Chương 112: The Battle of the Wheat Field

The massive host cleared the high stone gates, pushing aggressively due west. To maximize his unit mobility, Li Qinwu had stripped his logistics down to the absolute bone; aside from the six standard field artillery pieces, he carried zero heavy baggage trains. Not only did they abandon their supply wagons, but Li Qinwu went so far as to command the soldiers of the Punisher Army to strip off their heavy iron doublets and helmets.

They cast aside every shred of personal defensive armor, executing a true, unmitigated light infantry forced march. Sustained by this sweeping, ultra-light mobility, the battalions advanced across the terrain for two continuous days. At a coordinate roughly eighty li west of Poloia, they slammed directly into the vanguard elements of the enemy host.

Count Fischer fully loomed as the second most formidable military aristocrat within Poloia's jurisdiction; his mounted scouting pickets had mapped Li Qinwu's approach long before the encounter. By the time the Punisher Army arrived at the vector, the human host had already completed its tactical deployment, standing in a fully formed, massive combat array. A thousand vibrant heraldic banners snapped violently in the wind.

Tens of thousands of professional soldiers encased in heavy plate and mail stood in dense, uniform lines, completely choking a grid that stretched across three kilometers of the horizon. Their massive forest of raised pikes pointed directly toward the sky, reflecting the blazing sunlight with a blinding, terrifying intensity. The theater where the two opposing forces had intersected was a vast, sprawling agricultural expanse—a sweeping ocean of young, emerald-green winter wheat.

Whenever the high winds gusted across the plain, the lush verdant stalks rippled in synchronized, rolling waves across the unobstructed terrain.

"What an absolute tragedy," Li Qinwu murmured, casting a brief glance over the pristine landscape.

"To ruin such a magnificent field of grain... a terrible shame." Shaking off the momentary sentiment, he issued a sharp command to deploy the lines. For this engagement, he deliberately eschewed his standard loose, elongated line infantry formations. Instead, he ordered his soldiers to cluster into a hyper-dense defensive square, establishing a protective perimeter around the six field artillery pieces. He harbored zero intention of allowing his infantry to engage the enemy in close-quarters melee.

Getting entangled with a host of that magnitude would prove catastrophic; his operational objective here was purely to harass and disrupt the human advance. For that purpose, a sustained long-range bombardment would be more than sufficient. Simultaneously, Gobu Run had already guided his Spider Cavalry detachment, alongside ten specialist Incinerator Goblins hauling heavy canisters of volatile oil, along a sweeping flank.

They were currently executing a wide, multi-kilometer circuit intended to hit Count Fischer's massive, vulnerable baggage train from the rear. Li Qinwu's sole responsibility was to deliver a crushing, psychological head-on blow to Count Fischer's vanguard, keeping the primary human host completely pinned and preoccupied so his flanking element could operate without interference. Across the green expanse, the human host completed its alignment and began a synchronized, steady advance.

Forming the iron tip of their spearhead were the heavily armored pikemen, who began their slow, rhythmic march toward the goblin square from a distance of fifteen hundred meters. Li Qinwu's eyes remained completely locked onto the advancing enemy grid, tracking their forward momentum line by line. The moment their vanguard crossed the twelve-hundred-meter mark—the maximum effective threshold of his ordnance—he spun toward his artillery crews and barked a single, deafening command:"Fire!!"

The gunners trained their dark muzzles directly onto the dense center of the human formation and touched their burning slow-matches to the touchholes. A succession of thunderous, earth-shaking blasts tore through the wheat field! Six heavy, solid iron cannonballs screamed out of the barrels at hypersonic velocity, tracing low, elegant arcs across the sky before plunging violently into the human lines.

Carrying an immense, unstoppable kinetic energy, the iron spheres instantly plowed jagged, crimson lanes through the dense infantry formations. The heavy steel plate armor worn by the professional soldiers offered no more resistance than wet parchment before the raw velocity of the ordnance; limbs were instantly sheared off and flesh was pulverized into a soaring spray of blood. Agonized, piercing shrieks erupted from the center of the human vanguard.

A single six-gun volley had instantly neutralized over twenty soldiers on impact, leaving dozens more twisting on the trampled wheat, wailing in unmitigated terror as they stared at their shattered, mangled lower limbs. The catastrophic reality of the front lines was immediately relayed to Count Fischer at the rear by a galloping messenger.

