Beneath the overcast sky, the cavalry’s advance surged forward like a rising tide. Viewed from above, the mounted formation, nearly six thousand strong, looked packed and dense. At its leading edge, the armored heavy cavalry surged forward like wave after wave of a swelling tide, charging across the plain with a force that seemed capable of flattening small hills, crushing everything in its path.
As the armored heavy cavalry thundered forward, the rear half of the formation gradually split away to the sides, beginning to circle around and press forward on the flanks—these were the light cavalry, split off from half of the armored force. Though the Iron Kite were heavy cavalry, in Western Xia’s campaigns they were often deployed as the main striking force, well-suited to long-range raids and highly mobile in the field. On extended raids, they would be accompanied by an equal or double number of pack horses carrying the heavy armor. Though these pack horses were nowhere near as fine as true warhorses, once the heavy armor was removed, the accompanying auxiliary troops could still mount them and form up as light cavalry.
Western Xia had always operated under a tribal system with a rigidly hierarchical order. As the elite of the elite, each Iron Kite rider was typically accompanied by three auxiliary soldiers—servants and personal retainers from the rider’s own household, chosen from among the very best for their courage and loyalty, one in a hundred at least. Even mounted on lesser horses, they remained a formidably capable fighting force.
Given the fearsome strength the Black Banner Army had shown in taking Yanzhou, Meile, hoping to swiftly run down this bandit force emerging from the rear, had led two thousand seven hundred Iron Kite cavalry on a rapid advance, accompanied by over two thousand seven hundred light cavalry mounted on pack horses. From the moment preparations for battle began, the auxiliary commander Chang Da had received orders to harass from the flank and act according to circumstance. Leading nearly three thousand light cavalry, he began circling around to the side; the enemy’s formation, orderly and disciplined, looked formidable enough—but according to past experience, this reckless, overconfident army would still be shattered swiftly by the heavy cavalry vanguard, even at a heavy cost in exchange. What he himself needed to watch for was the one or two thousand light cavalry the enemy had already drawn up at the rear of their formation.
The enemy rode horses bred specifically for war; his own mounts were somewhat inferior in comparison—but the valor of the riders under his command would not fall short of anyone in the realm. On this point, Chang Da held great confidence. Should the enemy show any sign of weakness, the cavalry under his command would charge them without the slightest hesitation.
He kept his eyes fixed on the battle unfolding ahead, breathing steadily in and out as the heavy cavalry, hooves churning, pushed their speed to its absolute peak, about to enter arrow range. Past experience suggested that arrows would come flying—though for the Iron Kite, it hardly mattered; even knowing this, there would still be arrows, and sometimes an unlucky rider or two would fall from his horse.
But no arrows came.
In the next instant, the attack crashed down like an avalanche!
With almost no warning at all, as the first bloom of fire rose, countless explosions surged up in a great wave along the cutting edge of the cavalry tide. A deafening roar swept outward; that wave rose and surged in silence, as if rushing forward to meet them, crashing headlong into the Iron Kite’s own onrushing tide—the two seemed to hang suspended for an instant before slamming together.
“Waaaah—”
Boom!
Crash—
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—
Squad leader Nagu roared as he charged into that towering wave of smoke and dust, only to be violently thrown clear out the other side. His fallen armored warhorse pinned his body down; amid a mingled sense of pain and numbness, he raised his head, and there, on this side of the great wave, countless flowers were blooming skyward!
A dark gray wall, smoke and dust, surging shockwaves, an acrid and choking smell—everything was rising, expanding. Objects fired from ahead came thundering into that curtain, exploding in bursts of yellow light amid the black smoke and dust, accompanied by the howl of dark red flame, all manner of small fragments spraying outward, shockwaves rolling and raging in every direction.
In Nagu’s field of vision, the explosions nearby looked like the earth itself shaking apart. For any individual caught up in it, the heavily armored Iron Kite horses, charging like mountains on the move, tumbled and rolled as they burst out of that curtain, collapsing like landslides in their own right. The impact against the enemy formation compressed the leading edge of the cavalry’s ranks, packing the horses far more tightly together than usual, while the rising black smoke and dust blinded the riders’ vision. Not a few riders remained more or less intact, yet at such high speed, some were tripped by the corpses of fallen horses, others collided with panicked comrades suddenly veering sideways, and amid the thunderous noise, they were sent flying and crashing to the ground.
The loess plateau’s terrain was already sparsely vegetated—not quite as barren as it would later become, but the churn of the explosions sent dust billowing up in thick clouds regardless.
Amid this overwhelming chaos, a portion of the horses had already been spooked into panic.
His vision reeling, the air thick with an indescribable dread, Nagu watched his comrades charging out of that black curtain—some running, some collapsing, and a scattered few still pressing forward at speed. He saw one heavy cavalryman burst out of the smoke, the rider on his back still apparently unharmed—only for something fired from the enemy side to strike the charging rider with a loud crack the next instant, and even as the horse continued its charge, the armored upper half of the rider’s body was blown apart in a spray of fragments.
