Chapter 908 - Wang Chong Strikes! The Bane of the Battlefield Halo!
Chapter 908: Wang Chong Strikes! The Bane of the Battlefield Halo!
Translated by: Hypersheep325
Edited by: Michyrr
Li Siye, Sun Zhiming, Zhuang Zhengping, Chi Weisi, Gao Feng, Nie Yan… these commanders led the forces of Qixi in a frenzied charge in front of the second defense line. However, just their force of forty thousand could not stop the charge of the more than one hundred thousand Turko-Tibetan elites. For soldiers, quality outweighed quantity. This battle was taking place in Talas, west of the Cong Mountains, and the Tibetans and Turks had needed absolute secrecy in their approach, so they were not capable of bringing that many soldiers.
Thus, while Dalun Ruozan had only brought around seventy thousand and Duwu Sili had only brought around forty thousand, these were the elite of the elite.
Though they were fighting against forty thousand powerful soldiers of the Great Tang, they continued to come in endless waves. Not even Li Siye and his Wushang Cavalry wreaking havoc through their lines could stop all of them.
Some of the Turks and Tibetans had even chosen to go around Li Siye and Sun Zhiming to attack the second defense line together with Duwu Sili’s wolves, with Xu Keyi’s ballista force being one of their primary targets.
Neigh!
A warhorse cried out as a Turkic cavalryman borrowed a pile of wolf corpses to jump over the shields of the infantry and land behind them. Swishswishswish! Countless sabers, spears, swords, and halberds came at him from all sides.
This Turk’s body landed as a sieve that leaked blood, a corpse that could not be any more dead. But his arrival was like a signal, as he was soon followed by the rest of the army, Turkic and Tibetan cavalry jumping over in twos and threes, landing in the middle of the army to take the place of the fallen.
“Kiiill!”
Meanwhile, on the other side, a frenzied shout echoed through the sky, spoken not in the language of the Tang, but in an Arabic tongue that was suffused with a brutal and bloodthirsty aura. Khaled, the Beast of Arabia, had previously had his Iron Beast Army essentially crippled by the Tang ballistae.
But the Iron Beast Army had still played a major role. They had raised up the corpses on the battlefield, using them as shields to block the ballista fire. They might have lost their warhorses, but the Iron Beast Halo and the Dark Blood Shield remained in place, still reducing the lethality of the ballistae.
Roooar! A dismounted Iron Beast soldier raised up high the massive corpse of a horse as he charged at a ballista. A ballista bolt pierced through the dead horse and through his armor, but then it was deflected by his charge and went shooting off into the sky.
Only the warriors of the Arabian Empire, who fought to live and fought to the death, would dare to so fearlessly and ferociously use their bodies to block a ballista bolt.
The fearless Iron Beast Army had obtained an incredibly precious opportunity for the rest of the Arab army. Thousands upon thousands of their men had fallen to the beehives and ballistae, but thousands upon thousands more had used the chance bought by the fallen to charge up to the steel walls.
Soldiers were constantly braving the forest of pikes, using the corpses to leap into the fray. Even if they ended up pincushioned by attacks from all sides, they still charged in, heedless of death. The concept of fear did not seem to exist in the minds of these Arabs.
The more death there was, the more gruesome and gory the battlefield, the more they wanted to fight. Even those mercenary pikemen from Greater and Lesser Balur began to show fear in the face of these savage and roaring Arabs, so one could easily imagine what the other mercenaries felt.
To the west of the Western Regions, in the battlefield legends, Arabs were synonymous with death. Countless powers and empires had felt the terror of the Arabs, their formidable will that did not fear death. And those kingdoms whose armies had collapsed and scattered like beasts in the face of the Arabs had formed the building blocks for the Arabs’ legend of invincibility!
One wave, a second, a third… The Arab soldiers continued to roll in like the ceaseless tide, crashing again and again upon the first defense line.
“Hold!”
“Saber- and axemen, get ready!”
“Archers, get ready!”
On the battlefield, Wang Yan and Wang Fu were serene and unperturbed, like rocks standing firm against a pounding river as they commanded the infantry at the first defense line. No matter how fierce the Arab assault was, how fearless they were, or how many times they attacked, they were unable to penetrate the infantry formations of Wang Yan and Wang Fu.
