Chapter 429: 429
The ninth and tenth emblem groups consisted of infantrymen, these soldiers were equipped with inferior horses . Even though inferior horses were used, a distance of fifty miles could quickly be covered . Lex was furious, Daniel had ruined her plan .
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If Daniel's five-hundred man team was extirpated, then the morale would undoubtedly be affected even if Lex managed to seize Fort Strand .
She could not blame Daniel though . Daniel was originally a small noble who only needed to wait for money to enter his pockets, he would not know how to fight a war . That was why Saleen instructed Gurney to lead the battle . Saleen had deployed the army which was under Daniel's command however . This caused a contradiction .
When Gurney wanted to claim credit, Daniel should have stopped him . Saleen's words had caused Daniel to have misgivings, after all, he was clueless about fighting a war . Since Daniel felt that Gurney made sense, he acceded to Gurney's request .
Gurney was a person who was not fond of a direct battle with the enemy . Very quickly, the soldiers sent for the investigation had sunk into Gurney's ambush . On a narrow road fraught with rocks on both sides, the barbarians hid behind the rocks . Up ahead, a team of pirates rode on the skeletal warhorses, pretending to run into the enemy by chance . Then, the pirates fled, luring the enemy into the ring of the trap .
Daniel's death creature, the pikoosi, was hiding in the ground . When the enemy arrived, the pikoosi immediately emerged from the ground and cast a Death spell called Weak Space .
In that instant, hundreds of cavalrymen with their horses were inflicted with this spell . A spell with such a huge range had caused the pikoosi to be exhausted . He did not bother fighting with the enemy, he simply turned around and escaped . The soldiers would not dare chase the pikoosi .
The warhorses went limp and fell to the ground, while many of the soldiers in metal armor also fell down . The barbarians then leaped out from behind the rocks on both sides of the road, waving their giant axes frantically, causing Gurney to be outraged .
When the soldiers from Fort Strand got struck by the giant axes, their armor was destroyed . This caused blood to spurt in all directions . All of their clothes were ruined . Gurney's plan to change into the enemy's outfit was thwarted .
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If the soldiers were unqualified, any kind of plan would also come to naught . Daniel and Francis were seated in the magic chariots, they did not take any action . They had to conserve their mental strength and magic chords in order to begin the battle after entering the city . At that moment, the responsibility laid on the two-hundred barbarians .
Other than being a little crazy, the barbarians were fine . In the face of an enemy who outnumbered them two to one, they had the upper hand . Since the pikoosi's Death spell had not lost its effect, the enemy's strength was reduced by more than half .
The hundreds of enemies present were not considered heavy cavalrymen, but they were not light cavalrymen either . After losing the warhorses, no one would be able to travel swiftly . That body of metal armor thus became the soldiers' burden . Had they been wearing leather armor, they might have been able to match up to the barbarians .
The barbarians bellowed crazily . At the start, they were still pretty coordinated . After that, they simply charged into the middle of the enemy's formation and started slaughtering the enemies in a wild fashion . If it was not for that Death spell with a large area of effect, at least half of the barbarians would have died . At that moment, only a few barbarians got injured by accident . The rest of them simply rode on their armor advantage and went on a rampage .
The armor Saleen had crafted for the barbarians was thick, but not heavy . It was very suitable for a person who possessed brute strength . Even without armor, the barbarians would simply hack the enemy, they rarely dodged . Whoever was more ruthless would achieve victory . A fighting style like that was very disadvantageous on the battlefield . The enemy was already very weak, they could not wield their weapons anymore . Only the tips of their swords could hurt the barbarians .
That was a very slow but effective way of fighting, on the condition that the enemy's offensive power had been greatly reduced . In some sense, the weapons crafted by Saleen had saved the barbarians . If the barbarians had wielded stone weapons, it would have been difficult for them to break the enemy's metal armor . The barbarians paled in comparison to the Caucasus people . There was a number of forgers among the Caucasus people who could create razor-sharp metal weapons . The barbarians were using weapons crafted from the obsidian rock however . These weapons might be effective against a magic beast, but they would not work against human soldiers .
Back then, when Saleen first recruited thousands of barbarians, he used his metal weapons to exchange for a huge quantity of obsidian rocks . These obsidian rocks had been accumulated for thousands of years . Some barbarians had even wielded the same weapon for dozens of generations already .
Both parties were overjoyed . The barbarians obtained a stronger weapon, while Saleen had obtained the precious obsidian rocks .
Gurney was helpless . He instructed the pirates to do a rear swing, using their crossbows to kill the enemy . At this point in time, the pirates' archer skills were exemplified, several barbarians got shot . Luckily, their armor was good, so they did not die . An injured barbarian was even more ferocious . With eyes bloodshot, they swiped their axes about as though they were insane .
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Gurney was dumbfounded . He greatly admired Saleen . "No wonder Sir had given my team a large volume of the Restorative Water, he already expected this outcome a long time ago . "
The messy battle mysteriously ended in a victory .
After about half an hour of intense battling, four-hundred enemies were massacred before the Death spell lost its effect . Of course, the armor on the corpses was tattered and torn, it could not be worn anymore .
Fortunately, Daniel got quite lucky . Shortly after, another four-hundred infantrymen arrived . They were discovered by a flying spirit which Daniel had released earlier on . Gurney was for a moment muddle-headed, as he commanded the pirates to go for a head-on battle .
