Volume 1 The Breaking Mountains and Rivers of the Kingdom Chapter 14 The Battle of the Stone Castle
When the wolves at the front saw the soldiers in formation, they stopped ten steps in front of the formation and looked at the humans and roared in a low voice.
"Whoosh" Another rain of arrows came, and only a few howls were heard, only to see a few wolves in the pack wailing with arrows.
"Slowly retreat into the fort." The sergeant in the formation heard someone on the stone fort more than 50 meters behind. After thinking about it, it must have been the order issued by Zhu Lihua, and all the soldiers slowly retreated, but the weapons were still pointed at the wolves.
At this moment, Tang Yuan was already tired, and when Chang Gebing caught up with him, he had already collapsed to the ground, and was pulled up by Li Ji, who came to the rescue, and carried him on his back. But Li Ji understood that if he ran first with Tang Yuan on his back at this moment, he would definitely let the wolves that bypassed the military formation catch up, so he could only stay behind the military formation.
The two of them slowly retreated with the Changge array composed of more than ten people, forty meters, thirty meters, twenty meters, as everyone retreated towards the stone fort, the number of Sumeru wolves drilled out of the woods also reached nearly a hundred, and slowly gathered in front of the Changge array.
The increased pressure was the same as what happened to Lihua and the others a month ago, causing sweat to flow down the cheeks of these Changge soldiers in array.
Maybe it was because he felt the cold light of these human weapons, or maybe he was afraid of the rain of arrows that had been shot from the stone castle several times. The Sumeru wolves didn't press forward, they just stood at a distance of fifty paces and stared coldly at these humans.
"Not good!" Zhu Lihua only heard a loud scream, turned his head to look, and found that dozens of Sumeru wolves on the east side of the stone fort crawled in the grass and bushes and slowly crawled towards the Changge army formation.
Rao was like this, and those Changge soldiers were also in absolute danger, and Lu Lihua immediately shouted, "Run, run to the stone castle!" Then everyone around him also shouted, reminding those Changge soldiers.
The soldiers under the fort suddenly heard that the stone fort let them run quickly, they were a little stunned, but they still subconsciously ran back, when they turned around and found that there were dozens of wolves behind them pounced on them, they suddenly felt their scalps numb, so they just ran towards the stone castle regardless of it.
Seeing Chang Ge soldiers coming, Zhu Lihua suddenly shouted "Oops", then drew his sword and rushed down to the castle. Run and shout, "Shoot arrows"! The archers on the fort were already on standby with their arrows, and after hearing the order, they raised their bows and shot down.
Lu Lihua rushed to the door of the first floor of the stone fort, and when he met Chang Ge's hand, he also rushed back to the stone castle, and Lu Lihua shouted, "Stop, guard the gate!" ”
But the Changge hand outside the door listened to the wolf howl behind him, and he was already frightened, and when he saw the gate of the stone castle, it was like seeing the heaven of rebirth, where could he still muster up the courage to turn around and line up. Only four or five people rushed through the door and pushed him to the ground.
The soldiers who rushed in ran to the second floor of the fort tower, and the soldiers behind them also desperately squeezed through the gate, and suddenly became a mess.
At this time, Zhu Lihua found that he was being pulled up by a person, and when he looked up and saw that it was Liu He, he shouted: "Quickly guard the gate." As soon as he finished speaking, he saw Li Ji carrying Tang Yuan into the door, so he rushed up and pulled him down, and was about to order him to follow him to guard the door, but found that a Sumeru wolf had run to the door, biting the calf of a soldier who entered the door last, and the soldier immediately grabbed with both hands, buckled the wall of the stone castle gate, and desperately grabbed to prevent the wolf from dragging him away.
Zhu Lihua let go of Li Ji, shouted, raised the sword in his hand and slashed at the Sumeru wolf.
Zhu Lihua didn't like to shoot the emperor since he was a child, but after being a nobleman and a general, he also learned some sword dancing and gun moves since he was a child, but he never used actual combat. At the critical moment, he could only pick up his sword with both hands and slash at the Sumeru wolf. When the wolf saw that someone had raised his sword and slashed at him, he was also fierce, and threw away the soldier's leg and bit at the arm of the soldier. Zhu Lihua had used all his strength to cut the sword out, and where could he get it back, so he had to temporarily change the direction of the chop, using inertia to throw himself away from the wolf's mouth, and staggered with the direction in which the wolf pounced, but in this way, he threw himself out of the door.
There are already dense wolves outside the door, and if they fall out of the door, how can they survive. But at this moment, there was no other way for Lihua to take back his sword in the air, and with the momentum of the wolf's pounce, the tip of the sword slashed through the wolf's abdomen from the bottom to the top, only to hear a sound like "cracking" sounded, Lihua smiled slightly, and fell out of the door.
