Demon's Advent

Chapter 169

Chapter 169: Charge the Formation!

Translated by Light Novel Aloud

The cavalry moved.

But the first to advance were not Li Fusheng’s Formation-Breaking Camp.

Instead the two cavalry formations on either side of it, more than six thousand riders in total, began accelerating.

For cavalry distance was critical.

A warhorse needed enough ground to build speed.

Cavalry that could not accelerate properly were little more than living targets.

Later-era historical war films often showed huge cavalry formations charging once, then immediately drawing sabers and hacking at one another from horseback.

That made for better cinema.

But in reality the most effective use of cavalry still lay in speed and in the terrifying impact that speed created.

Normally, after one collision, if cavalry could be pulled back out, briefly reorganized, then sent in for another charge and repeat that cycle several times that was the proper way to squeeze every last drop of value from cavalry.

Like wringing the final smear of toothpaste out of an empty tube just to brush your teeth one more time.

But only exceptionally high-quality cavalry could manage this.

If discipline was poor if organization was poor if the horses and riders themselves were poor then after a single charge the unit might scatter like an egg smashed against a wall.

Once spread apart it would never gather again.

Zheng Fan had personally seen the quality of the Zhenbei Army.

He was not worried about this in the slightest.

The cavalry on both sides moved.

The central formation where Zheng Fan remained did not.

Garrison Commander Zheng was already a grown man.

Unlike that childish Liang Cheng who still wanted to grab a horse lance and ride to the front to play—

Garrison Commander Zheng stayed where he was and carefully “oversaw the overall situation.”

More than three thousand cavalry on each flank slashed diagonally toward the foremost Qian formation.

This was the most “elite” of the three Qian battle lines.

The Zu Clan Army was famous throughout Qian for discipline and formation warfare.

As a newly risen army, it had already fought out a reputation and confidence of its own.

Yet faced with the rolling iron hooves before them panic still appeared inside every soldier’s heart.

Sea pirates no matter how numerous no matter how vicious could never produce cavalry like this!

“LONG SPEARS—

“LOWER!”

Shhk!

The front rank of spearmen crouched.

Their weapons angled upward, the butts braced against the frozen earth.

With flesh and blood they built a wall of thorns against the oncoming cavalry.

The second rank tucked their spears beneath their right arms while using their left hands to stabilize and adjust direction.

Their spearpoints aimed forward.

Countless spearheads formed the shell of the formation a shell covered in spikes.

But among those spearmen many hands and feet were already trembling.

Facing a cavalry charge was like standing in the road while a motorcycle came racing straight at you at full speed.

Who would not be afraid?

They were human.

Living men.

Who willingly wanted to die?

And every soldier in the outermost ranks understood one cruel truth.

After a major battle their chance of surviving would be extremely low.

Especially the front-rank spearmen.

Even if their weapons pierced enemy horses even if they managed to unseat riders the horrifying momentum of those horses would still smash into them.

Being killed instantly by the collision might actually count as good fortune.

The true nightmare was being left alive with bones shattered throughout the body.

Every additional moment alive would simply mean another moment of torment.

“AXEMEN!”

Shhk!

The axemen moved into position.

They stood behind the shield troops.

Once the cavalry collided with the formation, they would rush beyond the shield wall.

Their job was to wait for the spearmen in front to blunt the cavalry’s momentum then leap forward and hack the riders apart.

Behind the shield troops stood archers and crossbowmen.

They were the formation’s true killing power.

Zu Zhuming had been born into a military family.

But that family had been embarrassingly poor and insignificant.

In truth, the rise of the Zu Clan depended mainly on Zu Zhuming’s personal ability.

And also on the thousands upon thousands of pirate heads from the southeast that had paved his road upward.

He was a man who studied warfare.

Learned warfare.

Researched warfare.

When the Emperor’s decree arrived ordering the Zu Clan Army north—

Zu Zhuming had already begun considering methods for infantry to defeat cavalry.

No.

More accurately for the past century, every Qian general who still possessed blood in his chest and dreams in his heart had spent certain nights sitting awake in silence thinking about how to withstand Yan cavalry.

The defeat a century earlier remained an eternal wound in Qian hearts.

Many feared another northern expedition.

But even more dreamed of succeeding in one.

Zu Dongcheng sat on horseback.

Orders spread outward through the messenger riders around him.

Battlefields changed in an instant.

A commander was the brain of an army.

Only after the brain gave direction could the body respond.

But sometimes that coordination failed.

Sometimes the commander was too mediocre to make the correct decision quickly.

Sometimes the troops were simply too poor.

No matter how brilliant a man might be if his body was crippled, asking him to perform hard labor still remained impossible.

