The Signal Cannon was actually just a hole dug in a thick piece of wood, some gunpowder was poured in, and a spark was thrown in. The boom was very loud, and it was used to warn people at critical moments. But Gule Mountain hadn't experienced such a thing for ten or twenty years. The people in the stockade were shocked when they heard the sound. Then they wondered what was going on.
Ma Chengta was still cursing when he heard the sound. He had been in a bad mood all day. Killing a female slave didn't completely relieve his frustration. When he heard the sound of the cannon, he thought there was an accident. But the guards on the wall soon pointed to the riverbank outside and screamed. He quickly climbed up the wall to see what was going on. He saw a group of people advancing quickly with torches hundreds of meters away.
Ma Chengta still didn't realize the danger was approaching. He was just wondering where the group came from in the middle of the night. It wasn't until he saw Zhou Qingfeng riding a giant wolf that he cried out, "Enemy attack! The Han people are here."
Ever since Li Chengliang abandoned the Six Kuandian Castles and left Liaodong, the Han people's army hadn't attacked the Jurchen tribe. The Han people at the border kept fleeing, and some of them were even willing to be slaves to the Jurchen tribe. Their cowardly reputation gradually spread, and the Jurchen tribe looked down on them. But today, the Han people came to attack.
There weren't many soldiers on the wall of the stockade. The gate of the stockade was open, and they were still receiving food from Suzi River. A large number of slaves were blocking the entrance of the stronghold. Seven or eight supervisors were yelling and cursing under the light of the turpentine torches. When they heard Ma Chengta shout 'enemy attack', many people were baffled. They had no idea who the enemy was. The Jin Kingdom, with Jianzhou as its main body, hadn't been beaten for many years.
It wasn't until Ma Chengta started screaming that the gate of the stockade began to close slowly. But the slaves and supervisors who stayed outside the gate were suddenly terrified. They tried to block the gate and hide in the stockade. Ma Chengta was anxious when the two sides were pushing and shoving.
Others didn't know how powerful Zhou Qingfeng was, but Ma Chengta knew. Seeing the young man riding a wolf come in the middle of the night, he finally knew why he was so agitated. His investigation and harassment of Fushun had been unsuccessful twice. Someone must be behind this. This kind of abnormality had never happened in the past, so it should have been a cause for alarm.
However, Ma Chengta did not expect Zhou Qingfeng to be so bold. In his heart, the Jianzhou army had always held the initiative, and they could fight whoever they wanted. However, he did not expect that Zhou Qingfeng, who had just taken control of Fushun and had just climbed to the position of Baihu, would actually risk universal condemnation and take the initiative to start a war. Daming's imperial court had never shown mercy to their own generals who dared to start trouble at the borders. They would kill them as soon as they caught them.
Ma Chengta had always been a tyrant. Now that it was his turn to be killed, the panic in his heart was no less than that of Zhou Qingfeng a few days ago. When he saw that there were still slaves blocking the gate, he shouted angrily, "Kill those slaves! Close the gate is more important!"
No, it was useless to close the door. There was no one on the walls of the stronghold. The fighting soldiers were all sleeping, so there was no way to defend against them.
Ma Chengta couldn't help but feel even more panicked. He glanced at the spear formation that was advancing quickly with the help of the Traveling Charm. He gritted his teeth and jumped down from the wall of the fort. By this time, there was already some chaos in the stronghold. The fighting soldiers who were resting were constantly being woken up by their comrades who were on sentry duty. When they learned that someone dared to launch a sneak attack on Da Jin's stronghold, the fierce Nuzhen soldiers who had been fighting all year round were filled with righteous indignation.
Nuzhen barbarians with disheveled clothes ran out of one house after another, swinging their braids. Few of them were wearing proper armor. Instead, they were holding weapons and shouting curses everywhere. A few Nuzhen leaders were commanding their men and calling their subordinates to their sides.
