Chapter 59: The Assault of Bolts and Arrows
Translator: StackThatCoin Editor: AntiGod
Dust rose to the sky, and the rapid clatter roared like thunder. The remaining four thousand Crocottas cavalries of Yulin Army rushed out through the north-gate of Little Meng City in panic.
‘Just let these cavalries of Yulin Army deal with those barbarians!’ Wu Qi intentionally drove them out from the north-gate. The decision came from the tiny guilty pleasure of Le Xiaobai which hid in Wu Qi's soul. The collision of cavalries in a cold weapon era, this was going to be a pleasant and delightful battle.
But too bad, Wu Qi was disappointed by what he saw. These cavalries of Yulin Army didn't yell out their battle cry courageously and charged toward barbarians. Instead, they cowardly clustered and hid behind Mo Machines, establishing themselves as a loose line of defense. All these cavalrymen were looking at Little Meng City over their shoulder. A look of fright and panic could be clearly seen in their eyes.
The barbarian riders were approaching. Under the lead of respective barbarian leaders, all the barbarian fighters from the other three directions were also charging ferociously toward Little Meng City, coiling up dust from the earth and blanketing the sky. There wasn't any communication between them, and they didn't seem to have prepared beforehand. When the army of barbarian approached a certain distance, they initiated the assault petulantly.
The ten thousand barbarian riders from the north slapped on the head of their horned bull, gradually increasing the speed of their charge.
Sharp noises of bugs chirping came from the west as countless strange and eccentric poisonous bugs sprung into the air and swarmed in like a deadly tidal wave.
The barbarian beast warriors from the east strode with huge steps, each step bringing them tens of feet further towards their destination. Like a galloping horse, they brought countless fierce and wild beasts and sprinted forward.
However, the dozens of barbarian leaders from the south purposely slowed down the speed of their pace. The tens of thousands of barbarian fighters behind them kept slamming on their iron drums and blowing horns, brushing past these barbarian leaders and rushing forward like a herd of wild beasts that had gone frenzied. A few hundred poorly made ladders were thrown to the ground by these barbarian fighters, and soon were crushed into bits of wood by the heavy steps. The city gates of Little Meng City were wide opened now, and even a large part of the city wall was missing. They didn’t need the ladder anymore.
Luo Kedi swallowed a lump in his throat with much difficulty. Panic-stricken, he stared at those barbarians approaching from all four directions.
He had heard of barbarian tide before. Basically, every two to three years, Little Meng City would be besieged by a great army assembled by barbarians. They would use a tremendous number of poisonous bugs and wild beasts as their weapon, deploying all sorts of strange and peculiar fighters and charging into the city like a fierce tidal wave. Every time it happened, it would always bring a severe casualty to Little Meng City. This was the so called barbarian tide.
However, little to his knowledge, the barbarian tide was something even the monarch of Lu Kingdom would talk about occasionally like a fantastic story. When he finally faced it himself, he was struck with a crushing feeling of despair.
Near instinctively, he turned his ride and prepared to gather his soldiers so they could rush back into Little Meng City. He simply had no courage to fight in an open field with these barbarians, who had occupied an absolute home advantage.
But when he turned his head, he immediately saw the civilians and soldiers of Little Meng City hastily moving a great number of bricks, tiles, stones, and a large quantity of building pillars. They were piling them up in the breach on the city wall, which he himself gave the order to break not long ago. More than half of townhouses in the city had collapsed by the bombardment of Mo Machines, and there were a lot of broken buildings near the city gate. They now came in handy for blocking off the breach.
Driven by a strange mentality of taking pleasure in other people's misfortune, the productivity of these civilians and soldiers had increased by a lot. It just took a very brief moment of time when the breached city wall had been completely sealed off. In addition to that, the height of the filler was actually ten feet taller than the original city wall on both sides.
Even Ma Liang, who was proud of himself for being intelligent during normal times, was dumbfounded. He stared blankly at the sealed off city wall, then turned around and looked at the barbarians who were rushing savagely not far in front. He suddenly felt a tingling sensation from his lower abdomen, and a stream of liquid nearly burst out from his crotch.
"Luo Kedi!" Watching the army of countless barbarians reach a distance fewer than one mile away, Luo Kedi still remained standing, stranded and unprepared. Ma Liang hurriedly cried out loud to wake him up.
