Two miles away on the leeward slope, fifty night scouts formed up along the shadowed side of the sand dune. The men held gags in their mouths, the horses were muffled, and even their breathing was kept to the shallowest minimum.
Xu Zhan knelt on one knee atop the sandy ridge of the slope. Supporting himself on the ground with his single arm, he lay half-prone behind a patch of withered camel thorn bushes.
He did not move an inch.
Behind him, his deputy Old Qian crawled over, pressing his lips close to Xu Zhan's ear and whispered, Commander, they are coming.
Xu Zhan had already sensed it.
It was not the sound of hooves. On this kind of soft sand, the thud of hooves was muffled and could not travel very far.
What he heard was the lingering echo of a conch horn, intermittent, carried over by the wind from the northeast. Mingled within were the rough shouts and laughing curses spoken in the Helian tongue.
It seemed quite a few of them were coming.
Xu Zhan quickly estimated the distance and density of the sound source in his mind. Around a hundred cavalrymen, moving at a good pace, their formation loose and entirely off guard.
It was exactly as expected.
He stretched out his single arm, spread his five fingers, and made a pressing motion toward the night scouts behind him.
No moving, no making a sound. They could only wait.
Old Qian passed this hand signal down the line. Along the entire sandy ridge, the fifty men pressed themselves even lower to the ground. A few warhorses grew restless at the scent of their own kind in the distance, but their riders immediately pressed down hard on their necks.
The moonlight was thin, but the sandy surface of the Gobi naturally reflected light. By this faint illumination, one could barely make out the scattered clumps of withered sea buckthorn and dry grass.
Twenty iron watermelons were buried right beneath them.
Arranged in a wild goose wing formation, there were three on the left, three on the right, and four forming a triangle in the center. The remaining ten were laid out sequentially along the route the enemy scouts were most likely to take, stretching the depth to thirty paces.
As soon as the first one went off, the startled herd of horses would inevitably panic and stampede, and the direction of their stampede would fall perfectly within the coverage area of the remaining iron watermelons.
Jenny Huang called this a chain trap.
The sound of hooves grew closer and closer.
Xu Zhan could distinguish the gait of the leading horse. The alternating rhythm of its four hooves was steady and powerful. It was a fine steed, the kind accustomed to running at night.
The rider's weight was on the heavier side; he had to be a burly man.
Batur.
He had pried this name from the mouth of a captured Helian informant. Huyan Ba's most capable scout leader, the one who took the greatest joy in harassment tactics, and who always led the vanguard.
Tonight was no different.
The hoofbeats were now close at hand.
Under the moonlight, a dense, dark column of cavalry poured out from behind the sand dunes to the northeast. The leading jujube red horse was particularly eye-catching. The rider was tall and imposing, a conch horn hanging at his waist, his neck tilted back as he laughed and talked loudly with the men behind him.
The laughter was unrestrained, and even from two miles away, the intermittent Helian words could be heard.
Xu Zhan closed his five fingers.
The pace of the jujube red horse suddenly faltered.
It was slowing down, its front hooves alternately pawing at the sand. Its neck tossed from side to side, and its mane stood on end.
Xu Zhan saw it clearly. The horse was resisting; it refused to go any further.
But the rider did not care, merely lashing down with a whip.
Stung by the pain, the jujube red horse suddenly lunged forward three paces.
The spot where its hooves landed was precisely the burial point of the first iron watermelon on the left flank.
Xu Zhan's gaze hardened.
He did not hear the click. He was too far away.
But the sound that immediately followed, he would never forget for the rest of his life.
Bang!
The earth trembled violently, and the gravel beneath their feet bounced up in response.
A ball of tangerine flames erupted from the center of the sand dune, mixed with churning dust and crushed stone, shooting thirty or forty feet into the night sky.
The fireball tore through the canopy of the night, illuminating everything within a hundred paces as bright as day.
Xu Zhan could clearly see Batur's jujube red horse.
The front half of the horse's body was simply gone.
The center of the explosion was right beneath its front hooves. Caltrops and broken porcelain shards, blasted out from the shattered iron shell, pierced through the horse's neck and chest at extreme speed, launching Batur on its back high into the air along with it.
Batur's body tumbled twice in the fiery light. The conch horn at his waist came loose, tracing an arc in the air before smashing into pieces on the sandy ground.
He did not even have time to cry out.
Before the aftershock of the first explosion could dissipate, the second one erupted right on its heels.
The second one on the left flank.
A gray warhorse stepped on the trigger mechanism. The angle of this explosion was more skewed. A fireball flared up diagonally from below, flipping the gray horse completely over. It crashed into the adjacent cavalry line along with its rider, knocking down three or four other horses.
Chaos spread.