That was why generals needed long-term familiarity with their own armies.

In the early years of Qian, the founding Emperor had wanted to centralize military power.

He transferred elite troops from regional armies into the Imperial Guards.

In that age the Imperial Guards truly were the strongest armed force in the entire state.

Whenever war broke out anywhere the Imperial Guards left Upper Capital to suppress it.

But first—

Emperor Taizong’s northern expedition destroyed the elite core of those Guards in a single disaster.

They became the “Silver Wave.”

Then, decades of peace allowed the Imperial Guards to rot from within.

Yan and Qian had not fought a true large-scale war in nearly a century.

Yet the Imperial Guards had already declined to the point that they could not even reliably suppress domestic rebellion.

When the southwestern native-chieftain rebellion first erupted, the Imperial Guards had actually served as the main suppression force, with the Western Army supporting them.

Who could have expected more than a hundred thousand Imperial Guard troops to be ambushed by Wolf Native Troops inside a valley?

The disaster caused the entire campaign to collapse.

Native chieftains who had still been sitting on the fence saw just how useless the Qian army was and immediately joined the rebellion.

That was when the southwest truly fell into chaos.

Both the Zu Clan Army and the Western Army had risen by stepping across the corpses of the Imperial Guards.

Once the central army could no longer shoulder responsibility the rise of regional military blocs became inevitable.

And a regional army would never suffer the problem of soldiers not knowing their generals, or generals not knowing their soldiers.

Zu Dongcheng’s palms were drenched in sweat.

He knew perfectly well whether the Zu Clan Army could truly stand upright before the realm depended on this one clash.

Since the Yan had chosen his formation as the breakthrough point then fine.

Let them try.

Let them see whether the Yan truly possessed teeth sharp enough to bite through it!

“BEAT THE DRUMS!”

Zu Dongcheng ordered.

BOOM!

The war drums thundered.

The Zu Clan Army began adjusting formation with the rhythm.

Zu Dongcheng trusted his own ability to command troops.

He did not believe he was inferior to whatever Yan barbarian general stood opposite him.

What he did not know was that the Yan army across from him was not being commanded at all.

At that moment, the six thousand Zhenbei Army cavalry surging forward from both wings had already closed to the proper distance.

Every rider drew a bow and nocked an arrow.

Whoosh!

Arrow clouds arced from both flanks.

The riders gripped their horses with their legs while drawing bows from the saddle, balancing their own center of gravity with the motion of the galloping mounts.

The spearmen around the outer formation immediately began suffering casualties.

And almost inevitably both wings of the Qian formation compressed inward.

Men feared death.

They had already been terrified by the cavalry charge.

Now arrows were falling.

Take one step back.

Then another.

It was instinct.

“LOOSE!”

At Zu Dongcheng’s command, the archers and crossbowmen inside the formation returned fire.

This time the Zhenbei Army riders did not withdraw to avoid the incoming arrows the way they had during the earlier probe.

They continued forward.

They continued shooting.

The distance had closed enough that there was no longer any need for arcing fire.

They could aim directly.

Casualties among the Zu Clan troops began rising rapidly.

Especially among the outer spearmen.

They possessed no shields.

Their armor was not sufficient protection.

So they had no choice but to remain standing like statues one after another being shot down.

That was the cruelty of war.

Its mercilessness.

But there was no alternative.

Without spearmen around the outside to block the coming cavalry impact the formation would never endure.

At the same time the Zhenbei Army began taking losses.

Riders were struck and fell from the saddle.

Horses took arrows and crashed to the ground.

Yet neither cavalry wing slowed.

They continued closing the distance.

Continued drawing bows.

This was trading lives for lives.

This was a contest of courage.

Riders who fell but did not die quickly gathered together on foot and kept firing.

They did not wander helplessly.

They did not retreat from the battle.

They continued supporting their comrades as much as possible.

Closer.

Very close!

“CHANGE FORMATION!”

Zu Dongcheng ordered.

The shield troops began withdrawing.

The axemen moved forward.

They prepared to meet the cavalry once the charge struck home.

Inside the formation the bed crossbows began taking aim.

Their advantages were obvious.

Long range.

Terrifying killing power.

Their weakness was the painfully slow process of reloading.

Whoosh!

Every bed-crossbow bolt tore through the air and each one brought a spray of blood.

But then, something happened that stunned Zu Dongcheng.

At the final moment the cavalry formations on both wings turned their horses away.

A fast cavalry wheel.

The maneuver demanded extraordinary coordination and discipline.

It also demanded excellent horsemanship.

Lose control by the smallest amount and riders would collide with one another.

Then came the chain reaction.

Horse after horse piling together.