Mounted upon his armored destrier alongside his high-ranking vassal lords, the Count listened to the rider's frantic report, triggering a wave of volatile commotion through the aristocratic command circle. The enemy possessed a mystical engine capable of delivering lethal force from well over a kilometer away—how could the traditional rules of engagement possibly account for such madness?

Even the learned magi within their retinue possessed zero capacity to project destructive spells across such an immense distance!

"My Lord! What is our counter-measure?!" a minor baron demanded, his voice laced with rising panic. The sudden emergence of an entirely unprecedented paradigm of warfare had deeply unsettled these traditional military elites.

"Maintain your composure, you fools!" Count Fischer roared, his booming voice instantly silencing the bickering lords.

"The enemy's weapon may boast an impressive operational reach, but its destructive yield is entirely pedestrian! A full, coordinated salvo from their engines manages to claim nothing more than twenty of our men. Do not allow your minds to lose sight of reality—we have seventy thousand soldiers deployed on this field!

"Even if I commanded all seventy thousand men to stand completely motionless and offer their throats to the demon host, how many hours would it take those creatures to butcher us all?" The assembled lords parsed his logic, their racing hearts gradually settling. In the grand mathematics of a seventy-thousand-man juggernaut, the loss of a few hundred front-line grunts was nothing more than a negligible drop in an ocean of iron.

At that moment, an attractive, sharp-featured young knight stepped forward from the Count's personal guard detail. He bore a striking facial resemblance to the warlord.

"Father," the young man interjected, "the terrain along the enemy's left flank is anchored by a dense forest. I am entirely willing to guide our auxiliary cavalry through the cover of those timbers, executing a wide circuit to launch a devastating, surprise assault against their rear flank!" The speaker was Keith, Count Fischer's second-born son—a remarkably handsome and ambitious young aristocrat.

His elder brother, the primary heir to the earldom, had previously been entrusted with the family's elite vanguard divisions, deploying to a separate, high-profile theater of the war to accrue immense martial glory. This arrangement had left Keith deeply embittered. He was consumed by a desperate desire to secure his own legendary military merits; thus, he had seized upon this tactical opening to personally volunteer to lead a decisive cavalry charge against the demon formation.

Count Fischer hesitated for a brief moment before nodding his approval.

"Very well. However, you must restrain your advance until our heavy infantry has closed the distance and fully engaged the enemy's lines!" The old warlord harbored a lingering anxiety that his son might be obliterated along the open approaches by the enemy's long-range weapons, offering the warning in a stern, paternal tone. Keith was overjoyed. He immediately strode out of the command pavilion, shouting commands to assemble the four hundred riders assigned to his auxiliary column.

These horsemen did not constitute the elite, purebred heavy cavalry of his family's personal household; rather, they were a mixed composite detachment of squires, outriders, and mounted messengers brought along by the various minor vassal lords. The family's two thousand pristine heavy knights had already been requisitioned by his elder brother for the northern front, leaving Keith with nothing more than this somewhat ragged, disparate assembly. Yet, irrespective of their lineage, cavalry remained cavalry.

So long as he could successfully drive their iron hooves deep into the flank of the demon infantry, he could shatter their cohesion in a single, devastating impact! Back on the main field of engagement, the six field guns continued to let out a succession of deafening roars. The black-powder, muzzle-loading engines possessed a notably slow rate of fire, requiring roughly two to three minutes to execute a single cycle.

With every discharge, the heavy iron carriages would violently recoil backward into the churned soil, forcing the goblin gunners to strain their muscles to haul the weapons back to their original firing positions, clear the bores, and reload before they could fire again. Nevertheless, because the human infantry columns were marching in such an incredibly dense, claustrophobic array, every single solid shot punched clean through multiple soldiers.

The casualties were horrific; those unfortunate enough to be struck directly by the flying iron were instantly torn to pieces, leaving no whole corpses behind. The thunderous booming of the artillery echoed continuously across the valley, solid iron spheres repeatedly plunging into the compact human squares, triggering a non-stop cascade of flying gore and agonizing screams. Had Li Qinwu possessed even a dozen more of these field pieces, he could have shattered the human host's morale from a kilometer away.

A deep, instinctual terror began to claw its way into the hearts of the human infantry. The sight of their comrades being violently dismantled beside them, coupled with the raw, piercing shrieks of the dying, caused their pulses to race. However, these men were seasoned, career mercenaries and professional household troops; their psychological tolerance for battlefield mortality was exceptionally high.

