Bai Yuzhu's eyes snapped open, a cold, predatory light flickering within them. "Rest time is over! Pass the word to the entire fleet, prepare to attack!"
His trusted lieutenants sprang into action immediately, relaying the command across the water. Communicating between ships was usually a logistical headache that required complex flag signals or rhythmic drumbeats, especially in a proper navy. However, Bai Yuzhu's ragtag fleet didn't suffer from such formalities. His ships were packed so tightly together, hulls grinding against hulls, that the orders were simply carried across the river by sheer lung power.
"Get moving, you lazy bastards!"
"Time to take that wharf!"
"Boss's orders! Every boat surges at once. If you can't hit the sand, use the ships in front of you as a bridge. We are storming the shore by any means necessary!"
"Kill that arrogant Heyang County Magistrate!"
"Hack those militia rubes into pieces and feed them to the dogs!"
"Feeding dogs is a waste of meat! Bring them back and we'll eat them ourselves! Hahaha!"
The rebels shouted and cursed as they prepped their gear, their movements fueled by a simmering resentment. Since they had joined Wang Jiayin's rebellion, they had only truly tasted the bitter sting of defeat twice. Once was at Hequ County, where General Wang Guoliang of Shanxi had hammered them with Western-style cannons until they ran for their lives. The second was at Yichuan County, where Hong Chengchou had somehow managed to break their formation in a way they still didn't quite understand. Aside from those two blips, they hadn't known the meaning of failure.
The more you win, the harder it is to accept a loss. Every small setback at Qiaochuan Wharf had only added fuel to their collective rage.
The entire fleet began to churn the water. Oarsmen braced themselves to row with everything they had, while the soldiers checked their improvised defenses. From the first wave, they had concluded that the defenders' primary weapon was the bow and arrow. The "bombs" thrown by Flat Rabbit were loud and scary, but they lacked the shrapnel to be truly lethal, or so they thought. As long as they held their shields high or draped thick, padded cotton quilts over their heads, the arrows wouldn't be able to bite through. To them, these local militia rubes were nothing but a disorganized rabble that would fold the moment the distance was closed.
"Charge!"
"Hear my command!"
Bai Yuzhu essentially clicked the 'F2-A' of his strategic mind, screaming at the top of his lungs, "All units, full frontal assault!"
Every ship in the river, save for Bai Yuzhu's own flagship, lunged forward simultaneously. It was a terrifying sight. If the Heyang County Militia were still the ones standing behind the palisades, they would have likely burst into tears and fled at the sheer scale of the oncoming wall of wood and steel.
But the Gao Village Militia was a different breed of beast entirely.
Feng Jun watched from the high watchtower, his heart hammering against his ribs. He noticed that while a few of the newer recruits in the Gao Village ranks looked a bit pale, the majority of the fifteen hundred men stood like stone statues. A full thousand of them were veterans of the Huanglong Mountain campaign. They had traded blows with the likes of Wang Zuogua and had been forged in the fires of real combat. To them, this was just another Tuesday.
"Prepare to bring down the palisade!" a captain barked.
Feng Jun nearly tripped over his own feet. "What? Why would you tear down the wall? If the wall is gone, how are you going to defend?"
Bai Yuan chuckled, snapping his fan open with a leisurely click. "A single-layer palisade is too narrow at the top. It gets in the way of our musketeers' firing rotation. We need more room to work. Don't worry, Officer Feng. Our men don't need a wooden wall to hold this ground."
Feng Jun stood there, his mouth agape, unable to process the sheer audacity of it.
The first rank of ships slammed into the riverbank. Bandits leaped into the shallow water, performing a chaotic dance of improvised defense. They raised iron shields, wooden planks, and even heavy iron pot lids. Some moved in pairs under the cover of thick cotton quilts, looking like clumsy, multi-legged insects.
The ships behind them crowded in, creating a solid platform of decks that stretched far out into the water. The rebels used these as stepping stones, leaping from boat to boat until they hit the sand. It looked like a hundred monkeys crossing a river, agile and desperate.
From the towers, the Gao Village archers and crossbowmen unleashed their response. A sharp, rhythmic snapping sound filled the air as a rain of bolts hissed downward.
