Ryunosuke and his entourage had more than 100 ronin troops, and almost all of them were heavily armed units. In addition to the 30 samurai on horseback, most of the rest of the people are heavy armor, and they use infantry bows, nagi swords, and large spears. Such a force would not move too quickly, and even if there were horses to carry the baggage in large Rigal chariots, it would have taken Old Joe a day and a half to go there and inform them to come back.

Such an elite samurai unit with more experience in fighting outside can win against several times the number of cloth-clothed rogues in frontal combat, but if the terrain is not a plain but a swamp, the problem will become relatively complicated.

The swampy terrain near the hot spring village has been cultivated by humans for many years and in part intentionally, and there is actually an overland route that allows for minimal walking. It's just that these roads compacted by reeds mixed with mud can be counted by a few people on a sunny day, and it is very likely that the heavy troops of more than 100 people will pass because of the bad road conditions.

Rumors among the villagers say that the gang of outcasts is entrenched in the depths of the road journey of about a day, but they do not know what kind of journey the so-called day is based on the footsteps of the people, and in which direction they will take the day's journey.

Because the smallest and most detailed maps in existence are state-level maps with the concept of the entire Zhangzhou region, and they have not been updated for 50 years, it is not feasible to take out the map and try to find it on it and ask the peasants to point out the specific place where the Liukou are harboring.

The lack of a clear direction can lead to a larger search area, which is higher than a person, and annoying reeds everywhere obstruct the view – which is actually a big reason why many villagers can't tell where they are. They may be able to follow the paved road to dig deeper into the search for resources and then walk out according to some landmarks, but they don't have an overly clear impression of the north, south, south, and north.

With a black eye, it would be too unprofessional to wait for Ryunosuke and his party to come in again and try their luck to find those gangsters.

Henry, along with Mira, Lulu, and an old hunter from the village, went deep into the swamp as Old Joe set out, and went into battle to reconnoiter before the army arrived.

Years of experience and summed up the law are their reliance, and there is a lot of necessary information before the official launch of the army to produce a conflict, and they need to grasp it without landing.

Just as a hunter going up the mountain doesn't wander aimlessly and just wait for his prey to hit the door, the first thing you need to do to find a certain target is to substitute the other person's thoughts.

If the prey is a wild boar, lower your eyes to observe the rhizomes of the plant - wild boars like to arch the food that grows in low places, such as potato rhizomes and various mushrooms. The traces of the soil and the vegetation above the relatively intact roots that have been dug up and eaten indicate that wild boars were feeding in the vicinity, and the freshness of the notch can be used to infer when they fed.

If you notice this, you can try to find the beast path and tracks, tiptoeing downwind and carefully following them.

Deer, on the other hand, prefer berries, buds and herbaceous plants that grow higher – if you find a shrub with its juicy shoots eaten away except for the old, astringent dark green leaves, it's probably a deer's job.

Biological preferences are also important to identify and track – wild boars like to roll in mud and cover their bodies in mud to have a hard shell to resist mosquito bites, while deer like to rub their bodies back and forth on rough tree trunks to relieve itching.

The size and size of the deer herd can be seen from the height of the bark rubbed off, and the marks near the mud pool always provide you with some important information about the wild boars nearby.

What if the prey is human?

Humans have storage utensils and various tools, camping supplies, etc., and organized and large-scale humans have the ability to be self-sufficient to a certain extent out of the local environment. They can bring in rations and fresh water from elsewhere and don't need to be overly active in the environment in the short term. From this point of view, it is clear that humans are relatively less likely to be tracked and detected - but only if the other party is deliberately hidden and has a high level of willpower.

Cats know how to bury their feces, while dogs tend to excrete anywhere. It's the same with people - a master of hiding can come and go without a trace, but where can a rogue who lacks discipline do this.

Drinking and having fun, half-eaten dried fish was casually discarded and crawling with ants, and empty bottles fell to the ground and even half of the bottom was trampled into the mud.

"It stinks. I don't know which guy was relieved nearby, and the smell of urine left behind made Luo'an girl's little eyebrows wrinkle together. The group apparently didn't know how to hide themselves, and the materials they brought with them were not properly hidden and buried after use, and these artifacts were out of place in the natural environment, becoming the most obvious landmarks.

