The Swordfish sailed from Jaffna and sailed at an average speed of a dozen knots across the vast eastern Indian Ocean, carrying the news of victory all the way to the heart of the Republic.

I walked with the celebrities who were drinking and feasting in the Limen City Hall, surrounded by the citizens who spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate, towards the military port where the hot air balloons were released.

It was a sleepless night. Hundreds of citizens temporarily forgot the haze of the bombing plot of the Nanyang terrorist organization, and held lanterns and kerosene lamps to dispel the darkness of the night, expressing enthusiasm and joy in song and light.

For several kilometers, I clutched my slightly painful wounds and walked slowly through the jubilant crowd step by step. Wuhua followed me, quietly blocking the citizens who might bump into me from time to time.

"It doesn't look like the Indian Ocean is going to be calm." He said.

I turned my head to look at him: "From India to here, even if it is a clipper boat, it will take half a month." If I were the commander of the Indian Ocean Fleet, as soon as I had finished fighting the Portuguese fleet, I would have begun to clear the Portuguese positions on the mainland. ”

Wuhua shrugged his shoulders and suddenly said, "I remember that you were an intern in the Sri Lankan fleet before. ”

I glanced back at him and didn't speak.

Just as Limen entered the sea of celebration, Kandy, a religious city built in the 14th century, thousands of kilometers away, also entered the sea shrouded in light and fire.

On a hillside a few kilometers south of the city, Lieutenant General Huo Feiyu, commander of the Army's Indian Front, was smiling at the ancient city that dyed the night sky orange-red.

He looked at the city in the distance, but his heart was nostalgic for his hometown.

He hails from a small town in the southern part of mainland Australia. In his hometown, every year during major festivals such as the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival, the townspeople will set off a large number of fireworks in the town's square. Colorful flames bloom in the sky, rendering the dark sky gorgeously colorful.

"Here, however, there is only one color in the night sky." The lieutenant general thought with some regret.

The bright night sky of the Australian town represents the strength and richness of the Australian Song. The light of the holy city of Kandy reflects the trauma that the ancient city is suffering.

Tens of thousands of Sri Lankan indigenous soldiers, wielding scimitars and carrying antique arquebuses, are pouring into the city under the command of a handful of Australian and Song officers, burning as much as possible in the old streets with traces of age.

Gunshots, explosions, shouts ... Second Lieutenant Wang Zi shook his head, drove the noise out of his head, took out a mint candy from his pocket and stuffed it into his mouth, chewing it vigorously.

"Click, click", the sound of candy breaking came from his mouth, and the pungent breath of mint sobered the lieutenant a little.

He struggled to his feet against the wall, holding an arquebus in his right hand and his left arm trying to support the ground, but he was unexpectedly weak.

"Damn, the bones look like they're broken." Wang Zi scolded, threw away the rifle, and pulled out a bandage from the first-aid kit around his waist.

He looked around, staggered a few steps forward, drew a bayonet stuck in its scabbard from the belt of a corpse, half-crouched down and pressed it against his left arm, holding it in place with a bandage on the ground and mouth.

After the wound was treated, the second lieutenant stood up again.

He vaguely remembered that he had commanded a company of Sri Lankans in a street fight, only to have the rabble disintegrated in pursuit, leaving him with less than a squad of men left.

Afterward... Later, I fainted inexplicably, as if someone had thrown a bag of explosives through the wall, and the last sound I heard was "bomb!" in Sri Lankan. ”...

"It's unlucky." Wang Zi became angry again. Now that he has become a bare-bones commander, he has not a single soldier under his hand, and his left hand is still broken. If you are not careful, it will be the rhythm of capsizing in the gutter, and maybe it will be packed in a box and taken back to Australia.

Wang Zi suddenly came back to his senses from complaining. He was lying on the edge of a fallen wall in the alley, a position that could not be attacked or defended, and if he was discovered by the royalists, it would be really cold.

He cursed his stupidity, and quickly got up and ran towards a courtyard with a half-hidden courtyard gate.

As soon as he got up, he heard a few words of Sri Lankan vernacular coming from the side, and it sounded like the speaker was only separated by a wall from him.

Wang Zi's eyes immediately turned red, and he said in his heart that he wouldn't be so unlucky, what would he be afraid of. He immediately quickened his movements, and finally scurried into the courtyard before he was discovered.

This seems to be the house of a rich family, and it is richly decorated. If he is victorious, Wang Zi will definitely open his bow left and right to fill his own pockets. But at this time, he fell into Pingyang, and his majesty was no longer there, but he wanted to angrily scold why the tables and chairs here were hollowed out, and he was such a big person hiding in it, as long as the royalists were not blind, they could find out.

"Fuck you, why don't you have a straw pile!"

He glanced around quickly, and the worry in his heart grew stronger, so he had to rush towards a closet, and hurriedly grabbed a piece of clothing in front of him, hoping that if anyone came in, he would not find a strange bulge in the closet.

Of course... It would be best if no one came in and stayed in peace until dawn.

