TWANG—WHOOSH!
Fifty sixty-pound horn bows snapped forward at the exact same moment.
A black cloud of fifty heavy, three-foot iron-tipped arrows screamed across the fifty-yard gap between the Black-Arrow Mercenary Company and the eastern gate of Dry-Well Village.
Ten of those arrows angled upward toward the wooden shade pavilion on top of the gatehouse roof, while the other forty whistled straight toward the wooden gate doors and the big red circle painted on the yellow mud wall where One-Eyed Jack had written [ WARNING: MUD STILL WET HERE! DO NOT HIT HARD! ].
Out in the sand, Steward Liu stood up on the back of his donkey and clapped his hands in vicious glee. "Yes! Pierce that wet mud! Turn that ninth brat into a porcupine!"
Captain Hu folded his muscular arms across his black scale-armor, a cold smirk playing on his scarred lips. He had seen his archer squad punch through oak shields and mud-brick watchtowers dozens of times. With forty heavy armor-piercing arrows hitting the same damp spot on a freshly piled mud wall, the mud would split open like wet bean curd!
Up on top of the gatehouse roof, Pei Xuan didn't even blink as he spat out a watermelon seed.
"Old Wei," Pei Xuan said casually. "Take the ten arrows aimed at our table. Hong Ling enjoys collecting scrap iron."
"Yes, Young Master!"
Old Wei stepped one pace forward to the edge of the battlement. His Rank 2 Early Martial blood-Qi surged with a low roar like a furnace bellows, and his five-foot Rank 2 Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber blurred into a sweeping fan of black light!
CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!
Ten crisp metallic rings echoed like a blacksmith striking an anvil in rapid succession. Every single one of the ten high arrows had its iron arrowhead neatly shaved off in mid-air by Old Wei's saber, while the ten headless wooden shafts dropped harmlessly into a bamboo basket at Hong Ling's feet!
"Ten iron arrowheads, about two pounds of good pig-iron!" Hong Ling cheered, writing furiously in her fine ledger. "Plus two hundred silver taels in attempted murder and rooftop littering fees!"
At that exact split second, the remaining forty heavy armor-piercing arrows slammed full-force into the twenty-foot-high [Lv.2 Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall] down below!
The fifty mercenary archers in the front rank didn't even bother raising their wooden bucklers. Why would an archer raise a shield after shooting at a mud wall? They simply lowered their bows and waited to hear the dull thud-crack of iron arrowheads sinking deep into wet clay.
Instead—
BOING-BOING-BOING-BOING-BOING!
Forty weird, high-pitched twanging sounds—like forty giant rubber bands snapping at once—echoed from the yellow mud wall!
The forty heavy iron arrows sank two inches into the deceptive yellow mud skin, where they struck the tightly woven matrix of Ghost-Tendon Rubber Sap and Black-Iron Kiln Slag. Instantly, the wall's [200% Kinetic Rebound] trait activated!
The forty indentations on the mud wall snapped outward like forty invisible crossbows firing in reverse!
Before the fifty mercenary archers could even register what that strange BOING sound was, all forty heavy black-iron arrows shot backward out of the wall—fletching-first, then spinning around in mid-air through aerodynamic drag—at DOUBLE the speed they had been fired!
WHIZZZZZZZZ—!
"Huh?! Why are the arrows flying back—?!"
A front-rank archer barely got half a word out of his mouth before his own black-iron arrow screamed back across the fifty yards in the blink of an eye!
THWACK! PFFT! ARGH!
Because the arrows rebounded at twice the speed of a sixty-pound horn bow, their force was now equal to a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound siege crossbow!
Thirty mercenary archers didn't even have time to scream before they were struck by their own heavy arrows! Iron arrowheads punched clean through their leather greaves, thigh muscles, and shoulder plates, pinning twenty men straight to the desert sand by their legs and knocking ten more flat on their backs with arrows sticking out of their wooden bows and shoulder guards!
One stray rebounding arrow whistled right between Captain Hu's legs, grazed the leather saddle of Steward Liu's donkey behind him, and pinned Steward Liu's oversized coat-tail straight to a dry bush ten yards back—yanking the rat-faced steward off the donkey into the dirt!
"Aiyah! My backside! The mud wall shoots arrows back!" Steward Liu howled, kicking his bandaged feet in the air like an overturned beetle.
Across the front rank of the Black-Arrow Mercenary Company, utter chaos erupted.