"It's about 500 meters after going around here. The sage pulled out a blank straw notebook from his pocket, one of the supplies purchased from Ziyun, and the Moonland, where papermaking was developed, did not rely on sheepskin as Rigal, so the price of paper was very low. Even though they were sold by book rather than sheet, the small size of the book, which was usually used as a ledger, was cut smaller by Henry himself with a knife and bound with waterproof cowhide stitching coated with beeswax and animal oil, and it came in handy at this point.

If you don't have a map, you can draw a simple one, and it's better to remember it than to have a bad pen. And considering the large number of people who will act together next, if he is the only one who knows the way, he will lack flexibility and fault tolerance in some situations.

A simple and striking landmark: Henry marks the place where the hot spring village departs, with a circular curve that looks like a mist rising, and a willow tree that grows crookedly as he travels a distance, followed by a dense reed bush after the stick figure grasps its character, and so on. Progressively, the eye-catching landmarks are marked with small characters on the left and right turns of the simple terrain, and the simple map is also improved little by little as the pace progresses.

Towards evening, they managed to get close to the place where the abandoned bottles and half-eaten dried fish were located—apparently the outskirts of the camp of the rogues.

"Observe for a while and then go back. Visibility began to drop dramatically near dusk, but Henry decided to take advantage of the darkness to make another observation. A team of four people, including the hunters in the village, took a look and tried to hide in a nearby place with thick reeds. The group of four traveled lightly, with Lulu and Orion carrying a rudimentary hunting bow, a shorter bow known as the four-and-a-half bow in the concept of a samurai, though it was also 160 centimeters long.

This bow is much smaller than the large infantry bow of more than two meters, but it is slightly larger than the 130 cm long half-bow used for mounted archery. It is a type of bow that is used more by the folk than the samurai, and is commonly found in the hands of farmers and hunters, and some ashigaru is also chosen for its small size and the portability of the dense forest.

The four-and-a-half bow of the hunting bow level is only about 30 kilograms in the Rigal concept, and it is a bit reluctant to hunt adult wild deer around 100 kilograms, and it can only be said that it is just enough to reach the passing line as a war bow.

Even worse than this was Henry and Mira's newly purchased simple crossbow machine, which was very primitive and rudimentary because of the fact that crossbows were rarely used by people. The all-wood crossbow is larger than Rigal's steel crossbow but less than a third of its power, and its only purpose is to harass opponents while escaping, or to shoot in an attempt to inflict minor damage before melee begins.

Still, it's more or less reassuring to have ranged weapons to rely on.

Coarsely ground grains mixed with water and salt-roasted dry food with fresh water became the dinner for four tonight, and they couldn't pursue much without being able to keep an eye on it. They managed to spread a layer of reeds on the ground to keep out the moisture, waited patiently for more than an hour, and after nightfall, they got closer under the cover of darkness.

"It's like an island in the middle of a lake, with only one entrance. There are patrols on the perimeter. The surrounding reeds seemed to have been cleaned by man, and after passing from the place where the bottle had been abandoned, the group was completely exposed to the view of the wanderers in the middle of the lake, and this distance was still a hundred meters away.

"Thankfully, those people are informal. The Luoan girl sighed, the place before was densely covered with reeds, but if she ran forward for a while, she would be directly exposed to the unobstructed clearing. Fortunately, the patrolmen discarded the food and bottles at will and relieved them there, which aroused their vigilance, and they knew that they had reached the vicinity of the rogues, and deliberately hid until night fell, and then those who were in the middle of the swamp under the cover of darkness lit torches and bonfires, and they were prostrate on the ground to observe them in detail.

"Ahh

The sound of "poof-" sounded, and the two people who were pushing and shoving in this place like the island in the middle of the lake seemed to have fallen directly into the water in a drunken state, and the four of them observed carefully, they pushed and thrashed, and after a while, they actually stood up directly from the water.

