Chapter 447: This Is the Yinqiang Xiaojie Unit

Jieli Pijia stared at Feng Hui's troops emerging from the somewhat dilapidated garrison town, and was simply stunned. He widened his eyes in disbelief.

A close minister beside him, eager to please, laughed exaggeratedly: "We have come with tens of thousands of elite cavalry, and they send out just over two thousand men to resist us outside the city. Heaven has delivered them to the Khagan!"

Hearing the close minister's words, the surrounding Gaochang Uyghur officials, high and low, all burst into laughter along with him.

Jieli Pijia had won out in the struggle among four sons for the throne, and had then thoroughly disposed of his two elder brothers and one younger brother. He was no benevolent ruler.

His subordinates had long grown accustomed to flattering this Heavenly King of the Gaochang Uyghurs. Whoever dared object had to worry about whether he could keep his life.

Amid the tide of fawning voices surging toward him, Jieli Pijia narrowed his eyes in comfort, though in his heart he still understood a few things clearly.

Seen from here, the garrison town of Chiting was packed with dense ranks of Liangguo troops, but whether there were actually twenty thousand of them was still uncertain.

And he absolutely had to determine their numbers, because if there were twenty thousand troops here, then the main Liangguo army would very likely be coming from Yinzhou, and these men would be the vanguard.

Zhang Zhao had used traveling merchants on the Silk Road to learn the situation of the Gaochang Uyghurs, and the Gaochang Uyghurs were likewise using their own traveling merchants to probe Liangguo's true strength.

Although they could not possibly uncover its secrets, they still had a reasonably clear idea of how large Liangguo was and what conditions were like within the country.

From the moment Zhang Zhao first sent envoys to Gaochang City demanding that Jieli Pijia renounce the title of Heavenly King, Jieli Pijia had been consulting with his close ministers and generals about preparations against Liangguo.

The assessment they produced was, in fact, very close to Zhang Zhao's actual plan.

Because to attack the Gaochang Uyghurs, there were only two options: cross Fusha in the north to Foutu City, or attack and take Yinzhou from the east. There was no need to strain over guessing.

The difficulty lay in determining the enemy's main axis of attack, so as to make targeted dispositions.

The only thing that exceeded Jieli Pijia's expectations was that Zhang Zhao, even while still sending envoys to negotiate with him, had suddenly won over the Chen family of Yinzhou.

This meant that before Jieli Pijia could strengthen Yinzhou's defenses, Yinzhou had already fallen.

Judging from the number of troops Liangguo had committed in each of its previous campaigns, Jieli Pijia estimated that Liangguo's capacity to field an army was around thirty to fifty thousand men.

Reaching or exceeding the scale of fifty thousand men would require nationwide mobilization.

Obviously, if Liangguo had to commit more than fifty thousand men to attack his Gaochang Uyghurs, Jieli Pijia would laugh himself awake even in his dreams.

The long supply lines and the three great natural barriers — the cruel Moheyan Desert, the Great Ghost Desert, and the the the Shatuo Desert — would alone be enough to cost Liangguo troops and generals.

Therefore, if ten-some thousand or twenty thousand troops really had reached Chiting Garrison, then it could basically be confirmed that Liangguo was coming from Yinzhou.

After all, an army of only thirty or forty thousand men would not possibly split into two routes.

Even when the Khitans broke through Foutu City back then, they had committed more than thirty thousand iron cavalry. Liangguo could not possibly take Foutu City with just ten or twenty thousand cavalry.

Moreover, tens of thousands of Saktu's Karluk cavalry had arrived inside Foutu City. If Liangguo divided its forces like that, Jieli Pijia would throw back his head and laugh three times.

To make Saktu and Liangguo's Zhang Zhao fight like dogs biting dogs — how delightful that would be!

But there was a problem: the Liangguo troops at Chiting Garrison would not just stand there and let him count them.

He would have to move in close and fight a round, force the Liangguo troops at Chiting Garrison to be fully stirred into action, and then use their combat strength and the banners that appeared to determine their numbers.

In fact, what Jieli Pijia did not know was that a major reason Feng Hui had sent out two thousand troops to form up in front of the city was precisely this.

