Chapter 908: Wang Chong Strikes! The Bane of the Battlefield Halo! (1/2)

Translated by: Hypersheep325

Edited by: Michyrr

Li Siye, Sun Zhiming, Zhuang Zhengping, Chi Weisi, Gao Feng, Nie Yan… these commanders led the forces of Qixi in a frenzied charge in front of the second defense line. However, just their force of forty thousand could not stop the charge of the more than one hundred thousand Turko-Tibetan elites. For soldiers, quality outweighed quantity. This battle was taking place in Talas, west of the Cong Mountains, and the Tibetans and Turks had needed absolute secrecy in their approach, so they were not capable of bringing that many soldiers.

Thus, while Dalun Ruozan had only brought around seventy thousand and Duwu Sili had only brought around forty thousand, these were the elite of the elite.

Though they were fighting against forty thousand powerful soldiers of the Great Tang, they continued to come in endless waves. Not even Li Siye and his Wushang Cavalry wreaking havoc through their lines could stop all of them.

Some of the Turks and Tibetans had even chosen to go around Li Siye and Sun Zhiming to attack the second defense line together with Duwu Sili's wolves, with Xu Keyi's ballista force being one of their primary targets.

Neigh!

A warhorse cried out as a Turkic cavalryman borrowed a pile of wolf corpses to jump over the shields of the infantry and land behind them. Swishswishswish! Countless sabers, spears, swords, and halberds came at him from all sides.

This Turk's body landed as a sieve that leaked blood, a corpse that could not be any more dead. But his arrival was like a signal, as he was soon followed by the rest of the army, Turkic and Tibetan cavalry jumping over in twos and threes, landing in the middle of the army to take the place of the fallen.

”Kiiill!”

Meanwhile, on the other side, a frenzied shout echoed through the sky, spoken not in the language of the Tang, but in an Arabic tongue that was suffused with a brutal and bloodthirsty aura. Khaled, the Beast of Arabia, had previously had his Iron Beast Army essentially crippled by the Tang ballistae.

But the Iron Beast Army had still played a major role. They had raised up the corpses on the battlefield, using them as shields to block the ballista fire. They might have lost their warhorses, but the Iron Beast Halo and the Dark Blood Shield remained in place, still reducing the lethality of the ballistae.

Roooar! A dismounted Iron Beast soldier raised up high the massive corpse of a horse as he charged at a ballista. A ballista bolt pierced through the dead horse and through his armor, but then it was deflected by his charge and went shooting off into the sky.

Only the warriors of the Arabian Empire, who fought to live and fought to the death, would dare to so fearlessly and ferociously use their bodies to block a ballista bolt.

The fearless Iron Beast Army had obtained an incredibly precious opportunity for the rest of the Arab army. Thousands upon thousands of their men had fallen to the beehives and ballistae, but thousands upon thousands more had used the chance bought by the fallen to charge up to the steel walls.

Soldiers were constantly braving the forest of pikes, using the corpses to leap into the fray. Even if they ended up pincushioned by attacks from all sides, they still charged in, heedless of death. The concept of fear did not seem to exist in the minds of these Arabs.

The more death there was, the more gruesome and gory the battlefield, the more they wanted to fight. Even those mercenary pikemen from Greater and Lesser Balur began to show fear in the face of these savage and roaring Arabs, so one could easily imagine what the other mercenaries felt.

To the west of the Western Regions, in the battlefield legends, Arabs were synonymous with death. Countless powers and empires had felt the terror of the Arabs, their formidable will that did not fear death. And those kingdoms whose armies had collapsed and scattered like beasts in the face of the Arabs had formed the building blocks for the Arabs' legend of invincibility!

One wave, a second, a third… The Arab soldiers continued to roll in like the ceaseless tide, crashing again and again upon the first defense line.

”Hold!”

”Saber- and axemen, get ready!”

”Archers, get ready!”

On the battlefield, Wang Yan and Wang Fu were serene and unperturbed, like rocks standing firm against a pounding river as they commanded the infantry at the first defense line. No matter how fierce the Arab assault was, how fearless they were, or how many times they attacked, they were unable to penetrate the infantry formations of Wang Yan and Wang Fu.

Along the first defense line, the area defended by Wang Yan and Wang Fu was the most frequently assaulted. However, no matter how many Arabs managed to get past the steel walls, past the shields, beehives, and ballistae, they would all meet their ends in front of Wang Yan's infantry formations.

At the rear, nearly ten thousand infantry stood calmly in waiting.

In this era where cavalry was king, the Great Tang, where the terrain was not suitable for raising high-quality warhorses, had not won its hegemony through cavalry. In terms of infantry, however, the Great Tang reigned supreme, and it had been by means of these infantry that the Great Tang had once managed to crush Ü-Tsang, the Eastern and Western Turks, Goguryeo, and Mengshe Zhao, and even expanded into the Western Regions.

That had been the era of infantry!