Yue Fei had some of his best and most agile archers to climb the area surrounding ythe pa.s.sageway. He had ordered these guys to continuously pelt the enemy with arrows while the infantrymen met with the spartan defenders. There was another part of this plan though. Relying on just these archers wouldn"t be enough so he had to take up a bow and arrow himself.
Yue Fei was no slouch when it came to archery, because he had practice it for many years. He had once been entered into an archery compet.i.tion where he placed first by successfully hitting a target from 240 paces away nine times in a row. His bow hadn"t been used in a while simply because Yue Fei had been too busy with his elder duties. This way of warfare was not uncommon within the Chinese community, but none of them were both as good as Yue Fei in archery and tactics.
Before the two armies met and clashed with each other, Yue Fei led approximately 500 archers to climb up onto a high ground so to have a better line of sight. They had just reached the summit when the two forces clashed and they started shooting immediately. The other archers weren"t very accurate and so was only able to hit the enemy soldiers occasionally, but Yue Fei was able to shoot with almost machine levels of accuracy. The reason for this was because he had spent a pretty penny obtaining a pretty good bow blueprint from the community store. After a few years of practice he was able to exceed his past achievements. Another reason was because this bow was a lot heavier and harder to pull than normal bows, and also he liked to use arrows laced with poison. A poison that near instantly kills the one that it touches.
However, since the enemy was wearing heavy armor and his arrows couldn"t pierce it he could only try to aim for the openings in their armour. This drastically reduced his effective in killing his enemies to about 2 or 3 for every 10 shots. Another benefit of using this poison arrow is that it sowed confusion and panic into the enemy ranks and therefore they would be less effective in battle. A few hours pa.s.s and Yue Fei and his archers managed to kill over 200 of the defending army while the infantrymen didn"t even manage to kill 100. The next two days would see a similar result, but surprisingly Han Xin did not retaliate in any way.
Finally, three weeks had pa.s.sed since the first day of battle and Yue Fei"s men had finished the secret blueprint. It was a very weak imitation of Greek Fire. In history there are many victims of greek fire, many being sailors. What made greek fire so terrifying is that it continued to burn for a long time, even if you were submerged in water. This flame is at least on par if not even more powerful than the ancient flamethrower that the Chinese invented. However, this was a pale imitation so it wouldn"t be nearly as powerful. Even so, this flame could still eat through many things therefore it is still horrifying to be pitted against.
It took three weeks to make because of the incredible amount of fine tuning it needed in order for it to be used, and since this was Yue Fei"s first time using such a weapon he would naturally need a bit more time. The way he planned on using this flame was to put it in a container and is basically a flamethrower. The weapon blueprint that could utilize this flame was also given to him by Baron. Today was the day that they would use this flamethrower to completely decimate the opposition. They had produced 20 such weapons and they would be spread out covering multiple places.
The attack of the day began and already apparent was Yue Fei"s dominance. The two greek fire users at the very front was making a lot of progress. These two were instructed to not use too much of this weapon because the corridor that they were fighting on was very narrow. If they sprayed too much of the flames, then they wouldn"t be able to advance any further. They were quite successful until they reached the middle of the pa.s.s where they were met with thousands of repeating crossbowman, and multiple polybolos". The polybolos was a greek invention that was very adept at killing the enemy. If the repeating crossbow could be compared to a machine gun then the polybolos could be compared to the king of the machine guns, the gatling gun.
Everything after that moment went south for Yue Fei"s army. The flames couldn"t reach these enemies with the repeating crossbow, and polybolos. However, the enemy could reach them. The place was a wreck thousands of Yue Fei"s army was slaughtered every few minutes. The retreat order had been issued quite quickly early on, but with the amount of chaos that followed many of the men wasn"t aware of the order for retreat and instead rushed to their deaths. What made it even worse was that along the retreat path there were enemies lying in wait to ambush them. Since the pa.s.sageway was narrow all of Yue Fei"s men were bottlenecked into a small place. Therefore, this made it extremely easy for Han Xin"s men to swiftly deal with many of the retreating enemy. By the end of the day, over 250,000 of Yue Fei"s men had fallen. One day. One very well planned out maneuver. Had crippled Yue Fei"s side. Yue Fei forfeited the simulation.
Yue Fei had no idea what had just happened. Never had he been so outplayed by his opponents. Granted he hasn"t faced any real old demons, but he though that he would be able to do something with Baron"s blueprints. He felt depressed. Just as he got out of the simulation the others were in the room too. All five of them looked at each other and an uneasy silence filled the room. Han Xin was the first to speak.
(HX) "You alright Yue Fei?"
(YF) "Yea.....yea. I"m just no match for you."
(HX) "Oh that"s not true. The biggest reason that I had bested you wasn"t because of my two secret weapons, nor was it that I had better tactics than you. In this case it"s because I had the necessary information to plan ahead of time."
(YF) "What? But I got rid of lieutenant Bee."
(HX) "I put more than just 1 spy in your inner circle. My other informant was your engineer Robby."
(YF) "Wait, but he came back to us all beaten up and bruised."
(BM) "Allow me to explain this to him elder Han Xin."
(HX) "Go for it."
(BM) "Deception and lies are everything to a spy. If they can convince you that they are trustworthy you are more likely to tell them your plans. After Robby"s recovery he immediately went back to working on the blueprints I gave you right?" Baron said as Han Xin perked up his ears.
(YF) "I believe so, why?"
(BM) "That"s because Robby was trying to get enough information on these weapons, their capabilities, how you plan on using them, and other important plans. Once he had this he went to go inform another spy, then that spy informed Han Xin, and Han Xin prepared a strategy to counter yours."
(YF) "No way."
(HX) "Don"t feel so bad about yourself. Isn"t this your first time dealing with someone who knows how to expertly use spies? Considering that you did fairly well."
(BM) "One more thing, Robby escaped your camp by tricking the people who was tailing him, went back to Han Xin, informed him of everything and waited for you to rescue him. Since it didn"t seem like you were coming to get him, Han Xin had to change his original plan and Robby had to be lashed and all that before he was delivered back to your camp. Pretty genius if you ask me. Brutal, but genius nonetheless."
(HX) "So Baron, you were the one that gave Yue Fei that flamethrower blueprint?"
(BM) "Yes actually, is there something you want?"
(HX) "No, no. I"m just curious as to how you got such a terrifying blueprint despite being here for a very brief amount of time."
(BM) "Oh that"s because i"ve researched a lot into weapons and warfare back when I was still alive. That benefitted me a lot when I came to this planet 4. I see you"ve got the blueprint for the repeating crossbow, I have one too. I"m just wondering how you got the blueprint for the polybolos, that is a magnificent contraption elder Han Xin."
(HX) "I received this blueprint when I entered a tournament a while back at the Greek community I believe. This blueprint was the prize for the winner of that tournament."
(BM) "That"s pretty interesting, might I ask as to how much blueprints you have?"
(HX) "You are still fairly new here so I don"t blame you, but the way we value a strategist is not just by their number of blueprints. After all, I could just purchase a million common sword blueprints, but they are fairly useless in an actual battlefield since most of your soldiers will already have weapons. The way we do it here is we rank people by their most prized blueprint. My most prized blueprint would have to be either the repeating crossbow, the polybolos, or the exploding gunpowder that I used against Ban Chao. These three are all fairly rare."
(BM) "That"s quite impressive, what do you think about my flamethrower then?"
(HX) "Going by my experience very few people have it, so I believe it is slightly rarer than the three of my greatest blueprints."
(BM) "I see. It"s time. Lets have a duel shall we elder Han Xin?"