"BREAK FOR ME—!!"
Lieutenant Ma's roar echoed like thunder against the base of the twenty-foot wall as he and the twenty shirtless mercenary strongmen hit peak sprinting speed!
Twenty-one pairs of iron-shod boots dug into the packed earth for one final, explosive push. All twenty-one men locked their fingers tightly around the iron side-handles of the thousand-pound battering ram—so tightly that their knuckles turned white—because in street sieges, if you let go of the handles when a heavy ram broke through a wall, the back-swing would crush your ribs!
WHAM—!
The solid cast-iron boar head at the front of the twenty-foot tree trunk slammed dead-center into the crooked red circle painted on the [Lv.2 Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall]!
For a split second, Lieutenant Ma grinned savagely.
Why? Because when the iron boar head hit the yellow mud wall, the wall gave way!
Just like pressing a fist into a giant ball of dough, the yellow mud surface caved inward by a foot... two feet... three full feet!
"Hahaha! It's caving in! Push harder, brothers! The mud is giving way!" Lieutenant Ma howled at the top of his lungs, leaning his entire Rank 2 Early Martial body weight against the back of the log.
Eighty yards back in front of the red command tent, Steward Liu jumped up and down on his bandaged feet, clapping wildly. "It went in three feet! The wall is collapsing! Captain Hu, your ram broke through!"
Even Captain Hu smiled proudly and reached for his saber hilt to order the main infantry charge.
Only up on top of the gatehouse roof did Pei Xuan shake his head with a sigh of deep sympathy.
"They didn't let go of the handles," Pei Xuan murmured.
"And the twenty-first guy is bracing the back end with his chest," Old Wei added solemnly, taking off his straw hat and holding it over his heart in a gesture of mourning.
Down at the base of the wall, the three-foot-deep dent in the [Elastic Iron-Mud City Wall] reached its maximum compression limit!
Inside the eight-foot-thick wall, ten thousand cartloads of spirit-soaked clay, thirty thousand catties of black-iron slag, and five hundred cauldrons of concentrated Ghost-Tendon Rubber Sap glowed with a hidden golden-brown light under the fake mud skin.
==================================================================== [ WALL DEFENSE TRIGGERED: 200% KINETIC REBOUND! ] * Incoming Force: 1,000-lb Iron Ram + 20 Rank-1 Men + 1 Rank-2 Man (Below Rank 3 Threshold -> Zero Structural Damage!) * Calculating Rebound Multiplier: 200% Outward Catapult Force! * Status: LAUNCHING IN 3... 2... 1... ====================================================================
Lieutenant Ma suddenly felt the iron battering ram beneath his hands stop sinking inward.
Instead, the three-foot-deep pocket of yellow mud began to hum like a ten-thousand-pound bowstring pulled all the way to the breaking point!
"Wait... why is the mud pushing back—" Lieutenant Ma's eyes bulged out of their sockets. "Let go! Everybody let go of the handles—!"
Too late!
BOOOOOOOOOOING—!!
A sound like a giant bronze temple bell mixed with a thunderclap echoed five miles across the Red-Sand Wastes!
The three-foot-deep dent in the yellow mud wall snapped outward with twice the combined force of twenty-one charging martial artists and a thousand-pound iron log!
Because the twenty shirtless mercenaries had locked their fingers around the iron side-handles in a death grip, and Lieutenant Ma had braced his chest against the back of the log, not a single one of them could let go in time!
"WHOAAAAAAA—!!"
All twenty-one burly men—still clinging like winter cicadas to the sides of the thousand-pound battering ram—were launched backward off their feet straight into the sky!
Up on the gatehouse roof, Pei Xuan, Old Wei, Batu, One-Eyed Jack, Old Guo, and Hong Ling tilted their heads back as the giant shadow of a twenty-foot log with forty-two kicking legs attached to it sailed right through the air at a thirty-degree angle!
"Look at the form!" One-Eyed Jack cheered into his brass speaking-trumpet. "Arms locked, toes pointed, flying eighty yards without flapping a single wing! Ten out of ten!"
