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On top of a small hill roughly two hundred meters high, Fei Qian glanced at the sky and said, "Hansheng, I entrust this matter to you."
Huang Zhong let out a hearty laugh and said, "Rest assured, Commandant. I am off!" With that, he spurred his horse forward and led more than a thousand soldiers ahead.
Fei Qian watched Huang Zhong's departing figure and sighed softly to himself.
It was not out of worry for this battle, but rather a sense of regret on Huang Zhong's behalf.
As the saying goes, illness comes on like a mountain collapsing, but departs as slowly as drawing silk. Although sickness does not form in a single day, once it erupts it is often extremely violent, while treating it often involves many complications and is exceedingly troublesome.
Although Huang Zhong's son had received treatment and care from Zhang Zhongjing, a body that had been ill for a long time could not possibly recover completely in the blink of an eye.
Zhang Zhongjing was, after all, merely a renowned physician, not an immortal who carried around eight or ten Nine-Turn Golden Pills of Resurrection in his pocket at all times. The fact that he had managed to pull Huang Zhong's son back from the grasp of death was already an extraordinary accomplishment. For the boy to recover to the state of an ordinary healthy person would still require some time.
In other words, there was no problem at all for Huang Zhong to help Fei Qian out here on this occasion, but if it came to following Fei Qian all the way to Bing Province, there would probably still be some difficulties.
He would leave it to fate. After all, some things simply could not be forced.
There was no denying that Huang Zhong was an outstanding commander, but this was not a game where one could mow down thousands of enemies single-handedly like a warrior cutting grass, or devour a steamed bun and suddenly spring back to life full of vigor.
As long as arrangements were made properly, even a few hundred men could inflict severe harm upon a general.
Human beings are an incredibly fragile kind of creature. The breakdown of any tiny component can potentially cause a catastrophic collapse of the entire body.
Martial artists are more alert than ordinary people, move more swiftly, and possess greater strength, but that does not mean they have bodies of iron and steel that can ward off all harm. They still bleed, still get wounded, and still die just the same.
Otherwise, Guan Yunchang would not have been struck by arrows so many times.
To break through the defense of the Warrior Saint, one would need at least a weapon enhancement of plus five or higher, would one not?
Before the blade and the spear, all men are equal.
This was precisely the reason Fei Qian dared to stand up and resist Sun Jian.
Moreover, Fei Qian had also ordered the Huang family craftsmen to urgently produce a batch of string-drawing devices, specifically designed for drawing back the bowstrings of powerful crossbows.
Fei Qian had initially been somewhat mistaken in his thinking. He had wanted to create something like a ratchet wheel device for drawing crossbow strings, but then he realized that such a mechanism would not actually be faster than human strength. The ratchet could control the draw length and thereby adjust the crossbow's range, but that was about all it offered.
So Fei Qian simply proposed a concept based on the simplest principle of leverage, increasing the torque used to draw the string, reducing the average force required for each draw, and thereby increasing both the speed and the number of times a crossbow could be spanned.
It was like the wrenches and pliers of later generations—the simplest application of torque. Although one still had to apply force by hand, it saved a considerable amount of effort and reduced the intensity of the labor.
The crossbowmen were divided into teams of three. One man fired, one passed the crossbows along, and one spanned the weapons. After every five shots, they rotated positions. Under skilled conditions, the rate of fire of crossbowmen working in coordinated divisions of labor was still not quite equal to that of archers firing at full speed, but in every other aspect—including range, power, and sustainability—they surpassed the archers.
Of course, for the sake of safety, what Fei Qian had prepared for this ambush was not only powerful crossbows but also a contingent of archers to supplement them.
Fei Qian turned his head and asked Huang Xu, "What about the clothing? And the banners and flags? Are they all prepared?"
Huang Xu, standing off to the side, grinned as he handed over a set of garments and said, "Everything's ready. Here, my lord, this is the 'beard.'"
Fei Qian took it and looked, and immediately felt a surge of irritation. He said, "Is there such an ugly beard as this? It's curly in places and uneven in others, like it's been chewed on by a dog! Where on earth did you go to get this thing?!"
This was absolutely an unforgivable mistake!
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Sun Jian and Han Dang led their troops southward in orderly formations. Scouts fanned out far ahead, like the tentacles of a jellyfish in the sea extending outward to probe for a target.
In the military formations of the Han Dynasty, it was not like what one saw in movies or television dramas, where the moment the enemy was spotted, everyone let out a chaotic roar and then charged headlong with no thought. If one did that, one would certainly be beaten black and blue by an equally prepared enemy force standing in tight formation.
Once the enemy was discovered, under normal circumstances the army would stop at an appropriate distance. If the force was primarily infantry, they would choose to establish their formation anywhere from one to two li away, depending on the situation. The front line would stabilize, the left wing would deploy forward and to the left, and the right wing would deploy forward and to the right. The center and rear forces would then merge with the front line to form a solid central battle group, and only after that would the army advance.
In this process, when two field armies encountered each other, what decided the outcome was the soldiers' mastery of their formations, the speed at which they could assemble, and even the strength of the left and right flanks. Any of these factors could influence the result of the encounter battle.
Scouts came streaming back like flowing water, continuously relaying information about the enemy. Although there were still casualties among the scouts, it was no longer a one-sided situation. From the scouts' reports, Sun Jian learned that the enemy's scouts had also suffered losses, and this allowed him to finally breathe a long sigh of relief.
If his scouts had been completely suppressed, Sun Jian might well have immediately turned around and returned to the main camp. If the disparity in individual fighting strength was too great, then an encounter battle would not have been a good choice. But from the current situation, although there was a slight gap, it was still a fight worth taking, especially since his own side had the numerical advantage.
There was another point that had always given Sun Jian confidence in fighting this battle. No matter how strong the soldiers of Jingxiang were, their strength had its limits. On a real battlefield, only soldiers who had seen blood would not become tense or panic. Only they could fully display what they had learned in ordinary training. As for those weaklings who had never seen blood, perhaps their first strike would wound a man, but the moment they saw blood, their next strike would falter.
A scout brought word that the enemy troops had begun forming their battle lines.
Sun Jian was briefly taken aback. Forming lines already?
A smile slowly crept across Sun Jian's face. He turned to Han Dang and said, "Yigong, what do you make of this?"
Han Dang threw his head back and laughed heartily. "Strong soldiers but a weak commander—this battle is surely ours! We may as well advance at a leisurely pace!"
Sun Jian also laughed loudly. "Exactly what I was thinking. Pass the order: the entire army is to slow its pace and form ranks in an unhurried manner!"
The messenger responded in a loud voice, then wheeled his horse around and galloped toward the front to deliver the order.
Forming ranks too early generally indicated one of two things: either the troops were newly trained and had no choice but to form up ahead of time, or the commander leading them was—to put it kindly—cautious, or to put it bluntly—timid and cowardly.
And now, judging from the mutual losses between the scouts, the enemy soldiers were actually not weak at all. Yet they had formed their lines so early. In that case, what did it mean? Was it not perfectly obvious?
Furthermore, the commander was an utterly unknown middle-aged officer of the Huang family, someone never seen before, and now he had made such an erroneous move. In Sun Jian's eyes, this was nothing short of an gigantic mistake.