Along the first defense line, the area defended by Wang Yan and Wang Fu was the most frequently assaulted. However, no matter how many Arabs managed to get past the steel walls, past the shields, beehives, and ballistae, they would all meet their ends in front of Wang Yan’s infantry formations.
At the rear, nearly ten thousand infantry stood calmly in waiting.
In this era where cavalry was king, the Great Tang, where the terrain was not suitable for raising high-quality warhorses, had not won its hegemony through cavalry. In terms of infantry, however, the Great Tang reigned supreme, and it had been by means of these infantry that the Great Tang had once managed to crush Ü-Tsang, the Eastern and Western Turks, Goguryeo, and Mengshe Zhao, and even expanded into the Western Regions.
That had been the era of infantry!
The Great Tang had made everyone experience the power of the Central Plains’ infantry, allowing it to attain its dominant stature. Across the entire world, only the infantry of the Great Tang were capable of holding against the attacks of all kinds of cavalry.
Wang Yan’s infantry did not have as strong of a charge as cavalry, nor were they as flexible, but in a defensive battle, they were a steel wall. Furthermore, the assistance of Wang Chong’s steel walls only bolstered their already formidable defensive capabilities.
“Wind!”
With four black-armored guards standing sentinel around him, Wang Yan solemnly swung down his right hand. Whoosh! The thousands of shieldmen holding the gap suddenly retreated, revealing a large path behind them.
In an instant, thousands of paths like these appeared in the seemingly impervious defense line.
Buzz!
The Arabs’ minds went blank at the appearance of all these gaps. But then they bellowed, flailing their weapons as they charged into the paths. The Arab cavalry behind them also noticed nothing strange, shouting as they followed their comrades.
“Fire!”
Wang Yan waved his right hand once more. Clangclang! The shieldmen worked with the axe- and sabermen to close the paths that had been opened. In an instant, those Arabs who had charged in were trapped.
“Kiiill!”
With an earth-shaking cry, the Tang soldiers began to hack and stab at the trapped Arabs from all directions. No matter how strong, fierce, and courageous the Arab cavalry were, no matter how fearless they were, they were still hopelessly outnumbered by the Tang infantry. So swiftly were they felled that they were not even able to stir a ripple in the Tang formation.
“Wind!”
“Fire!”
……
Wang Yan repeated this tactic again and again, baiting in Arab soldiers and then cutting them off so that they could be slaughtered. Once the shieldmen closed the gap, no Arab horseman could escape Wang Yan’s infantry formation alive.
In Wang Yan’s hands, infantry were not solely restricted to defense, but were also excellent offensive weapons, attacking while defending and defending while attacking. The twenty thousand infantry were like a finely-tuned machine, slaughtering the Arab cavalry with extreme efficiency. Bait, surround, kill… they worked with such callous composure that even the Arab cavalry began to feel intimidated.
The Western Regions mercenaries defending the area with Wang Yan were subconsciously influenced and were motivated to continue their staunch defense.
In doing so, they formed the firmest region of the defense line.
……
“It’s about time!”
In the middle of the two defense lines, amidst tens of thousands of soldiers, Wang Chong sat on the White-hoofed Shadow beneath the banner of the Great Tang. As he listened to the battles going on, a sharp light glimmered in his eyes. The battle was gradually growing more intense, with the Arabs, Turks, and Tibetans all having committed almost the entirety of their forces. The lines on both the east and west were under tremendous pressure.
Wang Chong had reached an important phase in his plan.
Buzz!
As the winds blew, a light even more blazing white than the sun exploded from Wang Chong’s eyes, but only for the briefest moment. And then, the entire battlefield, both east and west, began to tremble. With Wang Chong as the center, a milky-white halo began to expand, sweeping over the region like a hurricane.
The Bane of the Battlefield Halo!
With the forces of the four sides in vicious combat, Wang Chong had finally released his Bane of the Battlefield Halo. Buzz! As it swept through the battlefield, the dazzling halos of the Tibetans, Turks, and Arabs suddenly began to flicker like candles in the wind. Clangclangclang! Before anyone could react, their tens of thousands of halos instantly dimmed as they dropped a level.
This halo instantly effected a momentous transformation on the fierce melee.