Two more enormous boulders soared over the city wall, tracing high arcs through the sky.
This time, even more villagers stopped to watch. Apparently, once you had seen a catapult launch a boulder into the air, watching it happen again became strangely addictive.
BOOM!
BOOM!
The stones slammed into the bandit formation, turning their confident advance into a panicked scramble. Men screamed as the boulders crushed their comrades and kept rolling through the ranks.
The charge that had looked unstoppable moments ago began to lose momentum. Some bandits were already reconsidering their career choices, their courage submitting its resignation before the battle had properly begun.
On the wall, the villagers watched the destruction below, and their fear gradually gave way to excitement. Their trembling hands steadied, their hearts stopped pounding so violently, and soon enough they were shouting encouragement at the top of their lungs.
"Hahaha! That's incredible!"
"Flatten those bastards!"
"Keep firing! Don't let them get close!"
"Li Da! Gao Yiyi! Give them another one!"
The two blacksmiths hardly needed encouragement. They were already hurrying toward the next pair of catapults, hammers in hand, looking like men who had just discovered their favorite new pastime. After all, how often did an ordinary craftsman get to operate a machine that could turn a bandit into roadkill?
Even the Bai family guards couldn't resist glancing back at the spectacle.
Master Bai's face darkened.
"What are you looking at?! Keep your eyes on the enemy! Archers, ready your bows!"
His furious shout brought everyone back to their senses. When they peered over the wall again, several of the fiercest bandits had already rushed to within 10 paces of the defenses.
"Loose!"
The Bai family guards reacted immediately. Bowstrings snapped, and 4 or 5 arrows flew toward the approaching men, striking their targets with dull thuds.
Li Daoxuan watched from outside the diorama and gave a small, approving nod.
"Nice shooting."
Then he waited for the bandits to fall.
They didn't.
The men who had been hit kept running like nothing had happened. A few arrows had found their marks, but instead of collapsing dramatically like extras in a television drama, the bandits simply kept charging with fresh holes in their bodies.
Li Daoxuan blinked.
Wait a minute. Wasn't an arrow supposed to kill a man the moment it hit him?
Apparently, the real world hadn't received the script for those historical television shows.
In the movies, an arrow struck someone's chest and the poor fellow immediately fell over, conveniently making room for the next character to deliver a stirring speech. In reality, unless the arrow hit something vital or caused a sufficiently serious injury, the victim might remain perfectly capable of fighting. A shallow wound could hurt like hell without doing much to stop a determined attacker.
The villagers' light hunting bows were proving especially unimpressive. Against men charging in thick clothing, their arrows often did little more than leave painful little punctures. It was rather like trying to stop a charging bull by poking it with sewing needles.
Nice aim, certainly. Rather disappointing results.
Some bandits began returning fire with their own bows. A few dozen arrows rose from the enemy ranks, wobbling toward the wall in a loose, poorly aimed volley.
Li Daoxuan's expression changed.
He had originally intended to keep his hands out of the battle and let the villagers defend themselves. But watching arrows descend toward his little people was another matter. Most of them wore no armor, and an arrow in the wrong place could kill them just as easily as it could kill anyone else.
He wasn't about to let a bunch of starving bandits ruin his afternoon.
Without drawing attention to himself, Li Daoxuan reached toward the diorama and positioned his enormous palm in front of the section of wall where the villagers were standing.
The arrows struck his skin with a series of sharp thwack-thwack sounds, then dropped harmlessly away.
From the bandits' perspective, their shots had simply failed to penetrate the defenses. Some arrows bounced off the wall, while others seemed to lose their force inexplicably and fell to the ground.
The attackers had no idea that the defenders were being shielded by a giant hand.
Li Daoxuan's palm was effectively an absurdly thick layer of living armor. Human skin is only a few millimeters thick in its toughest areas, but when scaled up to his enormous size, even that small measurement became a substantial barrier. The bandit arrows were about as threatening to his palm as toothpicks thrown at a fortress gate.
To the villagers, it seemed that their tall wall was protecting them from every arrow.
In truth, their survival depended on something far more outrageous.
They had activated the ultimate defensive cheat code, and only Gao Yiye realized what was happening.
She looked up and saw the enormous hand shielding them from the sky. Her eyes widened, but she quickly understood that Tianzun was protecting the village without revealing himself to the enemy.
The others continued shouting and preparing to fight, blissfully unaware that their divine protector had just intervened in the battle with the casualness of someone brushing crumbs off a table.
Overhead, another pair of boulders went sailing toward the bandit army.
The rear ranks scattered as the stones came crashing down, but the vanguard had already reached the foot of the wall. Several men strained together to lift a thick bamboo ladder, then leaned it against the battlements.
Master Bai spotted them immediately.
"Throw stones! Get the boiling oil ready!"
The Bai family guards seized the rocks they had prepared beforehand and hurled them down at the climbers. Unlike the arrows, these weapons were far less forgiving. A stone landing squarely on someone's head could end his participation in the battle without requiring a second opinion.
