Chapter Twenty-Four: The Iron-backed Repeater's First Strike (Part II)
"Woo..." The sound of trumpets resounded over the camp of the Fifth Legion. Except for the one pig brigade left behind, the fifth army of 110,000 people slowly marched towards the fortress of Fancheng.
The Fifth Army Corps has three divisions, each of which consists of three brigades. Including a bear brigade, a wolf brigade and a pig brigade, a total of 90,000 people. There are also five centaur wings, three Leopard Clans, one Task Force Wing, one Tiger Clan Wing, and two Goose Clan Air Brigades.
On the ground, two centaur wings, one in front, one in the rear, and two to protect the Chinese army. The three divisions were lined up in sequence, with one brigade missing the 15th Division and one special task force, and the four regiments directly under the regiment as the central army. In mid-air, an Eagle Clan squad conducted reconnaissance, and two Wild Goose brigades protected the two wings of the whole army. For a time, the flags were raised, and the drums shook the sky.
Soon after the Fifth Legion was deployed, the reconnaissance team of Fancheng Fortress lurking in the shadows quietly passed the news back. After getting the news from the front, Guan Yinglong secretly said in his heart, Yamamoto, a centaur team still makes you can't help it. An emergency military meeting was immediately convened to study the deployment plan.
The east gate of Fancheng Fortress was hoisted high, and the human warriors on the city tower were busy shuttling and busily, constantly carrying all kinds of materials to the city tower. On the roofs and heads of some houses near the east gates of the fortress were two thousand three-man crossbows, disguised. Four giant ballistae were placed on the commanding heights of the castle towers. Five hundred vehicle-mounted heavy crossbowmen and five thousand light crossbowmen were already in place, hiding behind the battlements. 10,000 warriors armed with tower shields defended every nook and cranny behind the walls. More reserves are hiding in the caves beneath the city, ready to fight.
The wait was long, and finally a cloud of smoke and dust rose from the front, and a wing of centaur soldiers appeared in front of the city in the eyes of the defenders. Stopped a kilometer from the fortress and held his ground. A quarter of an hour later, the brigade arrived one after another, and each set up a position.
A trumpet sounded in the ranks of the Fifth Legion, and the four centaur wings advanced five hundred meters and separated on the left and right sides, took out their longbows, mounted their arrows, and corrected their bearings with a salvo. A bear brigade of the 13th Division in the middle slowly advanced towards the Fancheng fortress with a giant shield and a giant axe, followed by a wolf brigade and a pig brigade. A wild goose brigade each carried twenty spears into the sky and flew towards the fortress.
Seeing that the orc army began to attack, the warriors of the Fancheng fortress also moved, five hundred vehicle-mounted heavy crossbows were in the center, and five thousand light crossbowmen stood on both sides, raising the crossbow arrows in their hands, aiming at the advancing orcs, and the warriors raised their tower shields to cover the crossbowmen. The three-person heavy crossbows in the fortress and at the head of the city were also aimed in mid-air, ready to attack the heavenly beasts at any time.
When the Bear Brigade advanced to a distance of more than four hundred meters from the fortress, the fire suppression of the four centaur wings began. Centaurs are the most accurate in archery, and their shooting speed is much faster than that of humans, and the average human shoots one arrow with an ordinary longbow, and the centaur has already shot three arrows. The rain of arrows continued to rain down on the head of the fortress of Fancheng, and from time to time crossbowmen were shot by long arrows that passed through the gaps in the tower shield.
When the centaurs rained down two rounds of arrows, the human crossbowmen began to fight back. The 5,000 light crossbowmen were divided into two groups, and the centaur soldiers on the left and right sides were shot alternately, and now the light crossbowmen of the Fancheng fortress used an improved version of the iron-backed repeater transported from the Bokan Iron and Steel Group, which had a fast rate of fire and a long range, which was twice as high as before, and the range had reached 500 meters, which could compete with the centaur archers. The five hundred vehicle-mounted heavy crossbows in the center launched an attack on the advancing bear brigade, and the huge crossbow arrows were loaded into the crossbow machine, and with the sound of the machine, five hundred heavy crossbows with the thickness of arms flew towards the bear array, and the bear soldiers held high the huge shields to cover their bodies to dodge the crossbow arrows. With a loud bang, a huge crossbow arrow pierced through the giant shield raised by the bear soldier, pierced through the thick armor on his body, and stabbed into his body fiercely, and blood splattered everywhere. The bear soldier let out a wail and rolled to the ground in pain. After a round of shooting, one or two hundred bear corpses were left on the ground.
In the sky, the Yan Brigade also flew close to the sky above the Fancheng Fortress, and with a dive, the spears they carried were thrown towards the city, and the spears fell with a roar with the acceleration of the fall. The heavy crossbows inside the fortress and at the head of the city also opened fire at the same time, shooting into the sky. Since the soldiers of the Goose Clan had to fight in the skies, in order to reduce their weight and carry more weapons, they rarely wore armor, and the attack power of the heavy crossbow was not something that their fragile bodies could resist. For a while, the spears fell, the crossbow arrows attacked, and a rain of spears and arrows intertwined in the sky, and from time to time there were wild goose soldiers falling from the sky screaming. The other soldiers also continued to rise into the air and dodge on either side.
Attacked from the fortress, the Yan soldiers could no longer dive and throw spears at the unbridled swooping that they had previously hovered overhead. Don't dare to get too close to the fortress, hovering high in the air and throwing downward, the spears of the Yan clan also lost their accuracy, and some fell outside the fortress but caused damage to the siege soldiers of the bear clan, so angry that the brigade commander of the bear clan jumped on the ground and scolded his mother.
After hurriedly throwing the spear in his hand, the Yan Brigade quickly flew back to its own camp. Their companions who took them up again could only fly quickly towards the fortress with crossbow arrows, throw their spears and dodge.
In the case of comparable range, the advantage of the centaurs is not so obvious, and they are not used to dodging human attacks, so they suffer a lot of losses, and after paying five hundred lives, they also began to dodge human crossbow arrows non-stop.
The power of the vehicle-mounted heavy crossbow was huge, but the reloading time was much slower, which gave the bear brigade some respite, and after withstanding six rounds of attacks and leaving more than a thousand corpses, the bear soldiers finally rushed to the bottom of the fortress. The pig soldiers, who arrived after him, erected rows of siege ladders. The bear soldiers climbed the ladder with a huge shield and attacked the city wall step by step.
As the bear soldiers attacked the city, the vehicle-mounted heavy crossbow could no longer attack it, and could only shoot at the wolf and pig tribes behind. The warriors at the head of the city have come to the back of the battlements, ready to meet the bears soldiers who have climbed up. Ten thousand human warriors rushed out of the cave under the city, carrying rolling wood and stones against the attack of centaur bows and arrows and threw them at the bear soldiers on the ladder, and five thousand giant sword warriors and five thousand spearmen also came to the city.
From this moment on, the battle began to enter a white-hot state, both human warriors and orc soldiers attacked wildly, and people fell in pools of blood every minute and every second. The bear soldiers were desperately climbing towards the city walls, and the human warriors were struggling to block them. The orc's giant ladder cart was finally dragged under the fortress, and the arrival of the ladder cart also allowed the orc soldiers besieging the city to storm upwards faster.
Finally, with the continuous efforts of the orc soldiers, the first batch of bear soldiers reached the top of the city.