Chapter 292: Even Wants to Rob Me Too
Chapter 292: Even Wants to Rob Me Too
“Wow! They started fighting.”
Cheng Xu and Xing Honglang hovered in mid-air watching the scene happily.
As Wang Zuogua of Yichuan’s vanguard charged, the officials began to panic.
Wu Zimian had originally led three thousand men out for bandit suppression, but he took bribes to let many officers go. These officers then took away their private soldiers, leaving Wu Zimian’s force reduced to two thousand.
Moreover, these two thousand soldiers had low morale and were utterly consumed with avoiding battle.
Upon seeing thousands of bandit troops suddenly emerge from the forest—their numbers unknown—Wu Zimian’s subordinates immediately panicked.
The only elite soldiers, Wu Zimian’s hired guards, didn’t charge out to fight the enemy. Instead, they tightly protected Wu Zimian himself.
This made any chance of combat absurd.
With just one charge from Wang Zuogua’s vanguard, Wu Zimian’s outer formations were thrown into chaos. Before they could recover, shouts erupted from all directions: “Miao Mei of Yichuan is here!”
“Feishan Hu of Yichuan has arrived!”
“Big Honglang of Yichuan has arrived!”
Three top generals under Wang Zuogua attacked from the other three directions.
Wu Zimian looked around: “What the fuck, why are bandit troops everywhere?”
His hired guards shouted urgently: “General, disaster has struck! The bandit army quietly surrounded us.”
Wu Zimian asked: “Where are the horses? My five hundred fine horses? They can sell for tens of thousands of taels of silver.”
The guards responded desperately: “No time for those now, General, run!”
A group of guards shielded Wu Zimian and desperately fought their way north.
Meanwhile, Zao Ying felt a bit bewildered.
She had just finalized pricing with Wu Zimian’s hired guards when, to her frustration, Wang Zuogua of Yichuan suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
Zao Ying thought to herself: Enough! At worst, I’ll forget this deal. I didn’t bring any silver and only stumbled into it by accident. Now officials and bandits clash—I’ll just slip away unnoticed.
She hurriedly gathered her followers, mounted up, and prepared to retreat.
The horses of the mounted bandits had been scattered around the village grazing earlier. But after Wu Zimian’s men arrived, they had brought the horses back and readied for possible conflict. Now, upon Zao Ying’s command, they quickly mounted.
Zao Ying was about to gallop off when a ferocious man blocked her path, grinning widely: “Woman, you’re the Yichuan mounted bandit, Zao Ying, aren’t you?”
Zao Ying replied: “That’s right. And who are you?”
The man chuckled heartily: “I’m Big Honglang of Yichuan. No more talk—hand over all your horses.”
Zao Ying paused briefly, then exploded in anger: “Damn! Even wants to rob me too?”
Big Honglang laughed: “Not wants to—already doing it.”
With that, he lifted a long spear and thrust fiercely towards Zao Ying.
Zao Ying whipped out her saber and deflected the blow with a clang. Her arm went numb—Big Honglang truly had immense strength.
Her mounted bandit followers tried to charge forward, but behind Big Honglang surged a large crowd of bandit troops, all armed with spears. A spear formation rose before them, completely blocking the path of Zao Ying’s group.
She tugged at her reins to turn the horse and break free another way. Yet on all sides, Wang Zuogua’s men crowded in, each holding a spear, or sharpened wooden stakes or bamboo poles…
From their posture, it was clear from the start they were here to besiege the horses!
They were absolutely determined to seize both the officials’ five hundred warhorses and my own horses.
“Damn it,” Zao Ying cursed under her breath, while pondering inwardly: This isn’t good. My numbers are small, barely over a hundred, while Wang Zuogua has thousands upon thousands. He’s surrounding us from every direction, preventing my cavalry from gaining speed and robbing us of our advantage.
What should I do?
At that moment, Xing Honglang spoke up: “Deity, we could rescue that female horse bandit.”
Li Daoxuan: “?”
Xing Honglang swiftly explained: “That woman is Zao Ying, a horse bandit who operates across Yichuan, a forest hero. She has no history of wrongdoing, always targeting only the authorities and never plundering common folk. She can’t be equated with the likes of Wang Zuogua. See, Wang Zuogua is attacking her too. She’s inexplicably caught in this ambush. It would be a pity if she died here.”
Cheng Xu interjected beside them: “Wu Zimian’s forces have already been driven off by Wang Zuogua. If we mean to do some ‘black eating black’, now is the perfect time to strike. We need to hit them while Wang Zuogua’s troops are still reveling in their victory, before they can reform their battle lines.”
Li Daoxuan slowly lowered his hand, returning both of them in front of their subordinates.
This single action was tantamount to an order for them to act immediately!
Xing Honglang was elated: “The Deity consents to saving Zao Ying!”
Cheng Xu: “The Deity is always benevolent, ever ready to lend a hand to good people. Since that’s the case, there’s no need to wait. Back up in the sky, we clearly saw the surrounding terrain and the deployment of Wang Zuogua’s forces, didn’t we?”
Xing Honglang nodded: “Saw it crystal clear.”
“Then let’s go!” Cheng Xu grinned, chuckling darkly. “Grenadiers! Firearm soldiers! Get ready!”
After Xu Dafu developed the “Fuse Hand Grenade”, mass production started immediately. The blacksmiths and gunpowder makers’ apprentices worked together and had already produced twenty “Fuse Hand Grenades”. As for the firearm soldiers, they now had ten triple-barreled arquebuses, one flintlock firearm, one bird firearm…
The quantity wasn’t exactly vast, but the Deity was still overhead. What was there to be afraid of a hammer?
Cheng Xu brimmed with fighting spirit; looking out across the world, half a sign of a grandmother was nowhere to be seen. He swept his arm forward, laughing heartily: “The bandit army is in four units. Two are chasing Wu Zimian and seizing the officials’ warhorses. The other two are besieging Zao Ying. We’ll smash the encirclement around Zao Ying first.”
…
Zao Ying was spinning desperately in circles.
She and her men had horses; with horses, they could run fast. But encircled on all sides by dense spear formations, no matter how fast they were, they couldn’t break out. All they could do was run in circles within the tightening ring.
From Li Daoxuan’s vantage point above, he could see Zao Ying and her party spurring their horses round and round, constantly rotating inside that massive circle of encirclement.
With every rotation, the circle tightened a step, their space for movement shrinking further and further. If this continued, they wouldn’t be able to move at all.
The inevitable endgame was being speared off their horses…
Li Daoxuan couldn’t help but secretly admire: Wang Zuogua has truly learned so fast! Before, he was just a bumbling fool, spamming F2A – telling his men to simply charge forward. But this Wang Zuogua now understands dividing forces and coordinated attacks, using spear formations to box in cavalry.
Tsk, tsk, tsk!
Zao Ying’s heart had sunk to the absolute depths. She felt this time she was done for, that she would meet her end here.
Just then, Cheng Xu’s unit arrived.
The first to hit were the two Fuse Hand Grenades hurled by Gao Chuwu and Zheng Daniu.
After the latest improvements, even an ordinary person could throw a grenade over a dozen zhang. Yet monsters like Gao Chuwu and Zheng Daniu could manage more than twenty zhang.
Two grenades arced across the sky, plummeting into Big Honglang’s spear formation.
BOOM! BOOM!