Behind the defenders, the village women were already at work. They carried pots of scalding rapeseed oil toward the wall, handed them to the guards, and hurried back to refill them from the cauldrons bubbling behind the defenses.
Every pot poured made their hearts ache.
Cooking oil was precious, especially in a year of drought. Watching it being dumped onto bandits was painful enough to make some of the women wince.
Still, there was little point worrying about the price of oil if the enemy broke through and slaughtered everyone. Better to spend it now than let the bandits take the entire village later.
As the exchanges continued, the villagers gradually found their courage. Their first wave of panic gave way to the confidence that came from seeing the enemy suffer real losses. The giant boulders helped, of course, as did the growing realization that the bandits were not nearly as invincible as they had first appeared.
Gao Chuwu was among the first to seize the opportunity. He rushed forward, grabbed a heavy rock, and hurled it over the wall.
"Take that!"
Zheng Daniu quickly followed his example.
"And another one!"
The other villagers joined in, shouting as they hurried to collect more stones.
"Make room! I've got one!"
"Throw it farther!"
"Watch your aim!"
Before long, the defenders were working together in earnest. The Bai family guards continued raining down stones, while the villagers supplied them with whatever they could lift. Rocks large and small, jars of boiling oil, and anything else that could be thrown at the enemy began falling from the wall.
The bandits at the front suffered badly. The men operating the battering ram were especially unlucky. Their heavy timber weapon had seemed like a splendid idea when they began the charge, but it quickly became an awkward burden under the barrage. Several men were struck, the formation broke apart, and the remaining bearers abandoned the ram and fled.
The wall was proving much harder to conquer than their chief had promised.
However, the ladder crew had chosen its position carefully. They were working several meters away from the worst of the falling rocks and boiling oil, which gave them just enough breathing room to raise their thick bamboo ladder and brace it against the wall.
Several villagers rushed forward when they saw it.
"Push it away!"
Master Bai immediately shouted them down.
"Don't push! You'll never move a ladder that thick by yourselves! Spearmen, get into position. Anyone who climbs up gets stabbed!"
He had explained these exact procedures before the battle, repeating them until he was certain everyone understood. Unfortunately, there was a significant difference between understanding an instruction during a peaceful briefing and remembering it while an army of bloodthirsty bandits was trying to climb through your front door.
Master Bai watched his carefully prepared plans dissolve into confusion. Before long, he was running along the wall, shouting orders at everyone who seemed to have forgotten what they were supposed to do.
He had wanted to be a battlefield commander. Somehow, he had ended up as a schoolteacher trying to keep 100 unruly students from doing something stupid.
Fortunately, the village had the advantage of its walls, and the attacking bandits were hardly a model army themselves. Both sides were improvising as they went, with the defenders at least benefiting from the fact that gravity was working in their favor.
A bandit finally managed to climb far enough up the ladder to reach the battlements. He clung to the bamboo rungs with 1 hand, waving a short cleaver with the other as he struggled to get his footing.
A villager thrust a sharpened bamboo spear toward him.
The bandit barely had time to scream before the point struck him and knocked him backward. He tumbled from a height of 2 zhang and landed flat on his back with a sickening thud.
Whether the spear wound or the fall had finished him was difficult to say. Either way, he was no longer climbing anything.
Another bandit appeared on the ladder.
This one was considerably more troublesome.
He was a huge, heavily built man wrapped in thick raw cowhide. The hide covered his torso like a crude suit of armor, making him look less like a bandit and more like a butcher's shop that had somehow learned to swing a sword.
When the villagers thrust their bamboo spears at him, he didn't even bother to dodge.
The sharpened points struck his chest, but the thick hide stopped them from penetrating. The villagers pushed with all their strength, yet they couldn't force the hulking man away from the ladder.
The bandit grinned.
He raised his broadsword and swung.
SNAP!
The bamboo spear broke in half.
The villager holding it stared at the broken shaft in disbelief, then stumbled backward in terror.
The bandit hauled himself over the battlements and landed on the wall with a heavy thump. He straightened up, laughed loudly, and raised his sword for everyone to see.
"Remember this name! I'm Yi Dao, the One-Blade Bandit! Today, I'm going to cut every last one of you down!"
Several villagers rushed toward him.
Yi Dao barely took them seriously. His cowhide armor had already stopped their spears, and he had little reason to believe their other weapons would fare any better. To him, these were just frightened peasants who had mistaken a tall wall for an impregnable fortress.
He had personally cut down 5 guards during the assault on Bai Family Fort the previous day. Compared with those men, the villagers before him seemed like easy prey.
"Come on, then!" he sneered, raising his blade. "Who wants to be first?"
A tall, muscular young man charged toward him.
Yi Dao laughed and swung his sword at the man's chest, expecting the blade to bite into flesh.
CLANG!
The sound rang out across the battlements.
Instead of cutting into the man's body, Yi Dao's sword struck something hard and metallic. The impact sent a sharp vibration through the blade, leaving him momentarily stunned.
He stared at his opponent's chest.
Huh.!! Iron armor.
The young man was wearing a suit of iron armor.
Yi Dao's confident grin vanished.
"What the hell?!"