Damn it, I'm in the garbage book I wrote

Chapter 761 Go for it, just go for it.

Many people don't understand the importance of information in war. For example, the war that is about to happen here is a case in point, where both sides have a serious information gap.

Firstly, due to the incomplete terrain data and intelligence network, the Han army's analysis of the battlefield situation was largely based on the layout of the Central Plains battlefield, where the enemy's main force was often in units of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands.

Therefore, during the war preparation phase, they all proceeded based on their own standards, which can be considered a kind of stereotype about war. They prepared muskets, cannons, and "Astartes" for the upcoming defensive battle.

Five hundred fully armored soldiers have entered the camp. These guys are 178 centimeters tall and weigh an average of 217 kilograms. They are flesh monsters built purely from meat, eggs, and dairy products. They are a naturally expensive army that even Fuliang dares not raise casually. Only when His Majesty the Emperor gives an order can they be gathered together as war machines.

At least in this era, they were undoubtedly war machines. If the enemy did not have armored cavalry and engineering weapons, ten of these fourth-generation heavy infantrymen could defend the gates of a city.

After the war begins, they will be supported by artillery and muskets from a distance.

This is the current war strategy of the Great Wei, and it is also the war experience summarized by various military academies based on the current equipment and personnel. There is nothing substantial or illusory, only the overwhelming power of generational difference and the devastation of firepower. We must strike the enemy with the heaviest punch, defeat them in one fell swoop, and minimize our losses.

The Japanese army was also thinking with its own fixed mindset, and their way of assessing the battlefield was also heavily influenced by stereotypes.

For many years, the number of people they fought on the island rarely exceeded ten thousand. There were a few times when the number of refugee uprisings reached ten thousand, but who were those ten thousand people? Refugees, commoners, and starving people. What fighting power could such people have? The most common thing they saw was the fighting between the nobles or daimyo of both sides.

Such battles can involve anywhere from several thousand to several dozen people, and sometimes the combined number of people in a fight between two small factions might only be a little over a hundred.

As for equipment, they had little concept of it. Before they started trading with the Central Plains, they had almost no smelting technology. Historically, their smelting technology was introduced from the Tang Empire during the Nara period, but now, due to Xia Lin's trade law, this timeline has been pushed forward by about seventy or eighty years.

Even so, they still haven't fully figured out what smelting is, and almost all iron weapons are heavily reliant on imports. The temperature of their furnaces is only just now enough to melt copper ore.

Their warriors and nobles spent a fortune to buy ironware imported from the Great Wei or the Tang Dynasty. With these weapons, they fought against the refugees and starving people who were armed with wooden sticks and bamboo poles, and naturally, they were unstoppable.

Actually, it's not that they didn't know what the Central Plains Empire was like, because they had started doing business along various ports a long time ago. But that's how merchants are; in order to better control the information gap, they would never tell people back home what they saw.

When they sold those bows, arrows, and swords, they always told buyers that these were the weapons carried by the most powerful soldiers of the Central Plains Empire, and that it was by using these weapons that they were able to become a powerful empire.

Many of the ministers and officials who had been there had long since become accomplices with the merchants, after all, they made a fortune from these trades, and they were all living a life of luxury.

Are there any people here who genuinely want to do something for the country? Yes, but they can't, because they are all from the same Asian cultural sphere, with the same development patterns and the same way of thinking. Those families who make money by being middlemen won't give them a chance to speak up.

Not every land will produce a revolutionary who can lead the country toward hope.

Therefore, Japan is in a very contradictory situation. On the one hand, they regard powerful empires as objects to be caught up with and learn from, while on the other hand, they enjoy huge profits from monopolizing resources and information, creating massive wealth by deceiving their own people.

Therefore, even a high-ranking general like Soga Hyuga would fall into this trap meticulously woven by his own people—even if it was an enemy, it was an enemy he knew well, and this time the thousands of the Empire's most elite warriors he brought would easily take their heads.