It was to keep the Gaochang Uyghurs from figuring out how many troops he had under his command, and then to use the formidable Hanshan and Yinqiang units to give Jieli Pijia a false impression.

Feng Hui's troops outside the city quickly finished forming up: the Manxiong on the left, Dunzhu on the right, and the six hundred Yinqiang troops of Wu Jixing, who had come over with Feng Hui, in the center.

Wu Jixing was an interesting man. In history, after Feng Hui had completely wiped out the Tangut Tuoba Yanchao faction in Lingzhou, it happened that Li Wenqian, the Acting Military Governor of Liangzhou, had shut his gates and burned himself to death with his entire family.

Feng Hui then sent Wu Jixing with two thousand yabing guards into Liangzhou, and set himself up as Acting Military Governor of Hexi.

As soon as he took office, he in effect "became one" with the various factions of Liangzhou — and the various factions of Liangzhou still could not defeat his two thousand Yinqiang troops, and could only go weeping to the Later Jin court to complain.

The Later Jin sent Chen Yanhui, Escort Officer of Jingzhou, to mediate. The Liangzhou factions wailed and clung to Chen Yanhui's legs, refusing to let him leave, and voluntarily submitted to Chen Yanhui's command, petitioning the Later Jin court to make Chen Yanhui Prefect of Liangzhou.

Shi Jingtang also feared that once Feng Hui gained a firm foothold in Liangzhou, he would imitate the Li family of Dingnan and begin refusing to recognize Wu Jixing's position as Acting Military Governor of Hexi.

Wu Jixing, without support, could only return to Lingzhou. Thereafter he followed Feng Hui, pacifying the border tribes in Lingzhou, and was renowned for his grace and good faith.

In history, after Zhang Xichong's death, not one Han Chinese in ten remained in Lingzhou, and the Tangut tribes were arrogant and overbearing. It was entirely up to Feng Hui and his subordinate Wu Jixing to govern them.

Otherwise, Lingzhou might well have been lost as early as the Later Han period, without waiting for the Great Song to lose it.

But in this era, Wu Jixing believed he had come to the right place.

Because the atmosphere within Liangguo was completely different from the Central Plains court — it had a sense of vigorous vitality, of all things flourishing and contending.

Before he came, Feng Hui had analyzed with him that Liangguo, crouching over Hexi and Longyou and holding all of Lingwu and Xiasui, had a better chance than any other power in the realm of ending this chaotic age — and Wu Jixing fully agreed with that conclusion.

Clatter-clatter-clatter! Hoofbeats rang out, and a Gaochang Uyghur cavalryman in a brocade robe, holding a white flag, galloped over from the distance.

This was an envoy, come forward under a white flag to parley.

Wu Jixing curled his lip and raised his hard bow with a mocking air.

"Still coming to urge surrender? Do these barbarian Hu really think they're the Heavenly Khagan?"

Twang! The arrow streaked past like a shooting star, and the brocade-robed rider toppled at the sound, without getting out a single word.

Jieli Pijia's face flushed red with fury. In his extreme rage, he rose from the ornate Heavenly Khagan six-horse carriage.

"The Left Shenwu Army will attack, with the tribes south of the mountains as the vanguard."

The "tribes south of the mountains" Jieli Pijia spoke of were the tribes south of Bogda Mountain — those local tribal armed herdsmen who received no pay.

Upon receiving the order, over ten thousand Gaochang Uyghur cavalrymen began to move out.

In an instant, dust and smoke began to spread across the vast sandy ground west and north of Chiting Garrison.

This was the favorite tactic of Western Regions cavalry. Because the area was relatively arid, the ground often accumulated a thick layer of yellow dust, and attacking cavalry would often stir up dust in all directions before the main army moved out, both to create a great show of force and to conceal the direction of the attack.

Wu Jixing also immediately began changing formation. He had Guo Guangcheng and Chen Huiming, each commanding five hundred cavalry on the left and right, pull their cavalry back behind the infantry.

First, to avoid becoming the first target of attack, and to remain highly mobile even if struck; second, to leave distance for the warhorses to charge.

