The Bohemians wanted to retreat, but the players had no intention of letting the enemy disengage.
A few players realized that the terrain favored their side. In this tangled mountain forest, the numerically superior Bohemians could not deploy their formations or bring their numbers to bear locally, allowing the players to exploit their superior individual fighting ability.
If they let the enemy fall back to open ground where they could form up... judging by all those spearmen and halberdiers, who made up more than half their force, even the players would have to leave a hundred or so corpses behind to break through that dense forest of weapons with only cotton armor to protect them.
So they could not let them leave the forest. They had to pin the Bohemians here until Little Knife arrived with the main force.
Most players had not realized this. They were not stupid; they simply could not be bothered to think while playing a game... if the enemy ran, of course they had to give chase! Where else would their reputation points and military merit come from?
And when it came to giving chase, the company of Bohemians left behind in the forest became a particularly irritating obstacle.
Most of the players serving as makeshift skirmishers chose to go around it, but a handful of stubborn types, or people with ideas of their own, such as Old Cat, headed straight for the "obstacle."
So, as Little Knife led the remaining members of the Mountain Tiger Warband down the mountain road, jogging in formation, he heard gunfire and battle cries rising one after another from the forest.
Little Knife narrowed his eyes and raised a hand to halt the column, then quickly climbed onto a jutting rock and took out his telescope to survey the