Iron Powder and Spellcaster

There are no more insects, no more birds, and the completely silent forest is full of murderous intent.

Therefore, the series of horse hoofbeats in the distance seemed particularly abrupt.

The soldiers on the camp wall set up their muskets and pointed in the direction of the sound of hooves, their fingers resting on the firing rod.

The smoldering match rope flickered on and off, the musketeers' tense jaws loomed, and everyone swallowed unconsciously.

The three riders broke through the night and galloped straight towards the camp gate.

Seeing the leader's black armor and silver horse, the sergeant on the camp wall immediately shouted: "Don't shoot! It's Centurion Montagne!"

There was a gasping sound on the camp wall, and the musketeers closed the lids of the medicine pools, took off the match ropes, placed their muskets against the wall, and returned to the standby posture.

"Open the door!"

"Crunch... crunch..."

The heavy wooden gate slowly rose, and as soon as the three riders entered the doorway, it suddenly fell again.

The two riders went to rest their horses, and the leader walked straight into the command post.

The command post was deserted, with only a few people inside.

"How is it?" Lieutenant Colonel Robert raised his chin and stared at the map without raising his head.

"I left the bridge forest and headed north and then west. I ran at least two kilometers before encountering the enemy's light cavalry." Winters took off his helmet and pointed out the general range on the map: "No trace of the Herds was found in the bridge forest. , not even a rabbit."

It's not like the Barbarians are going to attack the Qiaolin camp - at least they won't attack from the north. This is the conclusion reached by Winters himself when he led the reconnaissance team.

The sound of footsteps and the collision of armor came from outside the military tent again.

"Second Lieutenant Varga is back." The guard came in to announce.

Not long after, Varga, who was scouting south, walked into the tent.

"There's a fight in the south." Varga ignored the salute and reported directly: "You can hear shouts of killing in the northern highlands, and you can also vaguely see the light of fire in the southern highlands. The camp is fine for the time being."

"How's it going over there at the bridge?" Lieutenant Colonel Robert asked.

"Half was destroyed." Varga replied: "The engineers are repairing the remaining half."

The activity space of the Plato Scout Cavalry was compressed into a small area, and the battlefield turned into a mist. No one knew what the White Lion had planned.

Although the defense has a tactical advantage, at the cost, the enemy also gains the initiative.

The military tent became quiet, and the atmosphere became dull for a while.

"Nothing strange." Seeing that his subordinates were silent, Lieutenant Colonel Robert said, "Yasin has been holding his urine for more than ten days. It's time for him to be relieved."

This metaphor was too vulgar to come from the mouth of a gentle man like Lieutenant Colonel Robert.

Some people laughed in agreement, but Winters failed to appreciate the leader's sense of humor, and he was actually more frightened.

"There are two reasons for the barbarians to make big moves. Either their reinforcements are coming, or our reinforcements are coming soon. Whether it is good or bad, we will see in the next few days." The lieutenant colonel said lightly: " Let’s each go back and rest, we must eat well and sleep well to have the strength to fight.”

The lieutenant colonel arranged the order of rotation, and the officers adjourned the meeting.

Everyone spent this night in tension and vigilance.

The soldiers on night watch kept their eyes open. They wanted to spot the enemy from behind the dark tree line, but they also didn't want to see the enemy.

Soldiers who were not on duty at night could not sleep well. Most of them did not even take off their armor and fell asleep.

Arpad's cavalrymen returned to the Qiaolin camp one after another, most of them with injuries.

When asked about the situation of the battle, these people could not tell clearly. They were all separated from the main force in the melee.

One second, most of them were waving their sabers and slashing left and right. The next second, they suddenly realized that there were no enemies or comrades around them, so they moved closer to the nearest friendly forces.

You can't blame them. Most night battles are like this: the two sides collide, fight in a confused manner for a while, and then retreat, leaving behind their wounded soldiers and corpses.

In this case, the prepared party always has an advantage.

After asking questions one by one, Lieutenant Colonel Robert already knew the situation of Arpad's department.

Apparently, the cavalry led by Arpad was intercepted by the enemy.

The two sides fought hard for a while, and the barbarians should have been repulsed—otherwise, it would not just be scattered wounded soldiers who would come back.

General Arpad, on the other hand, continued north along the river bank with his large cavalry force.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert ordered the estranged cavalry to be taken in, and arranged for people to boil water and melt salt to treat the wounds of the wounded.

As time went by, more and more separated and injured soldiers returned to the Qiaolin camp, and several officers were brought back unconscious by their horses.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert received more and more detailed information: the Hurds who had been deployed upstream had been defeated. Arpad continued to move north, encountering more and more Hurd cavalry.