At this point in time, the pikoosi had regained some energy, and he became the first one to lead the pack . The pikoosi was a grade-8 spirit, and even though its magic was restricted to grade-7, its physical strength and toughness were not reduced by a lot . That impact had fractured the formation of infantrymen . Nash was out of luck . He did not deploy any mages to follow these troops, and as a result, they were not prepared at all .
In Qin, most infantrymen would ride on warhorses, but the warhorses were not of good quality . Such horses helped carry the equipment of an infantryman, such as a metal shields . If the infantrymen were allowed to assemble and form a layer of three metal shields for defense, the pikoosi would not have been able to charge through .
There was also a number of swordmasters amongst these infantrymen . In the face of the pikoosi who could not cast any spells, they must have damaged his fundamentals . If there was even a Bronze Grand Swordmaster among the infantrymen, the pikoosi could have been killed . If there was a grand mage present, then Daniel would have cried buckets .
There were no ifs on the battlefield though . Nash's order was flawed . When these two teams of people were out for investigation, the infantrymen and cavalrymen got separated, both teams were detached from one another . There were no mages accompanying them either . At first, the cavalrymen were killed by the Death spell, and after that, the infantrymen's formation were destroyed by the pikoosi . The pirates then rode on their skeletal warhorses, waving their longswords and slaughtering the enemies .
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Strictly speaking, the pirates would have lost to the four-hundred infantrymen even if the pikoosi was present . After the pikoosi killed dozens of soldiers swiftly, dozens of swordmasters swarmed forward . One of the swordmasters managed to slash one of the pikoosi's heads . This caused him to charge forward frantically, he no longer coordinated with the soldiers .
This pikoosi was unique . He was trapped on the plane of the Myers mainland, so it was very difficult for him to return to the death dimension . If he died in battle, his soul would simply dissipate, unlike those summoned skeletons who could still return to the death dimension to be revived .
It was always a tragedy for cavalrymen to be trapped in the midst of infantrymen . If the cavalrymen could not increase their speed, they would be massacred by the infantrymen . The elite infantrymen from Qin, who could kill a warhorse which had stopped moving in an instant, especially . Each infantryman had three short weapons, and one of them was solely used to deal with warhorses .
Gurney's subordinates were riding on skeletal warhorses, however . A one-foot long metal thorn would not be able to cause harm to them at all, unless a magic-infused weapon was used .
Infantrymen never had magic-infused weapons . In that period of time where these highly trained soldiers were out of sorts, dozens of them already got slaughtered .
The pirates might not be as skilled as the Qin infantrymen, but they were perceptive . Upon seeing the pikoosi escape, they immediately made the decision to follow the pikoosi out of the circle of infantrymen . That was the instinct of a pirate, no training was required . From afar, Gurney was on the brink of tears as he observed the battle . "The army which I have put so much effort into is only capable of that?"
It was this escape which salvaged the pirates . Nash's subordinates did not know that a skeletal warhorse could increase their speed abruptly, so they could not organize an effective barrier in time . The pirates abandoned a few bodies as they fled . This happened in a matter of a dozen seconds, Gurney never gave such an order .
In a matter of dozens of seconds, the enemy killed four pirates as the pirates were not prepared . This caused the pirates to be overwhelmed with fear . They no longer dared charge into the enemy's formation to execute a massacre . Instead, they fired arrows from a distance away .
If Nash's infantrymen were not detached from the cavalrymen, such a fighting method would not have been suitable . Be that as it may, the infantrymen were riding on inferior horses, they could not catch up to the skeletal warhorses . It was more challenging killing an infantryman as compared to a cavalryman though . Every infantryman had two shields . One shield was metal, used to form a defense formation, while the second shield was used to block arrows .
A wooden shield could not resist an alchemical crossbow . It possessed a certain defensive ability against steel crossbows or longbows however . The infantrymen's offensive power was also high . In that barrage of arrows, only a dozen or so got killed .
The infantrymen proceeded to wield their crossbows for a counterattack, but a crossbow's range was no match for that of the steel crossbows wielded by the pirates . After the counterattack, another dozen more infantrymen were actually killed . In less than two minutes, almost one-hundred infantrymen were dead . Had the enemy been a motley crowd, they would have fled in all directions by now . These two brigades of infantrymen retreated towards Fort Strand under orders from their commander, as they used the wooden shields to defend against the steel crossbows .
Three-hundred infantrymen had abandoned their horses . They retreated on foot in an orderly manner . Fort Strand was located just behind after all . No matter how strong the enemy was, they would not dare come close . They never expected that the enemy's original intention was to charge into the city .
Gurney felt that something was amiss . In the beginning, the four-hundred cavalrymen had died wrongfully due to the narrow terrain . They were also enveloped by the barbarians and under the effect of a Death spell . These infantrymen in front of Gurney made his heart lurch .
A regular army was really powerful . The pirates had exhausted their steel crossbows . At this moment, they changed to their short bows, firing feather arrows . Currently, half of the pirates were too fatigued to continue firing their bows . If this went on, the infantrymen would make it back to the city .
Out of desperation, Gurney came to Daniel's hideout . The magic chariots were concealed in withered grass . Gurney knocked on the carriage and whispered, "Sir, the enemy cannot be eliminated . "
Daniel had been observing the battle all this while . He knew that if he still did not take action, the pirates would have no choice but to retreat, and the enemy would escape .
"Okay, gather the barbarians to protect the chariots . We will conduct a direct assault . " At last, Daniel had given a right order . His battle that day would have ended in tragedy otherwise, even though it started off with jubilance .