Chapter 308 - 281: Slaughter
Anyone who’d been shot at with any frequency would know: getting hit by a bolt from a professional crossbowman at a dead run from within sixty meters was a death sentence.
Gao Yuan charged out of Hongding Mansion with the others. He often boasted that he’d won the school-wide 100-meter dash three times at his high school sports meets.
In reality, he’d been the runner-up for three years straight. The champion was his childhood friend, Shen Han.
They were neighbors who grew up together. From childhood to adulthood, Shen Han had always been more popular with girls, had better handwriting, got better grades, and was even better than him at sports.
Whenever they were together, Gao Yuan felt he was destined to live his life in Shen Han’s shadow.
That was until the incident in the snow mountains. Shen Han got into a fight with someone over food and was killed by a fire axe to the head.
Before he died, Shen Han told Gao Yuan to eat him.
Gao Yuan ate Shen Han’s brain, his hands, and his feet. He also found a chance to kill the man who had struck Shen Han with the fire axe.
From then on, Gao Yuan often told others that he had always won championships at sports meets as a kid, that he was popular with girls, and that he had excellent handwriting.
To maintain this persona of a high school sports champion, Gao Yuan charged forward quickly. He was afraid that if he ran too slow, others would start to doubt him.
But as he found himself at the very front, his throat went dry at the sight of the grim spear formation and the crossbowmen behind it. Suddenly, Gao Yuan regretted running so fast.
He wanted to slow down, but the massive force behind him was like a flood, sweeping him forward. He could only advance; there was no retreat.
Even though he tried his best to shrink back, he only managed to fall back by two positions. He was still among the front ranks.
The enemy moved.
He heard a powerful voice shout a single word: "Fire!"
A giant of a man, one-point-nine meters tall, running three meters to his front right, was struck in the shoulder by a black blur. The impact was like a sledgehammer blow. He staggered two steps, then collapsed, rolling twice on the ground.
The people behind trampled over him and continued their charge.
To his front left, a burly man with a shaved head raised a small round shield and let out a furious roar.
The roar was cut short, the sound dying abruptly as a bolt pierced his shield, ran clean through his chest, and poked out of his back, revealing a small section of the arrowhead.
The front line fell like scythed wheat. With a great thud, a whole wave of them went down.
Before Gao Yuan could even react, he was at the very front again.
Exposed to the enemy’s gaze, Gao Yuan opened his mouth, wanting to say something.
Suddenly, a sharp pain flared in his stomach. As he ran, it felt like he’d been punched. Excruciating pain followed. He tried to clutch at the wound, but his fingers had barely touched his abdomen when they met a hot, sticky wetness, along with the fletching and nock of a bolt.
His momentum sent him stumbling forward three more steps before his limbs, trembling and weak, gave out. He collapsed heavily to his knees on the muddy ground.
’So this is how much it hurts to be shot with an arrow? Even running is a luxury now.’
Someone stepped heavily on his back, and Gao Yuan let out a muffled groan.
’That son of a bitch... I think he stepped on the arrowhead in my back.’
It felt like a thousand tiny knives were carving up his insides.
One foot, two feet, three...
In a daze, Gao Yuan thought he saw Shen Han.
Shen Han’s face was contorted with rage, cursing him furiously. Gao Yuan suddenly remembered: on the day Shen Han had fought with that person, he could have escaped. It seemed that he, Gao Yuan, had been the one to lock him out.
The men charging from Hongding Mansion fell row by row. Unarmored, they had no defense against the crossbows.
"A slaughter! This is a pure slaughter!"
Yang Long’s hands and feet went cold as he watched. He had assumed Qin Ziwen hadn’t sent many men and that the main force for this battle would have to be his people from the Urban Village.
Now, he saw that was not the case at all.
Looking at the Qin Alliance’s well-trained troops...
A thought inexplicably surfaced in Yang Long’s mind.
’No wonder rebel armies in history were always so easily crushed by the Court’s regular forces.’
’They’re not even in the same fucking league!’
Only now, with this comparison, did Yang Long understand what true elites were.
He wanted to build an army like that, too.
The large force that had charged out of Hongding International finally broke after seeing their comrades in front being slaughtered in waves, completely powerless to fight back.
The people at the front refused to charge forward, preferring to crash into the ranks behind them.
Front and back, the charging mob collided with itself, devolving into a massive stampede.
"Continue," Du Yu said, not ordering them to stop.
The crossbow squad continued firing until every man had shot all twenty of his bolts.
After the last bolts were loosed, as they released their bowstrings, many of the men’s arms dropped uncontrollably. They rubbed their arms, their faces slick with sweat.
Below Hongding Mansion, the ground had become a mountain of corpses in a sea of blood.
Blood pooled into streams. Hundreds of bodies were scattered across the ground.
They were riddled with bolts, front and back.
"BLEGH!" A resident of the Urban Village suddenly dry-heaved.
They had never witnessed such a hellish scene.
It wasn’t just them. In fact, even among the Qin Alliance members in the front rank holding long spears, many felt their hands and feet go cold, their bodies trembling slightly.
"How is this possible?! How could this happen?!" On the rooftop, Mei Yuqing’s face was a mask of horror. She wasn’t afraid of the scene of death below—many had died inside the building before, so it wasn’t something she’d never seen.
The reason for her fear was that the ones being slaughtered were her own people from Blood Words. It didn’t just show that their combat strengths were on completely different levels.
It also showed that the enemy didn’t see them as human at all! They struck without the slightest hesitation.
"We can’t fight them on open ground! We have to call everyone back and hide in the building!" Mei Yuqing said urgently. "Since they haven’t tried to storm the building, it means they don’t want to fight in the corridors either."
Mei Yuqing could roughly guess the Qin Alliance’s strategy. They probably wanted to eliminate them with minimal losses.
She refused to let them have their way.
’If you want to kill us, then come into the building. Even in death, we’ll take a piece out of you.’
In truth, she didn’t need to say a word. The head-on confrontation had terrified countless people, and they were already scrambling back as fast as they could.
"Chairman Yang, I’ll have to trouble you to send your men to retrieve those bolts," Du Yu said, looking at Yang Long.
Yang Long nodded.
He gave the order, and many people from the Urban Village raised their shields, bent low, and went to pull the bolts from the corpses.
𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞
From the floors above, some people started throwing things down.
A few unlucky ones were hit and suffered considerable injuries.
The Urban Village residents quickly retreated.
Du Yu waved his hand. "Catapults! Load with rubble and fire on the upper floors!"
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
After a few volleys, the upper floors fell silent.
The last bit of defiance from the Blood Words Gang was crushed.
When people went to retrieve the bolts again, the windows remained quiet. No one dared to peek out and throw things anymore.
As everyone was gathering their things, a low rumble echoed from the distant horizon.
RUMBLE...
The western skyline darkened as thick, leaden clouds slowly rolled in from the distance.
A strong wind began to blow across the sea.
"It’s going to rain," Qin Ziwen said, looking at the sky with a slight frown.
’I wonder how heavy this rain will be, or how long it will last. Hopefully, it won’t affect the coming battle.’