Of course, after yesterday's sneak attack, he also slightly increased the enemy's combat strength, but then he thought that it was the enemy's main force after all, so losing it wouldn't be a loss, since he had also found out the enemy's true strength.

Thus, a war unfolded in a nearly double-blind manner.

Thousands of samurai and noble warriors, wielding expensive longswords, began to slowly make their way toward the enemy camp under the command of General Soga Hyuga.

Their movements had already been observed by sentries, lookouts, forward scouts, patrol scouts, and guards. To these professional spies, their actions gave the impression that these scoundrels had not received any professional training. It was no exaggeration to say that even the old men in their village were more professional at finding sheep than they were.

The first to send back the message was the hidden sentry lurking at the farthest point, who used a whistle to imitate the call of a raven to relay it to his comrades behind him. Then, the visible sentry used flag signals to send a message to the lookouts in the main camp. Upon receiving the message, the lookouts immediately notified the camp staff below, who would then blow the horn at the first opportunity. No matter what the soldiers in the main camp were doing, they had to put on their armor immediately.

Then, scouts at all levels would return to the main camp to report the enemy's movements in all directions to the adjutant general, who would then compile this information and present it to the commander, who would then make a long series of deployments in the shortest possible time.

No joke. Without professional training or exceptional talent, let alone commanding a large army, one wouldn't even be able to understand the directions and orders reported by others. Not to mention, when it comes to the final step, the commander might only have less than fifteen minutes left.

The battalion commander led the heavily armored soldiers out to meet the enemy, leaving the recruits in the barracks to slaughter pigs and wash vegetables.

At this moment, Zhang Feng was squatting by the stream in the camp washing a basket of potatoes, while his companion was processing winter melons opposite him.

Brother Dugu can rest today because of his injury, but he still has to work because he needs to prepare meals for the heavily armored soldiers.

They really didn't have any objections to this, because many of them had experienced being heavily armored soldiers yesterday. Wearing armor weighing sixty or seventy pounds plus weapons, and carrying a weight of nearly one hundred pounds on their bodies, they had to fight continuously for an hour. This was beyond human endurance; even oxen used for plowing fields weren't subjected to such hardship. They all knew from their childhood that after spring plowing, people ate chaff while oxen were fed wheat and rice. If working oxen were subjected to this, how much more so would these people fighting in battle?

Just then, the first bugle call sounded outside. Zhang Feng looked up and gazed into the distance: "They must have encountered the enemy, right?"

Their companions on the other side looked over with envy: "I wonder when we'll be able to become heavy armored warriors..."

At that moment, right at the main camp's passage, in a valley formed by two mountains, the soldiers of both sides finally clashed. The sound of war drums shook the leaves in the valley, and the heavily armored soldiers at the forefront, wielding long, flexible maces and shields, were preparing to charge, roaring at the enemy opposite them. This was a genuine war cry, a roar accompanying the rhythm of the war drums and the sound of shields being struck, which not only boosted the morale of their own side but also had a very strong psychological impact on the enemy.

From the perspective of the Japanese samurai, the scene was terrifying. They were marching along peacefully when suddenly hundreds of monsters, dressed like monstrous creatures and nearly twice their size, appeared in front of them. The impact of that was unimaginable...

The key point is that the opponents are not only covered in metal armor, so you can't even see their faces, but they can also beat drums and make terrifying roars.

To put it more concretely, it's like an ordinary office worker who was going to relax at a bathhouse after get off work, but just as he crossed a street, he saw twenty fully insured, heavily modified semi-trailer trucks with their license plates covered, heading straight for him, shifting into neutral and revving their engines.

The armored soldiers slowly advanced to the rhythm of the war drums. Soga Hyuga glanced at the armored soldiers at the front, then at his own horse, and was surprised to find that even on horseback, he was not as tall as these things in front of him...

But seeing the warriors being forced to retreat, he steeled himself, drew his long sword from his waist, and pointed it forward: "Kill!"

The warriors were also startled, but at this point they had no choice but to follow the order to attack and charge towards the mountain-like monster on the other side.