The entire formation clogging itself into chaos.

Zheng Fan had seen this tactic before.

Back when Liang Cheng personally led troops, he had used Green Willow Fortress’s barbarian cavalry to kite a merchant convoy’s guards to death with almost no losses.

At the outer edges of both turning cavalry formations several hundred riders did not follow the main body through the wheel.

They continued straight into the Qian formation.

The turning army needed space.

Those riders broke away to create that space for their comrades.

And by this point the distance was already too short.

Trying to halt their horses now would only leave them standing still to be shot into hedgehogs.

So instead they used every scrap of speed their horses had already built and smashed directly into the enemy formation!

Thud!

Horse after horse impaled itself on spearpoints.

Rider after rider was thrown from the saddle.

Yet men and horses alike carried so much momentum that they continued crashing deep into the Zu Clan Army.

Two enormous holes were blasted into the formation’s wings.

“Hiss...”

Two sharp inhalations sounded almost at the same time.

One came from Zheng Fan.

Watching elite cavalrymen smash themselves into a wall of spears like that Garrison Commander Zheng’s heart physically hurt.

How much silver did it cost to equip men like these?

How much effort and expense did it take to train them?

Raise soldiers for a thousand days.

Use them for one hour.

At this moment, the phrase revealed its coldest and most brutal meaning.

The second hiss came from Zhong Mao.

Even he found it difficult to endure seeing cavalry used to smash directly into infantry formations like this.

And those riders every last one of them truly did not fear death.

It was terrifying.

Nobody wanted to fight a pack of madmen who did not fear death.

The two cavalry wings completed their wheel and pulled away.

The riders who had struck the formation some had already forced their horses into the Qian ranks and begun hacking with sabers.

Others had fallen, rolled to their feet, and continued fighting on foot.

Not one withdrew.

Every man pushed forward toward death!

At the same time the cavalry formations positioned to the east and west began moving.

They almost seamlessly continued the pressure previously applied by the two wings.

As the first cavalry wings wheeled away the eastern and western formations drew bows and began suppressing the Zu Clan Army with arrows.

Every transition was nearly perfect.

Because they were simply too familiar with one another.

That familiarity was the true reason Li Fusheng could sit calmly within the Formation-Breaking Camp and allow the battle to unfold without directing every movement.

Meanwhile, the two cavalry units originally responsible for blocking the Qian retreat also began pressing forward.

They applied pressure against the eastern and western Qian formations.

That prevented those two formations from sending help toward the main formation built around the Zu Clan Army.

Zheng Fan suddenly felt this looked like wolves driving a flock of sheep.

Because the foremost Qian formation the strongest and most elite formation of the three had already begun being compressed by repeated cavalry attacks.

Disorder appeared in several places.

The chaos was obvious enough that even Zheng Fan still a novice in large-scale warfare could see it.

There were several reasons.

First the Zhenbei Army’s mounted archery was too strong.

Even while riding their arrows were no less deadly than those of Qian archers and crossbowmen standing firmly inside formation.

In some respects they were even better.

Liang Cheng had once discussed cavalry charges with Zheng Fan.

He had said that even after muskets and cannon appeared in the early modern era, infantry formations that had not properly stabilized could still be broken by mass cavalry charges.

Even concentrated musket and cannon fire did not automatically stop cavalry.

And this was an age of absolute cold weapons.

The image of cavalry simply riding forward while arrows poured into them and row after row fell as though standing before a firing squad was almost impossible.

Second there were the riders who had deliberately smashed directly into the formation.

Their impact was like two giant stones striking the shell of a tortoise.

The Qian battle line’s internal movement became badly obstructed.

Those riders were not merely skilled on horseback.

Once thrown from their horses, they still understood how to fight together on foot.

Often three or five gathered naturally into small groups.

Even the strongest axemen of the Zu Clan Army men chosen for size and strength were completely suppressed when fighting equal numbers of these dismounted Zhenbei veterans.

The Zu Clan Army had no choice but to use greater numbers to pile onto them.

And once more strength was drawn to one place other places naturally became weaker.

Then, once the attacks from east and west arrived in succession the Zu Clan formation became like a slab of sticky candy.

Bitten.

Pulled.

Bitten again.

The cracks and openings were stretched wider and wider.

Zu Dongcheng had never imagined that the Zu Clan Army he was so proud of the formation warfare his family had built its reputation upon would appear this fragile before the Zhenbei Army.

Like a paper lantern sold on the streets of Upper Capital during the Lantern Festival.

The difference was truly this enormous.