He fell to the ground, and before he could raise his head, he heard the sound of wolves and the wind rushing in his ears, and closed his eyes. One breath, two breaths, he felt that something was wrong, and suddenly opened his eyes, and saw that the two wolves in front of him had been shot into hedgehogs, and one wolf on the left and right was staring at the air with its mouth open, and one of the wolves had reached the neck of the wolf. Looking at it again, it turned out that the two wolves each had three or four Changge inserted in their bodies, and when they heard a "boom", they fell from the air, and their huge bodies slammed into the ground.
"My lord, my lord" Liu He and Li Ji rushed out of the gate, and quickly pulled Lihua into the stone fort, and as soon as he entered the gate of the fort, he saw more than ten Changge hands in front of him squatting or standing to seal the gate of the stone fort tightly.
He glanced at the Sumeru wolf beside him who had been disemboweled, and then he found that his heart was beating and his legs were weak, and the hand holding the sword was shaking.
"My lord, we are surrounded by wolves, how is it okay?" Liu He asked hurriedly. Zhu Lihua looked at the fort gate, which was less than two meters wide and no more than three meters high, coughed, and said in a positive voice: "Now guard the gate, if you can't keep it, follow the stairs to guard, I'll go upstairs first." Then he got up with the support of Liu He and ran to the fort alone.
It turned out that while Lihua fought bravely to save the soldier, the soldiers who ran to the fort were also blocked on the stairs. The panic at the beginning had a sense of security, and at the same time, reason also gained the upper hand again, not to mention that several of these Changge hands were those who fought a hundred battles under An Xuzhi. They blocked the stairs and couldn't go up, so they could only subconsciously look behind them, just in time to see the main general's desperate move, and the few people at the back of the stairs subconsciously hurriedly lifted Changge and stabbed at the two wolves who pounced on the two wolves. As for the two wolves killed by the arrows, they were killed by the archers on the fort, and those archers were also under the command of Wei Yuanqi, constantly shooting the wolves that rushed towards the fort gate.
Shooting arrows on the fort, and the gate of the fort has a sharp long ge, so that these wolves have no idea for a while, and when more than a dozen wolves fall at the door of the stone fort, they simply no longer rush inside, but just confront the castle around the stone fort.
Wei Yuanqi saw that Lihua had gone to the stone fort, and complained: "Brother Lihua is reckless, how can you, as the main general, risk your life, only to lose the brothers to save in time, otherwise I really dare not think about the consequences." ”
Zhu Lihua was a little moved, he understood that Wei Yuanqi was a person, although he was very arrogant on weekdays and spoke babblingly, but he was extremely smart and knew the overall situation, so he went to the fort by himself, leaving only Wei Yuanqi to command.
He saw that Wei Yuanqi commanded the archers not to shoot indiscriminately, but just to greet the wolf at the fort gate, and he knew that Wei Yuanqi still used his own heart to use the army. Although there are a lot of arrows brought out of the customs this time, but they can't stand a random shot, if the bow and arrow are gone, they can only go to hand-to-hand combat, obviously Wei Yuanqi also knows this in his heart.
"There is Brother Lao Wei who remembers, and I know it." Zhu Lihua apologized to Wei Yuanqi, and said, "Brother Wei can see the number of wolves. ”
"I saw clearly, there were more than 160 horses in total, and about 70 percent came out of the woods in the west, and 30 percent came out of the woods in the east. It is estimated that the wolves that came out of the woods in the east were also in a group with the wolves in the west, and the detour to the east was to sneak attack the Changge soldiers, and after the sneak attack failed, all the wolves were drilled out of the woods in the west, and the east never came out again. ”
Lihua nodded and asked, "Can you see a white Sumeru wolf?" ”
Just as Wei Yuanqi was about to answer "I haven't seen it", the two of them saw almost at the same time that in the woods two hundred steps away in the west, a snow-white Sumeru wolf slowly walked out. The wolf was the one he had met a month earlier, because the wolf was much larger than the other Sumeru wolves, similar to a calf, and one of its eyes was blind.
Intuitively, she sensed that the wolf's eyes were the ones that had been shot blind by the six dead brothers. Because the last time I saw it, it wasn't like that.
The grandfather, father, brother, younger brother, and son of each soldier were or are or will be a soldier on the border, so the military literacy has always been higher than that of the other three countries in the Guannai, and most of the soldiers in Lihua are from the mountain people and hunters, and everyone shoots a good arrow, and almost all the arrows can be done within a hundred steps. So it wasn't impossible to shoot the wolf at the beginning, and it wasn't impossible to shoot it in the eye. It's a pity that those brothers are dead. When she saw the white-headed wolf again, she couldn't help but feel even more resentful in her heart.