Luo Kedi's wandering mind was brought back in an instant. He circulated his innate energy and burst out a thunderous cry, "Aim all Mo Machines at those barbarians, and kill them all!"
Before Luo Kedi gave out his order and right when the barbarians just made their appearance, the soldiers who controlled Mo Machines had already started adjusting the direction of Mo Machines. Amidst the noises of rubbing and cranking that came from the gears, the noses of Mo Machines were slowly lowered down, gradually becoming parallel to the ground. Without the need of Luo Kedi doing too much of the talking, the sound of gears cranking at top speed was heard coming from within all eighty Mo Machines, as the powerful bowstrings were pulled to their maximum draw length and released.
A dark curtain was being released at an incredible speed parallel to the ground.
More than one thousand barbarian riders who rode at the foremost, together with their mounts, were letting out shrill cries at the same time. With the distance as short as one mile, the heavy bolts of Mo Machine pierced through their heavy armors easily, poking through their bodies and continuing their way into another barbarian behind the first.
Fresh blood spilled and smeared the ground. The first wave of bolt shower had killed more than one thousand barbarian riders with ease. Immediately followed after that was the second wave, third wave, and forth wave.
By the time all twenty Mo Machines deployed to the north of the city depleted their bolt cartridge, out of the initial ten thousand barbarians, only eight hundred managed to survive. The overly crowded charging formation and the short distance had allowed these Mo Machines to bring their maximum damage into play. Dead bodies were piled up and scattered across the land as fresh and warm blood spilled and flowed into a river on the ground. Those barbarians who were fortunate enough to survive the shower of bolts still kept charging forward. However, their faces seemed blank, and in their slow-witted eyes, they could no longer see their enemy.
The cavalries of Yulin Army greeted them, and without much effort, they slew these barbarians, who had lost their will to fight, with their swords.
A few cavalrymen jumped off from their Crocottas, starting to examine the equipment used by these barbarian riders. A cavalryman hastily brought a helmet and a broadsword over to Luo Kedi. "General, all armors and weapons are of standard military equipment of Lu Kingdom." While saying that, the cavalryman's face was brimming with an excited smile. He had long heard that someone was having a secret relationship with the barbarians, and these people even sold them weapons and armors. Sure enough, they had found the evidence this time. And perhaps, this was a finding worth him obtaining a great merit.
Luo Kedi gave this cavalryman a fierce gaze. Angrily, he scolded, "What does this have anything to do with us? Gather everyone, let's fight it out with these barbarians!"
The cavalryman had recovered from his fancy dream. They were not the imperial envoys who undertook the mission of investigating this case. Regardless who it was that had a secret relationship with the barbarians, it was better to put it aside for the time being, until they could carry through this hard time in front of them!
Faced with the frightful lethality of Mo Machines, the ten thousand barbarian riders charging in a crowded formation from the north had turned out to be the weakest among the barbarian tide. In just less than the time to drink a pot of tea, all ten thousand barbarian riders had suffered a severe causality by Mo Machines, while the remaining few hundred riders were completely slain by the Yulin Army.
The Mo Machines on the north of the city quickly divided into two teams, rushing their way toward the east and west of the city to provide reinforcement.
On the east, a couple dozens of barbarian beast warriors had approached to a distance less than half a mile from the Mo Machines. Nearly a thousand feet behind them was the ocean of strange wild animals. Tigers, rhinoceroses, gorillas, wild boars, buffaloes, all sorts of wild beasts, they had their eyes turned bloodshot, panting ferociously and charging toward Little Meng City without taking care of their own safety.
A rain of whistling bolts burst out from Mo Machines deployed to the east of the city. The dark curtain flew at top speed, sweeping across the land and leaving behind rows of blood sprinkles, as they shot to a hundred feet away. Three barbarian beast warriors failed to dodge the attack, and their bodies were pierced through by the curtain of bolts. A huge clump of bloody mist exploded from their body as the nearly invincible bolts had pierced and broken their body in half from their waist. The powerful force of the bolts even brought the upper half of their body back to the direction where they came from, while the lower part of the body still kept running forward for a few hundred feet.
The ocean of wild beasts let out shrill and miserable cries. They didn't know how to dodge the attack. Their simple mind made them only know how to keep charging forward. The bolts came and penetrated into their body. Often, a single bolt would pierce through seven to eight bodies of these wild beasts, and only then lose its strength and get stuck into the body of the last beast.