Stanching their fear, not a single soldier broke formation to flee; they simply gritted their teeth, lowered their heads, and continued their relentless march forward into the meat-grinder. Watching the spectacle unfold through his looking glass, Li Qinwu felt a cold prickle of apprehension. In his initial tactical projections, he had hypothesized that a few sustained rounds of heavy artillery fire would inflict enough psychological trauma to trigger a mass panic and rout across the lines.

But reality had thoroughly shattered that optimistic illusion. The enemy possessed the raw, collective courage and disciplined resolve required to absorb severe casualties without losing structural cohesion, their lines continuing their steady, rhythmic advance. Letting out a slow, appreciative breath, Li Qinwu turned toward Gobu Boom and delivered a revised directive: "Transition to canister shot. Deliver a single, concentrated volley across their front, then immediately limber the pieces and prepare to withdraw."

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. The human vanguard had officially breached the seven-hundred-meter threshold—the exact operational sweet spot for the devastating canister ammunition. Each canister casing was packed with twelve individual iron balls, each roughly the size of a ping-pong ball, bound together by wooden discs and a coarse canvas wrap until the assembly resembled a heavy cluster of grapes.

This specific payload possessed an unparalleled destructive efficiency when deployed against massed soft targets within a five-to-seven-hundred-meter window. Under the harsh, bellowing commands of their NCOs, the artillery crews rushed into action. They plunged wet, woolen sponges down the smoking barrels to extinguish any lingering embers of the previous charge, rammed home a fresh silk bag of pre-measured black powder, and used their heavy ramrods to pack the propellant tightly into the breeches.

Finally, they shoved the heavy canvas canisters down the bores. With the preparations complete, the gunners used their handspikes to align the muzzles directly with the center of the human lines. Gobu Boom unleashed a fierce, guttural roar: "Fire!!" All six field guns discharged in a single, unified blast. Each weapon sprayed twelve ping-pong-sized iron balls across the plain, launching a lethal cloud of seventy-two projectiles simultaneously.

While a portion of the scattering shot zipped harmlessly into the sky and another fraction plowed into the dirt, nearly half of the payload slammed directly into the compact human lines, instantly detonating a horizontal wall of crimson mist. Dozens upon dozens of professional soldiers collapsed into the trampled wheat like harvested stalks.

The kinetic energy behind the canister shot was terrifying; a single iron sphere possessed more than enough force to rip clean through a man's torso, punch through the steel plate armor of the soldier standing directly behind him, and embed itself deep within his flesh. This singular canister salvo instantly obliterated nearly a hundred human soldiers in the span of a heartbeat! A volatile, ragged commotion finally began to ripple through the human formation.

The demon host's thunder-making engines were no longer merely contesting the field—they were executing a systematic slaughter. The human sergeants and knights began screaming at the top of their lungs, striking the flats of their swords against their men's shields to desperately maintain the integrity of the line, yet the non-stop booming of the ordnance continued to claim lives with mechanical indifference. The forward momentum of the infantry began to visibly falter.

The pristine, razor-straight lines of their original array warped into a ragged, uneven zig-zag. Within their minds, the terrified soldiers were praying desperately to any god that would listen: In the name of the Goddess of Life, let those accursed thunder-clap weapons fall silent! As if the deity had personally interceded to grant their frantic supplications, the terrifying roar of the artillery did indeed cease.

The moment the crews discharged their final round of canister, they swiftly hitched the hot iron carriages to the towing harnesses. Six massive, muscular war-spiders surged forward, dragging the field pieces into a high-speed retrograde movement; they had not the slightest intention of allowing the human infantry to close within melee range.

"Maintain structural alignment! Prepare to execute a fighting withdrawal!" Li Qinwu tracked the human lines as they closed within six hundred meters, giving the order to break contact immediately. The soldiers of the Punisher Army maintained a flexible posture that allowed them to snap back into an active firing line at a moment's notice, executing an orderly, high-speed retreat across the plain.

It was precisely at this critical juncture that Keith guided his four hundred auxiliary horsemen around the margin of the forest, emerging directly onto the left-rear flank of Li Qinwu's retreating column. Seeing that the demon host had actually initiated a full retreat, Keith was consumed by a sudden, frantic impatience.

Completely ignoring his father's explicit directive to wait until the heavy infantry had pinned the enemy in place, he turned to his mounted vassals and bellowed an immediate charge order:"The monsters are fleeing! Form the wedge! For every rider who claims a demon's head, a personal bounty of three silver sovereigns from my household treasury!!" The auxiliary riders immediately aligned their mounts into a tight charging formation, their eyes gleaming with avarice.