The ferocious assault of the Platonic cavalry ended in a fire that burned the sky red.

Thick smoke shot straight into the sky, and even the sentinels sent out by Lieutenant Colonel Robert could see clearly.

Before that, Arpad led his troops to burn all the trees within a fifty-mile radius of the bridge except the bridge forest.

Judging from the results, the range of fifty miles is too conservative and underestimates the white lion.

This time, Arpad should have hit farther.

While everyone rejoiced at Arpad's victory, Winters had a bad feeling. He couldn't say why, maybe it was just because it went too smoothly.

Winters was not the only one who was uneasy. Lieutenant Colonel Robert was also worried - but he hid it well.

At the same time that he learned that there was thick smoke rising into the sky from the north, Lieutenant Colonel Robert ordered the Qiaolin camp to prepare for war.

The troops in the Qiaolin camp were divided into two parts: "those who can attack" and "those who cannot attack".

Winters' centurions were moved to the side of the attacking force because of their stronger combat power.

The premonition of the two "pessimistic" officers soon came true.

At dawn, the messenger cavalry, who had lost his helmet, brought Arpad's ring and a message: The garrison of the Qiaolin Camp came forward to assist.

"Could this be false?" Second Lieutenant Varga objected to taking the initiative: "Will General Arpad ask us for help?"

First deceive the defenders out of the strong camp, then gather them together and annihilate them. This set of things has been used by the barbarians, and the Platoans cannot help but be on guard.

"After inspection, the ring is real and the person is real." Lieutenant Colonel Robert ended all discussions: "Arpad must have really encountered a problem."

Carrying three days of dry food, one day of drinking water, and no baggage carriages, Lieutenant Colonel Robert led 1,200 soldiers to attack lightly.

Winters is among them.

…

Walk, walk, take steps, keep walking.

At first, there were only sporadic Hed's Qingqi around. Their courage was as small as sparrows, and they would flee if they were even slightly frightened.

The further they went, the more barbarians gathered around Robert's men.

The barbarian's courage increased sharply with the number of people. When they were riding one or two people, they would only spy from a distance, but when they were riding more than a dozen, they dared to approach and observe without restraint.

Qiang Yun snorted, and Winters gently rubbed the side of its neck.

Horses snort when they are anxious and snort when they are excited, and only close riders can tell the subtle differences.

"Don't worry, little guy." Winters put on his helmet, pulled up the throat armor, and put down the face guard: "Don't worry."

Eight hours later, Arpad's and Robert's men finally reunited.

The barbarian cavalry retreated, but the Platuan people only suffered a miserable victory.

Winters saw Wolf Town Dussac, and it turned out that the cavalry of the Jashka Brigade also accompanied Arpad in the battle last night.

He didn't see Andre and Bud.

"Andre! Bud!" Winters searched frantically among the wounded and asked when he saw someone: "Did you see Second Lieutenant Bad? Where is Second Lieutenant Cellini?"

No one could give him an answer.

Everyone was shouting, the horses were neighing, and Winters' mind went blank.

"Back there, I seem to see Second Lieutenant Cellini." A soldier whispered.

Winters jumped on his horse and ran to the back of the queue.

He didn't see Andre, but he saw Andre's extremely powerful dark horse.

There was no mistaking that horse, for it was the Turtletown champion's horse, which had been found by the river after the war.

According to the rules, when Winters entered the Turtletown Championship, the horse belonged to him, but he gave it to Andre.

Seeing the black horse, and taking a closer look, the dirty groom holding the reins was none other than Andrea Cellini?

Winters jumped off the saddle, sprinted over, and grabbed Andre's shoulders tightly. First I wanted to cry, but then I couldn't help but laugh when I saw Andre's embarrassed look.

Winters had never seen Andre in such a sorry state in his life.

The latter's gorgeous hussar uniform had been scorched, and the tassels and tassels had been burned away.

His bearskin hat also disappeared, and now he was wearing a broken sewing hat that he "would rather die than wear" - it seemed that keeping warm was more important.

Winters has a bit of stubble on his chin because he hasn't bothered to shave it.

In order to look beautiful, Andre grew a very delicate beard and had to take care of it every day.

Now those beards are gone too. To be precise, they are curled up and charred black.

Andre's face was even more smeared, as if he had been washed with coal.

The contrast was so great that at first glance, Winters didn't think that the "groomman" was Andre.

"Why are you here?" Andre was startled at first, and then he was very happy when he recognized who was in front of him.