Out on the desert floor, the remaining one hundred and fifty mercenaries in the center formation froze like clay statues, their necks craning upward as the thousand-pound battering ram and twenty-one screaming men whistled straight overhead like a giant black javelin!
"M-Mother—! Why is Squad One flying in the sky?!"
"Lieutenant Ma is waving at us from thirty feet up!"
"Wait—where are they landing?!"
Standing right in front of the red silk command tent eighty yards back, Captain Hu and Steward Liu slowly tilted their heads up toward the blazing noon sun.
A huge, dark shadow swallowed both of them.
High above their heads, the thousand-pound iron battering ram—along with twenty-one screaming, flailing mercenaries—reached the peak of its arc and plummeted straight down toward the red command tent, the four siege carts, and the eighty tightly packed infantrymen standing around Captain Hu!
"SCATTER!!" Captain Hu's voice cracked like a frightened rooster's as his Rank 2 Peak instincts screamed in mortal terror.
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Captain Hu kicked his dapple-grey stallion with all his might, diving sideways off the saddle into a sand ditch just half a second before impact!
Steward Liu tried to run too, but his two feet were wrapped in giant white bandages! He took half a step, tripped over his own donkey's rope, and looked up just as Lieutenant Ma's flying backside came hurtling down from the heavens!
"Don't sit on my face—!"
CRAAAAASH—BOOM!!
The ground shook as if a meteor had struck the desert road!
A hurricane of red sand, splintered cart wheels, torn red silk tent cloth, and flying helmets blasted thirty feet into the air!
The thousand-pound battering ram smashed all four wooden siege carts into firewood on impact, rolled sideways through the center of the infantry ranks like a giant iron rolling pin, and flattened Captain Hu's red command tent into a pancake!
Ninety mercenaries who had been standing near the command tent didn't even get a chance to swing their swords before they were bowled over by twenty-one flying human cannonballs and a thousand-pound iron log!
When the thick cloud of dust finally settled ten seconds later, the scene outside the eastern gate of Dry-Well Village looked like a bowling alley after a strike.
Out of the two hundred proud fighters of the Black-Arrow Mercenary Company: - Thirty archers from the first wave were still pinned to the sand groaning with their own arrows in their thighs. - Twenty-one ram-carriers (including Lieutenant Ma) lay sprawled on top of the wrecked command tent with their eyes spinning in circles like mosquito coils, completely knocked out from the eighty-yard flight. - Seventy infantrymen who had been standing around the tent were buried under broken cart wheels, tangled tent ropes, and stunned mules, groaning with bruised ribs and twisted ankles. - And poor Steward Liu was buried waist-deep in the sand underneath Lieutenant Ma's two-hundred-pound unconscious body, with only his two bandaged feet sticking out of the dirt and twitching weakly!
Without a single villager stepping outside the gate or losing a single hair, one hundred and twenty-one out of two hundred mercenaries were already down on the ground!
==================================================================== [ BATTLE REPORT: THE FLYING BATTERING RAM! ] * Enemy Casualties (Non-Lethal / Knocked Out): 121 / 200! * Enemy Morale: 95 -> 18/100 (PANICKED / TERRIFIED OF THE WALL!) * Remaining Standing Enemies: 79 Men (Shaking in their boots) * Wall Durability: 10,000 / 10,000 (Didn't even lose a flake of mud!) ====================================================================
Up on the gatehouse roof, Hong Ling was slapping her brass abacus so fast that sparks practically flew off the beads.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
"Young Master! I calculated the new total!" Hong Ling announced joyfully, holding up her ink-covered ledger for Pei Xuan to inspect. "One battering ram strike on our red circle: five hundred silver! One Aerial Launch Service for twenty-one passengers at ten silver per ticket: two hundred and ten silver! Crushing four carts and one red tent on our road without a demolition permit: three hundred silver! Total bill is now two thousand seven hundred and ten silver taels!"
Pei Xuan nodded approvingly and handed Hong Ling a cold slice of watermelon. "Good math. Round it up to three thousand silver for administrative handling fees. You worked hard counting all those flying legs."
[Citizen: Hong Ling (Chief Treasurer) | Rank 1 Mid Martial | Loyalty: 99/100!][Current Thought: The Young Master praised my math! If Captain Hu dares swing his sword, I'll charge him fifty silver per swing until he owes us ten thousand years of ditch digging!]
