Chapter 706: Chaotic Warfare

The Lightning-Charged Arquebus was, of course, looted from the Ming army.

Liu Chengzong's Marshal's Headquarters could not even produce enough of the heavy arquebuses and wall guns — standard-issue firearms already on the equipment rolls.

Although he controlled all the key handicraft centers of the northwest, the relentless expansion of the army and the explosive, short-term growth of his forces meant the equipment shortfall remained enormous.

There was therefore even less reason to waste labor on producing something as sophisticated, cutting-edge, and non-standard as the Lightning-Charged Arquebus — a personal firearm not yet in the official inventory.

Of course, after acquiring the Lightning-Charged Arquebus last winter, Liu Chengzong did consider adding it to the Armory's production queue and sent a few samples to Shi Chengwo.

The answer he got was disappointing: without half a year, the Marshal's Army's gunsmiths could not master it; add improvements, and that was another half-year. Mass production would have to wait until at least the tenth year of the Chongzhen reign.

Fortunately, Liu Chengzong was not that stubborn. Obtaining this thing in the first place had been an unexpected delight.

This batch of Lightning-Charged Arquebuses came from Zhang Tianlin's ambush of Bai Guang'en. Over a thousand were captured in total, all brand-new and in perfect condition — it was said the oil on the stocks still hadn't dried when they got them.

But Zhang Tianlin's campaign at the time was truly grueling. His lone regiment had plunged deep into Gansu with neither supplies nor reinforcements, turning the Gansu heartland upside down. Liu the Lion could hardly snatch the spoils from his own man.

Even the so-called punishment — just those horses — was merely to placate Chantu Taiji, whose equipment had been seized.

Such fine items, Liu the Lion certainly would not demand.

So the Lightning-Charged Arquebuses stayed in Zhang Tianlin's hands until last year, when they entered Guanzhong.

Zhang Tianlin was first promoted to Tong Pass Regional Commander, and later, when the military system was reformed to establish garrison brigades, he became the Regional Commander of the Guannei Circuit. His large regiment was expanded into the Guannei Brigade, with four regiments under its command.

His equipment shortfall was severe, so it was only when reorganizing his armaments that he turned in the Lightning-Charged Arquebuses as scrap, in exchange for newly manufactured heavy arquebuses, wall guns, and rocket carts.

The Lightning-Charged Arquebus was indeed a fine weapon — otherwise Zhang Tianlin would not have held onto it for over a year.

But in his hands, it was practically no different from scrap.

This had to do with the ill-timed history of the Lightning-Charged Arquebus.

Its creator was Zhao Shizhen, who invented it before the twenty-fifth year of the Wanli reign.

At that time, during the Wanli Emperor's campaign to aid Korea, Zhao Shizhen submitted a memorial on weapons, presenting four new types of army firearms — imitated, researched, improved, and developed by himself — to the imperial court.

The four weapons were: the Lumi Arquebus, the Western Arquebus, the Lightning-Charged Arquebus, and the Thunderbolt Arquebus.

Among them, the Western Arquebus was a light firearm used by Western sailors. It had a long barrel, a light stock, and a small powder charge. The bullet weighed eight fen with a one-qian charge, making the caliber very small. It was accurate but weak, suitable for southern infantry against unarmored enemies.

This weapon was widely copied in the south at the time, all called fowling pieces. Civilians even used it for hunting, because the small bullet and light charge could hit small birds without shattering them.

The Lumi Arquebus was modeled on the Ottoman matchlock. Its barrel was long and heavy — heavier than the Western Arquebus but lighter than the Japanese arquebus — making it handy for infantry combat.

The Lightning-Charged Arquebus was a breech-loading type, designed for elite troops to deliver rapid fire on the battlefield, capable of firing six shots in the shortest possible time.

The Thunderbolt Arquebus had five barrels and a shield, serving as an upgraded replacement for the three-barreled hand cannon.

