"Bang!!!"
At the tremendous crash, Xue Liang shifted his gaze expressionlessly to the layer of panel-built earthworks behind him, where a massive crossbow bolt had blasted open a breach, then immediately turned back toward the main battlefield he had been watching.
There, a power that spanned heaven and earth was unfolding, with the might of soaring dragons and leaping tigers.
Yes, the war had escalated.
Although both sides seemed convinced that this war would be a relatively protracted struggle, and both believed the present battlefield had become a mire of steadily diminishing strategic value.
The war had escalated all the same.
In early October, the Exorcising the Dragon Army returned in force, bringing dozens of ballista carts, over a hundred simple long ladders, dozens of teams of draft animals, and four or five battering rams onto the battlefield, then launched a fierce assault on the Western Pass army's main camp.
The assault failed badly. Or rather, on a large-scale battlefield with ample cultivators, progress made by such siege equipment could not guarantee progress in the ensuing close combat.
By this point, the fighting had actually escalated twice within a single day. The first escalation was, naturally, the large-scale deployment of siege equipment; the second was that, under its suppressive fire, the Core Formation and Condensing the Core cultivators on both sides abandoned their restraint and began entering the battlefield in force, actively or passively, to control local positions.
Precisely because of this, after a noisy half-day of fighting, the Exorcising the Dragon Army began withdrawing that afternoon... Large quantities of siege equipment were abandoned on the battlefield, prompting many Western Pass troops to pursue and fight over them. The prepared Exorcising the Dragon Army then counterattacked, with several elite battalions attempting to encircle and devour these disordered Western Pass troops