"Your Highness, you mustn't!"
Kim Seon-a rushed forward and grabbed Gu Moran's sleeve with both hands.
"Your Highness, military texts say that one should not enter narrow passages. Kuki Yoshitaka is a naval admiral of the Wa. How could he possibly be genuinely guiding us?"
What if there's an ambush inside...?
Kim Seon-a looked up, her eyes reddening with anxiety.
Gu Moran didn't push her away. Instead, he reached out his right hand and wrapped it around her slender waist, pulling her closer to his chest so that her soft body pressed against his chest.
In front of the many soldiers on deck and Kuki Yoshitaka, Gu Moran leaned down and whispered in Kim Seon-a's ear, pinching the smooth, soft flesh of her waist with his right hand.
On the surface, it looks like flirting and comforting, but the voice is lowered so that only the two of them can hear it:
"Don't turn around, continue pretending to dissuade me."
He pretended to be angry and retreated to the rear cabin to find Lin Qingdai and Corporal Satsuma. He instructed them to select five hundred of their best and most skilled men, dress them all in the uniforms of the Japanese soldiers they had captured, and launch ten small boats.
Following the thick fog, we circled around from the right side of the open sea to the back of the cliffs on both sides of Ghost Cry Shoal.
The warm breath on her earlobe made Kim Seon-a's body go limp, and her ears turned bright red.
Upon hearing Gu Moran's words, she paused for a moment, then immediately realized what he meant.
She raised her hand and shoved Gu Moran hard in the chest, took two steps back, and said through gritted teeth with a cold face:
"Since Your Highness is determined to go your own way, Seon-a has nothing to say!"
After saying that, she flicked her white silk sleeve, turned around, and quickly walked into the rear cabin.
Beneath the wooden stakes, Kuki Yoshitaka glanced at the scene out of the corner of his eye and saw the three massive catamaran ironclad floating fortresses creak and turn around, forming a single file as they entered the canyon waterway on the left.
He pressed his head tightly against his chest, concealing the surging ecstasy in his eyes.
The left hand, which wasn't locked, was behind the wooden stake. The fingers dug into the scabs on the palm and quietly pried open the hollow whalebone needle that contained deadly poison.
As soon as the ambush begins, Gu Moran come over and question him.
He used this bone needle to pierce the neck of the Prince Yi Great Yan, dragging the commander of Great Yan down to hell with him!
The fleet sailed into Ghost Cry Shoal, following the gentle current.
The volcanic cliffs on both sides grew higher and higher, like two dark city walls that narrowed the sky, blocking even the sea breeze, and filling the air with a pungent smell of sulfur.
We had only gone less than three miles when the thick fog ahead suddenly dissipated.
Rumble--!
A deafening roar suddenly erupted from the towering volcanic cliffs on both sides.
Countless massive logs, each as thick as a person's embrace and studded with three-foot-long daggers, had their vines severed and tumbled down the steep cliff face with a thunderous crash, splashing into the narrow waterway and sending water spraying three meters high.
In just a few dozen breaths, hundreds of giant logs, each studded with sharp knives, jammed together between the rocks, completely blocking the waterway leading out of the valley and turning it into an impenetrable wooden wall.
"Enemy attack! Raise shields!"
Tuoba Mang roared and raised his large iron hammer to Gu Moran.
Above the cliff, behind the originally bare rocks, hundreds of bamboo catapults peek out with a clattering sound.
Immediately afterwards, thousands of Wa " Kamikaze Suicide Squad members, with white headbands and bare torsos, jumped out of the trenches.
These Japanese pirates all had bloodshot eyes and were making strange howling noises. They lit the earthenware oil jars they were holding with torches and were about to smash them down on the heads of the Great Yan fleet below!
"Hahaha!
"You little brat of Great Yan, you shall be buried with me!"
Kuki Yoshitaka, perched on the wooden stake, burst into wild laughter. He yanked his left hand out from behind the stake, pinching the black whalebone needle between two fingers, and with all his might, stabbed it into Gu Moran's fatal acupoint on the back of his neck, which was right in front of him!
Gu Moran didn't even turn his head.
Just as Kuki Yoshitaka opened his mouth to laugh wildly, Gu Moran placed his right hand on the hilt of the Sea-Calming Sword at his waist.
With a flick of his wrist, the heavy black iron hilt, imbued with Second Rank Pure Yang True Qi, slammed squarely into the back of Kuki Yoshitaka's head.
A muffled thud.
Before the maniacal laughter on Kuki Yoshitaka's face had faded, his eyes rolled back, the whalebone needle in his hand fell to the deck with a thud, and he slid limply down the wooden stake, instantly losing consciousness.
The kerosene vat above their heads was about to crash down.
Gu Moran stomped on the whalebone needles on the deck, strode to the bronze megaphone below the wheelhouse, grabbed the tube, circulated his inner energy, and shouted into the lower deck.
"Build the iron shed!"
The voice flowed directly into the lower deck through the copper pipe.
The gear winch made a series of creaking and groaning noises.
On either side of the decks of the three catamaran floating forts, four thick wooden canopies covered with wrought iron sprang up and closed in mid-air, tightly covering the entire deck.
Crackle!
The kerosene jars that fell overhead all landed on the sloping tin roof.
Pottery shards flew everywhere, and flames slid into the sea on both sides of the iron shed along the pre-installed guide channels, without even scorching a patch of the deck's wood.
at the same time,
Five hundred men dressed in Japanese army uniforms suddenly emerged from the forest behind the eastern cliff.
Lin Qingdai, dressed in black, walked at the front. With a flick of her wrist, her soft sword slit the neck of a Japanese sentry.
Corporal Satsuma, wielding a katana, led five hundred elite soldiers in a surprise attack from behind, quickly felling twenty bamboo catapults guarding the eastern cliff top.
In the watchtower at the highest point on the west side, Shimazu Yoshihiro commander of Tsukushi Port, was leaning on the railing and looking down.
Seeing that not a single hair on Great Yan's ship was ablaze, and that the catapults on the east side had fallen silent, they realized that...
He snapped his fingers together and crushed the bamboo tally sticks in his hand with a crack.
On the eastern edge of the cliff, Corporal Satsuma chopped off the head of a Shimazu Clan clan samurai in a single stroke. Holding his blood-dripping hair, he walked to the edge and, shouting in the Satsuma dialect at the top of his lungs, addressed the suicide squad descending the ropes below:
"Fellow countrymen! Stop working for the old dogs of the Shimazu Clan!"
Prince Great Yan has found out that Shimazu Yoshihiro sold all the paddy fields in our hometown to merchants from Hakata. Our wives and children are going to starve!
Halfway up the mountain, on the ropes, five hundred shirtless Satsuma suicide squad members stopped what they were doing when they heard that familiar accent.
Some looked down at the massive ironclad ship beneath their feet, then turned to look at the Shimazu Clan's oversight team atop the cliff, dressed in elaborate armor and pointing bamboo bows at them.
The ship-splitting hammer in his hand wobbled, and for a moment no one slid down.
From the western watchtower, Shimazu Yoshihiro, seeing the eastern flank fall and the suicide squad below halting in mid-air, didn't hesitate for a moment. He grabbed the black command flag from the table and waved it downwards.
Release the Eight-Forked Miasma!
"Refine those traitors and the Great Yan people together into a concentrated liquid!"
"Master, we still have five hundred Satsuma below us..."
The adjutant beside him hesitated for a moment.
"A bunch of lowly commoners who wouldn't even die in battle, keeping them around is just a waste of military rations!"
Shimazu Yoshihiro kicked the vice admiral in the buttocks.
"Ignition!"