Bai Yuzhu stood atop a mid-sized merchant vessel, his gaze fixed on the cavalry unit lining the cliff edge above. His brow furrowed into a tight knot of pure frustration.
He had initially assumed that taking a backwater county like Heyang would be a walk in the park. One solid charge and the place would fold like wet paper.
Instead, his men had been given a violent masterclass in artillery and explosives on the beach, and his attempt to flank the defenders had been unceremoniously crushed by a troop of elite riders.
The sudden turn of events caught him completely off guard.
"Dammit! Does this tiny Heyang County think they can just spit in my face like this?" Bai Yuzhu roared, his face flushing a deep, angry crimson.
"I refuse to believe they have enough gunpowder to keep this up forever. I am breaking through that wharf today, even if I have to fill the river with bodies to do it!"
He turned to his lieutenants and barked out fresh orders.
"Tell everyone to catch their breath. Let the sting of that last failure fade. Once morale has recovered, we hit them with everything."
"In the next wave, every single boat rushes the pier at once. The ships in the back do not even need to touch the sand. Just use the boats in front of you as a bridge and storm the shore!"
The rebels shouted their acknowledgment, and the offensive groaned to a temporary halt.
The ships that had managed to reach the wharf were rowed back, retreating slightly upstream to regroup and lick their wounds.
On any other stretch of the Yellow River, it would have been impossible for a fleet to simply hover in place without being swept away by the current.
However, this particular spot featured a pocket-like backwater bay. The massive fleet was able to rest on the water, drifting only slightly downstream while the men recovered.
Every few minutes, the oarsmen would give a lazy stroke or two to hold their position against the slow swirl of the water.
A tense standoff settled over the scene.
The defenders on the shore and the invaders on the water watched each other like starving wolves, waiting for the first sign of weakness.
Feng Jun frowned as he watched the rebels loitering.
"How dare those scoundrels act so brazenly? Staying right in front of us as if we are nothing. Do they truly think the government is made of straw?"
Bai Yuan shrugged and spread his fan with a casual flick.
"To be fair, the government basically is made of straw right now. Shaanxi General Wang Chengen is far too busy protecting the Emperor in the capital to care about a little wharf."
Feng Jun let out an awkward, dry laugh.
"Mister Bai, since those rebels are just sitting there resting for the next attack, what about your cannons? Now is the perfect time to give them a few more rounds. Do not let them have a moment of peace."
Bai Yuan spread his hands, looking entirely too relaxed for a man in a siege.
"The powder bags are all gone."
Feng Jun felt a warm trickle and realized his nose was bleeding again from the sheer stress.
"How is that possible? The cannons only fired a few times!"
"Well, Flat Rabbit and his crew decided it was a good idea to throw the rest of them by hand," Bai Yuan explained with a sigh.
"Throwing them is much faster than loading a heavy cannon, you know. They were gone in the blink of an eye."
"Honestly, it is a shame. I wanted to use the next few shots to practice my aim."
Feng Jun stood there, stunned into silence.
It was an incredibly awkward predicament. Panic began to set into the official's eyes as he looked at the empty artillery pieces.
"If we are out of gunpowder, how are we supposed to stop their next wave? They are going to steamroll us!"
Bai Yuan glanced toward the northwest and smiled.
"We will not have to stop the next wave."
Feng Jun blinked, confused.
"What?"
"The Gao Village Militia has arrived!"
Bai Yuan let out a triumphant laugh.
"Officer Feng, tell your men to step down and get some rest. From here on out, you get a front-row seat to see how Gao Village handles a real fight."
The reinforcements had finally reached the field.
At the head of the column was a formidable general clad in mountain-pattern armor, his face partially obscured by a mask. It was Cheng Xu.
Behind him marched fifteen hundred soldiers in a display of discipline that looked completely out of place in this chaotic frontier.
Among them were five hundred musketeers, two hundred grenadiers, and eight hundred infantrymen armed with traditional cold steel.
This was Wang Er's first time seeing the true military might of Gao Village.
He stared at the sheer scale of the force, his heart skipping a beat in shock, followed immediately by a surge of relief.
