Chapter 48: The Brutal Battle (Part I)

Ah, the air in Fornibo is truly fresh. I fell in love with this place the moment I arrived, haha.

Sun Li, dressed in full military uniform, stepped off the deck with a relaxed and cheerful expression.

"I think it's not the air of Fornibo that you love, but rather its land that has captivated you," Victoria said from the side, covering her mouth with a chuckle.

"Well said. The feeling of conquest is always so mesmerizing," Sun Li replied with an overbearing look, wrapping one arm around Victoria's slender and seductive waist.

This took place a few days after Sun Li's massive army completely captured this port city, as he arrived in the Fornibo region with the final wave of troops. Meanwhile, Victoria served as Sun Li's capable assistant, helping manage the logistical supply lines for the great army. Aside from commanding in battle, Victoria could be considered an all-around talent; otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to expand the Norman family's enterprise to such a massive scale.

Well, it wasn't as though the Song Empire lacked logistics personnel. Victoria came here for two reasons: first, she wanted to offer Sun Li whatever assistance she could; second, Sun Li naturally needed a beautiful woman to attend to his daily life. A man, especially a successful one, well, everyone understands...

After receiving the combat intelligence regarding the dwarves, Sun Li was astonished to discover that there was a nation in this world whose soldiers excelled even more at bayonet melee combat than those of the Song Empire. Even though the enemy achieved this through sturdy plate armor and superhuman strength, a fact was a fact. No matter any excuses or reasons, the fact that the enemy possessed superior close-combat capabilities compared to his own army was unalterable!

Well, it seemed he would need to fully unleash his army's firepower advantage from now on. The previous tactics of relying on bloody bayonet charges to crush the enemy needed appropriate adjustments. Until the enemy's morale completely collapsed, close-combat must be avoided as much as possible!

And this didn't seem too difficult. For instance, in the final battle of the landing, utilizing layered, staggered formations could constantly impede and suppress the advancing dwarf soldiers. Of course, this situation wasn't as simple as imagined; at least, if the enemy possessed overwhelming numbers and kept pressing relentlessly at your heels, sooner or later you would be completely broken through!

By that time, trying to be too clever might lead to a counterproductive disaster!

It seemed I needed to incorporate the skirmisher unit.

The so-called skirmishers were certainly not loose infantry in the literal sense...

In the modern history of European warfare on Earth, skirmishers were typically deployed as vanguard troops positioned ahead of the line infantry. These skirmishers were generally selected from soldiers with superior marksmanship within the army. They did not require rigid formations and did not even need to be equipped with bayonets. Most of them were armed with early types of rifled muskets.

During that period, smoothbore muskets remained the mainstream weapon, though the first generation of rifled firearms had already been invented as early as the 16th century. These rifled guns were also muzzle-loaders, later known as rifles. They required a metal ramrod to load ammunition from the muzzle. As everyone knows, the reason rifled guns had a greater range than smoothbore muskets was because of the rifling grooves inside the barrel, which caused extra difficulty during reloading. Early rifles even required a small iron mallet to hammer the ramrod in bit by bit! One could imagine that the reloading speed could simply not compare to smoothbore muskets!

However, the superior range and accuracy of rifled guns secured a place for this weapon on the battlefield. To increase enemy casualties and wear down enemy morale, skirmishers were frequently deployed in front of the line infantry formations. Armed with high-accuracy rifled muskets—essentially rifles—these skirmishers continuously sniped at the advancing enemy infantry formations. They could fire from various postures at will, without needing a formation or obeying officers' commands, as long as they put their marksmanship to good use.

Did this kind of infantry sound very undisciplined? Well, that was probably why they were called skirmishers, I guess...

When the line infantry advanced, these skirmishers disrupted and harassed the enemy lines. When both sides engaged in bloody bayonet melee, they served as the battlefield's sole source of ranged firepower. At that point, only these high-accuracy skirmishers could unleash their firepower freely, firing away without worrying about accidentally hitting their own comrades. The line infantry with their smoothbore muskets certainly dared not fire into intermingled enemies; the ethereal trajectory of a smoothbore musket meant the probability of hitting one's own men was hardly lower than hitting the enemy...

However, due to the limited number of skirmishers, and the fact that rifles were difficult to manufacture and even harder to reload, the force that ultimately decided the outcome of the battlefield remained the bloody and brutal volley fire!

Skirmishers merely inflicted heavier casualties on the enemy and piled greater psychological pressure upon enemy soldiers. Having a group of skirmishers constantly tracking you with their sights left a considerable psychological shadow on the soldiers marching chest-out to meet the enemy, because whether or not you got hit no longer depended on God, but on the whim of those skirmishers!

Utilizing his accumulated points coupons, Sun Li directly redeemed two thousand Minie riflemen to serve as the Song Empire's skirmishers. As the effectiveness of bayonet charges diminished, the role of skirmishers relying purely on firepower became unquestionably greater!

Sun Li looked at the newly recruited Minie riflemen, dressed in red military uniforms and wearing tall shako hats topped with a... a... could I call that a feather? Sun Li truly had no idea what kind of creature that feather came from...