"Oh, the water seems to be shallow, less than a thigh. This little detail didn't escape the attention of Henry's party - with the advantage that they didn't have to focus all on the ground passage leading directly to the Rogue camp.

"The number of men was between 60 and 80, and they had tents with them and they seemed to be well supplied. Weapons such as spears can be seen, but there are no horses or fences erected. While the sage took notes, Luo'an Maiden and Lulu and another hunter counted the people on the left, center, and right sides of the camp, respectively. Because they were moving around and the light and obstacles were obscuring the number, it seemed to be about the same number based on the 11 tents in total.

"They have a lot of baggage, but no cattle or horses. The girl of Roan was keenly aware of this, and the 80-man army needed a lot of supplies, and these people could abandon the dried fish bottles at will to prove that they were well fed.

"Waterway?" Lulu was also obviously very alert, and she reacted.

"But I didn't see the big ship. The girl looked a little puzzled, the other side of the camp faced a relatively wide water, although there was a possibility of being covered by the tent, but the large sailing ship that could carry nearly a hundred people at a time towered into the sky, even in the night, it was still easy to recognize.

"Most of them came by small boats. Because the swampy area has limited dry and hard land where you can camp, it can't accommodate too many people. Or simply sent out as a vanguard force. The sage deduced that small groups of infantry with heavy logistics far beyond their own carrying capacity usually meant that they were just a separate detachment. Considering the high carrying capacity of hydro transport, camps may be relatively far apart.

"Dig further to find the main force, Sensei?" Mira looked at the sage, not knowing where the main force of the other side was, and the risk was that they might be flanked by surprise reinforcements when attacking this camp, but the sage shook his head.

"It's too risky to go deeper. ”

It took a day's walk into the swamp in the morning to reach the camp of the Wanderers in the middle of the lake, and it was even more inconvenient to walk at night, and rushing deeper would only increase the risk of detection.

"It should be fine not to let them report it. "The reconnaissance information gave the sage enough information to come up with a battle plan, and all that was left was to return to the village and wait for Ryunosuke and his party to arrive.

"Let's go back. The drunken patrol rogue walked slowly in groups of three or five, holding torches, drinking and boasting, and the four of them lowered their bodies, first slowly touched the way forward, and then increased their speed and trotted away after entering the cover of the reeds.

Thanks to the sunny sun for several days, it is not easy to leave footprints on the dry and hard ground. Still, the sage ran back and forth sweeping the ground with a bundle of leaves broken from the depths of the reeds.

Falling reeds are a common sight on the muddy ground of swampy areas and therefore do not arouse suspicion, and the running footprints of people are longitudinal, and the vertical outline of the trails is disturbed by the debris that sweeps back and forth across the ground with reed leaves. It doesn't need to be eliminated completely, as long as you don't see a row of footprints at a glance.

It was a long way, and although I knew the way and hurried back at a faster pace, it was already around 3 a.m. when I returned to the hot spring village. If Lao Qiao succeeds in convincing, Ryunosuke and his party will be able to arrive in about half a day, so after drinking some hot soup and soaking in the hot spring, they handed over the notes to Narumi and Okami, who fell asleep first in the evening and woke up waiting at this moment, and Luoan Maiden and Lulu hurried to rest first.

The sage's detailed notes were written in Japanese-language so that the samurai leader could understand them. Henry himself, who had not yet rested, discussed with them afterwards and made a few copies of the map on a larger size of paper, waiting for Ryunosuke to distribute to his ronins tomorrow to quickly familiarize themselves with the terrain.

Exhaustive preparations were in full swing, and the rest of the people who had been out on their side as scouts were not idle. The equipment that could be repaired was simply repaired, the broken spear head was installed on a new pole, and the manager of Masayuki tried to mobilize some of the young men in the village to also take farm tools as a supplement to their combat strength, and everyone was fully prepared. As soon as the reinforcements from Ryunosuke's side arrived tomorrow, he tried to deal with the entrenched bandits.

Although the store manager's original proposal was to solve the bandits and evil Jiao, after returning from the investigation, the group had to admit that the problem of crocodiles may be secondary.

"Beasts are not as dangerous as humans after all. The samurai leader sighed.