Chapter Eighty-Seven: Rout (Third Update, Please Subscribe)

As fast as they could!

Ganning, mounted high on his horse, looked toward the distant fury of battle and kept urging his men onward.

But men were not forged of iron. They had already raced more than twenty miles, fought a fierce engagement at the bridgehead north of Nanyang, wiping out half of Yujin’s troops, and then had to gallop back over a long distance. It was, indeed, asking far too much.

So they had taken a brief rest in the middle. After all, Cao Cao’s side still believed Yujin would be arriving, and they too had been buying time, giving both armies a little room to breathe.

By the time Ganning returned, battle had already broken out on both sides. Yet with the fighting taking place on an endless plain, they had been spotted from several li away. There was no way to reach the battlefield in time, so all he could do was drive his soldiers onward as quickly as possible.

By then, Cao Cao and Zhang Xiu had already been fighting for nearly an hour. The clash was brutal. In this small-scale positional battle of roughly twenty thousand men, Zhang Xiu held the advantage of terrain, while Cao Cao held the advantage of manpower and morale.

The latter meant not only that Cao’s troops fought fiercely and moved with perfect coordination, but, most importantly, that Cao Cao’s own use of tactics was superb, and had already thrown the enemy’s formation into disorder.

Now both Zhang Xiu’s left and right flanks were under heavy pressure, and the formation had begun to collapse into confusion. Cao Cao then ordered a full assault, pressing hard against the front and leaving Zhang Xiu’s line visibly on the verge of breaking.

If not for the two thousand archers on the hill still raining arrows down upon Cao’s troops, the Xiliang army would likely already have been routed.

The only good news was that Ganning was almost there.

So long as Ganning launched a flank attack against Cao’s army, everything would change.

After Shen Chen and Deng Zhao drove back Han Hao together, Shen Chen noticed amid the chaos that the front-left line of Zhang Xiu’s forces had fallen into disorder under Shi Huan’s assault, and hurried over to reinforce it.

Yet never in his wildest imagination had he thought this: the flank he had finally managed to hold would be saved, only for Zhang Xiu, who stood at the very front, to suddenly falter.

With both wings under attack, the army’s formation was already in utter disarray. Zhang Xiu himself was locked in fierce combat with Cao Hong, but in the end he could not hold and was driven back by Cao Hong, forced to withdraw.

Had he not retreated, it might still have been manageable; with the commander’s banner still at the front, the troops could have held on by sheer will. But the moment he pulled back, the troops in front followed him in retreat.

The scattered center of the formation instantly drew in and collapsed backward, abandoning both wings outright.

If Shen Chen had still been on the hill, he would have surely cursed Zhang Xiu as a complete fool.

But he was not there. Unaware of the movement in the front ranks, he was still rallying the troops of Huangmen Pavilion and assaulting Shi Huan’s forces with all his might when, in the midst of the fierce struggle, the front of Zhang Xiu’s army suddenly crumbled as though a mountain had collapsed. The left and right wings of the vanguard broke apart in an instant.

“The general has retreated.”

“Faster, fall back!”

“Damn it, the enemy is catching up!”

“Run!”

In an instant, the whole battlefield tilted into collapse.

Shen Chen was stunned. He did not even know how they had lost. He had thought he was successfully plugging the holes and putting out the fires, only to see Zhang Xiu’s vanguard flee in a rout in the blink of an eye.

But this was no time to figure out where the problem lay. Seeing Zhang Xiu’s forces in full retreat, he immediately understood something was wrong and shouted, “Withdraw!”

“Withdraw!”

Deng Zhao, Shen Zhen, and the others at once blew their whistles.

The shrill notes rang across the battlefield. The soldiers of Huangmen Pavilion gathered toward this side and, under Shen Chen’s command, pulled northward.

They moved north in order to converge with Ganning, who was nearly upon the battlefield.

And at that moment, the situation on the field reversed almost in an instant. It was proof of the old saying: the battlefield changes in the blink of an eye, and no one knows whether a position of advantage one moment will become a disadvantage the next.

Zhang Xiu’s army fled in a complete rout, surging backward in a tide. Cao’s troops pursued in hot blood, driving the Xiliang soldiers to cast aside armor and helmets and flee in utter disgrace.

Far off by the riverbank, seeing his army victorious, Cao Cao let out a long breath. Seizing the moment when those around him were not paying attention, he wiped the sweat from his brow, then recovered his earlier calm and composure.

In truth, this battle had been a close thing even for him. Zhang Xiu had taken the advantage of terrain and seized the little hill on the left bank of the bridge, allowing his archers to fire down from above.

Though Cao’s side had the numerical advantage, if the fight dragged on, that advantage would quickly vanish.

The enemy reinforcements were about to arrive.

So the urgent task before Cao Cao was clear: before those reinforcements came, he had to use his temporary edge to crush the Xiliang army.

Time was short, the task formidable. Any slight mistake, or any delay too long, would have meant a catastrophic defeat.

For Cao Cao, then, finding a breakthrough in the shortest possible time was crucial.

Fortunately, he succeeded.

First, he took advantage of the brief confusion in the enemy’s rear-left flank and sent Han Hao to break through with precision.

Then he had Shi Huan strike like a startled snake, launching a fierce assault on the enemy left wing, throwing the entire Xiliang formation into disarray.

It must be remembered that Zhang Xiu had two thousand men stationed on the hill, so on the main battlefield he had only a little over four thousand troops, fewer than five thousand in all.

Cao Cao had nearly three thousand more than that, giving him far greater room to maneuver.

Still, Shen Chen had more than a thousand men as well, and that could not be ignored.

