Chapter 2167: City Defense Battle! (III)
Translated by: Hypersheep325
Edited by: Michyrr
The enemy’s morale had already been damaged. There was no need for the Tang army to continue fighting.
“There’s no need.”
But to everyone’s surprise, Wang Chong rejected Abusi’s proposal without hesitation.
“It’s not time to withdraw the soldiers yet!”
Abusi was taken aback by Wang Chong’s words.
As the Tongluo Great General and the Emperor’s close aide, Abusi possessed an outstanding grasp of military strategy. In his view, the forty thousand Tang soldiers were in an extremely disadvantageous situation, but Wang Chong seemed to be speaking with great confidence.
For a moment, Abusi didn’t know what to say.
Just when everyone was about to ask what was going on, a momentous shift took place.
“Kill!”
“Master has ordered a full offensive! Deserters are to be killed!”
“Bastard! They’re only a few tens of thousands! I don’t believe that so many of us can’t kill them!”
“All soldiers, press forward and kill them all!”
The front line of the alliance army had regained order, and it had also realized that forty thousand soldiers had lost their ‘natural barrier’ and had been encircled. The soldiers roared, their eyes crimson as they charged at the forty thousand soldiers from various directions.
It was not so easy to break such a heavily defended fortress, but killing these forty thousand Tang soldiers was another matter entirely.
If they couldn’t even take care of this lone army of forty thousand, how could they handle the six to seven hundred thousand soldiers within the fortress?
In a flash, all of the alliance soldiers rallied, their bodies seething with killing intent as they charged.
From the sky, the forty thousand Tang soldiers appeared like a small splash of froth in the ocean, about to be dashed to pieces at any moment. Even so, the forty thousand soldiers stood firm like a rock, showing no signs of retreating.
On the contrary, they continued to advance.
“Kill!”
War cries filled the air as the armies crashed against each other like two waves.
“For His Majesty!”
“Conquer the Great Tang!”
A string of Goguryeon cries rose from the army, and from the left flank, thousands of Goguryeo soldiers with two black sabers in their hands charged out, savage and fierce expressions on their faces.
These Goguryeons, organized into teams, lunged like beasts of prey at a small group of Tang soldiers.
This group had only twenty-some people and was located at the very edge of the forty thousand soldiers. To the Goguryeon soldiers, these were lambs that had been abandoned. With their advantage in numbers, it would take only a few exchanges to kill them all.
Clangclangclang!
In a din of clashing metal, the two groups began to battle, their weapons glinting with cold light.
Blood gushed out and turned into crimson mist. This battle ended much faster than imagined, but the final result was not something these Goguryeon soldiers could have imagined.
With heavy thuds, the Goguryeon soldiers dropped their heavy sabers and collapsed to the ground in pools of blood, their bodies cleaved open.
“How could this be?”
The pale-faced Goguryeon captain looked around with disbelieving eyes at all the Tang soldiers that had suddenly outnumbered them. Blood spurted out of his back, his body went limp, and he collapsed to the ground and knew nothing.
At the final moment, he vaguely sensed that there was something odd about the Tang formation.
It now seemed that the twenty-some ‘isolated soldiers’ at the edge were not as simple as they had appeared.
This deceased Goguryeon commander had been rather sharp, but most of the alliance soldiers had been completely caught in the trap of ‘destroying the forty thousand Tang soldiers’, failing to realize what was going on.
“Kill!”
The alliance soldiers charged forward like waves beating against a sea wall, failing to notice that the forty thousand Tang soldiers had reconfigured themselves into a complex circular formation.
This massive formation was like a toothed gear that was constantly turning and clashing with the alliance army. Within the toothed gear, the armored soldiers had divided into units of three to four thousand men, serving as chains that shot out from the gear and penetrated into the alliance army, pulling them into the gear.
Any alliance soldiers pulled into the gear ended up being vastly outnumbered and surrounded, so they all inevitably died.
