Chapter 688: Not a Single Soldier Surrendered

Bang!

Wu Qunlie slammed a fist onto the desk and clenched his teeth.

"The Grand Commander-in-Chief sees clearly. Execute his strategy immediately!"

"Send word to General Liao and General Xu at once. They are to abandon the Hukou defensive line immediately, withdraw without delay, and rendezvous with my main army!"

A moment earlier, Wu Qunlie had still been hesitating.

Now he had finally made his decision.

"Yes!"

The communications officer accepted the order and ran out.

Wu Qunlie waved the gathered generals over to the map.

Pointing along the river defenses from north to south, he said, "According to the Grand Commander-in-Chief's plan, we will abandon the river-defense line in full."

"But we cannot release every sector recklessly at once. If the entire line is abandoned simultaneously, the Yan forces crossing in the middle could cut off our troops moving south."

"We begin in the north and withdraw sector by sector."

"The army will move south and concentrate along the way, then mass overwhelming strength against Zhang Hu and Xu Jingyue after Xu crosses the river."

"If the battle goes smoothly, good."

"If it does not, we immediately follow the Grand Commander-in-Chief's intention—mix feints with real attacks, keep Yan's army constantly entangled, deny them any opportunity to obtain supplies, and exhaust them to death inside Great Song!"

...

"Heh, heh!"

Inside the temporary central command tent, Zhang Hu received Guo Xianfu's report announcing that the grain had been successfully seized.

He gave a cold chuckle.

Then he ordered, "Send word to Xu Jingyue immediately. He is to cross the river and attack at once. No delay!"

...

A Goldenwing landed inside the army camp on the opposite bank.

Xu Jingyue soon emerged from his tent.

At one command from him, tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of troops immediately went into motion.

Cross the river!

...

"My lord, Xu Jingyue's troops have begun crossing!"

Inside a central command tent erected among the ruins, an urgent report sent Liao Nanqing and Xu Laiping rushing outside.

They ran to high ground and looked into the distance.

Upstream on the opposite bank, a dark mass of wooden rafts loaded with men was sweeping diagonally downstream with the current.

Liao Nanqing said heavily, "Brother Xu, take two hundred thousand troops and defend our rear. Guard against Zhang Hu attacking from behind."

"I will lead the remaining forces and stop Xu Jingyue from landing."

"We support one another from both sides. The moment either side begins to fail, the other reinforces immediately."

"Good!"

Xu Laiping agreed without hesitation.

Liao Nanqing assigned one of his own deputy generals to work with Xu Laiping while the latter assembled the two hundred thousand men.

There was no other choice.

Xu Laiping no longer had two hundred thousand troops of his own.

Since he needed to use Liao Nanqing's men as well, Liao naturally had to send one of his own officers to cooperate.

Before long, their more than four hundred thousand troops had been divided into two forces, one facing the river and one guarding the rear.

They did not have to wait long.

Killing cries soon shook the riverbank.

Xu Jingyue's troops attacked fiercely.

Compared with Zhang Hu's earlier forced crossing, conditions were far better. Every long-range defensive engine along the bank had already been dismantled by Zhang Hu.

On the shore and on the river, the two sides exchanged dense volleys of arrows.

Large numbers of men fell continuously on both sides.

When the arrow volleys briefly weakened, cultivators from both sides rushed out again and fought desperately over the water.

Xu Jingyue's men drove toward shore regardless of the cost.

Those who succeeded in landing were hacked down by Song soldiers with everything they had.

Yet the troops on the rafts continued gritting their teeth and charging onto land.

Xu Laiping, commanding the rear defense, climbed to high ground and looked into the distance.

As expected, Zhang Hu intended to attack together with Xu Jingyue from front and rear.

Zhang Hu's army was already advancing toward them in measured formation.

Then Xu Laiping saw the composition of that force clearly.

His eyes widened, and his expression convulsed.

Zhang Hu's men were pushing forward large numbers of long-range engines.

They were the very machines Zhang Hu had dismantled from the Hukou defensive line beforehand, secretly transported away, reassembled, and now brought back.

"Loose arrows!"

Xu Laiping drew his sword and roared, determined not to let Zhang Hu's army approach.

Amid a rapid clatter of impacts, Zhang Hu's troops raised shields above and before them, protecting the wooden frames as they continued advancing.

Men fell from time to time, but the advance did not stop.