This was sorcery! A wave of overwhelming terror surged through him; he tried to crawl out from under his horse, straining with all his strength, when another Iron Kite mount came bursting through from behind, stumbled, and, like a collapsing hill, swallowed his entire field of vision…
“—Elm cannons, second round, load!”
“Faster, faster, faster—”
“Don’t give them a chance to breathe—”
Within the Black Banner Army’s position, the officers of the Special Regiment shouted themselves hoarse. Behind them, two thousand cavalry were beginning to move out; within the infantry ranks, the atmosphere had turned grim and tense, Hou Wu, Mao Yishan, and the others waiting for the moment to charge. Around them, Special Regiment soldiers were rapidly assembling portable cavalry obstacles. These obstacles used cast-iron rods as a central axis, with iron spears crossed and inserted through them and then fixed in place—six spears bundled with one cast-iron rod formed a single unit, and once assembled, they were nearly impossible to move even when knocked over; rolled onto any side, they retained the same defensive shape. Once assembled, they were pushed forward at speed.
The great battle on the Dongzhi Plateau had only just begun, yet this opening strike already felt like something out of a dream—a sight that, in this age, had almost never before existed.
The first volley of cannon fire had directly disabled or killed perhaps only a hundred-odd of the armored heavy cavalry, but the truly spectacular effect lay in the rising curtain of smoke and dust. It blinded the Iron Kite’s charge entirely, and the fallen riders themselves became obstacles in turn, with the number of downed cavalry steadily climbing. Nearly a thousand horsemen in the leading ranks, all caught within that curtain, had been affected to one degree or another—some horses spooked and bolted off in the wrong direction entirely. In this age, cavalry were sometimes trained with firecrackers or other loud noises to acclimate their horses to battlefield sounds, but nothing had ever come close to preparing them for this.
Some riders had their eardrums ruptured by the shockwave while still mounted, their eyes blinded by the swirling dust, their horses’ balance thrown off as well. In the chaos, riders bursting free of the smoke either tripped over fallen comrades and snapped their necks in the fall, or collided with other horsemen mid-charge, desperately hauling on their reins as their mounts only ran faster before crashing violently to the ground. The remaining cavalry, adjusting slightly, continued their charge—while the cannons kept firing in continuous succession.
Rider after rider was steadily filtered out of the charge.
Within the artillery position, soldiers rapidly cleared the barrels and loaded the elm-wood cannons with fresh rounds, hollow or solid. Among these, more than twenty were iron cannons, mostly loaded with hollow shells; these iron cannons varied in caliber and specification—some cast as single pieces, others already split into two sections, resembling the Frankish cannons of later eras. The barrel and the powder-loaded breech chamber formed a separate, detachable structure: once one shot was fired, the breech chamber was removed and another swiftly locked into place.
Lin Jingwei, head of the artisans at the Little Cang River, stood near the cluster of iron cannons alongside Gongsun Sheng, watching the scattered, disoriented heavy cavalry ahead—some wandering aimlessly, others struggling to rise from the ground—with a slight frown. The air around them was thick with deafening noise, shouting, and the roar of cannon fire. Lin Jingwei watched closely while shouting orders to the side: “Follow procedure, follow procedure! Hey, what are you doing over there! Watch that shell in your hands, you want to blow yourself to bits, you damn fool—”
Amid the booming reports, explosive charges continued arcing through the sky—some landing among the horses and detonating instantly, others taking a moment before going off. Gongsun Sheng watched the force of the explosions closely.
Nearly nine years had passed since Ning Yi first arrived in the Wu Dynasty. As for gunpowder, he had, almost from the very start, been quietly working to improve it. In a sense, the black powder of ancient China and modern yellow explosives were two entirely different concepts; black powder’s potential for improvement was not unlimited, and developing modern explosives—TNT, nitroglycerin—required a vast foundation of chemical knowledge.
Real limits existed, but that didn’t mean there was no room for compromise. Of the three basic compounds needed to produce nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid had long since been discovered by alchemists in ancient times. Nitric acid was not yet available, but its raw material was in no short supply within the Wu Dynasty—in this era, saltpeter was mainly used by wealthy households for making ice in summer. Dry-distilling saltpeter, or reacting it with sulfuric acid and hydrolyzing the result, could yield nitric acid. As for glycerin, heating sulfuric acid together with animal or plant fats, then reacting the result with soda or lime, would separate it out—and as a side benefit, one could even produce soap in the process.
None of these principles were unfamiliar to Ning Yi, but finding the right proportions and methods to actually produce them in this era was, naturally, an enormous challenge. Fortunately, though chemistry wasn’t his true specialty, managing people and organizing operations was. After teaching his craftsmen the basics of chemistry, he was able to let others handle the details—and once men like Gongsun Sheng joined his ranks, with the number of skilled artisans under him steadily growing, his own initial grasp of chemistry had long since been outpaced by the progress being made in the workshops.
In the later development of the explosives workshops, practical results had far outpaced theoretical knowledge. The artisans, armed with basic chemical understanding, might never become a Mendeleev, but under a modern research approach that emphasized efficiency, careful record-keeping, and comparison, the gunpowder they produced had grown increasingly refined. Once both sulfuric and nitric acid could be manufactured, substances like nitrocellulose had already begun appearing in the workshops. Gongsun Sheng and his fellow artisans mixed together all manner of miscellaneous compounds, and the resulting explosive power had already become considerable enough to be used decisively on the battlefield.
