the Fengtian Army, this was a truly unexpected delight! The war elephants' charging speed was originally astonishing, but forced by the narrow mountain road, the first wave of impact was actually absorbed by the Shahi dynasty's own men.

"Beat the drums! Make a show of force! Divine-arm bows, fire!" Zhang Zhao roared. Whether they could take down the Indians across from them today depended entirely on whether they could take down the war elephants across from them.

If they could, then it would be an easy crushing victory. If not, the casualties would likely be no small matter.

Heaven-shaking drumbeats rang out, and a hundred or more colored banners suddenly rose from the army formation. The drums beat fiercely, the banners flew, and the Fengtian Army's brave warriors howled along like ghosts and wolves.

The already-charging war elephants were startled by the sudden shouting and waving banners from the other side, and right after, a skyful of arrows flew at them.

Though the arrows did little damage to the thick-hided, armored elephants, the pain was still unavoidable.

Li Zaiyuan wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. Damn it, he had just gotten his hands on a hardworking, gentle, big-bottomed lady from Bukhara, and before he could properly enjoy her, he had better not throw his life away here.

But then he thought at once — this was a divine weapon that the Great King had ordered Young Lord Cao Shisi to forge. It could surely deal with the monsters across from them.

"Raise lances! Load thunder-fire!" Li Zaiyuan and his men stood in the first rank. As the squad leader of the first rank, an armored soldier of the original Hanshan Unit who had followed since the days of Great King Zhang's rise, his trust in Zhang Zhao was carved deep into his very bones.

The gunpowder and other items loaded into the pear-blossom spear tubes were all packed in advance in stiff paper cartridges, so when it came time to use them you simply dropped them into the tube. You could call these the earliest fixed ammunition!

"Light them!" Li Zaiyuan howled. The ten men in the front row and the ten in the second row ignited the powder in their pear-blossom spears at the same moment.

Amid those wild roars and volleys of arrows came a continuous burst of explosions — boom! — and twenty golden fire dragons erupted into the gloomy sky, the flames shooting out six or seven meters.

A brown war elephant charging at the front let out a pitiful wail as the searing gunpowder scorched its long trunk.

The trunk is the most pain-sensitive part of an elephant, and the intense agony made it want to turn and flee at once — but the driver on its back brought the war elephant back under control.

Yet at that very instant, the shattered porcelain shards and iron filings that had sprayed out with the flames from the pear-blossom spears drove deep into the war elephant's great head, and some even struck its eyes.

A still more violent pain seized it, and the war elephant began to thrash wildly. With a scream, the driver and the archer on its back were thrown to the ground.

Boom! Another twenty pear-blossom spears erupted, and the golden fire dragons reddened the whole sky. The extreme pain and extreme terror shattered the war elephant's composure.

The humans opposite were simply too terrifying — not only did their roars strike fear, they could also spit fire.

With no driver to control it, the war elephant forgot the pain of the elephant hook. Even the hook would have been useless now, because the flames opposite caused far greater pain.

Amid cries of terror, the brown bull elephant at the very front was the first to break. It wheeled around frantically, desperate to flee faster from those dreadful people opposite.

The road was narrow to begin with, and when it turned around, it immediately shoved the war elephant beside it on the far left straight off the cliff.

The elephant plummeting down the cliff let out an enormous wail, and that cry shattered the mental defenses of every living creature. Whether war elephant, soldier, or laborer, every one of them was left with a single thought.

Run! Run now! The farther the better!

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