Chương 113: The Battle of the Wheat Field (Part 2)

With the enemy cavalry utterly dismantled, Li Qinwu lost no time in ordering a swift retreat. During the brief period they had been entangled with the horsemen, the human heavy infantry had managed to close the gap to within a hundred meters. This was a critical, highly perilous distance, and the host was already initiating a frantic, roaring charge. Abandoning all tactical alignment, Li Qinwu flatly commanded his infantry to sprint for their lives.

Simultaneously, he reached into his strategic storage, pulled out several heavy demolition charges, set their slow-burning fuses to roughly thirty seconds, and hurled them onto the ground. He cast three of the heavy cylinders in rapid succession, turned on his heel, and fled. The Punisher Army had barely cleared the zone when the human heavy infantry swarmed over the exact grid where the goblins had just stood.

Having been relentlessly pounded by the demon host's thunder-clap engines all along the approach, watching countless comrades torn to pieces, these men were harboring a volatile, desperate rage. Now that they had breached the final hundred meters, they ceased hoarding their stamina and unleashed a final, frenzied sprint, determined to brutally close with and slaughter the thousand-odd monsters before them. However, the soldiers of the Punisher Army were completely unencumbered by heavy plate or chain mail.

The single heaviest item carried by any individual was their long-barreled firearm; they were operating under a true light-infantry paradigm, and the moment the order came down, they opened up their strides and fled like the wind. Even the six field pieces were being hauled at a frantic gallop across the wheat field by the muscular war-spiders.

A retrograde movement executed at that velocity was simply not something heavy infantry encumbered by nearly thirty kilograms of steel armor could ever hope to overtake; the distance between the two forces widened again in the blink of an eye. By now, the human vanguard was surging directly over the hidden demolition charges. The dense, clamoring mass of bodies completely blanketed the zone, not a single soldier noticing the catastrophic threat beneath their armored boots. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Three colossal, earth-shaking detonations erupted simultaneously within the center of the crowd. Exploding inside the claustrophobic thickness of the human formation, the demolition charges unleashed their raw, unmitigated destructive yield, violently launching dozens of shattered, fragmented human bodies into the sky while hundreds more were brutally bowled over by the expanding shockwaves. This single triple-detonation instantly claimed over two hundred human casualties, killing and maiming indiscriminately!

The sudden spike in mass neutralized targets immediately triggered a massive influx of experience, causing Li Qinwu to instantly surge two full levels higher! As a grotesque rain of pulverized flesh and shattered plate armor drifted back down over the field, the air was filled with the piercing shrieks of hundreds of soldiers who had been violently concussed or mangled by the blast.

The spectacle inflicted an indelible, devastating psychological trauma upon the surviving human troops; a collective, primal howling rippled through their ranks, and dozens of men were instantly driven stark raving mad by the sheer horror of it. At long last, unmitigated terror completely broke the human vanguard. Their forward momentum ground to a dead halt, no one daring to take another step over the blood-soaked earth.

The gruesome lethality of the demon host's supernatural weaponry was simply too unnatural; none of them wished to see their own bodies violently dismantled and strewn across a field of grain. While it was true that the high-tier fireballs manifested by the human kingdom's magi could produce similarly horrific dismemberment effects, those fortunate enough to survive a direct arcane bombardment were a microscopic minority.

Very few ordinary conscripts or line soldiers ever lived to witness a mage's destructive spellcraft firsthand; consequently, being torn apart by mechanical explosives was an entirely unprecedented and profoundly alien way to die in this world. As the human columns ground to a halt, a sweeping, volatile confusion spread through their ranks. The sergeants and aristocratic commanders quickly realized that their men's morale was teetering on the absolute brink of total annihilation.

Rushing into the gaps, they frantically issued commands to halt the advance entirely, deploying every ounce of their authority to re-establish structure and reform the lines. If they continued to push forward under this bewildering, asymmetric slaughter, the entire army ran the very real risk of dissolving into a mass rout. Yet, the moment the human host halted its pursuit, Li Qinwu stopped running.