An interesting phenomenon occurred: although the Gao Village force only had eight hundred infantrymen dedicated to cold steel, significantly fewer than the original Heyang Militia, the volume of their fire was nearly double. The Heyang rubes hadn't even had enough bows to go around, and their equipment was a mismatched mess.
In contrast, every single man in the Gao Village ranks was equipped with a hand-crossbow crafted in the Master Artisan's workshop. With materials provided by Dao Xuan Tianzun and craftsmanship that ignored the cost of production, these weapons were precision-engineered death dealers. Their draw weight and piercing power far outstripped anything the rebels had faced before.
The rebels found the experience of landing under this fire to be excruciating.
One bandit held his shield at the wrong angle for a split second. Thwack. A bolt buried itself in his thigh. As he screamed and stumbled, his shield tilted, exposing his torso. Thwack-thwack-thwack. Three bolts punched into his chest in rapid succession, sending him rolling into the blood-stained sand.
Another rebel tried to advance under a thick cotton quilt. He could hear the muffled thud-thud-thud of bolts burying themselves into the fabric, looking like a pin-cushion within seconds. Blinded by his own cover, he missed his footing on the gap between two ships and tumbled into the churning, cold waters of the Yellow River, never to surface again.
The beach was quickly becoming a carpet of groaning men.
However, these rebels were battle-hardened and fueled by the promise of plunder. They weren't about to tuck tail and run. The mutinous border soldiers took the lead, locking their shields together to form a turtle formation. They moved slowly, stubbornly, trusting their leather and cloth armor to soak up the occasional stray shot.
Behind them came the defected garrison troops, and behind those were the common bandits. It was a clear, three-tiered hierarchy of violence. Slowly but surely, they began to push forward.
The leader of the border veterans let out a rough laugh. "They haven't thrown any more bombs! They're out of powder!"
"Keep moving!"
"Maintain the shield wall! Don't let the line break!"
Just then, a massive CRACK echoed across the wharf. A huge section of the wooden palisade, the very defense the rebels were trying to reach, suddenly collapsed outward. A gargantuan cloud of dust and splinters billowed into the air, obscuring the view for everyone on the beach.
The rebels froze for a heartbeat before a roar of triumph went up. "Hahaha! Their wall fell down on its own!"
Bai Yuzhu, watching from his flagship, cheered. "The heavens are on our side! They must have been lazy with the construction. The logs weren't buried deep enough! Charge! Focus everything on the gap!"
The rebels surged forward with renewed fervor, screaming their war cries as they rushed toward the dusty opening in the defenses.
And then, the world turned into thunder.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The roar of musketry erupted from within the dust cloud. Hundreds of barrels flashed in the haze, hidden by the very dust the rebels had cheered for.
Smoothbore muskets didn't require much aiming; at this range, you simply pointed the lead pipe at the densest mass of bodies and pulled the trigger. The cloud of sand and smoke didn't hinder the Gao Village musketeers at all. Lead balls tore through the yellow haze, delivering a "message of love" directly into the faces of the charging rebels.
The power of a lead ball was nothing like an arrow. While an iron shield might deflect a stray bolt, the lead projectiles delivered a staggering amount of kinetic energy. The bandits carrying pot lids and wooden planks found their "defenses" shattered like glass. Lead punched through wood and metal with terrifying ease, finding the flesh beneath. Screams of agony were swallowed by the continuous roar of the volleys as the rebels were mowed down in rows.
The cinematic scale of the slaughter was undeniable. Each volley sent a fresh spray of blood and splinters into the air. The "invincible" border veterans at the front of the line were the first to feel the true weight of Gao Village's technology. The dust finally began to settle, revealing not a broken defense, but a perfectly ordered line of five hundred musketeers, standing shoulder to shoulder, their eyes cold and their hands steady as they cycled through their reloading drills with the rhythm of a ticking clock.
Bai Yuan, perched high above, leaned over the railing and took a long drag of the cool air. "Look at that, Instructor He. No commands, no shouting. Just a machine made of men."
Cheng Xu smiled behind his mask. "That is the beauty of the system Dao Xuan Tianzun gave us. We don't need heroes when we have a process."
Down on the beach, the rebels realized that the "broken wall" hadn't been an accident. It had been an invitation to a slaughterhouse. And they had walked right through the front door.