According to every established tenet of continental military doctrine, an enemy caught in the middle of a retrograde movement was the easiest target to butcher; their minds were entirely preoccupied with escape. So long as he could drive his cavalry wedge straight through their column, their cohesion would instantly disintegrate. By the time his father's heavy infantry caught up to the melee, the thousand-plus demon troops would be entirely surrounded, unable to extricate themselves from the slaughter.

The vision was beautiful, but reality was unyielding. Li Qinwu had rigorously enforced strict structural alignment during the withdrawal precisely to insulate his command against a sudden cavalry intervention. The moment his peripheral vision caught the massive cloud of dust and iron emerging from the left-front quadrant of his retreat path, his voice boomed across the plain:"Anti-Cavalry Box! Form the square! Form the square!!" The Chieftain's roar reverberated through the ranks like a physical shockwave.

Sustained by his monumental 25 points of Vitality, his lungs functioned as a literal human megaphone, projecting the directive flawlessly into every corner of the formation. The goblin soldiers reacted with terrifying velocity. Because they had been marching in a tightly integrated defensive column, it required nothing more than a series of synchronized pivots to snap into their anti-cavalry posture.

The classic anti-cavalry square materialized across the wheat field—a dense, hollow rectangular box with its outer perimeters facing outward in all four directions, sheltering the field guns and ammunition crates safely within the void of the center. The specific side directly facing the oncoming human horsemen was packed with three continuous ranks of musketeers, while the remaining three flanks were held by two ranks apiece.

This specific configuration maximized their forward kinetic output while providing ample security should the cavalry attempt to execute a wide wheeling maneuver to breach their flanks. The moment the musketeers completed their alignment, Keith's charging wedge reached its maximum operational synchronization.

"Charge!!" Keith screamed at the top of his lungs. The four hundred horsemen were arrayed in three successive lines, each rank separated by a gap of roughly fifty meters. They steadily accelerated, their warhorses chewing up the distance as they bore down on the goblin square. As the mounts fully settled into their strides, Keith raised his sword and unleashed a final yell: "Full gallop!!"

The rhythmic trot of the horses exploded into a desperate, high-speed charge, their heavy hooves tearing through the emerald wheat field and carving a wide, ruined path through the crops.

"Couch lances!!" With their velocity peaking, Keith tucked his heavy wooden lance tightly beneath his armpit, its iron tip leveled directly at the heart of the goblin formation. He felt an absolute, intoxicating certainty of victory. The weapon systems carried by these diminutive demon infantrymen looked entirely pathetic—their spears were laughingly short, nothing more than stubby blades fixed to wooden stocks.

A warhorse would feel zero psychological terror when facing such inadequate barriers; they would resolutely trample the formation into dust! Within the silent, motionless square that Keith so thoroughly derided, Li Qinwu's voice cut through the thundering rumble of approaching hooves:"First rank! Shoulder firearms!!" On the side facing the oncoming charge, the first line of goblin soldiers brought their long muskets up in a single, fluid motion.

Staring at the massive wall of iron and muscle bearing down on them at breakneck speed, their small frames trembled slightly—a purely instinctual, biological response to a cavalry charge. Li Qinwu calmly calculated the closing distance in his head. Five hundred meters... four hundred meters... three hundred meters... He deliberately withheld the command to aim, waiting for the horsemen to penetrate the critical two-hundred-meter threshold.

Delaying the presentation of their weapons was a calculated psychological tactic, preventing nervous soldiers from prematurely discharging their weapons and wasting their volley fire. The moment the galloping vanguard crossed the two-hundred-and-fifty-meter line, Li Qinwu's sword cleared its scabbard, his voice booming out: "Present arms! Take aim!!" The line musketeers raised their barrels, aligning their iron sights with the chests of the oncoming riders.

In the blink of an eye, the horses breached the two-hundred-meter mark. Li Qinwu brought his greatsword down in a savage arc.

"Fire!!!" BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!! A dense, blinding sheet of white smoke erupted from the front of the square. A lethal hail of heavy lead balls tore through the air like harbingers of mortality, ripping into the front line of the human cavalry and violently flipping horses and riders alike onto the earth. The pristine charging wedge was instantly thrown into absolute chaos.

Dozens of knights were unseated by the raw impact of the lead, their tumbling bodies and thrashing mounts instantly transforming into a horrific obstacle course for the second rank charging directly behind them. Multiple riders, moving far too fast to alter their vectors, saw their horses trip over the fresh carcasses; the mounts flipped violently, launching their riders high into the air to crash into the wheat field with enough force to shatter every bone in their bodies.