Having widened the gap to roughly three hundred meters, he ordered his battalions to wheel about and reform their lines. He then directed the artillery crews to immediately drop their pieces, unlimber, and load canister shot to hammer the stagnant human array once more. The gunners operated with mechanical speed, swiftly unhooking the field pieces from the war-spiders' harnesses, stabilizing the carriages, and driving heavy bags of canister down the bores.

This specific ammunition consisted of nearly a hundred standard musket balls packed into a tight canvas binding. The moment the reloading cycle was completed, Gobu Boom unleashed a fierce roar: "Fire!!" All six field guns discharged in unison. Over six hundred lead projectiles exploded outward in a sweeping cone of death. While a portion zipped harmlessly into the clouds and another fraction chewed into the dirt, the vast majority plowed straight into the dense, disorganized human columns.

The impact detonated a continuous sequence of crimson clouds and agonizing shrieks, causing a massive swath of the human formation to collapse into the dirt. The targeted regiments shattered instantly. A massive, uncontrolled rout began to ripple through the human lines; no matter how elite or battle-tested a professional soldier might be, no living creature could endure being systematically butchered without any capacity to strike back.

Seeing multiple enemy columns dissolve into chaotic flight, Li Qinwu was overjoyed. He immediately moved to catalyze the expanding panic into a total collapse. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"Infantry! Form two ranks! Load!!" The musketeers moved with fluid precision, rapidly compressing their box into a long, two-deep firing line, ramming fresh powder and ball down their barrels. Once the loading cycle was completed across the entire front, Li Qinwu barked: "First rank, kneel!!" The first line of goblin musketeers dropped onto one knee.

"Present arms!!" A thousand long barrels rose in perfect unison, locking onto the human host.

"Fire!!" BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!! Twelve hundred heavy lead balls screamed across the plain. Although a distance of three hundred meters technically exceeded the precise effective accuracy threshold of their firearms, the sheer volume of lead combined with the dense, packed nature of the human target ensured that the volley inflicted catastrophic damage, dropping another massive layer of soldiers into the trampled grain.

"Independent fire!! Continuous fire, at will!!" The moment the opening volley cleared, Li Qinwu authorized his men to break formation and fire at their own pace. At this stage of the engagement, his sole objective was to maximize their total kinetic output to deepen the enemy's systemic confusion. While a synchronized volley possessed an immensely imposing, terrifying psychological weight, individual soldiers possessed varying manual dexterity and reloading speeds.

Allowing them to fire at will relieved them of the need to constantly strain their ears for command cues, significantly increasing both their overall rate of fire and their individual accuracy. The musketeer goblins began to operate with frantic efficiency—loading, aiming, and firing in a continuous, rolling cacophony. With twelve hundred firearms continuously cycling on the line, a non-stop stream of casualties was inflicted upon the human host with every passing second.

At a distance of three hundred meters, the heavy steel plate armor worn by the professional human soldiers did possess a marginal statistical probability of deflecting or absorbing the impact of a musket ball—but it was nothing more than a desperate gamble. Countless soldiers still watched in horror as the heavy lead punched jagged, smoking holes clean through their pristine breastplates, tearing through the flesh beneath and claiming their lives.

In the paradigm of cold-weapon warfare, an army was entirely dependent upon maintaining rigid, compact formations to preserve its combat efficacy; hundreds of men had to move, breathe, and pivot as a singular, unified entity. The moment a formation ruptured or scattered, it effectively lost all capacity to project force, leaving the broken individuals to be systematically hunted down and butchered by an opposing, disciplined line or a pursuing cavalry contingent.

To preserve this vital structural cohesion, traditional commanders would enforce an exceptionally slow, deliberate pace during maneuvers. Whenever tens of thousands of men deployed across a wide front, it was entirely normal for the columns to spend up to half an hour simply traversing a single kilometer of open terrain to close with the enemy.

Yet, it was precisely this time-honored, traditional doctrine of the cold-weapon era that had just suffered a catastrophic, absolute defeat when forced to contend with modern firearms capable of projected lethality across immense distances with terrifying efficiency. By the time the six field pieces completed their cycling and unleashed a second devastating round of canister shot, tearing another massive, bloody chunk out of the human core, a full-scale, catastrophic rout erupted across the field.