They were sleeping soundly in the middle of the night. When they suddenly heard that the enemy was in front of them, even the veteran soldiers couldn't help but panic. If it had been the Ming Army, it would have been a mess. It was already good enough that the Nuzhen didn't run away immediately. After all, not everyone could provide their subordinates with enough meat to solve their night blindness. Not everyone could pull their subordinates out from time to time for emergency night gatherings.
When the one hundred fighting soldiers of the two Niu Lu all ran out and prepared to fight, Ma Chengta also called out the remaining people in the stronghold, the old, the weak, and even the slaves to fight the enemy. At the same time, he also had to send people to climb over the wall on the other side of the stronghold to ask for help from other strongholds and even Hetuala. Finally, he grabbed his Talisman Seal Bag and a few magic tools, preparing to fight Zhou Qingfeng head-on …
But just as he thought of fighting head-on, the wall of the stronghold on one side of Gule Mountain flew up into the sky with a boom. A dozen remaining people in the stronghold had just climbed up the wall with bows, arrows, and knives when they turned into a cloud of expanding smoke. The black gunpowder wasn't very powerful, and the inaccurate formula even weakened its power. But five three-kilogram packs of explosives were very powerful.
The flames in the explosion weren't very obvious, but the pressure of the explosion caused a violent vibration. Ma Chengta was at least fifty meters away from the explosion. But the blast wave still made his chest feel heavy and his ears ring.
Ma Chengta staggered two steps. He leaned against a wooden wall and turned to look in the direction of the explosion. He lamented in his heart, 'Why did I think of fighting head-on with Zhou Qingfeng? Could it be that I can compare to Mangu Ertai? "
But Ma Chengta was guarding Gule Mountain, so he couldn't just run away. He didn't know how many people Zhou Qingfeng had brought with him in the dark, but the attack was too fierce. After the wall of the stronghold was breached, there was a big gap in the defense. The only thing he could do was to immediately shrink the defense, withdraw the people who were arranged outside, and rely on the buildings in the stronghold to fight in the streets.
"Call the people back and use the buildings to fortify the stronghold. There aren't many Han people, so we can fight them. "Ma Chengta made up an excuse and wanted to gather the hundreds of people in the stronghold to resist together. The current situation was different from when he was attacked by Zhou Qingfeng in the horse market. He was appointed to guard Gule Mountain, so he couldn't run away. If he ran away, he would die.
This kind of military law that forbade escape forced the commander of the garrison to stay and fight to the death. Ma Chengta placed all his hopes on the few trusted aides he had just sent out. He hoped that at least a few of them would be able to escape and bring back reinforcements before the entire stronghold was destroyed. If they galloped on horseback, it would only take four hours for reinforcements to arrive from Hetuala.
After the wall of the stronghold was breached, the Nun Zhenren in the stronghold retreated and completely gave up on the periphery. The martial gate was the first to break open the half-closed stronghold gate and rushed in with the entire platoon. Under Zhou Qingfeng's control, the spears kept stabbing and killing the few enemies who were running around. However, if they wanted to fight the enemies in the stronghold one by one, they definitely didn't have enough manpower.
Zhou Qingfeng didn't want to occupy the stronghold. He just wanted to destroy it. For the buildings that used a lot of wood, the 'combat engineers' who had just done a meritorious deed took the field again. The 'arson grenades' stuffed with black gunpowder were constantly thrown into the fortified houses. The enemies in the houses had never encountered such a thing. The exploding pots didn't have much power, but the sound of the explosion was terrifying.
Li Yanxi led a spear squad to be the sharp knife. They were supposed to be used to break through the stronghold gate. In the end, the stronghold gate was easily taken down. When they killed their way into the stronghold, they didn't see the enemy elites who were stubbornly resisting and might cause a lot of damage to them. However, when facing the houses, the arrows that kept shooting out of the doors and windows became a problem.
Under the double protection of the military formation and armor, the morale of the soldiers of the 'First Battle Meritorious Deed Squad' was extremely high. However, it was not easy to continuously take down every house that the enemy was defending. It took too long to advance from house to house. Just when Li Yanxi was annoyed by the anxious front line and the slow attack efficiency, the combat engineers came to help.