Other horsemen, desperate to avoid the mounting pile of carnage, yanked hard on their reins to veer toward the flanks, completely destroying the structural cohesion of the charge. Before the human riders could comprehend the devastation of the first volley, Li Qinwu's voice cut through the smoke again:"First rank, kneel! Present bayonets!" The first line of musketeers did not even attempt to reload their empty weapons.

Instead, they dropped seamlessly onto one knee, slamming the heavy wooden stocks of their firearms firmly into the earth and gripping the barrels with white-knuckled intensity. Their long, gleaming triangular bayonets pointed upward at a sharp angle toward the oncoming horses, creating a rigid, impenetrable wall of iron spikes.

"Second rank! Present arms! Take aim! Fire!!" With the first rank kneeling, the second line of musketeers secured an unobstructed line of sight. Under the strict direction of the command, they raised their weapons and unleashed a second, devastating volley directly into the face of the fractured charge. Another uniform line of human horsemen was violently swept from their saddles. The beautifully staggered rows of Keith's proud cavalry were reduced to a fragmented, sputtering mess.

"Counter-march! Third rank forward!" Holding their smoking weapons vertically against their chests, the goblin infantrymen executed a rapid, practiced sidestep. The second and third ranks smoothly interchanged positions within the tight formation; the second rank drifted into the interior to begin pouring fresh powder and lead down their barrels, while the pristine third rank stepped to the vanguard.

"Present arms! Take aim! Fire!!" The third successive volley detonated across the plain. Another wall of lead tore through the remnants of the human horsemen, unleashing a fresh wave of crimson spray. The agonizing screams of men and the high-pitched, pathetic shrieking of maimed horses echoed across the ruined field, leaving a horrific tapestry of mangled flesh scattered across the green wheat.

By this point, every ounce of aristocratic arrogance had been completely drained from Keith's mind, replaced by an absolute, paralyzing horror. Just a heartbeat prior, an entire swath of veteran riders flanking his position had been wiped from existence in an instant—yet he had not seen a single arrow, bolt, or spell clear the enemy lines. He had no understanding of what manner of unholy sorcery he was fighting. Suddenly, a strange numbness bloomed across his right arm.

His fingers lost all sensation, and the heavy tilting lance slipped from his armpit, clattering uselessly into the dirt. Dazed, he cast a trembling glance down at his left shoulder. A clean, thumb-sized puncture hole had been punched straight through his steel shoulder guard, and a torrent of dark arterial blood was gushing from the wound.

"By the Grace of the Goddess... what manner of heretical engine is this?!" the young noble screamed, his voice cracking with absolute despair. Driven by raw, frantic momentum, he clamped his boots into his horse's flanks, guiding the handful of surviving riders left in his immediate orbit to slam directly into the goblin square. Keith's warhorse crashed headfirst into the wall of bayonets presented by the kneeling first rank. The long, triangular blades sank deep into the animal's muscular chest.

The beast let out a final, agonizing bray, but its sheer kinetic weight carried it forward a few more paces, violently bowling over several goblin musketeers before its legs buckled. Keith was launched from the saddle like a stone from a catapult, flying clean over the infantry ranks to crash violently against the iron frame of a field artillery piece resting in the center of the square. A sickening, rapid succession of snapping bones echoed through the interior of the box; he died before his body hit the dirt.

A tiny handful of other warhorses managed to force their way into the infantry perimeter, knocking a few musketeers off their feet, but their charging momentum was instantly neutralized upon impact. Before the dazed riders could recover their bearings, dozens of long bayonets converged on them from all sides, brutally skewering them to the earth. A proud auxiliary force of four hundred elite horsemen had been thoroughly dismantled and broken by nothing more than three successive rounds of disciplined volley fire.

The vast majority lay dead or dying across the approach vectors, with only a negligible fraction ever managing to cross the threshold of the square, inflicting nothing more than single-digit casualties upon the goblin lines. The remaining handful of surviving horsemen attempted to wheel their mounts, circling the exterior of the rectangular box in a desperate bid to locate a structural weakness or an open breach.

However, their desperate path brought them directly into the path of the pristine muskets held by the square's un-engaged flanks. Another series of sharp, rhythmic volleys rattled across the field. The remaining outriders were systematically picked out of their saddles, leaving nothing more than a few dozen terrified survivors to scatter frantically back toward the horizon, entirely broken and never daring to approach the demon square again.