Half an hour later, at the narrow valley entrance.
Wei Zhe brought Hu Lei and four others, pulling their horses to a halt as if deliberately waiting for the arrival of the pursuers.
Soon, a thousand-man cavalry unit of the Xiongnu appeared in their field of vision. Leading them was a fierce-looking Xiongnu centurion; when he saw Wei Zhe and the others, a cruel smile appeared on his face.
"Ha, ha! Step through the iron shoes and no place to find it, obtain it without any effort! Qin Army rats, you cannot run anymore! Give it to me, capture that leader, and there will be a reward of a hundred head of cattle and sheep!"
In his opinion, the other side had a mere five people, yet dared to linger here; it was simply foolish to the extreme.
"Kill!"
Over a hundred Xiongnu cavalrymen let out a battle cry, like arrows loosed from a bowstring, and fiercely charged toward Wei Zhe and the five of them.
"Squad Leader!" Hu Lei nervously gripped the shield in his hand.
"Don't panic." Wei Zhe's tone was frighteningly calm. "When they enter fifty paces, wait for my command and use the Armor-Piercing Awls to fire at will!"
Fifty paces... forty paces... thirty paces...
Watching the enemy draw closer and closer, Hu Lei's heart leaped into his throat.
Just as the foremost Xiongnu cavalrymen were about to rush up to them, Wei Zhe's voice sounded.
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The five simultaneously drew those lethal triangular Armor-Piercing Awls from beside their saddles and hurled them forward with all their might!
Wei Zhe did not throw toward ordinary soldiers; his target was that Xiongnu centurion charging at the very front!
Under the reinforcement of his agility attribute, which had surged to 225 points, the Armor-Piercing Awl he threw was as fast as a black lightning bolt!
The centurion only felt a blur before his eyes, a fatal sense of crisis enveloping his entire body. He instinctively wanted to raise his saber to parry, but found that his own movements were as slow as a snail in front of the other person.
Splrit!
The sharp Armor-Piercing Awl accurately pierced through his brow, the immense momentum carrying his body to flip backward through the air, tumbling to the ground with horse and rider alike.
At the same time, the four Armor-Piercing Awls thrown by Hu Lei and the others also successfully hit three Xiongnu cavalrymen, killing them with a single blow!
In a single encounter, the enemy commander and three vanguard fighters perished instantly!
The momentum of the charge stagnated because of it.
"Retreat! Enter the valley!"
Wei Zhe achieved his goal with a single strike and, without lingering in the fight, immediately turned his horse's head and led the four of them charging into the narrow valley.
"Pursue! Pursue them! Don't let them get away!"
After the Xiongnu soldiers in the rear reacted, they pursued them in exasperation.
However, when they entered the valley not even a hundred paces, an angry roar suddenly sounded from the cliff walls on both sides.
"Release!"
Qian Hu and the others, who had been lying in ambush for a long time, shoved down the boulders and sharpened wooden stakes they had prepared ahead of time all at once!
"Rumble!"
"Ah—!"
Inside the narrow valley, it instantly turned into a living hell. The Xiongnu cavalrymen were packed person to person and horse against horse, with nowhere to dodge at all, smashed by falling rocks into tumbling disarray as endless screams filled the air.
After a round of attacks, at least fifty or sixty Xiongnu cavalrymen were permanently left right here.
Without waiting for them to regroup, Wei Zhe had already led Hu Lei and the five others charging back from the other end of the valley!
They were like a red-hot sharp knife, viciously stabbing into the enemy formation that had grown loose due to the chaos.
"Kill!"
Wei Zhe took the lead, and the long halberd in his hand had at this moment turned into a reaper of lives. His speed was truly too fast; the Xiongnu soldiers often could only see a blurred afterimage flash past, and immediately their throats or hearts would grow cold, losing all their strength.
He alone was an army!
In a brief charge of fifteen minutes, this thousand-man unit was actually hacked into complete collapse by Wei Zhe and the twenty men under his command!
The remaining Xiongnu could no longer care about any military orders, wailing and howling as they turned their horses around and fled, escaping the valley in disarray.
Inside the valley, over two hundred Xiongnu corpses were left behind.
As for Wei Zhe's squad, only two suffered minor injuries in the melee.
"We... won again?"
The members looked at the corpses covering the ground, still feeling like they were dreaming.
Twenty men, ambushing a thousand-man unit, scoring a complete victory!
"Clear the battlefield! We're going home!"
Wei Zhe's voice pulled them back to reality.
When the setting sun dipped below the horizon, as Wei Zhe led his twenty brothers—bringing along hundreds of captured warhorses and the enemy commander's head—to appear on the horizon of Eagle Beak Cliff, the entire fortress was in an uproar.
"They're back!"
"Good heavens! They really came back!"
"Twenty-one people... not a single one missing!"
The soldiers upon the city walls burst into earth-shaking cheers.
When the fortress gates were thrown wide open for them, Shi Meng and a host of officers came out to greet them personally, and everyone was stunned dumb by the scene before their eyes.
Those twenty-one soldiers, although covered in blood and filth and exhausted to the extreme, had gazes as sharp as sabers, their bodies radiating that iron-blooded killing aura possessed only by hundred-battle elite troops. Especially Wei Zhe at the head, who sat quietly on his horse with a calm expression, yet the pressure stemming from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood actually made some of the officers not even dare to meet his gaze.
"Wei Zhe..." Shi Meng walked up to him, his lips moving before he finally spat out just two words: "Well done!"
Sun He, the centurion who had once sneered at Wei Zhe, was at that moment hiding behind the crowd with a pale face, utterly lacking even the courage to glance at Wei Zhe.
Inside the main tent, Meng Wu personally poured a full bowl of wine for Wei Zhe.
"Wei Zhe, with twenty-one men, you launched a night raid on the enemy camp, burned their provisions, and beheaded the enemy chieftain on the field; then upon the Gobi, with the few against the many, you ambushed and slaughtered an enemy thousand-man unit! Such a feat is enough to shake our Great Qin's Northern Frontier!"
"In this battle, the Right Wise King's forces suffered heavy casualties and lost their provisions, rendering them powerless to push south for at least three years! You have bought three years of peace for our Great Qin's Northern Frontier!"
Meng Wu's eyes were filled with excitement and admiration.
"Men!" he shouted loudly. "Pass down my orders!"
"Promote Wei Zhe to centurion of our Northern Frontier vanguard camp, the 'Tiger and Wolf Army'! Bestow upon him the title of Fifth Rank Official! Reward him with a thousand yi of gold and a hundred mu of fertile fields!"
"His subordinate deputy squad leader Qian Hu and squad leader Hu Lei are both promoted to chieftains! The rest of the brothers shall each be promoted one rank in official position and rewarded with a hundred yi of gold!"
"Furthermore, in Wei Zhe's name, issue a notification to the entire army! Let all three hundred thousand elite soldiers of our Northern Frontier know of his valor!"
"Boom!"
This appointment exploded in the hearts of all the officers like a heavyweight bomb.
Centurion! Fifth Rank Official!
Having enlisted for less than half a month, Wei Zhe had already accomplished a leap that others could not hope to reach in a lifetime!
He had leaped from a nobody to a rising, brilliantly dazzling new star within the Northern Frontier Army!
Wei Zhe took the wine bowl and drained it in one gulp.
He looked at the bright, clear moon outside the tent, thinking in his heart of Jiang Bo and Ling'er far away in Beacon Tower Town.
Ling'er, wait for me.
I will be back very soon.
His legend had only just begun.
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