The sun sank westward. Bodies had clogged the Golden River until its waters overflowed.
In all fairness, it was not as though the Exorcising the Dragon Army and the Western Pass Army had never fought bloody battles... even leaving earlier events aside, both the Henei and Nanyang battlefields had seen heavy casualties over the past half year or so. Now there was another Battle of the Golden River.
But one battle could be utterly different from another, and heavy casualties were not always the same thing.
At Henei, losses had numbered in the tens of thousands essentially because of the sheer scale of the war. The Exorcising the Dragon Army had continually rotated troops onto the front, and its total participating strength had not been much smaller than the enemy's. Those losses had also been spread across days of back-and-forth clashes, and neither side had ever lost control of the situation, so the casualties had instead felt almost numbing. Nanyang had been the reverse: the actual casualty figures had not been so exaggerated, yet both sides had been frightened by them, because those losses could have been avoided, but snow and cold had brought them about in great, disorderly numbers, repeatedly testing everyone's psychological limits. Now the battle on the Golden River took yet another form.
There were no frequent engagements, no unexpected losses-just naked confrontation, rout, pursuit and flight, followed by counterattack and encirclement.
At first, after they crossed the Golden River and the battlefield shifted to the west bank, the two sides had even seemed somewhat evenly matched. The Western Pass Army still carried the exhilaration of the pursuit and the joy of victory, but strong counterattacks soon struck from their left flank and directly ahead, drawing them into fierce exchanges. And as everyone with military experience had