Three Kingdoms: The Kingdom Cannot Be Partial

Chapter 60 Encirclement and Annihilation
The river valley road is more than a mile wide.

And since it is a valley, there must be a river flowing through it.

At present, the river is about 100 meters wide. Due to the lack of rain in Qinlong, the water level is still low in spring, so more than half of the riverbed is exposed, and the water depth in the middle of the river is only three feet.

Zhang He's 6,000 troops waded across the river to the east bank early, leaving only 2,000 troops on the west bank as a reserve.

At this moment, because the armored soldiers had been running for more than ten miles, the physical fitness of the eight thousand soldiers distributed on the east and west banks was different, and the entire team had already stretched to more than three miles.

There were even three or four hundred torches that completely left the team and were scattered around the river valley avenue.

Either they moved slowly northward, or simply stayed where they were, basically losing the possibility of participating in the war.

But there was nothing we could do. In this kind of sudden attack at night, it was impossible to ask everyone to keep up with the team.

"Tell those who are lagging behind to speed up and catch up, line up here, rest and wait for the enemy!" Zhang He reined in his horse and went down the mountain, and began to give orders, feeling confident of victory in the upcoming battle.

His troops were wearing armor and galloping, and the Shu invaders were also wearing armor.

His troops were tired, and the Shu invaders had fought a night battle, which made them even more tired.

"Right General, judging from the speed at which the torches in the east are moving north, we will not be able to reach this river valley road without three or four quarters of an hour!" Zhang Yu, the commander of the personal guards, looked slightly excited.

"After a night of rapid march, the Shu invaders must have reached the end of their strength!
"Our army is so long, the Shu invaders will surely be even more powerful than us!

"As soon as my army is ready for battle, I will be the butcher and they will be the meat!"

Zhang He nodded slowly. Although he was sure of victory, he couldn't feel excited at all.

I wonder how much food and grass the brothers Niu Jin and Niu Gai can save.

It is impossible to burn it all. The two brothers are not fools. They must set up camp near mountains and water, and store food and grass near water.

If only half of it was burned, the army could still withdraw safely to Guanzhong. If two-thirds of it was burned, more civilians and soldiers would starve.

Since there is no food or supplies to transport, what's wrong with going hungry?
"Extinguish the torches!" Zhang He suddenly thought of something and gave the order again.

The sky in the east was already turning pale, and it would be bright in another quarter of an hour or two. If the torches were extinguished at this time, most people would be able to see after their eyes adjusted for a dozen breaths.

On the hillside, General Meng Yan, the auxiliary Han army, led a thousand Wudang flying soldiers and walked crouching. The grass, which had not been eaten by livestock for ten years, was taller than half a person and became the perfect cover at this moment.

The rattan armor that was popular in the south due to the lack of iron and smelting methods was not without its advantages. At least it allowed them to move like the wind in the mountains, and unlike iron armor, it did not make the sound of armor plates colliding when walking, making it quite suitable for today's ambush.

"General Fu Han, the Wei invaders are trying to extinguish the flames." Guard Ma Dai whispered beside Meng Yan.

The Wei army was now more than three miles long, and the Han army's one thousand Wudang flying soldiers had also reached the slope beside the road.

If we rush down at this moment, we can cut the Wei invaders in half!

Just when Ma Dai spoke, the torch at the northernmost end of the Wei army had just been extinguished.

The military order to extinguish the torches was conveyed without words, by light.

So in just ten or so breaths, the torches of the Wei army in front of Meng Yan and Ma Dai were extinguished.

Ma Dai's expression froze upon seeing this. Meng Yan had already made all the preparations. Seeing this, he stood up without saying a word, holding the Yuanrong crossbow, and rushed down the mountain like an arrow!

The sound of chaotic footsteps and the rustling of grass arose at the same time!
On the river valley road, hundreds of Wei soldiers who were the first to bear the brunt of the attack temporarily lost their vision because they had just extinguished their torches. They never expected that someone would take advantage of this opportunity to launch a surprise attack!

"Enemy attack!"