Zhao Shizhen's memorial on weapons was highly ambitious, as it outlined a whole series of equipment designs for mixed firearm units.

But in the Great Ming of that time, Zhang Juzheng was already gone, the Wanli Emperor's enthusiasm for personal rule had faded, and military equipment reform was not something that could be accomplished overnight.

Still, it was not entirely meaningless. At least it was recorded by the Ministry of Works, and a batch was manufactured and delivered to the capital garrison.

Building on this, Zhao Shizhen created a weapon that was simpler to manufacture and had a far greater impact on later generations: the Three-Length Arquebus.

However, compared to the name "Three-Length Arquebus," people of that era generally just called it a fowling piece.

The so-called "Three Lengths" referred to combining the strengths of three personal firearms: the light, portable barrel of the Western Arquebus for range; the swift lock mechanism of the Lumi Arquebus, with an added flash pan cover; and the steady stock of the Japanese arquebus.

Most importantly, this improvement was purely in structural design and did not require much extra labor.

This became the standard fowling piece of the Chongzhen era.

As for the structurally altered Thunderbolt Arquebus and Lightning-Charged Arquebus, their fate always depended on the whims of various regional supreme commanders and governors. Those interested in weaponry would manufacture a batch, but none ever achieved any real results.

After all, new weapons require specialized training and supporting tactics, and even need complementary equipment like war wagons and other support weapons.

So true large-scale deployment to the troops had to wait until the Shandong New Army of the Tianqi era.

Though that New Army later switched sides.

The Lightning-Charged Arquebus was indeed a fine weapon, highly specialized. Its intended targets were the Japanese pirates and the northern barbarians.

The common trait of these two opponents was their poor armor.

But Zhang Tianlin needed the exact opposite. His core weapons were rockets and warhorses; he needed to deal with enemies who were still standing after a volley of rockets.

Such opponents were either very lucky, or their luck was average but their armor, shields, and war wagons were thick.

The former could be finished off with a saber; the latter required wall guns and heavy arquebuses to bring down.

The Lightning-Charged Arquebus could not do that.

It was essentially a breech-loading cannon in gun form, and in Liu Chengzong's eyes, a very successful modification of the breech-loader.

It used the breech-loader's signature tenon structure. The main barrel's rear was not sealed with a screw; it was simply a tube fixed to the stock with two pins at the front and rear and two copper bands.

It came with six five-inch-long breech chambers. On the surface, these looked like bullet casings, but in reality, they were the actual barrels that withstood the chamber pressure — the main reason for more than half of its high production cost.

Each breech chamber had a protruding lip at both ends to serve as a catch. After pre-loading the ammunition, the front lip slotted into the main barrel, and the rear square lip locked into the catch groove at the rear of the stock.

There was also a square hole at the rear of the breech chamber. An external pin passed through the stock and the chamber, securing it to the gun to prevent it from jumping out upon firing.

The two catches and the pin of the breech chamber fit perfectly, and the chamber was fitted with a small copper disc bearing a rear sight.

This structure was the result of Zhao Shizhen's further improvement after discovering gas-leakage flaws when he presented the new gun to the court.

But this copper disc was not designed to reduce gas leakage; it was to prevent leaking gas from burning the shooter's eyes.

All firearms leak gas to some degree. The touchholes of muzzle-loading matchlocks and flintlocks also leak.

As long as it can fire and send the bullet out, the effect of gas leakage on power... there is a very good solution.

It is not about reducing gaps between parts and minimizing leakage regardless of cost.

At least in the pre-industrial era, the most cost-effective solution to the gas-leakage problem of breech-loading guns was to design it to hold three extra grams of gunpowder.

A fowling piece firing a three-qian bullet uses a three-qian charge; but a Lightning-Charged Arquebus firing a two-qian bullet uses a two-qian-and-five-fen charge — it simply does not fear gas leakage.