A lit pot was thrown into the house, and a cloud of smoke would explode in a short while. Soon, a few Nun Zhenren barbarians would run out of the smoke, coughing violently and terrified.
Damn, no one had ever seen such a pot that could explode and make a sound. Seeing the Nun Zhenren barbarians squeezing out like headless flies, Li Yanxi shouted, "Kill!" and the ten spears of the entire squad immediately stabbed them. If stabbing once wasn't enough, they would stab a second time.
The Nun Zhenren barbarians on the opposite side were blown out of their wits and absolutely couldn't resist. Li Yanxi personally stabbed an armored barbarian to death. The first spear didn't pierce through. The barbarian waved his machete randomly and tried to break out of the encirclement. The second spear was changed to stabbing his throat, and only then was he killed.
"Squad leader, the one you stabbed to death was an officer." The soldier in the same squad shouted, "Do you want to cut off his head?"
"Cut off your head, we don't count military merits according to the head. We count according to whether the mission is completed or not. "Li Yanxi shouted, but she felt sorry for the Nun Zhenren officer on the ground.
The other party was probably a white-armored soldier who had just defended with five or six remaining soldiers. The arrow that this guy shot from the window directly hit the chest or the face, ruthlessly and accurately. Due to the current Imperial Guard personnel being scattered, the military formation built by Zhou Qingfeng couldn't gather courage to form a defensive wall. Li Yanxi was lucky enough to survive because of the armor she wore.
However, the Nun Zhenren white-armored soldier on the opposite side died under Li Yanxi's spear because of an exploding pot.
The 'Knife Squad' wanted to continue to advance, but the warning issued by Xu Bing made Zhou Qingfeng immediately order a retreat. The buildings in the stockade continued to be set ablaze, and the places where the tongues of fire licked continued to smoke. It wouldn't be long before the buildings were set ablaze. Under the light of the fire, no one could stand within more than ten meters, and one could still feel the rolling heat waves from twenty meters away.
Zhou Qingfeng ordered all the soldiers to withdraw from the stockade and regroup after counting the number of people. The spearmen who originally thought that they were going to be the main characters were ready to die for a righteous cause. However, when the battle started, they realized that the ones who were going to be the main characters were actually the peasant engineers who dug ditches and filled trenches.
The combat engineers usually bowed down when they saw the spearmen, but today they were especially proud. They held their necks high and looked up at the sky. The squad leader, Sang Wenlai, personally led a demolition team to the point pointed out by Zhou Qingfeng. They dug a hole, buried the explosives, lit the fuse, and retreated.
This time, with the help of the light in the stockade, more than a hundred soldiers who participated in the attack stood at a distance and saw the whole process of the explosion with their own eyes. It was really an earth-shaking explosion, and the walls and houses collapsed. It was as easy as crushing dry weeds and smashing rotten wood. In the past, those who had this kind of ability were cultivators above Level Five of Qi and Blood. However, in front of them were just a group of ordinary people who were transformed from farmers, small peddlers, and starving people.
How many cultivators were there? How many ordinary people were there? The "combat engineers" who mastered the powerful attack expressed their pride. Because just now, Zhou Qingfeng praised them as "the power that can decide the outcome of the war" and gave them the title of "Demolition Pioneers". At the same time, he also rewarded them with silver.
With a boom, another section of the stockade wall was blasted open. Behind the wall, there were hundreds of Nuzhen barbarians gathered. Once the wall was broken, they actually rushed out in the opposite direction as if they had gone mad. Zhou Qingfeng immediately flashed his military knife and shouted, "Spearmen!"
Whoosh …. Dozens of spears were raised vertically and laid horizontally. The shiny spearheads were pointed at the enemies who were charging at them like trapped beasts. The proud spearmen were very unconvinced. They felt that the combat engineers were threatening their position as the main force on the battlefield. When they saw the enemy invading, they felt that the only way to truly end the battle was to rely on sharp spears.
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