Li Xin immediately sent rangers to investigate, and found that it was a scattered Ming official army, hiding in the mountains and forests to make a fire and cook. These people were the guards of the original Zhenwu Guard, and when they fled here, they were killed and wounded and left behind, and there were less than a thousand people left, and the leader was a garrison who asked the Three Guards to give them some food. Li Xin gave them two options, one was to go with him and attack Xinzhou, and they could get food supplies. The second is to leave them to fend for themselves.

Now Wutai Mountain is in the spring when there is no harvest, there is no food or drink, if they stay for a few more days, they will not be destroyed by the thieves, but will also be starved to death. After some consideration, he expressed his willingness to go with the Three Guards, but he had to let them have a full meal first.

Li Xin sneered when he heard this, the soldiers were very fast, where was there time to delay their work, and after refusing to say anything, he told him that the soldiers must set off immediately, and the battle was urgent, and the three guards would not stop. In desperation, the garrison had no choice but to take his subordinates to the south with Li Xin, but their soldiers were 108,000 miles behind their morale, and they were actually slower than the auxiliaries of the Three Guards.

After a day and night of rapid marching, Li Xin's Three Guards crossed the Tuo River and finally arrived at the boundary of Xinzhou City in the early hours of the morning, and galloped southwest along another large river. After crossing the Tuo River, the terrain was gentle, almost flat, the whereabouts of the Three Guards could no longer be concealed, and the thieves' ranger scouts reconnoitred and followed from time to time in the distance, and a big battle could break out at any time, and all the soldiers and auxiliaries were in a high tension. It was especially difficult for the artillery battalion officer Heisenberg not to leave behind the eighteen cannons under his command, but it took a lot of effort. Because he understood that the Three Guards Army was alone in the depths, and without the fire support of artillery, it would be at a great disadvantage in field battles and offensive and defensive battles.

The thieves stationed in Xinzhou did not stick to the city as imagined, after they found the traces of the Ming army, they gathered more than 20,000 men and horses at the first time, and rolled over with the overwhelming momentum of Mount Tai, obviously did not put Li Xin's thousands of people in their eyes.

"Array! Array! The first line, the first battalion, the second battalion. 2nd line, 3rd battalion ......"

The soldiers of the Three Guards who were advancing in several columns immediately slowed down their advance and began to shout slogans, and with the whistle of the platoon commanders, they formed a Gustav phalanx that had been drilled hundreds of times. Lu Jiu's cavalry battalion cruised on the flanks of the phalanx, waiting for the Chinese general's order to act again.

Gao Shiming, who was following Li Xin's side, was almost scared, he had been following the auxiliary soldiers for a few days before, and on this day, he didn't know which tendon was wrong, and he actually followed the soldiers to advance, and he didn't dare to show that he was too embarrassed, and he lost the face of his own prison army, so he had to endure fear and follow closely behind Li Xin.

At this time, the auxiliary soldiers were still five miles away from the soldiers across the river, and the reason why Li Xin arranged it this way was that when the battle was about to be made, the soldiers would have to devote their energy to take care of the auxiliary soldiers. However, due to the lag of communication, when Li Xin sent people to Tongzhi Master Guo to stop advancing, they had already arrived at the bank of the river after the soldiers, and when they saw the thieves rolling on the other bank, they immediately formed a formation of carts in accordance with the previous exercises, and all the auxiliaries were armed with weapons and ready to join the battle at any time.

In the face of the rolling thieves, the phalanx did not attack forward, but slowly backwards step by step, leaning straight to the circular river beach behind them, and there was a tendency to fight against the water. The thief generals should obviously also have noticed that this small group of Ming troops that broke into the hinterland of Taiyuan was already in a dilemma, with a big river behind and 20,000 troops in front to see how they responded.

The war drums suddenly exploded, and the thieves let out an earth-shattering shout, and then they sped up and ran straight for the Three Guards on the river beach.

The 1st and 2nd Battalions were grouped into two phalanxes and placed in the same line, and at the top of the two T-shapes were two of the most elite pikemen, who played a crucial role in withstanding the onslaught of the enemy. The principle is the same as when Li Xin renovated the city wall in Gaoyang, which is to increase the attack area in the smallest space possible.

At the bottom of the T-shape are alternately juxtaposed with three musket platoons and two pikes, with one musket platoon in the center serving as a reserve, and the remaining four muskets for long-range fire and pikes for hand-to-hand combat.

The 3rd Battalion formed a phalanx alone, located on the second front, waiting for an opportunity to counterattack.

"Kill! Kill! Kill! ”

The voice of the thief is getting closer and closer, deafening, holding all kinds of weapons like an overwhelming locust, Li Xin's pupils suddenly contracted, this is the first time since he came to the Ming Dynasty, the first time to face the enemy far beyond his own strength, this is the only way for an army to mature, if the battle is victorious, it will establish great self-confidence for the three guards, if defeated...... All these hundreds of days and nights of hard work will be in vain......

