Chapter 1381: Old Bastard

Chapter 1381 -337: Old Bastard

“This lord is spent. You lot, escort me into East Mountain Fort to rest.”

This wasn’t Lord Zheng deliberately trying to put on some kind of show; he really was exhausted.

He’d been hacking and slashing for so long, and even been possessed by Mo Wan once in the middle of it. To have held out until now without collapsing was already no small feat.

Even the Sword Saint’s robes were already stained with blood—that alone showed how much of an ordeal this slaughter had been.

Tired,

truly tired,

but he still could not lie down to sleep,

at least,

Lord Zheng knew full well in his heart that right now, he still had to keep bringing his own value to bear.

Once war breaks out, tens of thousands of lives on both sides are drawn into it. From bottom to top, no one actually escapes it. Every single person strains every nerve, all for that final outcome;

either you die, or I perish—there is no vague middle ground to choose from.

No matter how tired, how drained,

you still have to grit your teeth and hold on.

The counterattack just now was something he had forced through by using the command carriage and his suit of golden armor to rally the center and the routing troops and smash them back out. Now, although Jin Shuke’s stroke of genius had caused the Chu people on their side to start collapsing, the situation—the overall situation, to be precise—had not yet truly settled.

The killing, the brutal fighting, would still have to go on for a while longer.

But dawn was already showing. In such a situation, the wind had in fact already shifted. Now, unless the Chu people still had some fresh reserve force they hadn’t committed yet to throw in, the longer they lingered outside East Mountain Fort, the more awkward their position would become.

In the end it was the structure of a strong Yan and a weak Chu. That Zhuguai of Chu had indeed almost flipped the game with his surprise move, but as long as Lord Zheng here managed to hold out and catch his breath again, that “trick” was doomed not to last.

Even if they won this battle, Lord Zheng’s side was destined to win only at a terrible cost, but it was still worth it.

Whether the price of victory is worth paying really depends on the level of the opponent: the Chu imperial clan’s guard, plus that Zhuguai and that Fire Phoenix banner.

Any way you calculate it,

it’s a profit!

“Escort the lord into the fort!”

“Escort the lord into the fort!”

The horses that had originally dragged the command carriage had been almost completely killed or scattered in the earlier chaotic melee, but that didn’t matter. A crowd of Yan Army soldiers began to push the command carriage forward by sheer manpower.

The “Zheng” character standard still fluttered,

and the golden-armored figure on the command carriage, even just sitting there, gave people an impression of tremendous stature.

To push the command carriage forward like this, on such a tense battlefield, did seem to waste a small portion of manpower—but honestly, this bit of manpower, in the context of the whole battlefield, really wasn’t anything.

Just like doing business—you have to put down capital before you can expect returns.

The shift in the situation along the central line, together with the command carriage moving forward again, amounted to telling all the other forces across the field:

Counterattack,

begins now!

Lord Zheng had always had Liang Cheng at his side, not to mention being personally coached by Prince Jingnan. Naturally, he had his own understanding of the battlefield posture at this moment.

The hardest phase had already passed.

The Chu people’s tactic of splitting their forces to peel away layers like an onion, looking for a decisive solution in the center, had indeed given Chu an enormous advantage for a very long stretch earlier, but now it had also dug the pit in advance in which they would bury themselves.

After the cavalry force under Jin Shuke smashed through that one line, he immediately hoisted the great banner and charged out again, with a host of Yan Army riders who had just broken free of their respective engagements swiftly following behind.

Even farther away, all the Yan cavalry who happened to be mounted and had previously been fighting on their own scattered fronts now instinctively converged beneath his banner.

Once upon a time, Jin Shuke had been just one of the original prisoner soldiers, his origins as low as could be. At the start, he didn’t even speak the Xia language.

When Lord Zheng took up residence in Green Willow Fortress and began his southward campaign adventure, Jin Shuke had accompanied him in storming a Qian people stronghold. That fortress was more like a “chicken coop.”

That night, Jin Shuke caught one detail: when Lord Zheng’s gaze swept over these Barbarians who were openly showing their primal desire toward women, there was a certain, deep gloom in it.

So later, when Jin Shuke became the captain of the gate guard and had the means, he still insisted on marrying a wild woman.

No one is born an idiot. And even idiots can tell beauty from ugliness.

Back in Shengle City, wild women were the lowest of slaves, and in the red tents they were also the cheapest class.

The women of Jin land were clearly cleaner, and their skin was better. When you get right down to it, for a Barbarian, marrying a Xia woman was in itself something worth boasting about.

But Jin Shuke still chose not to do that, all because of that faint displeasure Lord Zheng had shown by the campfire that night.

As a wolf within the pack, to pay attention to and study the wolf king’s preferences—there’s nothing shameful about that, and it’s not disgraceful in the slightest.

And now, that obscure nobody from back then who had not died in the grinding slaughter of the desert prisoner tribes, who had not died in one after another of Lord Zheng’s war-time adventures, had endured to this day, held out to this moment, and finally it was his turn, by his own strength, to help the wolf king forcibly change the course of this battle.

It’s just a pity

that Jin Shuke right now had no mind at all to savor the excited aftertaste of his own transformation, because he still had many things to do, he still had to keep busy.

That cavalry force under his lead threaded back and forth again and again, slicing through and cruising again and again, plunging again and again into one battle cluster after another. He was like a strand of cord that forcibly took the battlefield, chopped into many separate parts, and made the whole of it come alive.