Augustus Road

Huge smoke and dust rose up, and the Balantians began to understand Lepidus' intention. They gathered all the tribe's elite warriors and cavalry, rushed out from the fence, and wanted to defeat the Roman civil engineering works! "Didn't you say that this tribe only has two or three thousand men who are worthy of fighting?" Lepidat, who was naked and sweating, shouted to Sabokemus below from the sentry tower of the small camp next to him, "This That’s nonsense. In my opinion, there are five to six thousand of them, like ants in the cemetery outside the Maxim sewer.”

Sabo didn't believe his ears either. He climbed up to the sentry tower with Lepidus, then looked around and shouted in a daze: "Why are there so many people? Because even the women of this tribe have gone to war!" Lepidus touched the railing. What Sabo said was correct. The women of Balantia all held up short swords and daggers, exposed their breasts, and their upper bodies covered with tattoos. They followed the men, screaming and joining in with disheveled hair. Into the charging team.

When the soldiers saw this scene, they were bound to waver and had to make a decision immediately. Lebida shouted: "Put up the white flag and beat the drums!" Then the sound of bugles and gongs and drums sounded everywhere, which made everyone shrink back. After receiving the signal from the camp, soon more than thirty small camps were arranged staggered, and each place was guarded by half to one hundred soldiers. Many of them hung their armor and shields on the fence to resist the barbarians. Bows, arrows and javelins, and projectiles in various camps were at full fire. The trained gunners and auxiliary soldiers worked tirelessly with ballistae, scorpion crossbows and slings, desperately throwing javelins and Stone bullets were thrown out, and there was no standard at all - the barbarian charging troops were like an ocean, everywhere. The Thyme Legion refused to fight with the Balantians in the field. They each stayed in the camp and used various signals to communicate with each other. , emergency and encouragement, there are waving cloaks, bugles, and lighted javelins. The staggered camps form a crossfire. If one camp is in emergency, the adjacent camp will mobilize their troops and fight to the death. save.

The sound of killing was like a strong wind, shaking the entire camp group, sometimes from south to north, sometimes from east to west. The bloody corpses of Balantian warriors and horses, with javelins as dense as wheat, They fell in various places in the gaps between the camps and fortresses, and there were many bare-breasted women among them. They were as tough as the men in the fight to the death, screaming in terror, and dying with their hands that were dripping with blood. They climbed the crumbling fence and tried to break into the Roman camp, but Lepidus' soldiers on the opposite side, in their extreme panic and subsequent murderous intent, simply forgot the identity of the other party. They used spears and swords to , stabbing and prodding through the gaps in the fence, until the women's lower abdomens and vaginas were all drained of blood, and then they slid down along the wooden posts of the fence - they didn't even have vaginas, they died.

When a few bloody Balantians rushed through the camp and prepared to break into the camp behind Lepidus, they discovered that the camp of the treacherous Roman treasurer had "moved" back one and a half steps at some point. Dia, placed in the middle is a circular trench filled with thorns, and the Numidian harpooneers waiting behind another fence...

When the battlefield fell silent, Lepidus walked out of the camp and stepped among the corpses everywhere. In other words, he didn't even get a foothold. The Balantians' crazy attack was defeated. The remains of the tribe's men and women were like those after the ebb tide. The dense gravel was as dense as rocks, and no less than three thousand people were killed. Lepidus understood that the essence and manpower of this tribe were completely destroyed. Even if he withdrew his troops now, the other party would be unable to intercept him, and he would never be able to restore the tribe's strength afterwards. Energetic.

But he will not leave again. Since the hatred caused by bloody killings will not be eliminated for a hundred years, then eradicate it completely now - the Barantia tribe, the siege of you will continue until your Until the totem and bloodline completely disappear from this world.

The next day, the Roman soldiers began to dig trenches in front of the camp chain. Even though the Balantians could no longer launch large-scale attacks, they were still cautious. Half of them were working and the other half were on guard. The rustling of shovels and the sound of shovels The clanging sound was as dense as the music of death. When the standard trench appeared, the military slaves and other soldiers began to build walls behind it, and the bodies of the barbarians killed the previous day were all loaded up. , was thrown into the ditch of the big camp behind, covered with soil and trampled down, Lepidus ordered the entire camp to be destroyed, and all the soldiers and slaves moved into the small camp behind the blockade wall, waiting for the order of the general attack.

After a market day, the blockade wall, which was fifteen stadias long, was completed, like a noose, strangled at the throat of the city of Barantia.

In addition, in order to prevent the soldiers from being idle and panicking, the kind-hearted Lepidus used whips and money to urge them to build an earth embankment at the small freshwater river between the Douro River and the city of Barantia, and then dig a ditch. Divert the water to your own camp group. In this way, the external water source of this barbarian settlement was also cut off.

At this time, many small tribes in the Vittini region and Lusitania who resisted Rome crossed the mountains and passes, carried water and food on pack horses, and then changed to small boats at the Douro River, and entered the river one after another. They stubbornly and bravely tried to climb over the earthen embankment and deliver supplies to the Balantians, but the camps on both sides of the river threw dense and rainy javelins at them-the Iberian Peninsula is now the warmest period of the year, but the Romans in the camps can often salvage human limbs and blood in the water, which is very disappointing.

Soon, the personnel supervising the epidemic in the camp strongly suggested to Lepidus that if this continued, the fresh water in the river would be contaminated by the corpses of [***] and would be undrinkable, even if boiled, and the groundwater was mostly bitter and salty. If the mules and horses did not want to die of thirst, they had to launch a general attack on Balantia as soon as possible.

In this way, Lepidus gave a cautious order and launched a general attack on the city three days later. He was actually waiting for the enemy's envoys to surrender, but they have not surrendered until now.

Three days later, the Romans' "general attack" was in name only, because when a vanguard of a hundred people ran into the settlement, they found that all the people, regardless of the old, weak, women and children, had committed suicide. Some used daggers, and some hanged themselves on the beams of the house. The bodies were hanging and lying everywhere. The whole city became a dead city - no one could hold out for so long under the blockade without water. (To be continued.)