Of course, no matter how much people verbally mocked the Yan no matter how often they claimed the Zhenbei Army’s reputation as the finest cavalry beneath Heaven was exaggerated neither regional generals nor the Chancellors at court had ever truly dared underestimate Yan’s military power.

Otherwise—

Qian would never have rushed armies north from every direction.

And Grand Commandant Yang would never have remained commander of the Three Frontiers after proposing a strategy of avoiding battle.

Everyone’s mouths said one thing.

Their bodies were far more honest.

Zu Dongcheng and Zhong Mao had also heard their elders discuss the Yan countless times.

And whenever the Yan were mentioned the Zhenbei Army inevitably came up.

Their elders had already treated that force with enormous seriousness.

Three hundred thousand Zhenbei cavalry on the battlefield that was supposed to be a serious headache.

But what they were witnessing now was this really merely a headache?

Only now did the two young heirs of the Zu and Zhong Clans truly understand how terrifying the Zhenbei Army actually was.

This army had fought the barbarians across the desert for a hundred years.

Its previous enemy was the barbarian people.

A terrifying race in which nearly every adult tribesman naturally became an excellent rider.

And even those barbarians had been hammered again and again by the Zhenbei Army.

Their bones broken piece by piece.

Their pride beaten out of them.

Compared with the barbarians what were the Qian?

Zu Dongcheng raised his long saber and urged his horse forward.

Zhong Mao immediately shouted, “Brother Dongcheng!

“You need to remain here and command!”

“If the front formation breaks—we all die!”

The three-part formation formed the character *pin*.

Everyone understood that the front formation was the strongest.

And if it broke the consequences went far beyond merely losing the shield protecting the two formations behind it.

First the soldiers of the front formation would collapse and flee.

Those fleeing men would crash into their own allied formations.

Second once the two formations behind saw that even the strongest front had been broken their morale would instantly collapse.

And then, a rout would begin.

Many things in this world were unfair.

Cavalry fighting infantry was one of them.

If cavalry decided a formation was too hard to bite through they could casually probe it and then withdraw.

Infantry could not catch them.

But once infantry was defeated and tried to run how could two legs outrun four?

Put another way if the front formation broke then these thirty thousand Qian troops would be completely destroyed here in a single day!

Zhong Mao lifted his horse lance.

“Brother Dongcheng!

“I’ll go with you!”

At that moment, the two cavalry wings that had previously wheeled away began charging again.

Meanwhile, the eastern and western cavalry formations finished their own pass and turned away.

It felt like four iron hammers repeatedly smashing the Qian formation.

At the same time the cavalry under Old Fifth Han had been pinned inside the eastern and western Qian formations.

Especially inside the Imperial Guard formation even after exposing the hidden bed crossbows and war carts, the formation was still showing signs of collapse beneath the suicidal pressure of Zhenbei Army cavalry.

Now even if Old Fifth Han wanted to turn around and reinforce the front he could not.

First his three thousand cavalry had somehow been entangled by only several hundred enemy riders and could not disengage.

Second if his cavalry pulled out now, the Imperial Guard formation would immediately explode into chaos.

Motherfucker.

Why are these Yan so damned fierce?

...

At the front of the battlefield the Formation-Breaking Camp, which had formed ranks early but had remained motionless throughout the fighting, finally began increasing speed as Li Fusheng rode forward.

This was the true formation-breaking cavalry.

One thousand horse lances.

The elite among elites.

At last, they were about to enter the battle.

War meant death.

Li Fusheng understood that perfectly well.

The cavalry formations that had repeatedly skimmed and battered the Qian lines had already suffered significant casualties.

Those losses were necessary.

Inevitable.

But they would not grow too large because this phase would not continue for long.

As long as the main Qian formation was broken the tens of thousands of Qian soldiers remaining across the battlefield would scatter like birds and beasts.

Like panicked lambs running in every direction.

They would no longer possess offensive power.

No longer possess killing power.

And Li Fusheng’s riders would harvest heads from them easily while they fled.

Everything earlier had merely been preparation.

Now the moment had arrived.

Li Fusheng raised his horse lance.

The thousand riders behind him mirrored the movement.

Then, Li Fusheng leveled his lance forward.

A thousand horse lances followed.

His eyes were scarlet.

Like a starving wolf.

He had already waited far too long.

“Give them—the final shudder!”

Li Fusheng roared, “WILL TO BREAK THE FORMATION!”

Behind him a thousand riders thundered together, “NO LIFE—

“ONLY DEATH!”

And then, the entire Formation-Breaking Camp accelerated.

Like thunder racing across the earth.

At last, under the personal leadership of Commander Li Fusheng one thousand riders of the Formation-Breaking Camp smashed into the already tottering Qian battle line.

BOOM!

---

(End of Chapter)

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