Like the worthless matters under the heaven, fresh blood spilled on the earth and flowed to converge into a small pool. Eventually, it formed a large pool of blood that covered an area of a few miles.
Faced with this formidable curtain of bolts, those barbarian beast warriors could only dodge left and right without any other alternative. They were suppressed by the rain of bolts and couldn't march further. Even though they possessed the powerful force enhanced by their beast soul and could unleash offensive strength not weaker than a Xiantian warrior, when faced with Mo Machines, a weapon specifically designed for mass slaughter in the battlefield, they could only roar furiously and helplessly into the sky.
The situation in the south of the city was even more miserable. The barbarian fighters that came charging in a crowded formation kept falling off to the ground, wave after wave. Mo Machines kept letting out a pleasant sound of whistling while the bolts blanketed the sky and kept harvesting the life of these barbarian fighters. The area from fifty steps to the distance of two miles from the Mo machines had totally become a dead zone. Any barbarian fighters who were brave enough to step into this region would be immediately killed by a bolt that came at lightning speed.
At this moment, the assault of the barbarians was trapped in a stalemate. Only the barbarians that came from the west had obtained a significant progress.
The barbarians who assaulted from west of the city were 'Voodoo Barbarians', a tribe which made anyone tremble with fear upon hearing their name. They were experts in controlling and using all kinds of poisonous bugs, and possessed a variety of peculiar power that made one wonder. Countless poisonous bugs were swarming in like crazy, rolling and flying like a deadly tidal wave as they thrust towards the Mo Machines who were 'guarding' on the west of the city.
Like their peers, these Mo Machines unleashed a devastating rain of bolts. A lot of poisonous bugs with bigger bodies were killed in this wave of attack. Venomous pythons with the diameter of a rice bowl, spiders as large as a water urn, centipedes with bodies as long as few feet, spiders as huge as a millstone, none of these large-sized poisonous bugs could withstand the dreadful assault of Mo Machines. In nearly just a blink of an eye, they were completely annihilated.
However, among this ocean of poisonous bugs, a majority of them actually possessed a normal sized body, and the came in an astonishing quantity. Few feet long venomous snakes with the diameter of only a human thumb, poisonous spiders with the size ranging from a human thumb to fist, centipedes a few inches long, and palm-sized spiders... They totaled to a number of nearly five hundred thousand. A dense, crowded army of poisonous bugs covered a land of few miles, swarming in ferociously and approaching those Mo Machines while chirping noisily.
Though Mo Machine could inflict a devastating damage to large-sized targets, when faced with this army of tiny poisonous bugs, they had lost all of their power.
The ocean of poisonous bugs came swarming in, leaping and crawling up the bodies of those soldiers who controlled the Mo Machines. Shrill, horrified cries rang through the air as a few hundred soldiers were immediately flooded by the tide of bugs and fell onto the ground. The bugs tide flowed through these soldiers, and very soon, they became motionless and soundless after a brief struggle. When the tide was finally over them, one could only see a pile of black bones on the spot where those soldiers were initially.
The soldiers working inside the Mo Machines were also killed by some poisonous bugs that crawled into it. All twenty Mo Machines had become junks now.
The barbarians who controlled these poisonous bugs and assaulted the city from west let out a joyful and pleased laugh that sounded hideous. While whistling an odd tune, they brought forth a chilly breeze and strode towards Little Meng City. Their whistles had driven the tide of poisonous bugs to continue assaulting the Little Meng City. In just a brief moment, they had come in front of the city wall.
Ten Mo Machines that came from north of the city had arrived at the intersection between north and west city wall. Noticing how frightening these poisonous bugs were, they immediately halted and dared not to move further. Nevertheless, the army of ten thousand voodoo barbarians who commanded their poisonous bugs to assault the city had come into the shooting range of this ten Mo Machines.
The curtain of bolts made its debut again. With the quickest speed they could manage, ten Mo Machines shot out rapid bolts in one go and emptied their bolt cartridge.
Half of these ten thousand voodoo barbarians were killed. The poisonous bugs controlled by them immediately fell into a messy state, dispersing into all directions in a disordered fashion.
A dense shower of prickles suddenly came pouring down from the sky. The bird barbarians, who had been circling in high altitude and watching the situation of the battle, had finally pulled their bowstrings slowly and initiated their assault towards the ground.
The rain of arrows poured down over the head of those soldiers who were controlling Mo Machines. Amidst shrill cries, many of them were hit and fell to the ground.