"AAARGH! My thigh! Who shot me with a black arrow?!"
"Idiot, look at the red feathers on the shaft—that's YOUR OWN arrow! It has your name carved on it!"
"Ghosts! There are ghosts inside that yellow mud! My arrow hit the red circle and flew back at me twice as fast!"
Thirty wounded archers rolled on the hot sand clutching their bleeding thighs and shoulders, howling like stuck pigs, while the remaining twenty archers dropped their horn bows as if they were red-hot pokers and scrambled backward behind the infantry shields!
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Up on the gatehouse roof, One-Eyed Jack leaned over the battlement with his brass speaking-trumpet and roared down at the stunned mercenaries:
"HEY! BLACK-ARROW BOYS! THANK YOU FOR TESTING OUR NEW WALL! YOUR FIFTY ARROWS ADDED ONE THOUSAND SILVER TAELS TO YOUR BILL! PLUS, SINCE THIRTY OF YOU ARE NOW BLEEDING ON OUR FRONT ROAD AND MAKING THE SAND DIRTY, HONG LING JUST ADDED A THREE-HUNDRED-SILVER BIOHAZARD CLEANUP FEE! YOUR TOTAL DEBT IS NOW ONE THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED SILVER TAELS!"
Batu and fifty villager militiamen peeking over the battlements laughed so hard they had to hold onto the wall so they wouldn't fall down.
[Citizen: Batu | Rank 2 Early Martial | Loyalty: 95 -> 97/100!][50 Villager Militiamen Morale: MAX! Combat Confidence +50%!]
Down below, Captain Hu sat frozen on his dapple-grey stallion, his scarred face twitching as he stared first at the thirty archers groaning on the ground with their own Black-Arrow shafts sticking out of their legs, and then at the twenty-foot yellow mud wall.
On the surface of the mud wall, the forty tiny dimples where the arrows had struck smoothed themselves out in three seconds, leaving the crooked red warning sign [ WARNING: MUD STILL WET HERE! DO NOT HIT HARD! ] looking completely untouched!
"Captain!" Lieutenant Ma ran up, his face pale under his beard as he held up a shield. "That... that's not wet mud! What kind of demonic material bounces sixty-pound iron arrows back at double speed?!"
Captain Hu took a deep breath, forcing down the shock in his chest. He was a veteran who had fought across three border counties; he refused to believe in ghosts.
"Calm down!" Captain Hu barked, smacking a panicking archer across the helmet with his bow. "Look closely at the surface of that wall where the arrows hit! There's a layer of sticky white sap mixed into the outer clay!"
Lieutenant Ma squinted. "Sticky white sap... wait! Ghost-Tendon Rubber Vine?!"
"Exactly!" Captain Hu sneered, convinced he had figured out Pei Xuan's whole trick. "My cousin once hunted in the northern gullies. If you boil enough Ghost-Tendon Rubber Sap and smear a two-inch layer over a wall, light, pointy things like arrows can't pierce the rubber skin and get bounced back! That's why that cunning little brat painted 'DO NOT HIT HARD' on the wall—he WANTED my archers to shoot arrows at the rubber skin!"
Steward Liu, who had finally ripped his coat-tail free of the arrow pinning him to the bush, limped back over on his bandaged feet and nodded furiously.
"Captain Hu is wise! Captain Hu sees through everything!" Steward Liu shouted. "A thin coat of rubber sap can bounce back two-ounce arrows, sure—but behind that rubber skin is still just piled-up mud and brick! Rubber sap can't stop a thousand-pound iron battering ram!"
"Hmph. Of course it can't," Captain Hu said coldly, his confidence surging right back up to ninety percent. "An arrow relies on a sharp point. A thousand-pound siege ram relies on pure, crushing weight! Even if he smeared three inches of rubber sap on the outside, one full-speed charge from our thousand-pound boar-head ram will cave the whole mud wall inward like a stepped-on eggshell!"
Up on the gatehouse roof, Pei Xuan's RTS Tooltip immediately displayed Captain Hu's current thought bubble right over his helmet:
==================================================================== [ TARGET: CAPTAIN HU BIAO (Rank 2 Peak Martial) ] * Current Thought: "Hah! You almost fooled me with a thin layer of boiled rubber sap, little brat! Wait until twenty of my strongest men smash a thousand-pound iron ram into your wall—let's see your thin rubber skin stop ten thousand pounds of crushing force!" ====================================================================
Pei Xuan nearly choked on his watermelon juice.