"Come to pick you up!" Winters asked hurriedly: "Where is Bud?"

Andre's face turned gray, pointed to the simple sledge pulled by the black horse, and whispered: "At the back."

The black horse dragged a simple sledge made of branches and leather straps. Bud was lying on the sledge, with a bloody cloth wrapped around his head, motionless.

These words were like a bolt from the blue. Winters' eyesight turned black and he could almost lose his balance.

"Not dead!" Andre also noticed something was wrong: "Not dead!"

Winters couldn't care less - even though he really wanted to punch Andre hard - and immediately checked on Bud.

Bud is still alive, but has fallen into a deep coma. The other injuries on the body were not fatal, so the only wound left was the one on the head.

"I got hit on the head." Andre became more and more sad as he thought about it: "The helmet was dented."

"As long as you are alive." Winters carefully fixed Bud's neck with clothes: "As long as you are alive."

Andre squatted on the ground, grabbing his hair in pain: "Let's... what is this!"

"I don't know either."

"We should escape, we should have escaped from the beginning. If we had made up our minds to escape back to Veneta at that time, we would now..."

"No, listen to me!" Winters roughly pulled Andre up. He stared into the latter's eyes and said word by word: "It doesn't matter what happened in the past. Now, whether you want it or not If we are willing, we all have to win this battle for the Platuan people. Only in this way can we have a chance to survive."

…

The Hud reinforcements are really coming.

Because the barbarians spared no effort to inform the Platuan people about this.

The Hedians were greatly encouraged after receiving the reinforcements. They formed their troops in front of the southern and northern highlands. The leaders of the tribes were eager to let the Platuan people come down and count their heads one by one.

This is of course a psychological tactic, extremely simple and crude.

But it is indeed effective, because even the most stubborn Platoans can no longer deny that the barbarian reinforcements are really coming.

As for the reinforcements from the Platons? There is no news about them yet.

The White Lion burned two-thirds of the bridge forest, and Arpad also burned the source of the White Lion's wood to ashes.

It is very difficult for trees to thrive in the wilderness. A forest may take hundreds of years and various chances to grow, but it is much easier to destroy them.

The fire Arpad set burned for two days and one night.

If White Lion wanted to get wood again, he would have to go hundreds of kilometers away.

However, the Platuan people also suffered heavy casualties: half of the cavalry squadron was beaten to the point of losing their combat capability, and almost no one was without injuries; during the long-distance attack, the loss of horses was greater than the loss of personnel.

Arpad is said to have sent away the flags of the cavalry squadrons and the eagle flag of the Fifth Corps.

The cavalry that could continue to fight were organized into nine cavalry squadrons - this was the first time since the establishment of the legion.

The auxiliary troops can be dispersed and reorganized at will, but for the standing army, which has a stronger sense of belonging and honor, being dispersed and reorganized is equivalent to the destruction of an honorary collective.

The Platuan people began to shrink their troops, and the Qiaolin camp also received an order to evacuate.

The logging teams cut down all the trees that could be used, and the remaining shrubs and small trees were burned to the ground.

Then Lieutenant Colonel Robert led everyone to demolish the Qiaolin camp and retreat to the main camp.

Winters's troops returned to the Jessica Brigade, and Bard's centurion was now under his and Mason's command.

Bud regained consciousness, but his fever returned.

After Father Kaman's examination, he determined that Bud's skull had a linear fracture, and his medical advice was brief: rest.

Plato's entire army shrank into three camps: the southern highland, the northern highland, and the main camp.

Szekely and Arpad also knew that they could not count on auxiliary troops now, so the three camps were defended by standing troops.

All the auxiliary troops were devoted to bridge construction, and the Jashka Brigade was also transferred to the bridge construction headquarters.

White Lion's fire raft destroyed the bridge, which was originally over 110 meters long, to less than 50 meters, and the remaining bridge piles also needed to be reinforced.

The Platuan people have been forced to a desperate situation and are working almost day and night to repair the old bridge piles and replace the new bridge piles.

At the same time, the White Lions also launched attacks on the fortresses on the northern and southern highlands.

The city is being sieged on the mountain, and the bridge is being built at the foot of the mountain. The people building the bridge can hear the fighting on the hillside, and the people on the hillside can also hear the sound of piling.

The pain in the hearts of the Platoans was indescribable.

It was too late to build bridge piles, bridges, and bridge decks step by step. The engineer officer came up with the idea of ​​"not building a bridge, but directly fixing pontoons and rafts with bridge piles to build a [floating bridge]." This idea was immediately adopted.