"No, enemy attack!"

The Wei army soldiers who had heard the sound and knew of the enemy attack suddenly shouted loudly, but because they had lost some of their vision, they ran around like headless flies.

"Men of Nanzhong, the time has come to make achievements!" Meng Yan shouted.

When this sentence was uttered, which the Wei soldiers could not understand the meaning but at least they could hear the passion in it, in a moment, bursts of machine-driven sounds rang out on the hillside!
Almost in an instant, the clanging sound of crossbow arrows hitting armor plates and the wailing cries of Wei soldiers resounded throughout the entire valley!
Ma Dai, who led the troops, shot a crossbow, and the arrow went straight into the neck of the Wei invader, killing one of them instantly!
Afterwards, he stepped on the crossbow on the spot and continued to charge forward without hesitation!

In just a moment, more than two hundred of the seven or eight hundred Wei soldiers who were closest to the hillside and bore the brunt of the attack had fallen!
At a distance of forty or fifty steps, a crossbow arrow could easily penetrate the armor! If it hit a vital point, the person would fall to the ground instantly!

When the Wudang flying army, which was nearly a mile long, rushed to the mountainside thirty or forty steps away from the Wei army, and had already fired all their arrows, killing and wounding hundreds of people,

The Wei army soldiers finally regained most of their vision. When they saw the black shadow on the hillside, they were all terrified and didn't know where this ambush army came from!

In panic, most of the Wei army, who did not know what was going on, scattered and began to rush towards the shallow river in the middle of the valley!
At the northernmost part of the valley, Zhang He heard a sudden noise coming from the team one or two miles away. Although he couldn't see clearly what was happening for a while, he was already horrified!

"How could this happen?!"

"Why do the Shu invaders still have the strength to set up an ambush?!"

Zhang Yu, the commander of the personal guards, was also in a panic. He turned his horse around several times to observe whether there were any more ambushes on the hillsides to the left and right.

"Right General, retreat to the river!" The grass on the hillside was too tall to see what was going on. To be safe, they could only turn their horses westward, away from the hillside.

Zhang He's breathing became heavy, and he looked around in all directions. Instead of running away, he became furious:
“Drum roll! Drum roll!!!”

"I just don't believe how many troops these Shu invaders have left?!
"Bo Yu, organize the troops here to defend the north. We must not let the Shu bandits who attacked our camp escape!

"I will personally go to Hexi and call back the troops from the south. You will hold the position here and make sure to capture all the Shu bandits in one fell swoop!"

After he finished speaking angrily, the Right General of the Wei Dynasty, who realized that the Han army must be small in number and decided to surround and annihilate them, turned his horses westward and crossed the river with dozens of his personal cavalry.

While wading through the water, he shouted loudly, ordering the captains and Sima of each unit to lead the soldiers to form a formation and defend themselves.

Zhang Yu, the commander-in-chief, finally reacted when he saw the right general riding his horse and wading through the water.

He immediately ordered his men to bring the war horses and war drums, then he snatched the drumstick from his subordinates' hands and started beating the drum with all his might!
Continuous waves of drum beats echoed throughout the valley!

In the middle of the Wei army, more than 2,000 Wei soldiers who were being driven into the river like pigs by a thousand Wudang flying soldiers heard the familiar rallying drum sound, and their war instincts that had been cultivated for many years were instantly aroused.

How could the elite troops Zhang He had kept as his rearguard not understand that blindly fleeing would ultimately lead to death?!

So they finally gave up their blind rush and gathered in the north where the drumbeats were coming from!

However, new problems soon emerged.

Although their minds understood and their instincts were stimulated, the elite Wei army, who had been running for more than ten miles with heavy loads without a moment's rest, could not keep up with their thoughts and instincts.

Although he wanted to run north to join the right general's personal soldiers, even if he used all his strength, his thighs felt as if they were filled with lead and he could not run at all.

Behind them, the Wudang Flying Army, who had endured a night in the cold, were also cold and tired, but once they started running, they felt much more comfortable than before when they were curled up in the grass. At this moment, each of them was holding a crossbow and shouting, and their steps were very fast.