The shape of the battlefield could no longer accommodate Li Xin to think about it, so he restrained his mind and ordered the phalanx to constantly adjust the position under his feet, in order to engage the thieves in the best position. He could even see the facial features of the thieves at the forefront, the black and thin faces, the tense faces, and the unkempt beards, almost the same as a thousand people, the difference was the various machetes and maces they held in their hands, and even the standard saber Yanling knife equipped by the Ming official army.

Two hundred steps, one hundred steps, fifty steps...... When the thieves were fifty paces away from the phalanx, there was a slight commotion in the phalanx, and this strong psychological pressure caused a soldier to become incontinent, and he clutched the musket in his hand with humiliation and shame in the eyes of the crowd.

Li Xin suddenly pushed aside the guards and rushed to the side of the pikemen at the bottom of the T-shape, and pulled out the Yanling knife at his waist, "Prepare to kill the enemy!" ”

"Kill! Fight the enemy! ”

The three guards spoke in unison, and the word kill was as sharp as a sword and slashed towards the tide of thieves' violent drinking!

Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!

This time, Heisenberg's artillery did not fire from a distance with solid shells as a deterrent, but put the thieves within fifty paces and bombarded them with scattered shells. The artillery battalion was divided into two teams on both sides of the entire horizontal team, and cross-bombarded the thieves in the two sectors.

A salvo took the lives of the thieves for hundreds of years, and these thieves who have been smooth sailing can hardly find the east and west, north and south, but under the strong inertia of tens of thousands of people, the thieves who roared and tsunami did not slow down the speed of their attack, after the two volleys, although the heart was shocked and a large number of thieves were wrapped in each other, they still involuntarily continued to rush forward, rushing into the thick smoke of gunpowder drifting with the wind.

The musketeers at the bottom of the T-shaped are five rows deep like the pikes, and the first three rows of arquebusiers have been ready to shoot a salvo when the thieves reach the front twenty paces of the formation.

After the third salvo, finally, the spear team nailed to the tip of the T-shape like a mainstay, firmly nailed its feet to the ground, and stood still, and the six columns raised their spears like hedgehogs, pointing directly at the roaring thieves, and the sharp tips of the spears tore through the flesh and skin, and the first thief who could not stop because of the overwhelming crowd took the life of the first thief. The other thieves had to advance to the flanks in order not to be coerced by their companions into the gun formation. Thus, the spear array was like a mainstay to split the thieves into two strands.

Immediately after the two spears were split into four bands of thieves by the two spear arrays were the lead projectiles like a hail of rain, thousands of projectiles smashed over, the density of thieves was very large, and the barrage formed by countless projectiles was almost without a miss, and immediately a large number of thieves fell like cutting leeks. The thieves were completely dumbfounded, and before they could fight the Ming army, they were killed and wounded by the double blow of cannons and muskets.

But this was the beginning of the nightmare, just when the thieves were finally about to rush to the bottom of the Ming army's formation, three columns of muskets in the middle of the T-shaped column opened fire at the same time to the left and three columns to the right, and the side-fired fire hit the unsuspecting thieves' flanks, causing a shock far better than a frontal blow. Coupled with the continuous bombardment of the artillery battalion, the thieves who rushed to the forefront were on the verge of collapse while they were about to base the phalanx.

The 20,000 thieves can face the musket blow directly only the most cutting-edge thief soldiers, and the thieves who continue to pour up behind are like a machine that can't stop, pushing those thieves who are about to collapse to die, they have lost the will to fight, and let the spear battalion on top of them assassinate and die.

In the next battle, the soldiers of the Three Guards kept repeating this kind of killing, and the thieves who rushed to the front of the battle were untrained victims after all, and after the artillery and muskets were hit in turn, they completely lost their will to fight, and their morale fell to the bottom, and they only wanted to flee for their lives, but they had to rush forward under each other's coercion.

The hollow river beach seized by Li Xin was very beneficial to the Three Guards, with river water on both flanks, and the thieves outside the front line of the Three Guards were faced with the surging river, as well as the fan-shaped artillery scattered shells, and the pressure of the frontal bandits desperately squeezing outward.

After a few rounds of volleys, the thieves gathered more and more, and the pikemen team had a tendency to be unbearable, and began to move backwards step by step. Gao Shiming had no choice but to wield a Yanling knife and slash indiscriminately, saying that it was a coincidence that a thief soldier hit the knife edge and died. Gao Shiming saw that he had killed someone, and he fainted when he rolled his eyes.

At the same time, Li Xin ordered the pikemen of the second line to go up and stop the momentum of the thieves' advance.

Seeing this, Heisenberg immediately turned the muzzle of the cannon and bombarded the front bandits of the Three Guards, and because the enemy was extremely dense, the artillery shot scattered, killing and wounding dozens of people immediately. After two rounds of this terrifying strike fire, the thieves finally reached the limit of what they could bear, and the collapse was inevitable.

Looking at the thieves at the ebb tide, Li Xinling the riders waved the order flag, and the Lu Jiu cavalry battalion cruising in the distance immediately accelerated and went straight to the tail of the thieves who were leaving at the ebb tide. Knowing that at this time, the Three Guards under high tension did not realize that they had won the field battle. It wasn't until Li Xin's pursuit order was issued that they woke up like a dream, and the battle was won! And it's a battle of two thousand against twenty thousand!