"Hold formation! Forward! Keep moving!"

Officers shouted repeatedly, ignoring the soldiers struck down by arrows and forcing the army to maintain its formation as it advanced.

Once the range was right, Zhang Hu's side ignited numerous fireballs.

These were the very same weapons Xu Laiping had used against Zhang Hu's river-crossing troops before.

Xu Laiping's retreat had been too hurried.

All manner of supplies had fallen into Zhang Hu's hands.

Now Zhang Hu was using against him the very weapons he had once used against Yan.

"Release!"

At the order, wooden throwing arms snapped upward one after another.

Fireballs arced toward Song's formation.

They smashed apart among the troops and exploded into scattered flame. Clay pots and oil jars broke on impact, spraying burning oil everywhere and turning soldiers into running figures of fire.

Shrill screams rang without end.

The defensive works had already been dismantled by Zhang Hu.

Song's troops scarcely had anywhere to shelter.

Before long, the position was engulfed in flame.

Catapults also hurled great stones through the air.

They crashed into Song's formation with thunderous booms, smashing men apart amid constant screams.

The defensive line under Xu Laiping's command fell into chaos almost immediately.

The formation of archers broke.

Now the arrow storm came from Zhang Hu's side instead.

Men already trapped amid fire and falling stones could no longer properly raise shields against the arrows descending from above.

Rows of soldiers went down.

"Save me!"

A man struck by arrows collapsed, unable to move.

Seeing fireballs descend from the sky, he cried desperately for help.

A great stone came crashing down with a boom and smashed him into blood and flesh.

Song cultivators rushed out, attempting to destroy the enemy's engines, but countless arrows forced them back.

Xu Laiping turned and looked toward the riverbank, where men were still fighting desperately to prevent Xu Jingyue's force from landing.

Then he looked back at the disaster before him.

His face filled with grief and fury.

Tears shone in his eyes.

He knew they had fallen into a trap.

He knew this force was finished.

He knew the defensive line could no longer be held.

And he knew they could not allow the enemy to keep slaughtering them from afar with those engines.

Xu Laiping drew his sword and roared, "Charge!"

"Kill!"

Song's troops surged from the chaos, shields raised as they launched a frontal assault.

At Zhang Hu's command, the shield formation at the front rapidly withdrew and opened the line.

The foremost Yan archers immediately switched to flat, direct fire.

The archers behind them continued firing in high arcs.

"Lord Xu!"

A cultivator cried out.

Several others shouted at the same time.

Xu Laiping had seized a shield himself.

As commanding general, he actually raised his sword and charged together with his soldiers.

A storm of arrows came down from above.

Xu Laiping lifted the shield over himself.

Amid a violent clatter, soldiers charging in front of him suddenly fell.

Several arrows shot straight toward him from the front.

Xu Laiping rolled across the ground and avoided them.

But the moment he rose again, an arrow struck him squarely in the chest.

More than a dozen arrows followed in rapid succession, making his body jerk again and again.

One struck directly into his eye socket.

Blood pouring from his mouth and nose, Xu Laiping toppled backward.

Several cultivators flashed in, caught him, and dragged him rapidly away.

Song's troops continued charging regardless of death.

Soon they reached Yan's front line.

Yan's forward archers withdrew at speed.

The shield troops advanced again and formed a wall, absorbing the impact of Song soldiers crashing bodily against them.

From the gaps between shields, long spears thrust out in rapid succession.

Rank after rank of Song soldiers were stabbed down.

With booming explosions, Song cultivators accompanying the charge shattered the shield wall with sword qi.

Yan's cultivators immediately rushed out in groups and met them in a bloody clash.

"Countercharge!"

Zhang Hu raised his sword and roared.

"Kill!"

Yan's army launched a full counterattack.

The two forces crashed together in a brutal melee.

...

At the river-defense front, a general whose armor was drenched in blood ran to Liao Nanqing's side.

His voice was full of grief.

"My lord, Lord Xu has died in battle!"

"What?"

Liao Nanqing whipped around in shock.

In an instant he remembered Xu Laiping entrusting his wife and children in the capital to him.

"Ah!"

With a wild roar, Liao Nanqing kicked the deputy general he himself had sent to assist Xu Laiping, knocking the man to the ground.

He bellowed, "Then how do you still have the face to come back alive?"

Tears poured from the deputy general's eyes.