Taking advantage of their numbers and lightness, the samurai quickly stormed into the heavily armored soldiers' ranks. One samurai's standard longsword scraped against the breastplate of the floating beam armor with a piercing sound. Seeing that his attack had failed, he tried to retreat a few steps, but what followed was a cork mace. Using the elastic deformation of the cork and the strength of the wielder, the mace struck the samurai.

He didn't even feel pain the moment he was hit; he only felt his body fly up and then quickly fall to the ground. At this moment, pain swept over him, but his chest was already caved in, and he couldn't breathe on his own. He just reached out and grabbed at something before sinking into endless darkness.

The situation was similar for the others. Although there were more of these samurai, and it looked like several were surrounding one, the problem was that they couldn't get close to the enemy. Meanwhile, the enemy's attacks were unstoppable. Even the most unintentional attacks from the enemy could shatter them and their swords into pieces.

The heavily armored warriors slowly advanced, quickly surrounding the Japanese samurai. Some tried to escape, but each time a warrior with a spare moment would pull out a strange object from behind, which would then explode with a loud bang, causing the fleeing warriors to fall to the ground no matter how long it took.

At this moment, the heavily armored warriors became tools for ruthless harvesting. Their weapons were originally a combination of long and short, ranged and melee weapons, including maces, broadswords, and spears. But it is no exaggeration to say that even if they did not use any weapons and only used their fists, their fists, which were as big as casseroles and completely covered by gauntlets, could dent a Japanese samurai's face with a single punch.

Nearly three thousand Japanese pirates were slaughtered in less than an hour. Even Soga Hyuga's horse had its neck broken and was thrown aside. Now, the only person left standing on the battlefield was Soga Hyuga, the commander.

Apart from a few soldiers who were exhausted and resting to the side, the rest of the armored soldiers stood there unharmed.

Looking at the corpses scattered on the ground and the monster in front of him, Soga Hinata was completely plunged into despair. But his despair obviously did not last long. He was lifted up by his ankles. His weight of sixty or seventy pounds was not even as heavy as the stone locks that these armored soldiers used for daily training.

"Rare..."

Before he could finish speaking, the armored soldier carrying him swung him around and slammed him to the ground, his head splitting open like a watermelon.

"That's it?"

The highest-ranking officer among the armored soldiers, a captain, removed his helmet. The steam rising from his hair, when it met the cold mountain wind, resembled rising steam.

"Wasn't there supposed to be a large enemy army? Where did it go?"

That being said, their ability to sustain combat was indeed a weakness. At this moment, they couldn't care less about the enemy's large army. After a brief rest on the spot, they returned to their camp.

"You mean you didn't encounter the enemy's main force?" General Bao Wu, after receiving the news from the front, turned around in astonishment: "At most, only two or three thousand lightly armored warriors? You didn't leave any survivors?"

Liu Changmao laughed at this point: "That's how it's reported from the front lines."

"Do you think it's possible that these people are the main force?" Liu Changsheng's sudden question made everyone fall into deep thought.

After a brief moment of contemplation, Bao Wu looked up and said, "It's not impossible."

“If they are the main force, why does the commander need to build ships? We can just push them over.” Liu Changmao’s expression was as if he had swallowed a fly: “My three thousand armored soldiers cost a fortune every day. Are they just here to fight these trivial matters?”

"Go tell the commander-in-chief."

Bao Wu's words silenced Liu Changmao's follow-up remarks, and Liu Changsheng stepped forward and said, "If that's really the case, we'll immediately send troops north!"

Bao Wu shook his head and said, "We should not act rashly. We do not have a well-organized cavalry force. Our armored soldiers are slow and heavy, and they are not good at prolonged warfare. If we rashly march north, we will be an exhausted army. It would be better to spread some news and lure the enemy to attack. That would be a wonderful strategy of waiting for them to come to us."

"But we can't even understand their language, so how can we spread the word to lure them here?"

Bao Wu paced back and forth in the staff room. After a while, he looked up and said, "We will retreat twenty miles and use the 'luring you into the trap' tactic."

(End of this chapter)