The Wei soldiers who ran north upon hearing the drum now exposed their entire backs.

The Wudang flying army, needing almost no aim, effortlessly shot down the slow-fleeing Wei soldiers, then moved forward to finish them off. General Meng Yan, the auxiliary Han general, rushed to stand more than ten steps behind a Wei soldier, raised his heavy crossbow with one hand, and aimed it at the man's neck.

With a pull of the trigger, an arrow flies out.

Sure enough, it hit the target.

The Wei soldier fell forward and died.

This Fu Han general, who came from a wealthy family in Nanzhong, didn't feel much. He just felt that the Yuanrong crossbow in his hand had become lighter, and he estimated that there were only ten crossbow arrows left.

"Kill!" Without hesitation, the man stomped his feet, roared, and continued to chase the enemy to the north.

He ran nearly a hundred steps, killing one person every time he shot an arrow. He shot a total of six arrows.

At this moment, more than 500 Wei soldiers who had not participated in the battle finally formed a battle formation under the organization of a captain, and quickly rushed towards the 300 to 400 Wudang Flying Army soldiers around Meng Yan who were fighting independently and did not need any command.

The speed was so fast that it was almost the limit for the soldiers. It seemed that they wanted to quickly approach the Wu Dang Flying Army and turn the chase into a hand-to-hand fight.

Seeing this situation, General Fu Han was not at all panicked.

He simply stepped on the ground, loaded his crossbow, and calmly shot an arrow at a middle-level officer who seemed to be giving orders. Then he resolutely retreated up the hillside without even checking whether he had hit the target or not.

The hundreds of Wudang flying soldiers known as the Mountain Cavalry almost instinctively followed Meng Yan in retreating to the hillside after shooting an arrow as well, giving the Wei army no chance to engage in hand-to-hand combat with them.
The more than 500 Wei troops who rushed forward lost a military commander and left behind seventy or eighty wounded soldiers and corpses.

The distance between him and the three or four hundred Wu Dang flying soldiers who were running back up the hillside also increased from twenty steps to more than fifty steps.

It is impossible to advance or retreat at the moment.

However, before their captain could make a decision on whether to advance or retreat, the Wudang Flying Army on the hillside once again slowly advanced with Yuanrong crossbows, starting a new round of shooting.

After another twenty or thirty men were killed or wounded, the captain named Pan Feng was so angry that his eyes were bloodshot. He waved his hands helplessly and shouted, "Retreat first! No matter how many crossbows the Shu invaders have, they will eventually run out!"

After battling the Shu invaders for so long, I've never heard that they possessed such a formidable crossbow!
The 50,000 troops they brought with them to Long this time brought more than 4,000 horn crossbows, 1,000 of which were distributed to You Chu and Fei Yao who were besieging Qishan Fort. When they broke camp, each of the three divisions took away 1,000 crossbows.

However, they did not know where the one thousand horn crossbows belonging to their rear guard were, nor where the two thousand archers were.

You couldn't have not brought it, right?!

Riverside.

Ma Dai led three or four hundred Wudang flying soldiers but did not go into the water. Instead, he calmly shot and killed nearly a thousand Wei soldiers who fled to the middle of the river on the shore, wounding or killing four or five hundred of them.

The Wei soldiers here did not want to resist, but the situation they encountered was the same as that of Pan Feng's troops just now.

You can't catch up, and you can't run away.

Finally, they realized that the Han army could not chase them into the water, so they all began to flee into the water.

Ma Dai and the Wu Dang Flying Army around him were helpless in this regard. The Yuanrong heavy crossbow needed to be loaded onto hard ground to gain leverage, and the crossbow mechanism was sophisticated and could not touch water.

West of the creek.

Amidst the roaring sound of water, the right general reined in his warhorse and, accompanied by a dozen personal cavalrymen, slowly waded through the water and reached the west bank.

There were two thousand troops on the west bank. In fact, when the Han army just appeared, the captain in charge of this place was still thinking of taking his troops to wade eastward to rescue.