By this point, they’d already laid some groundwork for producing nitroglycerin as well, but Ning Yi had chosen not to rush its development. For one thing, materials were genuinely scarce after the rebellion began—in later ages, pigs were raised fat and heavy, but in this era, pigs were raised lean, all muscle, making it far too extravagant and cost-ineffective to extract glycerin from animal and plant fats. For another, the road from inventing nitroglycerin to using it with any reasonable degree of safety was still a long one—until his artisans fully understood diatomaceous earth, Ning Yi didn’t dare push things recklessly. And for this campaign, virtually everything usable at the Little Cang River had already been put to use.
Several types of delay fuses produced in the workshops, hand-crafted hollow shells, and the large-charge explosive packages Ning Yi had insisted on developing from the very beginning, along with the extravagantly expensive iron launch tubes—these large-caliber tubes for hurling explosive charges would, in a later age, be known as “flying thunder” mortars.
During the War of Liberation, explosive packages launched from oil-drum mortars proved far more devastating than ordinary artillery; the modern explosives packed within could sweep a radius of over twenty meters in a single blast, wiping out men and livestock alike, killing so thoroughly through concussive force alone that the dead sometimes showed no visible wound at all—earning it the nickname “the gun with no conscience.”
The explosive packages fired here, of course, carried nowhere near that kind of power. Still, once they hit the ground and detonated, the shockwave expanded outward across a radius of three or four meters, with a terrifying blast and roar; amid the billowing smoke and dust, any horse caught nearby would be hurled off its feet by the tremendous force, slamming into whichever comrade happened to be standing beside it.
“The world is about to change…” Gongsun Sheng murmured, watching the handful of heavy cavalry still charging toward him, clouds scattering across the sky above. He reached down and picked up the great iron hammer lying nearby. Dressed in the flowing robes of a Taoist priest, he looked every bit the immortal sage—yet in truth, he’d earned his place among the bandits of Liangshan through considerable physical strength of his own. Dragging his hammer, he charged forward as a heavy cavalryman bore down on him at speed; the two met in an instant, and the priest, using the momentum of the charge, swung his massive hammer upward from below with a horrifying crash, smashing it directly into the warhorse’s skull. The horse let out a terrible scream, its four legs flailing as it crashed to the ground nearby, blood and dust churning together.
Hammer in hand, he strode toward another oncoming rider, with infantry surging in from the side as well; once they’d brought that rider down too, Gongsun Sheng turned and bellowed toward the rear: “Faster—”
Of the heavy cavalry that had charged from across the field, passing through the blast zone and surviving to reach this forward line, only about a third remained; some, their riders or horses injured, still wandered dazed within the smoke and dust. Over twenty iron cavalry obstacles, carried by soldiers, waited in position ahead of them, backed up by horse-cleaving blades, spears, and iron hammers. The soldiers waiting here had likewise had their hearing devastated by the tremendous blasts—their ears registered almost no sound at all. The cavalry, having lost some speed to the barrage of cannon fire, still came on like an avalanche; the armored heavy cavalry crashed into the obstacles, snapping them or shoving them across the ground, and as more heavy riders arrived, the defenders met them with swinging horse-cleaving blades and spears, while hammer-wielding soldiers brought their heavy war-hammers crashing down onto the armor of horse and rider alike, blood welling out from between the joints of the iron plating.
By this point, the Iron Kite’s center formation had also pushed past that great wall of smoke and dust. They advanced with somewhat more caution now, their speed slightly reduced, veering more toward the edges of the smoke curtain. As the cannon fire weakened, the rising black smoke began to clear from view, and Meile, watching from the rear, could now roughly make out what lay ahead.
In this era, an ordinary army would typically collapse after taking ten percent casualties, but the Iron Kite was no such fragile force—they were the elite of the elite. Often, they were willing to pay in blood for victory. But what mattered was that such sacrifice needed to actually secure that victory.
Right now, the great battle had only just begun; a single charge, and while the front ranks had pushed through, the center formation had hesitated slightly, and by now had already entered arrow range of close engagement. They still wanted to press forward, but ahead, that enemy force, like some monstrous beast, was in the process of devouring a full third of the Iron Kite’s strength whole. Never before had any ranged engagement threatened the Iron Kite to this degree.
The center formation was still charging forward; everything had happened too fast for them to fully collapse yet. The soldiers in the ranks felt only confusion, while the more clear-headed officers turned to look back at the great command banner. Meile, too, was charging forward with his men—he had originally meant to rescue or reinforce the front ranks caught in the explosions, but even for a man as battle-hardened as himself, his mind, in this moment, had gone utterly blank.
The entire front formation had essentially lost all combat capability—it was finished.
But their morale hadn’t broken yet. Charging forward still seemed, perhaps, winnable. Press on, or pull back—that was the question.
In that instant… he thought of his mother…
…
Few noticed that, by now, the entire artillery position had gone silent…