If it had been a mediocre commander, or one who had failed to catch that sliver of weakness at the critical moment, Shen Chen’s thousand men might well have concealed the vulnerability Zhang Xiu’s army had exposed.

Fortunately, Cao Cao seized that tiny opening.

Seeing the battlefield turn in an instant, Zhang Xiu’s troops fleeing in mass while his own men pursued at their heels, Cao Cao ran them for about half a li before issuing the order: “Sound the recall!”

“Yes, sir!”

At such a moment, even the dullest fool beside Cao Cao would not have questioned the command.

Ganning’s army was already less than two li away.

The ringing of the bronze recall signal sounded out.

Cao’s soldiers were well trained and did not continue the pursuit to enlarge their gains, but swiftly pulled back and regrouped.

In this battle, Cao’s army suffered more than a thousand casualties, Zhang Xiu’s forces also lost more than a thousand, and the soldiers of Huangmen Pavilion lost only several dozen. Bodies lay everywhere across the bridgehead and over the hills and plain.

At first glance, the losses seemed roughly equal, but one must not forget that at least half of Cao’s soldiers had charged under a hail of arrows. If Zhang Xiu had not occupied the hill on the left bank, Cao’s casualties might have been cut in half.

From this alone, one could see how formidable Cao Cao’s battlefield command truly was.

Shen Chen had done his best as well, but first, he lacked experience; he had almost no experience commanding a battle of tens of thousands.

Second, and most importantly, he did not actually have command authority over Zhang Xiu’s troops, only over Ganning’s forces and the soldiers of Huangmen Pavilion.

Yet Ganning was not present, and the troops Shen Chen could truly use were few. As a result, he was led around by Cao Cao, patching one wall only to tear down another, and in the end still could not avert the rout of the Xiliang army.

Still, fortunately, Ganning had arrived in time and had not given Cao Cao the chance to enlarge his gains. Otherwise, if he had been delayed by another hour, Zhang Xiu’s army would have suffered at least another thousand losses.

By the time Ganning reached the battlefield, Cao Cao had already gathered his troops. His men were of very high quality indeed, at least infinitely stronger than the middle school and high school students of later generations.

When Shen Chen had been a student, he remembered that on Mondays the school would, as usual, hold a morning assembly on the sports field. The four or five thousand teachers and students would take more than twenty minutes to sort themselves into line, and only then would each class form up in order.

But after Cao Cao’s recall signal was sounded, the front-line soldiers had already sprinted back. Behind them, under the command of officers at every level, the rest of Cao’s troops had swiftly formed a defensive line facing north.

By the time Ganning was less than a li from them, in scarcely ten minutes, they were already in position, spears leveled toward Ganning’s army.

The two sides quickly fell into a standoff.

Shen Chen led the soldiers of Huangmen Pavilion to converge with Ganning’s force.

After the two sides joined up, Ganning came over and asked, “Achen, how did it go?”

“Not as I had hoped.”

Shen Chen shook his head. “I underestimated Cao Cao’s ability, and overestimated my own.”

“How so?”

“I thought I could fight him to a standstill. Unfortunately, I had no way to command Zhang Xiu’s troops. Otherwise, we should have been able to hold out a little longer.”

“So Zhang Xiu is that useless?”

Ganning frowned. Back then, how had he managed to defeat Liu Biao’s army, then?

But thinking back to the so-called military strength he had seen among Liu Biao’s troops, he felt some of his doubts fade. They truly had not been very capable.

Shen Chen said, “It’s not that Zhang Xiu is useless. His Xiliang troops are still very fierce. It’s only that Cao Cao’s ability to adapt on the spot far surpasses Zhang Xiu’s. He lost because, in terms of command and deployment, he was inferior.”

This could not be denied. As one of the most outstanding military strategists of the late Han and the Three Kingdoms, Cao Cao was indeed formidable in war.

Especially in a battle of this scale, with only ten to twenty thousand men, his command was nothing short of art. His instincts were extremely keen; if placed in later generations, he would at the very least have been marshal material.

If judged by individual combat strength alone, Zhang Xiu’s Xiliang army might even have been superior to Cao’s troops. But in terms of coordination, individual quality, and the command level of Zhang Xiu and Cao Cao, the two sides were not even in the same league.

In the short little more than an hour before Ganning arrived, Cao Cao had found a chance to whirl Zhang Xiu’s Xiliang army around in circles. Even with Shen Chen plugging the gaps, he still could not keep up. It was indeed admirable.

Yet this battle had also taught Shen Chen a great deal. Though he was not as good as Cao Cao in field command, at least he had succeeded tactically: first breaking Cao’s detached force, then waiting for reinforcements to arrive before using numbers to overwhelm the enemy, thereby achieving a tactical victory.

And seeing Cao Cao’s brilliant command on the battlefield had also greatly inspired him. At the very least, he would benefit from it for a long time to come, and use it as motivation to continue studying and improving.

Of course.

Although he had won a certain tactical victory this time, Shen Chen also understood that the reason for that success was his foreknowledge, and the fact that Cao Cao did not know Ganning had entered this war.

The conflict between Cao Cao and Zhang Xiu had only been underway for less than half a month. He did not believe Liu Biao could have reacted so quickly, never realizing that from the very beginning, Shen Chen had been involved.

So fundamentally, Shen Chen had actually seized the initiative and held a tremendous intelligence advantage.

If he and Cao Cao had stood on the same informational ground, this battle would likely not have ended in such a near draw; Shen Chen would probably have been thoroughly defeated.

For that reason, he felt no joy at all from defeating Cao Ren and Le Jin. Only by facing Cao Cao in person could one truly feel his power.