Its advantage lay in rapid fire. Its ignition mechanism was neither flintlock, nor matchlock, nor exactly a touchhole. Instead, it used a fuse pre-loaded into the breech chamber along with the ammunition. It was not afraid of jostling, nor did it require priming powder to be poured in the heat of battle.

Thus, it could fire six shots in the time other guns fired two, and it was easy to reload and fire on horseback.

As a personal firearm, aside from the slightly weak two-qian bullet, it had virtually no flaws.

But Zhang Tianlin needed heavy weapons. This light, rapid-fire gun clearly could not meet his needs.

After a volley of rocket arrows, the remaining enemies had to be aimed at precisely to hit — rather than spend ages firing muskets, it was better to just let the cavalry charge over and trample them.

If the rocket arrows missed, then Zhang Tianlin had even less reason to trade shots with them — just move to a safe position, then later seize the chance to hit them with another volley of rockets.

Once this batch of Lightning Lances reached Liu Shizi, they didn't see much use either — about a thousand in total, nowhere near enough to equip the whole army, and some of the sub-barrels even needed to be remade to complete the sets.

And the Feathered Forest Cavalry had just gotten their hands on a batch of specialty goods from the Tai Meng Garrison before the new year — every man was happily playing with a flintlock pistol and had no desire to switch back to long guns.

So Liu Chengzong picked out eight hundred eighty lances and allocated them to the roving battalions of the 1st and 2nd Field Brigades — four Han soldier divisions, two hundred twenty per division.

Their first appearance on the battlefield as weapons of the Marshal's Army earned them a merit right in the middle of a cavalry melee — these things shot farther than three-eye guns and fired faster than ordinary bird muskets, and crucially, a cavalryman could reload them on horseback.

It changed the order and rules of cavalry engagements, like cheating.

In that first clash, the two sides committed four to five hundred riders in total — the cavalry under Xu Yong of the Ming army's Left Garrison were utterly routed, riders falling from their horses in swathes, fleeing in chaos, their mounts refusing to obey and carrying their masters away from the battlefield.

It wasn't the men who were hit — it was that the Marshal's Army cavalry, due to aiming issues, had all aimed for the bigger target, firing shot after shot at the warhorses.

A tiny two-mace lead ball could hardly kill a massive warhorse in one shot, but it could strip these large beasts of their fighting ability.

The Ming cavalry who lost their horses reacted quickly — well-trained, they formed small squads, using the fallen horses as cover, dragging out wounded men pinned beneath them, and standing back-to-back in defensive formations against the charging Marshal's Army riders.

But the battlefield advantage was clearly not on their side, so much so that the scattered Ming cavalry, driven to different corners, all independently chose to move in groups, and in the end simply spurred their horses straight to the infantry formation, dismounted one after another, and actually formed a small infantry square of nearly a hundred men with their horses lying down as an outer perimeter.

This was completely different from Zuo Liangyu's plan.

Xu Yong, his eyes red with battle fury, sent another two hundred cavalry pressing forward — before Zuo Liangyu could even stop him, the riders, long poised for action, were already off in a cloud of dust.

On the Marshal's Army side, however, the cavalry had no intention of continuing a battle of attrition.

The Han division cavalrymen carrying Lightning Lances gathered in small groups to confer briefly, then shouted across the battlefield — soon men were aiming their firearms at the warhorses outside the Ming formation and firing, while the Mongol division riders closed in with circling formations and loosed arrows.

A burst of gunfire, arrows falling like rain — seven or eight out of ten warhorses were shot or wounded.

Then, with a sharp whistle, the Mongol cavalry used hooked-sickle lances to scoop up fallen comrades, and the horse troop withdrew calmly toward their own lines before the enemy riders could reach the battlefield.

On the other side of the battlefield, at Ma Ke's wave, four more horse troops that had long been ready formed up and rode out, once again splitting into four-rider squads as in the earlier formation change, spreading out to meet the enemy cavalry head-on.

The reason the earlier cavalry were pulling back to camp was not complicated — Ma Ke could guess it at a glance.