"Old Wei," Pei Xuan whispered, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief. "Captain Hu thinks we only painted a thin layer of rubber sap on the outside of a hollow mud wall. He wants to use twenty strong men and a thousand-pound iron ram to crush it through with brute weight."
Old Wei looked at the eight-foot-thick solid matrix of fused oasis clay, rubber sap, and thirty thousand catties of black-iron slag beneath their feet—which had launched his forty-pound sledgehammer a hundred and fifty feet backward last night—and silently made a prayer gesture for the mercenaries.
"May the heavens have mercy on them," Old Wei said solemnly. "Wait—Young Master, if twenty men ram the wall at full speed, where do you think the battering ram will land when it bounces back?"
Pei Xuan squinted down at the desert road, measuring the angle and distance with his eye.
Roughly eighty yards straight back from the red circle on the wall stood Captain Hu's newly pitched red command tent, his four spare baggage carts, and the thirty wounded archers who had just been dragged back there to have their legs bandaged.
"Hmm," Pei Xuan said thoughtfully. "Hong Ling, how much did Captain Hu's command tent and those four siege carts cost?"
"At least two hundred silver, Young Master!" Hong Ling replied promptly. "Wait—if they smash their own tent with their own flying ram, can we still charge them a fee?"
"Of course," Pei Xuan nodded seriously. "We charge them a Launch Service & Aerial Transportation Fee. Our wall doesn't work for free."
Down on the desert road, Captain Hu had already barked his new orders.
"Infantry Squads One and Two! Unstrap the #1 Heavy Boar-Head Siege Ram from the cart! Twenty strongest Rank 1 Peak brothers on the carry-handles—Ten men on the left, ten men on the right! Lieutenant Ma, you push from the back with your Rank 2 strength!"
"YES, CAPTAIN!"
Twenty of the biggest, thickest-necked mercenaries in the Black-Arrow Company threw off their shirts under the blazing sun, revealing oily muscles covered in wolf tattoos. Together with Lieutenant Ma (Rank 2 Early Martial) bracing his shoulder against the rear of the log, the twenty-one men lifted the massive, thousand-pound iron-wrapped battering ram off the cart chains!
Each man grabbed an iron handle welded to the sides of the twenty-foot trunk.
"Look at that red circle next to the gate!" Lieutenant Ma roared, his veins bulging like earthworms on his neck as he pointed toward One-Eyed Jack's painted sign. "The brat's masons left the mud weakest right there! We're going to sprint fifty yards at full speed, channel all our martial blood-Qi into our legs, and ram that boar-head straight through into their village square!"
"CHARGE!"
THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!
Twenty-one pairs of heavy boots pounded the hard desert road in unison!
With twenty Rank 1 fighters and one Rank 2 lieutenant pouring every last drop of their strength into the charge, the thousand-pound iron battering ram picked up terrifying momentum over the fifty-yard sprint.
Forty yards... thirty yards... twenty yards...
Dust billowed behind their heels like a runaway locomotive! The cast-iron boar head at the front of the ram gleamed savagely as it hurtled straight toward the red circle painted on the yellow mud wall!
"Smash it flat!!" Captain Hu stood up in his stirrups eighty yards back in front of his command tent, waving his iron bow and shouting in triumph.
Up on the gatehouse roof, Pei Xuan, Old Wei, Batu, One-Eyed Jack, Old Guo, and Hong Ling all leaned forward over the wooden railing, holding their watermelon slices and counting down together:
"Three... two... one..."
Down along the torchlit perimeter of Dry-Well Village, the night watch guards marched past in crisp formation, their heavy boots thudding against the packed roadbed in a steady, reassuring rhythm. Inside the warm kitchen yard, Old Guo scraped the bottom of the giant iron soup cauldron with his long ladle and banked the red-hot coal embers with grey ash so the morning broth would stay piping hot until sunrise. Beside the stone counter, Hong Ling carefully tied a red cotton string around her thick stack of charcoal-written work ledgers, counting the neat rows of copper coins and silver bits one last time before locking the heavy iron cashbox with a satisfied click. Even the yellow-vested debtor laborers stretched out on their clean straw mats inside the wind-sheltered barracks let out long, grateful snores, their bellies full of hot meat-potato stew and sweet well water as the desert stars glittered peacefully overhead.