Plato's engineers no longer built beams.

After they drove down the wooden piles, they directly fixed the pontoons, rafts, and boats on the wooden piles. Even if it is laid with simple wooden boards, people can barely leave.

The speed of bridge construction is greatly improved.

The offensive and defensive battle on the hillside once again verified an irrefutable truth: humans learn other things very slowly, but killing skills are the fastest to learn.

The Platoans never thought that the White Lion had learned anything from them.

The Platuan people had blasted the walls of Bienli three times. Now the barbarians followed suit and started to blast the Platt camp.

Their first blast was, as expected, fireworks.

Same thing the second time.

The third time too.

At first, the Plato soldiers were still laughing at the barbarians, but soon no one could laugh anymore.

With practice and improvement time and time again, the Herders gradually mastered the know-how, and their blasting power became more and more powerful.

The barbarians absorbed military technology at a speed that frightened the people of Plato.

The proliferation of military technology is a hundred or a thousand times more terrifying than the mere circulation of weapons.

Any Platoon who sees this scene will no longer question Plato's stifling strategy of the past thirty years. They will only regret why they didn't strangle the white lion's throat harder.

The sound of explosions that sounded almost every day was the best whip. It hit the backs of the Plato engineers and auxiliary soldiers hard, urging them to exert their full strength.

Progress on the bridge was rapid, and it took only two days to cross the middle of the river again.

At this time, it no longer mattered about Venetians, Platoans, regional discrimination, or sectarianism. Everyone was a grasshopper on a rope. If we lose this battle, no one will survive.

Winters also had a sense of crisis as if a sharp blade was pressed against his back, so he picked up an ax and worked hard like a lowly soldier with the lowest rank.

His only relief was that Bud's fever was gone.

Father Carman stayed with Bud all night, and Bud's fever miraculously went away the next morning. Just because of the massive blood loss, he was still very weak and needed to rest.

Seeing that the bridge pile was less than fifty meters away from the other side of the river, the last thing everyone wanted to see happened.

Along with the thunderous explosion, tons of soil mixed with human body fragments flew into the sky.

It was like a mud rain fell on the camp, and the bloody mud even flew to the feet of Winters, who was sawing wood.

Winters saw: first one person fled towards the main camp from the southern highland, then two people, and finally groups of broken soldiers ran down the hillside.

Not even the Supervisory Team could stop this rout.

Winters didn't say anything. He spit in the palm of his hand twice and continued to saw wood.

In the morning, the camp in the Southern Highlands was breached.

In the afternoon, the barbarians pushed the cannon up to the southern highland and bombarded the bridge.

In the evening, Lieutenant Colonel Jessica, Winters, and Andre were summoned to the corps headquarters for a meeting.

Colonel Laszlo, Lieutenant Colonel Robert, and their surviving centurions were also there.

Colonel Laszlo remained as calm as a dead man.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert's cheek was shot through with a heavy arrow, three teeth were knocked out, and the wound was sutured with cotton thread.

Unable to speak, he nodded towards Winters.

In addition, there are two centurions with shaved heads and red cloth tied on their left arms - they are officers of the death row camp.

This is all the troops of the Plato Army that are still capable of fighting.

Sackler didn't waste any words and told all the officers present bluntly: "Recapture the Southern Highland fortress tonight. If you win, you will live, if you don't win, you will die."

…

In the darkness, Montagne's centurions had assembled.

Under the dim moonlight, Winters looked at his warriors one by one.

Among them are the soldiers he brought from Wolf Town, the young men from Blackwater Town and Shengke Town, and other farmers and tenants from newly cultivated land.

He could call everyone by name and recognize everyone's face.

This battle, campaign and even war has entered a life-or-death moment.

Winters didn't need to say anything, he trusted them and they trusted him.

Winters' eyes were sore, but tears welled up in his eyes and stubbornly refused to flow down in the end.

"Fall away, night. Fall, stars." A sentence echoed in Winters' mind, and he chanted slowly: "At dawn, we will win!"

The cold wind blew through everyone's clothes, and the River Styx flowed silently.

Winters was the first to walk into the night: "Let's go!"

I drew a map of the Battle of Styx, which can be found in this chapter and in book circles.

I owe you another chapter... "Turandot" only premiered in 1926, but please don't pay attention to these details. Because before this story was born, the scene of Winters chanting "Let the night go, let the stars sink. At dawn, I will win" had already been born. This melody has been playing in my head for at least a year.

Thanks to book friends for reading, subscribing, recommending tickets, monthly tickets, tips and comments, thank you all.