Their Lightning Lances only had six sub-barrels — after six shots they had to reload, and the environment of a cavalry engagement made reloading too difficult, so naturally they had to find a way to withdraw.

For a moment, a rather comical scene unfolded on the battlefield.

At first the Ming relief cavalry came charging fiercely onto the field while the Marshal's Army cavalry withdrew — but when the Marshal's Army relief cavalry also came charging fiercely toward them, the Ming riders didn't even bother with the dismounted cavalry they'd left on the field, turning tail and retreating straight to their main formation.

Instead, it was Zhou Shifeng, the Left Garrison Vice General who was dispersing his formation in a flanking maneuver to the northeast, who waved his banner and gave the order, sending his five hundred riders sweeping grandly toward the battlefield.

Ma Ke urgently sounded the gongs in his formation, calling the charging cavalry back — part of Zhou Shifeng's riders pursued relentlessly, driving them off, while another part went to rescue their comrades, attempting to bring back the nearly one hundred dismounted cavalrymen.

But as soon as they entered range, rockets rose from within Ouyang Gun's formation.

Six rocket arrows soared up trailing tail flames, shrieking as they traced uneven parabolas through the air, streaked swiftly across the battlefield, then wobbled and spun erratically in the latter half of their flight, crashing down within a two-hundred-pace radius of the dismounted cavalry square.

Zhou Shifeng's cavalry were spread very wide — still, one rocket landed right over the heads of five riders moving in formation, the iron shards and pellets bursting in midair, killing two on the spot, wounding one, and injuring two horses.

The squad leader of that unit was very lucky — the rocket burst directly above his head, the iron casing slicing down past his face to the ground, and neither he nor his horse was struck by a single iron pellet, yet his face was pale and his heart still pounding with terror.

His warhorse, spooked by the explosion, reared up and bolted twenty paces with him on its back while he was still frantically patting down his padded armor and helmet, searching for pellet holes that didn't exist.

Though the actual results of those six rockets might not have matched even six musket shots, the attack from the sky and the erratic, unpredictable trajectories still dealt a massive psychological shock to this cavalry unit.

Even the troops in Zhou Shifeng's main camp two li from the blast site unconsciously spread a little farther apart.

Just as everyone's attention was fixed on the battlefield, ten li to the west, on the roof ridge of an embroidery tower in a large manor within a village —

Liu Chengzong, his face grim as iron, was surveying the battlefield through a telescope.

The vanguard of the corps' main force was still seven li away — the 1st Brigade's pond cavalry had seized this village fort by the Bitter River half a shichen ago.

In the half-shichen since, the pond cavalry had continued spreading toward the battlefield, gradually clashing with the scouts Zuo Liangyu had sent out, while five to six hundred riders had successively entered and garrisoned the village fort inside and out, establishing a security cordon.

Liu Chengzong, with a small escort, had entered the village in the third wave.

The moment he entered the village, he did two things.

First, he ordered his personal attendants to bring out silver and purchase grain from the villagers, and hired the women to light fires and set up stoves, draw water, and chop firewood.

Second, he climbed up the tallest embroidery tower of the wealthiest household on the east side, telescope in hand, muttering to himself: "Let me see just which great fool has gone and started banging away at people!"

Earlier, Ren Quan'er had fired cannons to lure the enemy — that he could understand — but now the cannon fire over there had stopped, and the pond cavalry were reporting hearing the crackle of gunfire here, and had even seen rockets flying up, which filled Liu Shizi with puzzlement.

One look was all it took.

Even with the telescope, Liu Shizi couldn't make out who was who on the chaotic battlefield — he couldn't even tell which of the several camps was the Ming army and which were his own subordinates.

But he could see a camp only five or six li away from him, with a great White Tiger banner hanging inside and a very conspicuous command tent set up.

He lowered the telescope and turned his head.

The Marshal's Army had no such command tent.

"Zhang Yong — five hundred riders, two horses per man. Do you dare charge over there and kick that tent down for me?"