Moreover, the toothed gear was constantly shifting. At times, the upper half of the gear would collapse, transforming into long and intersecting chains that charged and scattered the enemy before once more turning back into a gear that devoured and pulverized its foes.
Even though the Tang soldiers were vastly outnumbered, not only did they not crumble, they used this method to completely suppress the alliance army. Blood gushed out of the bodies of Youzhou soldiers, Eastern Turkic soldiers, Goguryeons, Xi, and Khitans as they collapsed to the ground.
The number of deaths began to exceed those of the previous clash!
What was most terrifying was that even though the alliance army was far more numerous, when an alliance soldier charged up and killed an enemy, he for some reason felt that it was his side that was getting smaller. As they battled, it took only a few seconds for them to be inexplicably surrounded by Tang soldiers.
The alliance soldiers had no way of stopping the attack of seven or eight heavy swords, and in only a few clashes, they collapsed in pools of blood.
“How could this be?!”
Cui Qianyou grimaced as he stared at the stalwart Tang army.
“It’s a formation!”
Tian Qianzhen blinked, also deeply affected by the strength displayed by the forty thousand Tang soldiers.
“These aren’t randomly selected soldiers, but an elite army that specializes in a joint attack formation!”
In this world, armies had various formations, such as the Arrow Formation, the Tibetan Echelon Formation, and the Turkic Wolf Pack Formation. The alliance commanders were familiar with all these formations.
But Wang Chong’s appearance had raised formations to a new level and refreshed the understanding of formations in the eyes of other generals.
In Wang Chong’s hands, formations became much more complicated and terrifyingly lethal.
An army trained in a formation could contend against an opponent that was many times their number. Wang Chong’s Cutting Formation was a classic example of this, and there were very few people on the continent that did not know about it by now.
This force of forty thousand soldiers was clearly displaying a similar ability, though it seemed even more complicated.
“Cui Qianyou, be careful! Ordinary soldiers can’t deal with them! We have to rely on the Underworld Cavalry to break them!”
Tian Qianzhen’s eyes widened as he once more glanced at Wang Chong.
All warfare was based on deception!
This was a saying in one of the strategy books Wang Chong had used to teach his subordinates, and at present, there were few in the alliance that did not know about them.
Wang Chong deployed his soldiers in a way that was impossible to fathom. When one believed that Wang Chong would fight in a direct confrontation, he would launch a sneak attack, and when one believed that he would attempt a scheme, he would engage in a direct clash!
In this aspect, Youzhou and its allies were far inferior and extremely reactive.
Thirty thousand, forty thousand, sixty thousand, one hundred thousand!
The alliance army was completely unprepared for this sort of tactic and was easily cut down, large swaths of soldiers being ground down by the formation. It took only a few moments for nearly one hundred thousand soldiers to fall on the battlefield.
Considering that one hundred thousand soldiers had already been lost, in this first skirmish, forty thousand Tang soldiers going on the offensive had already slain two hundred thousand enemy soldiers, and the casualties continued to climb, more and more alliance soldiers collapsing motionless onto the ground.
Upon seeing this efficiency, even Wang Zhongsi and Abusi were deeply shaken.
“In the Imperial Court’s recruitment drive, I heard that you took twenty thousand of the best recruits, and then you also took twenty thousand veterans from the various armies. Was that for this?” Wang Zhongsi suddenly said.
The quality of the soldiers in this recruitment drive was far higher than had been imagined. The Protector-Generals and Great Generals had all been fighting for the recruits, and even Wang Zhongsi had sought some.
However, the one who had moved the fastest was none other than Wang Chong.
Though others might not have known, Wang Zhongsi knew that Wang Chong had transferred out twenty thousand of the best recruits before the others had even had a chance.
Wang Chong had said nothing about where those twenty thousand recruits had gone, and the others were not in a position to ask too many questions.
But now, the reason seemed clear!
“As expected, I couldn’t hide it from Lord Junior Guardian!”
Wang Chong softly chuckled, not denying it.
Once he had arrived at the forward base, he had ordered these forty thousand men to join him.