Wang Zi had never heard of a Tessie philosopher named "Murphy" to the effect that if there were two or more ways to do something, and one of the choices would lead to disaster, someone would have to make that choice. In order to better understand the reader, I will state it as,

"If there's a chance that things will go bad, no matter how small that likelihood, it will happen."

After only a few minutes of anxiety, Wang Zi, who had just been relieved, regained his nervousness - he saw through the gap between his clothes that four or five Sri Lankans with guns were coming in through the courtyard gate that he had knocked open.

"Damn, how did I forget to lock the door!"

Those people didn't seem to notice that the house was occupied, so they moved all kinds of sundries near the courtyard gate to block the door, and it seemed that they were going to hold on here for a long time.

Wang Zi was about to breathe a sigh of relief when one of them suddenly shouted, pointing to a long series of bloody footprints on the ground and shouting.

The rest of the people immediately stood on guard, slowly moving the muzzle of the gun along the bloody footprints, and finally pointed to the wardrobe where Wang Zi was hiding.

Wang Zi slowly opened his mouth and gently spit out a national curse.

Gently pushing open the cabinet door with his foot, Wang Zi slowly came out with his hands raised, and said in his unskilled Sri Lankan vernacular: "Don't shoot, I surrender, my motherland will pay a ransom that satisfies you." ”

When those people saw an Ao-Song man coming out of the closet, they immediately threw their guns on the ground, bowed again and again, and showed a pitiful expression begging for mercy on their faces.

"Uh..."

Well, it's all because they have too much dust on their bodies, it's too dark at this time, and it's all because Wang Zi is in a bad state when he is injured, he didn't find out that the Sri Lankans who came in were all under the command of Ao Song.

Wang Zi put down his hand weakly and scolded: "stand up for Lao Tzu and take the gun!" ”

The five Sri Lankan soldiers hurriedly picked up the guns on the ground, and while hurriedly loading the ammunition, they showed a flattering smile, and put the food they were carrying on the table in front of Wang Zi with some flattery.

Wang Zi lowered his eyes and looked at the various unknown objects on the table. Well, including a piece of jerky that seems to have stinked, a few lumps of black rice balls, a handful of fried noodles, and a small bag of dry and hard rice cakes that really can't be seen from the raw materials?

He took a deep breath, trying to restrain himself from venting the anger that had accumulated from a series of bad luck tonight.

"Eat." He gritted his teeth and said with some difficulty, "I'm not hungry. ”

The five of them laughed a few times, knowing that their food could not meet the standards of the honorable Lord Ao Song, so they had to put their hands together, grab the rice balls on the table and stuff them into their mouths.

Wang Zi couldn't bear to turn his head, he really couldn't bear the pain caused by watching this group of barbarians eat.

He stood up, waved the men on, drew the pistol from his waist, and walked towards the stairs next to the living room.

Following the wooden ladder, Wang Zi came to the third floor of this house. He looked at the truncated staircase, and knew that the house he was in front of him had a fourth floor, but had already been destroyed in the war.

Standing on a high place, he easily took in the small half of the city.

The battle began in the evening. The artillerymen spent an hour preparing for artillery fire, and hundreds of cannons of different calibers bombarded continuously at a very close distance, tearing apart the walls of the ancient city, which had been urgently reinforced by the king of Sri Lanka.

Classical cities, which had been able to resist hundreds of thousands of enemies in the past years and had held out in isolation for years, were vulnerable to modern armies. To be honest, in Wang Zi's opinion, the impact of the city wall more than ten meters high on them is not as good as the dilapidated roads along the way.

"At least the broken roads will make it hard for us to walk, and the walls won't. While the artillery brothers were working, we sat on the ground and ate dinner. —Wang Zi's post-war memories

As the sun set a little way from the sky, the towering walls were finally destroyed by explosives planted by sappers approaching.

Hearing only a loud noise, Wang Zi and his comrades-in-arms watched the dust rising from the root of the city wall. Broken stones flew in all directions, and the roar of collapse drowned out the screams of the hapless spirits behind the walls. Some Sri Lankan soldiers who had remained on the walls under heavy shelling were swept away by the violent blast, cutting a parabola through the sky like the grains of wheat raised by farmers while drying their wheat.

Wang Zi and his comrades-in-arms habitually cheered a few times, but they were reluctant to put down the pancakes in their hands. Seeing that the middle-level officers did not instruct, they continued to lower their heads and chew slowly on today's dinner.

In the distance, a group of comrades who had finished their meals early had dispersed into the Sri Lankan army and took over the command of the army.

As the walls fell, the company headed rushed to the breach with shouts from the officers.

The arquebus companies on either side of them (made up of Sri Lankans, who were not armed with flintlock pistols) fired a blind shot at the smoke-filled gap, and the artillerymen in the rear also threw a round of explosives into the walls as cover for them.

The attack was very easy at the beginning. As with other battles fought by the Aosong and its vassals, once the walls were breached, the defenders inside the city would fall into a state of semi-madness. Either a frenzied counterattack or a frantic escape.

This thought continued until Wang Zi received an order to return to the team immediately and prepare to attack.