Badge in Azure

Chapter 429: A motley crowd versus a regular force (Part 1)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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