Chapter 181 - 164: Will to Fight
Chapter 181: Chapter 164: Will to Fight
The Beastman adjutant looked down in confusion to find that his abdomen and chest had been run through at some point. Veins bulged beneath his skin, as if desperately trying to save his life.
He realized the blood wasn’t from a human; it was his own.
The glory of his forefathers, the prosperity of humanity, riding a Warg Mount across boundless fields... In his final moments, the Beastman adjutant recalled his forefathers’ descriptions of the war from thirty years ago.
He remembered General Curry saying that the boundless fields of the Franks had once belonged to the Beastmen.
’What do boundless fields even look like?’
.....
After several charges back and forth by the human Heavy Cavalry, the infantrymen from the rear finally, belatedly, arrived.
In fact, this was the perfect time for the human Infantry to enter the fray. Robson had deliberately waited for this very moment.
The Beastmen’s massed formations had been shattered, and their forces were in disarray. Robson gave the direct order for the regiment to charge in with their wagons.
After all, many of the Beastman Infantry had taken cover in places the human Cavalry could not easily reach.
"Move out! Speed! Go!" Captain Jason commanded the soldiers behind him.
As soon as the wagons reached the barracks, the Non-commissioned Officers on board immediately began to organize their men, forming them up to launch the attack.
Hans and Odin had long since stopped their idle banter. Grabbing their shields and iron swords, they vaulted off the wagon. In a matter of seconds, all the soldiers from the wagon had disembarked and fallen into formation.
By this point, the recently scattered Beastman Infantry still hadn’t had time to react before the human army began to push forward.
Some of the Beastmen saw the situation and knew it was dire. They didn’t flee, nor did they rush forward recklessly. Instead, under the command of a towering Beastman Officer, a few Beastman Warriors formed a small squad. Panting heavily, they watched the approaching humans with extreme caution.
To deal with Beastmen clustered together like this, the human soldiers typically formed groups of ten or a dozen, assembled into a Shield Array, and slowly advanced on them.
"ROAR!"
The Beastman Officer watched the enemy’s maneuver and knew he was no match for these experts at using a Shield Array. He simply raised his giant axe, roared in fury, and charged the human formation.
The other few Beastmen roared and charged forward as well. But before their great-axes could even fall, the enemy’s longspears had already lanced out. The thrust and retraction were executed as a single, fluid motion, as if practiced a thousand times, their coordination perfectly seamless.
The Beastmen were already suffering from long-term exhaustion. Their ability to charge once more was fueled purely by desperate courage and primal bloodlust.
Many of them held their axes with their minds in a complete fog, unable to tell where they were or what they needed to do. If they could just collapse, they felt like they could sleep for years on end.
Scenes like this played out repeatedly throughout the Beastman Camp. The actions of the Beastmen just now could still be considered organized and planned—at least they had gathered together before launching their counterattack. In many other parts of the camp, Beastmen were fighting alone. Even now, many were just waking up, with no idea what was going on.
Their fates were even more tragic. Facing the well-prepared, tightly coordinated human troops in full heavy armor, these Beastman Warriors, whose spirits were not even fully roused, had absolutely no chance to resist.
A number of Beastman Officers did try to reorganize the troops under their command, hoping to launch an effective counterattack or rally a few hundred men to mount a new defense.
But how could Claude possibly give them that opportunity?
The Heavy Cavalry had been dispersed into groups of ten to rampage throughout the camp. Any unit of Beastman Wolf Cavalry that showed the slightest sign of forming up was targeted and broken apart, until they were reduced to nothing more than scattered individuals.
And awaiting these scattered individuals were the advancing squares of human Infantry.
After all, there were blind spots the Cavalry simply couldn’t reach. For the Infantry, however, no such restrictions existed.