After the white wolf king walked out of the woods, he looked coldly at the stone castle in the distance and the people on the stone castle, and suddenly stopped after meeting his gaze.
Lu Lihua suddenly felt that the wolf seemed to understand that he was the leader of the fort guards, and suddenly a cold sweat broke out behind him, and he just wanted to look away, but he thought of the tragic situation of the six brothers who were disemboweled, and he couldn't help but feel resentment, so he stared at the white wolf fiercely.
"Do you want to shoot it?" Wei Yuanqi suddenly asked softly. Hearing this, Zhu Lihua's heart was also moved, and he also understood that the distance of two hundred steps was not too far for these soldiers, but the accuracy would be smaller, but if twenty arrows were fired at the same time, the chance of hitting would be much greater.
But Lu Lihua shook his head, and he didn't intend to take Wei Yuanqi's suggestion, because he knew that six arrows could not be shot at the same time at a distance of fifty paces, let alone two hundred paces. With the speed of the Sumeru wolves seen earlier, it would have been easy for them to dodge the arrows from two hundred paces away, not to mention the obviously larger head wolves.
"Don't waste arrows. The order was given to send ten more archers to the fort and guard the gate with Changge's soldiers, and the rest of the archers were all concentrated above the fort gate. ”
As the order of Zhu Lihua was issued, the white wolf king suddenly raised his head and roared, and after the long sound of "......", he saw the wolves outside the fort surging, moving densely towards the stone fort.
He heard the barking of wolves and the shouts of soldiers stabbing in front of the door under the stone fort again.
In the gate on the first floor, two rows of Chang Ge hands kept stabbing the Chang Ge in their hands towards the Sumeru wolf who rushed into the door, those wolves were also not afraid of death, and after being stabbed by Chang Ge, they still borrowed their spare strength to open their mouths and bite the Ge pole, and a few sergeants around them stabbed the wolf's head fiercely, so as to completely let the wolf die. But at the same time, another wolf rushed into the door, and Changge's hand was too tired to deal with it, and he couldn't get the slightest rest.
Fortunately, the fort gate is not wide, and the wolf is very large, and it can generally only accommodate the body of two wolves, which makes the defense much simpler, just keep stabbing and stabbing. But it was this simple thrust, and after a long time, those sergeants lost their strength and were extremely tired, and there were several times when they were broken in by wolves and bit the soldiers because of the slowing down of their movements, which also caused two soldiers to be bitten directly by their throats, and they couldn't live, and four others were bitten lightly or severely.
Fortunately, there are archers above the castle gate to suppress the wolves, seeing a wolf break in, two or three rounds of arrow rain will shoot at the wolves behind in an instant, buying some time, so that the soldiers in the gate can kill the lone wolf who broke in and regain the advantageous position. More than a dozen archers from the lower fort stood on the spiral ladder and shot arrows from inside the door to support, and some archers took the dead and wounded sergeant's Changge to join the melee team guarding the door.
A moment later, he looked down from the castle and saw that the corpse of the Sumeru wolf had almost completely covered the gate of the stone fort. Suddenly, the white wolf heard a long howl again, and the wolves that surrounded the stone castle and kept attacking were like human armies, slowly retreating like a tide, and they all retreated into the woods in a short time, without the slightest chaos, which caused Lihua and the others to be amazed.
The dead wolf corpse was left outside the stone castle, and Lu Lihua and the others could see it clearly, but all the wolves who were shot by the arrow and had a breath were dragged back by their companions when they left. Yu Lihua was also happy to do this, and immediately ordered Chang Gebing to take the wounded to the fort for treatment and rest, while observing the surrounding movements. He and Wei Yuanqi led the archers on the second floor to go downstairs to clean up the wolf corpses and open the castle gate.
In fact, the archers went through countless rounds of arrows, and their arms were abnormally sore, but in general, because they were condescending, they were not directly threatened with death, so compared to the physical and mental exhaustion of the longer soldiers, it was just physical exertion.
In a short time, the gate of the stone fort was cleared, and at the same time, there were soldiers who collected the arrows they shot, and the wolf corpses were neatly arranged in front of the stone fort, with a total of twenty-three corpses. In this attack on the stone fort, the Sumeru wolf paid the price of killing thirty-five wolves, and the sergeant on the side of Yulihua also killed two and injured four, plus Tang Yuan, who was still unconscious, had injured as many as five people.
Only then did he see the attack of the Sumeru wolf, and understood that if it wasn't for his own side guarding the stone fort, I am afraid that the number of casualties would not be this number, and then thinking about the remarks he said when he came to the fort and everyone said, he couldn't help but laugh a little self-deprecatingly.