Chapter 64 The Shattering of the Myth
The fierce nighttime engagement stretched from the dead of night into the early hours of dawn. As the first rays of sunlight pierced the scarred and battered camp of the Song Empire, the outcome of the battle was no longer in any doubt.
As the light gradually brightened, the terrified soldiers of the Blue-Shirted Army were pleasantly surprised to discover that their side actually held such an overwhelming advantage. What on earth were we afraid of? Grab your weapons and beat the drowning dogs to a pulp!
At this very moment, General Amer had fewer than one hundred dwarf soldiers left by his side, every single one of them covered in wounds and seemingly drained of their last ounce of strength. A glance at how they had broken contact with the weaklings of the Blue-Shirted Army made it obvious that these dwarf soldiers truly had no strength left to kill.
Engaging in melee combat was indeed a physically exhausting trade!
The entire encampment looked as though it had been paved with a thick layer of flesh and blood; one could hardly take two steps without stumbling upon a body or a mangled crimson fragment. Looking out across the expanse, the number of iron-shelled corpses was vastly outnumbered by those in blue uniforms. Furthermore, while the armored dwarf soldiers had mostly fallen to firearms, the far more numerous blue-uniformed dead were riddled with horrifying wounds and bloody cavities.
This was undoubtedly a supreme irony!
Hu Hei surveyed the hellish landscape and furrowed his brow. Today's battle had been a truly pyrrhic victory! If word of this got out, there was no telling what kind of repercussions might follow!
On the battlefield, the slaughter had long since ceased. General Amer and the remaining hundred-odd dwarf soldiers were surrounded by thousands of Blue-Shirted infantrymen brandishing flintlocks. Deeply shaken and provoked by the savage close-quarters ferocity of the dwarfs, these Blue-Shirted soldiers glared at the exhausted, mad-eyed dwarfs with a mixture of burning rage and lingering dread, their muskets raised and ready.
Hu Hei stepped forward, and the tightly packed ring of soldiers parted to clear a path. An officer wearing the uniform of a red-jacketed brigadier general emerged, flanked by dozens of Red-Shirted guards.
"Are you willing to surrender? Lay down your arms, and I give you my word that your lives will be spared," Hu Hei rasped. After a night of shouting and issuing commands, his voice had clearly reached its absolute limit.
Hu Hei wanted to persuade these dwarf soldiers to surrender, certainly not out of some sentimental appreciation for their fearless, death-defying spirit, nor for any romanticized notions of mutual respect between heroes or honoring brave warriors. Such concepts were utterly useless to him!
The sole reason he sought their surrender was to salvage whatever reputation remained from this disastrously costly victory!
With a force nearly two thousand strong inflicting such disproportionate casualties on an army of over twenty thousand Song troops, failure to salvage some shred of honor would cause the formidable reputation earned by the Song Empire in its campaigns against the Dwarf Empire to vanish like a bubble in the stock market—poof, gone into thin air!
Winning a battle against a tenfold inferior enemy while suffering thousands of casualties made the Song military look like absolute garbage no matter how one spun it.
Therefore, Hu Hei wanted to capture as many dwarf soldiers alive as possible, ideally accompanied by their supreme commander. With these prisoners in hand, there would at least be some room for maneuver!
Failing to capture even a single prisoner would mean losing face beyond redemption!
Moreover, with enemy prisoners in their custody, their mouths could be leveraged to recover some of the "loss of face" sustained in this battle. From the loftier perspective of political maneuvering, forcing General Amer to surrender was an absolute necessity!
Even if it merely bought a little more time to stall the movements of other hostile factions and bought enough days for His Majesty the Emperor to organize and recruit a new army, it would still prove immensely advantageous!
Faced with Hu Hei's seemingly amiable attempt to negotiate a surrender, General Amer reacted as though he had suffered a mortal insult. "The dictionary of a dwarf warrior does not contain the word 'surrender'! Dwarf honor and our indomitable spirit shall endure for eternity! Long live the Dwarf Empire!"
"Long live the Dwarf Empire!"
Even though exhaustion was plastered across their faces and they could barely manage to stand, the remaining dwarf soldiers roared out their deepest convictions with every remaining ounce of strength.
Hu Hei watched the fanatical expressions on the faces of these dwarfs and gave a soft shake of his head. *Alas, it seems these dwarfs are just like us—the purest and most loyal soldiers in this world...*
Helpless, Hu Hei waved a hand toward the dwarfs who were stubbornly forcing themselves to remain upright.
"Raise muskets—aim—fire!" The officer beneath him caught the signal instantly, his commanding saber slashing downward once more.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Amidst a volley of gunfire, the stubborn dwarf soldiers collapsed peacefully to the earth, as if they had finally found their destined final resting place, completely devoid of any trace of regret!
"Emperor... Your Majesty... I... I have fulfilled... my... oath..." In the instant before he fell, General Amer gazed up into the heavens and muttered these final words, his stubborn eyes remaining open even in death!
"Clear the battlefield and prepare to enter the city. These dwarf soldiers should be their final garrison force; the city of Bernia should be completely undefended now. Once we enter, secure all the precious metal goods within the city immediately—those are the materials His Majesty the Emperor desires most!" Hu Hei cast an indifferent glance at the fallen bodies of the dwarfs. Dead enemies were nothing more than useless scrap metal in his eyes, and he naturally had no inclination to waste further thought on these brave warriors as he turned to issue orders for the next phase of operations.
Squads of Blue-Shirted soldiers methodically began clearing the battlefield and tending to the wounded. The war was over, and the living still had to survive!
With the fall of Bernia, every last inch of human territory previously occupied by the dwarfs was now completely conquered. The Song Empire officially supplanted the Dwarf Empire to become the largest territorial power on the continent of Europa!
However, as the Song Empire's grip on its newly acquired territories solidified, intelligence regarding the disproportionately high casualties of this battle inevitably leaked out through the residents of Bernia. Such staggering losses were simply too vast for Hu Hei to conceal, no matter how much he might have wished to do so.
The leaders of various rival factions—who had previously been terrified into retreating dozens of miles and dared not make a single reckless move, intimidated by the tenacious combat will of the Song soldiers, their advanced firearms, and the terrifying, spine-chilling human suicide bombers—were suddenly jolted awake.
With the Dwarf Empire licking its wounds and suffering catastrophic losses back in its homeland, the rulers of the various realms—General Paris, the Holy Light God's Kingdom, the Germanic Republic, and the Elven Empire—were utterly astounded by the outcome of this modest skirmish.
The military strength of the Song Empire had actually plummeted to such a pathetic level!
As the realization dawned upon them, the leaders of the various nations suddenly recalled that in the great clash between the Song Empire and the Dwarf Empire, fewer than ten thousand men out of the one hundred thousand under Sun Li's command had survived. Furthermore, the hundreds of thousands of Blue-Shirted troops subsequently dispatched lacked the combat capability to even shine the boots of the Red-Shirted elite!
It was glaringly obvious that Sun Li's elite forces had been virtually exhausted!
This was news too good to be true!
Previously, none of them had dared to imagine—or even entertain the thought—that Sun Li's formidable host had entirely lost its elite core. Saying it was easy, but who among them possessed the sheer courage to test the waters?
What if the Song Empire still harbored elite reserves, turning them into a second Dwarf Empire? Moreover, aside from the Elven Empire, the three human powers did not consider themselves vastly superior to the fallen Dwarf Empire...
Yet now, the myth of the invincible Song military had been shattered, making things infinitely more convenient!