In the sky-filling dust, a cacophony of shrieking and howling suddenly erupted, and combined with the near-zero visibility, it was genuinely intimidating.

On Wu Jixing's side, although the infantry had drawn their bows and nocked arrows from their quivers, they were somewhat at a loss as to which direction to shoot, because at this moment they still could not tell from which direction the enemy cavalry would launch the main attack.

Wu Jixing quickly raised a red triangular banner, and then the soldiers behind him began tapping the breastplates of their comrades beside them with their left elbows, signaling them to close ranks.

The soldiers who received the signal quickly assembled under the direction of their officers, and a small number of shield-bearers raised their large shields.

The infantry, originally standing in three square formations side by side, transformed with extreme speed into small formations somewhat resembling a diamond shape.

And they were arrayed in a triangular formation, with Wu Jixing's six hundred Silver Lance soldiers pushed directly to the very front.

Unlike ordinary infantry, who needed to form square formations when facing cavalry, Wu Jixing's approach stemmed from his confidence.

If the enemy were iron cavalry bold enough to charge the formation, playing it this way would likely get them broken through one by one.

But Wu Jixing did not believe the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry had the ability to charge straight into a spear square—the several thousand light cavalry earlier had already exposed their combat strength.

Arrows fell like rain, and a fierce smell of churned earth rushed at their faces. Within seventy or eighty paces, the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry that had been hidden in the dust appeared before everyone's eyes.

They had not, as was traditional, come swarming over the hills to harass with bows, but had instead formed an arrowhead formation, carrying long spears and sabers for close combat.

For a moment, both sides were stunned, each taken aback by the other's departure from convention.

The Gaochang Uyghur cavalry had expected to see infantry drawn up in a square, but instead found three steel hedgehogs arranged in a triangular formation.

Wu Jixing had expected to see the kind of cavalry the Tanguts used—spread across the field, each rider widely spaced, with bows as their primary means of attack—but instead a heavy cavalry force built for close-quarters melee had come.

This "heavy" did not mean they wore iron armor, but that their task was to charge the formation—heavy cavalry in role.

In an instant, arrows flew like locusts. The Gaochang Uyghur arrows arrived, and the arrows of Wu Jixing's Silver Lance soldiers flew back at them.

The dust and smoke grew thicker. Countless Gaochang Uyghur warhorses crashed to the ground, kicking up billowing clouds of dust.

On the Silver Lance side, though quite a few were hit as well, every man wore full iron armor, and arrows loosed from horseback bows could basically not pierce it.

Only the especially unlucky had an arrow slip through some gap in the armor plates and bore in.

"Raise spears!" Wu Jixing bellowed.

Thirty paces now. If the enemy dared to slam straight into them, his losses today would certainly be heavy.

That would prove the enemy cavalry's experience and courage both exceeded his estimate.

But if the enemy did not dare charge straight at him, and instead rode through the gaps between his three triangular infantry squares, then Wu Jixing's judgment would be proven right.

The Gaochang Uyghur cavalry's fighting strength was just that—nothing more—and they would surely be easily defeated.

Amid Wu Jixing's roar, more than three hundred long spears were raised.

The shafts of these spears were coated with a layer of white lacquer, and under the sunlight they gave off a hazy white glow—this was the origin of the "silver spears" of the Silver Lance Honor Guard.

In the dim yellow world, that streak of silver-white was dazzlingly bright, and even the steel spearheads gleamed with it, as if a brilliant light had suddenly appeared—tremendously intimidating.

And behind the three hundred silver spears were wooden crossbows firing ceaselessly and a small number of Divine Arm bows.

The charging Gaochang Uyghur cavalry were like a sesame flatbread being pounded over and over—the body of it was not much damaged, but the sesame seeds on its surface were pattering down.

At last, under the concentrated fire of strong bows and hard crossbows, and the intimidation of silver spears that looked anything but easy to provoke, the Gaochang Uyghur cavalry did not dare slam head-on into Wu Jixing and his men.

Instead, just as they reached thirty paces, they split off in a V-shape and rode around.

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