"..."
In such matters, Meng Zhang's knowledge far surpassed Xing Yan's. After repeatedly missing his blows, he had angrily reverted to his true form and lunged at his enemies, but within moments he realized how foolish that form was. He lashed his tail with all his strength, sweeping several dozen attacking Monster-Deities to the ground, then swept the field once more with flame and icy spume from his mouth, forcing the enemy back. Then he returned to human form, flicked his armor and robe straight, and calmly returned to his own lines.
After this, the decisive clash between the two main armies returned to its proper course. The Commander's Standards billowed like waves, command flags and camp banners swayed like a forest, and fresh contingents shot forward like arrows loosed from bowstrings, breaking through the waves under their commanders' orders.
Xing Yan stood beneath his contingent's central command banner, holding the same line as the commanders and officers of the other divisions. This was his first time commanding an army in a battle of such magnitude. As he issued orders in a steady stream, he stole glances toward the allied formations and discovered that, although the troops charged in orderly succession at the outset of the melee, each wave following the fallen, the places where those orders originated were quite the opposite: they were as noisy as vegetable markets. The normally dignified water gods and monster generals mostly craned their necks and shouted themselves hoarse, bellowing orders to their flag officers at the tops of their voices. Only this way could their subordinates hear them across the sea-and-sky battlefield, which had already boiled into chaos!
As for the disposition of the two armies, the scene looked no different from the great melees when they had first arrived in the South