Down below, the remaining seventy-nine standing mercenaries stared at the intact yellow mud wall as if it were the open mouth of an ancient demon god.
Not a single man dared to walk within fifty yards of that crooked red sign that said [ WARNING: MUD STILL WET HERE! DO NOT HIT HARD! ].
"D-Demon wall..." a scarred mercenary spearman stammered, his teeth chattering so loud his helmet strap shook. "Twenty-one brothers hit that wall with a thousand-pound iron ram, and the wall threw them eighty yards back into our own camp! Even an Immortal Sect's mountain formation isn't this evil!"
"Run! Forget Boss Qian's five hundred silver! This village is haunted!"
Ten terrified mercenaries turned around to bolt down the road—when a furious, gravelly roar erupted from under the torn red silk of the collapsed command tent!
"WHO DARES RUN?!"
RIP—BOOM!
A burst of fierce Rank 2 Peak Martial blood-Qi exploded from the wreckage! The heavy wooden tent pole and two broken cart wheels were blasted twenty feet into the air as Captain Hu tore his way out from under the canvas!
His iron helmet had been knocked crooked, his black scale-armor was covered in red dust, and a trickle of blood ran down his scarred forehead where a flying cart spoke had grazed him. Yet the aura rolling off his body was genuinely terrifying—every bone in his six-foot-tall frame hummed with a low, metallic clink-clink sound like tempered steel plates grinding together!
That was the hallmark of Rank 2 Peak Martial (The Complete Iron-Bone Stage)—one short step away from becoming a Rank 3 Martial Grandmaster!
"If anyone takes one step back toward Salt-Pool Town, I will split his skull with my own hands!" Captain Hu roared, his bloodshot eyes locking onto the wooden shade pavilion on top of Dry-Well Village's twenty-foot gatehouse.
"A rubber wall can only bounce back dead objects and weaklings who run into the flat bricks!" Captain Hu snarled, drawing a heavy, four-foot Hundred-Refined Steel Broadsword from his back scabbard. "The wall is twenty feet high, and that exiled brat Pei Xuan is sitting right there on the open roof! If I leap straight over the wall onto the roof and cut off Pei Xuan's head, his whole village of mud-farmers will collapse on the spot!"
Indeed, in border wars, cutting off the enemy commander's head was the quickest way to turn a losing battle around.
And in Captain Hu's eyes, Pei Xuan was just a pampered, sickly seventeen-year-old noble boy who had been kicked out of the Iron-Wolf Marquisate twenty days ago with a crippled dantian! Even if the one-armed old guard beside Pei Xuan was a Rank 2 Early fighter, Captain Hu was Rank 2 Peak!
"Watch me take that brat's head in three breaths!"
Captain Hu roared, stomped his iron-shod boots into the desert road—cracking the hard earth like a spiderweb—and sprinted straight toward the gatehouse like a black-armored charging rhino!
At thirty feet from the wall, Captain Hu didn't touch the yellow mud at all. Instead, he stepped onto the abandoned wooden frame of the siege cart, kicked off with all the explosive power of his Rank 2 Peak iron bones, and leapt twenty-two feet straight into the air—soaring right over the battlements toward Pei Xuan's bamboo rocking chair!
"Old Wei! Step back!" Batu shouted, reaching for his heavy hunting bow.
Old Wei immediately raised his Rank 2 Heavy Mountain-Cleaver Saber to intercept Captain Hu in mid-air.
"Hold on, Old Wei," a calm, clear voice sounded from behind them.
Pei Xuan set his empty watermelon rind neatly on the wooden tray, stood up from his bamboo rocking chair, and dusted off his blue cotton robes.
"I've been drinking top-grade Sweet-Spring water, eating fried Scorpion Kings, and soaking in the loyalty feedback of a thousand citizens for twenty days," Pei Xuan said, a warm golden-bronze glow rising beneath his skin as he stepped in front of Old Wei. "My bones have been itching since midnight. Since Captain Hu was polite enough to jump all the way up here, let me use him to test my new realm."
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.