However, looking at these Minie riflemen dressed like an honor guard, Sun Li felt that aside from their uniforms looking somewhat better, there didn't seem to be much difference. They didn't even have steel helmets... (Xiao Bai shouted helplessly: "Damn it, steel helmets didn't appear until World War I, alright?!")

Fine, Sun Li once again magnificently ignored Xiao Bai and casually blocked Xiao Bai's communication channel. This Xiao Bai always liked to peek into his thoughts. It was truly... so annoying!

Well, the Minie rifle adopted the round-nosed cylindrical lead bullet invented by Claude-Etienne Minie. Because this bullet was slightly smaller in caliber than the rifle barrel, it completely resolved the awkward situation of older rifles where front-loaded bullets were either too large to fit down the barrel or caused blockages. The Minie bullet could be easily pushed into the chamber with a ramrod, thereby greatly increasing the rate of fire. The bullet body featured carved grooves to engage the rifling, with animal fat packed between the grooves, and the base of the bullet used a soft cork material. When fired, the gunpowder gases struck the cork, causing it to instantly expand and suddenly broaden the bullet. Because the bullet expanded, it could instantly complete the chamber seal upon firing using the bullet itself, preventing gunpowder gases from escaping and causing a loss of kinetic energy. This solved the chamber-sealing problem of older muzzle-loaders, vastly enhancing the firearm's rate of fire, range, and safety (good sealing prevented gunpowder residue from accumulating, blocking the barrel, and causing explosions).

...

None of this was the crucial point (mainly because Sun Li didn't quite understand these technical descriptions). Sun Li skipped past these tedious explanations and went straight to the part that made him happy.

The lethal range of the Minie rifle could reach up to 918 meters, guaranteeing precise hits within 550 meters, and its power was quite formidable. Even within 15 yards, a Minie bullet could pierce straight through one person and still kill another person standing 10 meters behind them, achieving the true meaning of killing two birds with one stone!

This precision-killing range already surpassed the firing range of small-caliber smoothbore cannons of that era! Moreover, the distance of canister shot fired by all smoothbore cannons was suppressed in absolute terms by the Minie rifle!

Its maximum range could even go toe-to-toe with large-caliber artillery! Considering the frustrating accuracy of smoothbore cannons at the time, if a large number of Minie riflemen were concentrated together, they could completely prevent enemy artillery from exercising its firepower advantage! Of course, 12-pounder heavy cannons could still thrash Minie rifles...

But leave aside the Dwarf Empire, even the main artillery of the Song Empire consisted primarily of 6-pounder cannons!

Alas, it was a pity that points coupons were insufficient; otherwise, if he replaced all line infantry with Minie riflemen, wouldn't the Dwarf Empire's army simply be rolled right over?

At the very least, most of the enemy's artillery would essentially become useless. Could artillery within rifle range still fire leisurely? Would they even dare to fire cannons from their positions?!

Well, this was merely a pleasant fantasy existing in Sun Li's future outlook. Redeeming over two thousand Minie riflemen as skirmishers had nearly exhausted his points coupons. He only had himself to blame; previously, in order to supplement his ironclad warships, he had spent almost all the points earned from slaughtering the English...

Under Sun Li's readjustment, the Song Empire's 100,000-strong army neatly integrated the skirmisher sequence. At this moment, Sun Li commanded over 2,000 Minie rifle skirmishers, more than 10,000 lance cavalry, over 200 field artillery pieces of various calibers, with the remainder consisting of elite line infantry equipped with bayonet-fixed flintlock muskets. This era belonged to the infantry. At a time when cavalry was being forced out of the battlefield's core by firearms combined with bayonets, and before artillery accuracy had reached greater precision, infantry undoubtedly became the most crucial weight in deciding the outcome of war, with artillery and cavalry serving merely as auxiliary branches.

Just as the Song Empire's army was landing and making preparations, Marshal Aigris, the front-line commander-in-chief of the Dwarf Empire, received the news of the port city's fall.

Marshal Aigris looked over the detailed battle report submitted by his subordinates. Although the port's garrison army was completely wiped out, warfare of this scale never lacked lucky survivors who managed to escape with their lives. From the mouths of these routed battlefield soldiers, Marshal Aigris obtained firsthand combat intelligence.

The firepower of the Song Empire's army was on par with their own?! Furthermore, the soldiers possessed a tenacious will to fight, showing no signs of defeat or flight from beginning to end, acting almost like suicide troops who would rather die than submit!

Well, the heavy naval gunfire could be set aside; the enemy's close-combat melee was inferior to that of the brave dwarf warriors. That could be considered the only good news, though among human nations, it seemed not a single country's soldiers could match the melee capability of dwarf soldiers...

In other words, setting aside the dwarf's innate physical advantages, under identical technological conditions, the Song Empire's army was even more formidable than that of the Dwarf Empire!

This truly was terrible news!

For a moment, the proud Marshal Aigris found it somewhat difficult to accept such stark intelligence. Could the routed soldiers underneath be trying to cover up their defeat?

Shortly thereafter, he cast this thought out of his mind. Dwarf soldiers might be defeated, but they would never harm the nation's interests just to shirk responsibility!

It seemed that a decisive main battle would not be as easy as he had imagined. This time, he would have to go all out to deal with this newly risen Song Empire! (To be continued.)

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