Chapter 619: Cavalry Battle

Chapter 619: Chapter 619: Cavalry Battle

Being watched from above at every moment is definitely not a good thing. It’s like every move you make is instantly known to the other side, leaving you with no space to maneuver.

Even if a cavalry battle in the end is unavoidable, you absolutely can’t start the fight in the enemy’s grasp.

The guard who responded was also a cultivator at the Primordial Pill Realm, but with a height of three hundred zhang, he couldn’t just use magic to reach—he still needed the help of a magical artifact.

He took out a sword box. Only now did Shen Hao realize that among the three men always following him, one was actually a rare sword cultivator.

"Flying sword?"

"Mm, half-step flying sword. One should be able to reach that far." As he spoke, he left his horse, mimicking Shen Hao as he leaped onto the hindquarters of a companion’s horse, then cradled the sword box and took on a meditative pose.

Five or six breaths later, a flash of sword light streaked by, flying out from the sword box, heading straight into the clouds. The speed was so fast that even Shen Hao, standing so close, couldn’t react. By the time he came to his senses, he only caught a glimpse of the sword light’s trailing afterglow.

He hurriedly looked up. The little black dot high above was already plummeting to the ground like a stone. In the blink of an eye, it was clear it was an eagle, huge in size, but as it fell, the eagle didn’t move at all—evidently dead as a doornail.

Shen Hao let out a cheer, retracting his gaze from the sky, only to see that man had already put away his sword box, face slightly pale—such a distant stroke must have drained a lot of energy.

With the eagle above gone, that lingering, uncomfortable sense of being watched finally vanished from Shen Hao’s mind. The most direct result: Captain Xu’s command regained its effectiveness, they found a small breakthrough, and darted straight in.

It wasn’t the dead center, but the northwest—apparently, Captain Xu had weighed the options and picked a direction.

"Raise the command flag! Conical formation! Draw your blades—cavalry battle! Full speed, pierce through the enemy lines!"

Seeing Captain Xu’s order, Shen Hao wasted no time lingering in the center of the cavalry. He used his body technique, leaping across horseback to horseback, and ended up right behind the leading cavalryman at the tip of the conical formation.

"Save your breath. You ride. I kill."

"Yes, sir!"

The cavalryman had been startled, turning to slash—a move which Shen Hao stopped by squeezing his wrist, then explained in a low voice. The man recognized this Inspector’s Chief Officer, and had heard the stories—a famed cultivator. He responded instantly, his face twisting into a savage grin.

Seeing Shen Hao do this, the three Primordial Pill Realm cultivators sent by the Commander’s Office to shadow him weren’t going to let him charge alone. They also abandoned their horses, and following Shen Hao, vaulted onto the very tip of the conical formation.

Captain Xu saw this, and was surprised—he hadn’t expected these inspectors would throw themselves into the front lines. His task was to protect and escort, but now everyone had to fight for their lives, so he didn’t stop them—on the contrary, he was happy to see it.

All said and done, less than ten breaths had passed. Including the eagle-killing detour before, it was barely thirty breaths in total.

This time, though, there were no tricks left for either side’s cavalry.

Shen Hao was about to experience his first cavalry battle in life.

"Puchi!"

As the tip of the spear, the cavalryman carrying Shen Hao wasn’t just some ordinary soldier—he too had cultivation, though it didn’t show. But he was certainly bold: one hand on the reins, one brandishing a saber, he ducked his head, eyeing forward at an angle, legs clenched tightly against the horse’s belly, and once he picked out the nearest wolf rider’s warg, he delivered a drag-cut right to its skull.

This was a little trick for fighting the Barbarian Race’s cavalry. In wolf-rider battles, the wargs were more dangerous than the wolf riders atop them, known for biting at horses’ necks. When passing each other, a drag-cut with a saber across the wolf’s gaping jaws would rip open half its mouth, from left to right.

Think about it—a man losing half his mouth would be hopping mad or rolling on the ground. All the more for a beast—the agony would set it sprawling, throwing the cavalry’s formation into chaos.

All this happened in the blink of an eye. Shen Hao just felt like a saber slipping into lard.

With a flourish of his Yanji Saber—a circular spin—the Black Cut traced a neat arc along the blade. He controlled his strength carefully, to save True Qi. But even as Shen Hao held back a bit, the three wolf riders caught at first contact were still cleaved straight in two under the terrifying cut of his Black Cut. Only the wargs beneath frantically lunged and snapped, unaware their riders were already in halves.

The reason Shen Hao felt like a blade sliding through pork fat was there simply wasn’t any gap—no pause in the slaughter.

From the start, the Yanji Saber in his hand never ceased swinging. Same with the Black Cut—only when his True Qi was halfway spent did he have to switch from the highly effective Black Cut to ordinary Blade Gang, rebalancing his True Qi consumption.

And Shen Hao did have moments where he was forced to hack with the blade itself, not just rely on Black Cut and Blade Gang for ranged carnage. For example, after killing a wolf rider the warg came leaping over; only then did Shen Hao truly understand why cavalry fights favored drag-cuts over normal swings.

Because when you slash down with the momentum of a charging horse, the blade tears open flesh easily and bites straight to the bone. There’s no time to flick your wrist out and pull the blade free—it’ll get stuck, carried off as the target falls.

Fortunately, although Shen Hao lacked experience and had never fought a cavalry battle, his Gathering Spirit Realm Ninth Layer cultivation was rock solid; the Yanji Saber in his hand was a rare upper-grade magical artifact—sharp beyond belief, power far superior to common cultivators, and he still had Black Cut as a fallback.

So when his blow sank into the warg’s bone, he instantly used True Qi and Black Cut together to split the bone, freeing his blade. Otherwise, even if the huge warg died, its collapsing body would pin down his horse then and there.

Afterward, Shen Hao tried to avoid close-up hacking as much as possible—using Blade Gang when he could, Black Cut if he had to. Just glancing at the drag-cut technique a couple of times wasn’t enough to master it.

Shen Hao was the spearhead, with the three guards from the Commander’s Office supporting him. As long as the enemy’s three Primordial Pill Realm cultivators didn’t show up to challenge them, these Barbarian wolf riders had no chance of stopping the charging cavalry formation.

This squad of wolf riders was just over two hundred strong—a bit more than Shen Hao’s own cavalry squad, but not much thicker in depth.

Like slicing into pork fat, as long as the saber was sharp enough and the hand steady and strong, cutting through was just a matter of moments. In less than half a stick of incense, Shen Hao and the vanguard found no more Barbarians ahead.

They’d cut through.

Without slowing, the cavalry rushed through at full speed. There was no way the wolf riders in back could match their horses for endurance and speed now.

Shen Hao flicked the blood from his blade before sheathing it. Standing on his horse’s back, he looked back for a long moment, wiped the blood-soaked clothes clinging to him, and muttered, "This Barbarian blood feels a lot thicker than human blood!"