He sobbed, "My lord, leave quickly! The enemy's offensive is too fierce. The rear cannot hold!"

"This general is incompetent and cannot continue following my lord."

"I will go ahead first!"

He scrambled up, drew his sword, and slashed it across his own throat.

The movement was crisp and decisive, without the slightest hesitation.

Hot blood sprayed across Liao Nanqing's face.

Liao Nanqing froze.

Drops of blood clung to his blinking eyelids as the deputy general collapsed before him.

...

Liao Nanqing himself never knew afterward exactly how he escaped from the battlefield where killing cries shook the sky.

He only knew that he kept fighting.

By the time the noise around him finally faded, only several thousand soldiers remained at his side, every one of them bloodied and miserable.

Some of the wounded could no longer endure and dropped to the ground, gasping for breath.

Liao Nanqing had been dragged out of the encirclement by a group of cultivators who risked their lives to save him.

"General Liao, you are wounded."

One cultivator reached toward him, intending to remove his blood-soaked armor and treat the saber wound across his back.

Liao Nanqing shoved him away.

He looked at the several thousand battered soldiers standing silently before him.

More than four hundred thousand men.

And now only these few remained before his eyes?

The brothers who had followed him for so many years—was this all that was left?

"Ah..."

Liao Nanqing suddenly raised his sword toward Heaven and screamed in grief and fury.

Then he began hacking wildly at the grass and trees around him, like a man possessed.

The exhausted, numb survivors simply watched in silence.

...

Naturally, more than a few thousand men escaped from an army of several hundred thousand.

Nor did they all flee in the same direction.

Roughly twenty or thirty thousand men managed to escape, scattering everywhere.

There were simply too many directions and too many fugitives to pursue them all.

Yan's army could not possibly split itself apart endlessly to hunt fleeing soldiers.

What did it mean for corpses to lie across the fields?

The scene before them was the answer.

Gong Lince and the others stood atop a ruined wall and looked across the battlefield.

Hundreds of thousands of corpses lay spread before them.

Compared with a battlefield like this, what did the ordinary fighting and killing of cultivators amount to?

Gong Lince was silent.

This was the first time even he had ever seen so many men die in a single battle.

The smell of blood in the air was thick enough to sting the nose.

Bloodwater flowing down toward the river had dyed the current red.

Across that reddened water, a wooden raft reached the bank.

Xu Jingyue had arrived.

He and his group came ashore and looked around at the miserable battlefield.

Yan soldiers cleaning the field were searching Song corpses for whatever rations the dead still carried.

Other soldiers followed with baskets to collect the food.

Yan was simply too short of grain.

If anything edible could be found, they would not leave it behind.

Bodies that had already been searched were thrown directly into the river.

There was no other practical way to dispose of so many dead.

Throwing them into the current was the quickest method available.

They certainly could not leave the corpses piled here to rot.

Zhang Hu appeared to receive Xu Jingyue.

"Where is Marshal Meng? Let me pay my respects," Xu Jingyue said.

Zhang Hu replied, "Marshal Meng was too exhausted. The people here sealed his acupoints and forced him to sleep."

"Let him sleep a little longer."

Xu Jingyue nodded.

"We do not have enough rafts. Nearly two hundred thousand men are still waiting on the opposite bank."

"I need some of the rafts from this side to help ferry them over."

Zhang Hu understood.

The rafts sent back after the earlier crossing had never been enough in the first place.

He waved over one of his generals and ordered him to cooperate with Xu Jingyue's people.

Afterward, the two commanding generals walked together among piles of corpses, inspecting the battlefield.

Seeing so many dead, Xu Jingyue asked, "How many surrendered soldiers did you take?"

"Twenty or thirty thousand escaped. There are no prisoners."

"You executed all the men who surrendered?"

"No. No one surrendered."

"Those who did not escape fought to the death."

"These troops were extremely tough. Even after falling into a situation like this, they still cost us another hundred thousand men."

"Not a single soldier surrendered?"

Xu Jingyue was deeply shocked.

"What sort of men are Liao Nanqing and Xu Laiping?"

Zhang Hu replied, "What does it matter what sort of men they are?"

"Even if they had surrendered, I would still have killed them."

"I do not have enough grain to feed them."

Xu Jingyue looked around the battlefield and sighed from the heart.

"They were all good men."

"A pity their commanders were incompetent!"

[End of Chapter 688]