Is Gao Village truly this powerful?
As for Feng Jun, one look at the approaching army made his scalp go numb.
There were too many armored men. There were too many firearms.
If it had been just a handful of men in scraps of armor, he could have looked the other way and called it "local citizens defending their homes."
But an army of this size and equipment? That was a political disaster waiting to happen for any official.
Feng Jun reached up, touched his nosebleed, and realized he did not even know what to draw on his face anymore.
He just smeared the blood around until his face looked like a chaotic mask of red.
Finally, he gritted his teeth and shouted an order.
"Heyang County Militia, fall back and rest! Hand over the defense of Qiaochuan Wharf to the Gao Village Militia!"
Cheng Xu reached the front and gave a simple hand signal.
He did not even need to shout.
The militia units, guided by their centurions, began to flow into their positions with mechanical, practiced precision.
The musketeers did not bother climbing to high ground. Instead, they formed neat, overlapping lines behind the wooden palisade.
The grenadiers and archers scrambled up onto the watchtowers and the ramparts.
Curiously, the ten original musketeers who had first used the "Three-Eyed Guns" did not join the main ranks.
Instead, they took their rifled bird-guns and climbed the towers alongside the archers.
Bai Yuan watched this with interest.
"Instructor He, why are those ten staying out of the formation?"
Cheng Xu gave a low chuckle.
"Because they are carrying rifled pieces."
Bai Yuan had a sudden realization.
With rifled barrels, their accuracy was on a different level. There was no point in wasting their precision by making them stand in a line to play "volley roulette" with the enemy.
They were far more effective being allowed to hunt freely, just like the elite archers.
Bai Yuan smiled.
"In the future, they will need their own battalion. They deserve a new name."
"Tianzun has already named them," Cheng Xu replied. "He calls them Skirmishers."
"Skirmishers?" Bai Yuan scratched his chin. "Does that not usually imply disorganized, wandering troops? It sounds a bit like a demotion."
"I mentioned that to Tianzun," Cheng Xu said.
"But He told me that as the tools of war evolve, the word 'Skirmisher' will stop being a term of disrespect. He said we would not go wrong with that name."
Bai Yuan thought about it for a moment and nodded.
"Indeed. If every musket eventually gets a rifled barrel and the reloading issue is solved, we will be killing each other from so far away that standing in big squares will just be suicide."
"Eventually, every soldier will have to become a Skirmisher."
Regardless, if Tianzun said it, it was Gospel.
Bai Yuan stopped dwelling on the semantics, though he felt a tiny pang of loneliness.
Now that ten other Skirmishers had arrived, his own reputation as the "Master Marksman" who could pop a rebel's head from hundreds of paces away was going to have some serious competition.
"Showing off" was not technically one of the Confucian Six Arts, but Bai Yuan considered it an essential life skill.
Cheng Xu climbed the watchtower and scanned the river.
Seeing the carpet of rebel corpses littering the sand, he got the gist of the situation.
"Looks like they threw a wave at you and got their teeth kicked in. Now they are resting up to hit us twice as hard."
Bai Yuan nodded.
"Since you are here, Instructor, I plan on being a simple spectator for the second round."
Cheng Xu spread his hands and laughed.
"To be honest, I am basically a spectator too."
Bai Yuan blinked.
"What?"
"Since we started using all these firearms," Cheng Xu explained, "my job is basically done the moment I give the order to start."
"Once the lead starts flying, there is not much for me to do. The soldiers just follow their drills and cycle through their steps."
"I might as well be at a theater."
Bai Yuan was silent for a second, absorbing the cold efficiency of it all.
Cheng Xu laughed and pulled Bai Yuan further up the tower.
"Come on, Mister Bai. Let us get to the high ground and watch the show together."
"Let us enjoy a battle that does not even need a commander."
Bai Yuan pulled out his rifled piece and checked the action.
"Hmph. I am different. Even if I am not commanding, I can still use my 'Art of the Bow'... well, the gun... to support my boys."
"I am a jack of all trades, after all! Hahaha!"
Wang Er followed them up the tower in silence, his eyes fixed intensely on the horizon, waiting for the storm to break.