It turned out that in less than half a minute, the friendly troops on the east side of the river were driven down the river by the ambushes.

After the war drums sounded in the north, the right general rode his horse across the river to the west, so these two thousand men remained inactive, waiting for the right general's orders.

"Just follow me south for one mile!" Zhang He raised his whip, squeezed the horse's belly hard, and the horse galloped south.

The original intention of the two thousand men prepared in Hexi was to prevent small groups of Shu bandits from escaping after wading across the river, but unexpectedly, they were able to preserve the complete organization and strength.

After the group of more than 2,000 men had traveled a mile or more south, the right general reined in his horse, turned his head, and gave another order to the captain:

"Wait here!
"If you see the Shu invaders heading north, you should head north. If you see the Shu invaders heading south, you should head south!
"When I lead the southern troops north, you will hear my banners and drums as I cross the river!

"We must kill all the Shu invaders here today, leaving no one alive!"

Because more than a thousand Wudang flying soldiers cut the army, which was more than three miles long, into three sections: north, middle and south. The nearly two thousand Wei soldiers in the middle section suffered the most and were divided into three groups again to be expelled.

One group was chased by Meng Yanbei to the mouth of the valley, one group was chased by Ma Daixi to the river, and one group fled south along the same route.

The troops fleeing south were the farthest away from Zhang He and lost their backbone the first. Not knowing how many Shu bandits were lying in ambush, they could only be swept away and fled south with the defeated soldiers.

Zhang He needed to personally rally the troops' morale, then lead the two thousand men in Hexi to the east, and then lead the two to three thousand fleeing men in the southern section to the north, so as to surround and annihilate this ambush force of only about a thousand men.

Continuing to march south, Zhang He kept his eyes on the Han army in Hedong, and finally discovered some clues from the offensive posture of the Han army in Hedong.

The time intervals between the heavy crossbows fired by that group of barbarians with long hair and wearing strange armor was so short that it was unheard of, let alone seen!
If we can wipe out this elite Han army here today and seize these strange crossbows, the loss of some food and men will not be a big deal.

Hexi hillside.

The battle had been going on for two quarters of an hour when they heard shouts, wails, drum beats, splashing water, and the clanging of armor from the eastern valley. However, the elephant horns that should have been used to launch the attack were nowhere to be heard. Yin Shang, Liang Xu, Liang Qian, and the others were extremely anxious.

"Boyue, what should we do?!" Yin Shang's whole body was shaking, and his voice was trembling, perhaps because of the cold or the nervousness.

"Could it be that General Fu Han has forgotten? Or has the person responsible for blowing the horn been beheaded?!"

"Don't talk nonsense." Jiang Wei just looked quietly towards the southeast with a calm expression.

The hillside they were on faced south and back to the north, so they could only see a small number of Wei soldiers fleeing south along the same route they came. They had no idea what the battle was like in the north and could only rely on guesswork.

By this time, it was already bright outside, and these eight hundred people had no choice but to stay here without any orders, otherwise they would be easily discovered.

Just when everyone was feeling extremely distressed, several elite cavalrymen came from the north to the south and appeared in everyone's sight.

"Bo Yue, it looks like a general's flag... Could it be the bandit general Zhang He?!" Yin Shang's voice suddenly trembled with excitement.

Looking at the flag with the word "Zhang" on it, even Jiang Wei, who had been calm all night, felt a sudden pang in his heart.

Just as the young general from Tianshui was in doubt, dozens of elite cavalrymen guarding General Zhang's flag began to wade across the river and head eastward towards the defeated Wei army.

It was obvious that he intended to gather the defeated soldiers and then return to the northern battlefield.

"Woo——"

"Woo——"

At this moment, the ivory horn that Jiang Wei and the 800 ambush soldiers around him had been waiting for for a long time finally sounded!
Zhang He, who had already reined in his horse and entered the water, was stunned when he heard the sound of the ivory horn. After a moment, he looked behind him in a daze.

(End of this chapter)