429 A motley crowd versus a regular force Part 1 (1/2)

The ninth and tenth emblem groups consisted of infantrymen, these soldiers were equipped with inferior horses. Even though inferior horses were used, a distance of fifty miles could quickly be covered. Lex was furious, Daniel had ruined her plan.

If Daniel's five-hundred man team was extirpated, then the morale would undoubtedly be affected even if Lex managed to seize Fort Strand.

She could not blame Daniel though. Daniel was originally a small noble who only needed to wait for money to enter his pockets, he would not know how to fight a war. That was why Saleen instructed Gurney to lead the battle. Saleen had deployed the army which was under Daniel's command however. This caused a contradiction.

When Gurney wanted to claim credit, Daniel should have stopped him. Saleen's words had caused Daniel to have misgivings, after all, he was clueless about fighting a war. Since Daniel felt that Gurney made sense, he acceded to Gurney's request.

Gurney was a person who was not fond of a direct battle with the enemy. Very quickly, the soldiers sent for the investigation had sunk into Gurney's ambush. On a narrow road fraught with rocks on both sides, the barbarians hid behind the rocks. Up ahead, a team of pirates rode on the skeletal warhorses, pretending to run into the enemy by chance. Then, the pirates fled, luring the enemy into the ring of the trap.

Daniel's death creature, the pikoosi, was hiding in the ground. When the enemy arrived, the pikoosi immediately emerged from the ground and cast a Death spell called Weak Space.

In that instant, hundreds of cavalrymen with their horses were inflicted with this spell. A spell with such a huge range had caused the pikoosi to be exhausted. He did not bother fighting with the enemy, he simply turned around and escaped. The soldiers would not dare chase the pikoosi.

The warhorses went limp and fell to the ground, while many of the soldiers in metal armor also fell down. The barbarians then leaped out from behind the rocks on both sides of the road, waving their giant axes frantically, causing Gurney to be outraged.

When the soldiers from Fort Strand got struck by the giant axes, their armor was destroyed. This caused blood to spurt in all directions. All of their clothes were ruined. Gurney's plan to change into the enemy's outfit was thwarted.

If the soldiers were unqualified, any kind of plan would also come to naught. Daniel and Francis were seated in the magic chariots, they did not take any action. They had to conserve their mental strength and magic chords in order to begin the battle after entering the city. At that moment, the responsibility laid on the two-hundred barbarians.

Other than being a little crazy, the barbarians were fine. In the face of an enemy who outnumbered them two to one, they had the upper hand. Since the pikoosi's Death spell had not lost its effect, the enemy's strength was reduced by more than half.

The hundreds of enemies present were not considered heavy cavalrymen, but they were not light cavalrymen either. After losing the warhorses, no one would be able to travel swiftly. That body of metal armor thus became the soldiers' burden. Had they been wearing leather armor, they might have been able to match up to the barbarians.

The barbarians bellowed crazily. At the start, they were still pretty coordinated. After that, they simply charged into the middle of the enemy's formation and started slaughtering the enemies in a wild fashion. If it was not for that Death spell with a large area of effect, at least half of the barbarians would have died. At that moment, only a few barbarians got injured by accident. The rest of them simply rode on their armor advantage and went on a rampage.

The armor Saleen had crafted for the barbarians was thick, but not heavy. It was very suitable for a person who possessed brute strength. Even without armor, the barbarians would simply hack the enemy, they rarely dodged. Whoever was more ruthless would achieve victory. A fighting style like that was very disadvantageous on the battlefield. The enemy was already very weak, they could not wield their weapons anymore. Only the tips of their swords could hurt the barbarians.

That was a very slow but effective way of fighting, on the condition that the enemy's offensive power had been greatly reduced. In some sense, the weapons crafted by Saleen had saved the barbarians. If the barbarians had wielded stone weapons, it would have been difficult for them to break the enemy's metal armor. The barbarians paled in comparison to the Caucasus people. There was a number of forgers among the Caucasus people who could create razor-sharp metal weapons. The barbarians were using weapons crafted from the obsidian rock however. These weapons might be effective against a magic beast, but they would not work against human soldiers.

Back then, when Saleen first recruited thousands of barbarians, he used his metal weapons to exchange for a huge quantity of obsidian rocks. These obsidian rocks had been accumulated for thousands of years. Some barbarians had even wielded the same weapon for dozens of generations already.

Both parties were overjoyed. The barbarians obtained a stronger weapon, while Saleen had obtained the precious obsidian rocks.

Gurney was helpless. He instructed the pirates to do a rear swing, using their crossbows to kill the enemy. At this point in time, the pirates' archer skills were exemplified, several barbarians got shot. Luckily, their armor was good, so they did not die. An injured barbarian was even more ferocious. With eyes bloodshot, they swiped their axes about as though they were insane.

Gurney was dumbfounded. He greatly admired Saleen. ”No wonder Sir had given my team a large volume of the Restorative Water, he already expected this outcome a long time ago.”

The messy battle mysteriously ended in a victory.

After about half an hour of intense battling, four-hundred enemies were massacred before the Death spell lost its effect. Of course, the armor on the corpses was tattered and torn, it could not be worn anymore.

Fortunately, Daniel got quite lucky. Shortly after, another four-hundred infantrymen arrived. They were discovered by a flying spirit which Daniel had released earlier on. Gurney was for a moment muddle-headed, as he commanded the pirates to go for a head-on battle.