The terrified warhorses ignored all commands, stampeding madly in every direction. Some charged left, some bolted right, and others spun in circles. The riders desperately pulled their reins and shouted, but fear had already swallowed all their training and instincts.
The third sound.
Right flank.
The fourth sound.
Center formation.
The fifth, the sixth, the seventh...
The explosions went off one after another, the intervals growing shorter and shorter. The frantically stampeding herd was rapidly trampling over every single burial point Xu Zhan had so meticulously arranged.
Xu Zhan stood up, because there was no longer any need to stay prone.
By now, the entire sand dune had turned into a boiling cauldron of oil. The flames merged into a single sheet of fire, while smoke mixed with sand and dust billowed into the sky.
Caltrops tore through the leather and chainmail armor the Helians prided themselves on, while shards of broken porcelain sliced through the tendons of warhorses and the throats of riders.
Those men of the steppes, who had urinated and provoked them outside Zhenbei City during the day, were now rolling, struggling, and howling in a sea of fire.
But their howls were quickly drowned out by the dense roar of explosions.
Twenty iron watermelons were all detonated in less time than it takes to drink half a cup of tea.
There was no one left standing alive on the sand dune.
Behind Xu Zhan, the fifty night scouts all stood up, but not a single person spoke.
They were well accustomed to the slaughter of the battlefield, used to scenes of hacking swords, chopping axes, and blood splattering three feet high.
Yet this sight before them, where enemies fell in droves amidst a blaze of fire without a single blade being swung or an arrow being nocked, was something they had never witnessed.
That veteran soldier Old Qian was left dumbfounded.
The warhorse beneath him knelt on the sandy ground, its four legs trembling, refusing to stand up no matter how hard the rider pulled the reins.
Xu Zhan withdrew his gaze and said, Pass down the order. No one is to approach, and no one is to pursue! Wait in place. We will talk after the smoke clears.
He paused for a moment and added, Pacify your horses. Do not let them run off.
The smoke cleared much slower than anticipated. Although the night winds of the Gobi were strong, the dust kicked up by the explosions mixed with the pungent smell of sulfur to form a low, grayish yellow fog barrier that lingered for a long time.
The residual fires ignited by the leather on the saddles and the cotton jackets on the riders danced sporadically across the sand dune. The flames were small, but they illuminated the sickening debris scattered all over the ground.
There was no need for a headcount. With twenty iron watermelons against a hundred charging cavalry, even if some slipped through the net, they would number no more than the fingers on one hand.
The truth was indeed so.
At the northernmost edge of the sand dune, a lowly Helian soldier, thoroughly soaked in blood, crawled out from beneath the corpse of a dead horse.
Half of his face had been slashed open by a broken porcelain shard, leaving a deep gash. His left ear could no longer hear any sound, and his right ear was filled only with a continuous ringing.
He knelt in a pool of blood, opening and closing his mouth, making sounds that even he could not hear.
He turned his head and cast a glance at the sand dune behind him.
Under the glow of the firelight, blackened limbs and mangled horse corpses were everywhere. A few bodies were still twitching, but it was no longer possible to tell whether they were human or horse.
The stench in the air made his stomach contract violently. He lay on the ground dry-heaving for a good while before barely managing to prop himself up with his arms.
A riderless piebald horse was trembling twenty paces away. A fragment of a caltrop was lodged in its hind leg, but fortunately, it had missed the bone and the animal could still move.
The young soldier scrambled over, half-rolling and half-crawling. He clambered onto the horse's back, gripped its mane in a deathly tight hold with both hands, and squeezed his legs together.
The piebald horse let out a sharp neigh and galloped madly toward the north, blind to its exact direction.
Xu Zhan stood at the top of the slope, using the light of the dying embers to watch the dark silhouette disappear into the depths of the night.
Old Qian came up beside him and asked in a low voice, Commander, should we pursue?
Xu Zhan shook his head.
Let him run.
Old Qian was puzzled, Aren't we letting a tiger return to the mountain?
Xu Zhan offered no explanation. He merely raised his single arm and pointed toward Zhenbei City.
Let us go. Back to the city to report.
He swung up onto his horse, turned the beast around, and led his fifty Night Scout cavalrymen as they faded into the darkness.
On the sand dunes behind them, the lingering fires slowly died out, leaving only the smell of charred flesh and ash to be carried far away by the harsh north wind.
Meanwhile, the blood-soaked Helian soldier was riding that lame piebald horse, stumbling across the desolate wasteland, galloping desperately toward Huyan Ba's outpost camp sixty miles away.
All along the way, his mouth repeated only a single word over and over again.
Ghost... ghost...
At that exact moment, inside Chen Changfeng's felt tent, the blood-soaked messenger had just collapsed at his feet.