The human troops broke entirely, turning on their heels to flee toward the rear in a disorganized, trampling mass of panic. Agonized shrieks, furious roars, and the desperate, futile shouts of their officers echoed across the plain as seventy thousand men watched their collective morale collapse in an instant. An ecstatic Gobu Spear sprinted to Li Qinwu's side, his chest heaving as he bellowed: "Boss! The enemy has completely broken! Let's launch the charge!

We can ride them down and butcher them all the way back to their ancestral domains!!" Li Qinwu routinely educated his inner circle on advanced concepts of tactics, maneuvering, and the mechanics of battlefield morale; seeing the enemy collapse into a headlong flight, Gobu Spear recognized this as the absolute textbook window to execute a relentless pursuit. Yet, Li Qinwu slowly shook his head, his gaze cold and measured.

"Withdraw the battalions three li to the rear. Prepare to establish a defensive camp and rest the men. We will return to execute a series of night raids once darkness falls." Gobu Spear grew frantic.

"But Boss! Why are we refusing to charge?! You were the one who taught me—when an enemy breaks like this, a single, decisive push forward can utterly shatter them beyond any hope of recovery!" Li Qinwu extended his arm, pointing out toward the massive human host that still blanketed three kilometers of the horizontal plain.

"The enemy's numbers are simply too vast, and our operational force is far too small. Look closely at the field—the rout is entirely localized to their center-vanguard, the specific zone that absorbed the brunt of our heavy ordnance. The massive formations anchoring their left and right flanks have barely been touched by our fire.

"If I lose control of the battalions and allow them to chase the center, we will indeed drive deep into their ruptured core. The momentum of that flight might very well drag their flanks into the panic—but what if those flanks hold their ground? Have you thoroughly calculated the structural consequences if those two untouched wings close in around us?" Gobu Spear stared out at the terrain, his mind rapidly parsing the scenario.

If their small force rushed blindly into the center of the human array to engage in a messy, disorganized pursuit, and the massive, un-ruptured human flanks simply wheeled inward to clamp down on their rear, his entire command would be completely surrounded and wiped out. A cold sweat instantly broke out across Gobu Spear's brow. He lowered his head, realizing his tactical calculus had been incredibly naive.

Li Qinwu offered no rebuke; the fact that the goblin was asking these questions proved he was actively analyzing the battlefield, and analysis was the sole path to true strategic growth. So long as Gobu Spear maintained this analytical mindset, it was only a matter of time before he possessed the capacity to independently command an entire theater of war. In truth, Li Qinwu himself had been profoundly tempted by the prospect.

He had briefly weighed the option of commanding a full infantry advance, authorizing his company captains to recklessly hurl their remaining demolition charges into the retreating mass to convert the local panic into a total, irreversible catastrophe across the entire army group. Had he succeeded, it would have taken the human lords at least half a month to gather their scattered troops and restore any semblance of military cohesion. But ultimately, Li Qinwu did not dare risk it.

He harbored a deep respect for the sheer laws of probability; within a host of seventy thousand men, there was bound to be a handful of capable, clear-headed tacticians who kept their wits about them. Given the massive demographic reserve the human lords possessed, they had immense operational room to maneuver.

If even one or two competent commanders managed to rally a few intact regiments and launch a sudden, coordinated counter-stroke against his overextended lines, his pristine, elite force could suffer catastrophic, irreplaceable casualties. After all, the line separating a triumphant pursuit from a vulnerable, overextended rout was incredibly thin. His entire strategic foundation rested upon this handful of modern, highly trained elites.

If he allowed them to be caught off-guard by a sudden human counter-attack, the consequences would be fatal. The upcoming siege of the city gates was where the true, decisive battle would be fought; there was absolutely no reason to gamble his core assets on an open field. Furthermore... Li Qinwu tilted his head back, his eyes narrowing as he traced a massive, rolling column of dense black smoke billowing into the distant sky far behind the human lines.

It appeared the covert operation to eliminate Count Fischer's baggage train had been fully accomplished.