Ch.623How to Wage a Siege Battle with Cavalry

Five days later.

We began the war.

======[ The Wall ]======

“Uoooooooh!”

“Come up if you dare! You dog-like barbarians-!”

“Aaaaargh! My eyes! My eyeeees!”

“Kyaaaaaaah!”

Screams and shouts, curses and metallic sounds chaotically intertwine and blaze like flames.

Blood and heat, hatred and ecstasy, pain and excitement melt and mix together, becoming one as they flow down into the crucible called war.

It was a horrific and cruel sight.

“Don’t stop shooting! It doesn’t matter if you miss, pour all arrows to stop them!”

Thousands of arrows become a black downpour covering the sky, and ballistae positioned atop the wall fire massive arrows like spears with heavy booms.

“The wall must be defended at all costs! Even if you die, die on the wall! Don’t let those prairie demons violate the Empire!”

Soldiers lean over the wall, throwing boiling water, rocks, and massive logs. Arrows shot by mounted archers pierce the foreheads of unlucky soldiers, dragging their bodies down from the wall.

– Kwadeudeudeudeuk!

A massive blade attached to a chain sweeps across the wall’s surface like a pendulum, and the bodies of Ka’har warriors, split in two without even a scream, fall like autumn leaves.

Even warriors who nimbly avoided the blade were shot down by the javelins of knights guarding the wall, falling with echoes of death throes.

“Kieeeeeet!”

Warriors who managed to climb onto the wall despite all threats swing their blades with fierce battle cries.

Imperial soldiers’ necks are cut like harvest-ready barley, spraying fountains of blood, while knights who arrive late block the warriors’ blades, continuing the intensely fierce slaughter.

– Hwooooong!

“Catapults! Dodge! Dodge!”

Before someone’s warning ends, massive boulders fly toward the wall.

Projectiles the size of human torsos arc through the air, striking the defensive towers on the wall. With thunderous booms, the towers shatter into pieces, and fragments of brick, wood, and human remains rain down like hail.

“No, nooooooo!”

“Uwaaaaaaaah!”

Soldiers caught in the collapse of the defensive towers are thrown off the wall, falling toward the ground. Despairing screams. Bodies shattering into pieces.

The temporary moat was already filled with corpses, becoming a hill of flesh, while a river of blood overflowed with brains and entrails floating on it, emitting a terrible stench.

A desperate and tragic battle as if hell itself had been transported there. Human life no longer held even the weight of a piece of paper.

This situation wasn’t limited to just this location, but the entire wall.

—-

The fearsome aspect of the Ka’har is that all of their tens of thousands of soldiers are cavalry forces. Even their White Banner Army, trained as infantry, could outperform Imperial cavalry just by mounting horses.

With mobility that Imperial cavalry could barely match, horsemanship that allowed acrobatics on horseback, and mounted archery skills precise enough to shoot accurately while retreating.

In a battle on open plains, they would be toyed with and utterly defeated due to the gap in cavalry strength.

In other words, on battlefields where cavalry strength was difficult to utilize, their advantages were diminished.

If it was a battle where riding horses was impossible, they were not an unstoppable calamity but merely a group of aggressive fighters.

Therefore, Ludwig, who was preparing for the defensive battle, thought that the fact that most of the Ka’har forces were cavalry would become their weakness.

No matter how many tens of thousands of cavalry they brought, unless they could ride their horses up the walls, they would have to dismount to cross the wall.

And the moment they dismounted, they were just mediocre infantry. A barbaric group with excessive ferocity but severely lacking in siege and infantry combat experience.

The Imperial forces defending the wall were also mediocre forces, but if both sides had similar strength, the defenders naturally had the advantage over the attackers.

Even to capture an earthen fortress, conventional wisdom dictated that three times the manpower was needed, so what about a wall built of rock stacked dozens of meters high, solid enough to withstand catapult attacks?

‘Even with seventy thousand spears instead of forty-seven thousand, they couldn’t break through the wall’s defenses. You know that too, don’t you? Orhan.’

That’s why Ludwig wasn’t overly concerned about the possibility of being overwhelmed in a force-against-force battle.

What worried him was the power of those who defied common sense, like Orhan or the Champions, not the numbers of men who would honestly die when hit by arrows or swords.

But Orhan thought differently.

Unlike Ludwig, who thought they couldn’t exert their full strength in a siege because most of the Ka’har forces were cavalry, Orhan considered the fact that most of their forces were cavalry to be their greatest advantage.

Not just for battles on the plains, but for sieges as well.

‘Even if I concentrate all my forces in one place and push forward, I couldn’t break through that wall. I’ll admit that much.’

Orhan also knew that breaking through the wall with a frontal assault was impossible.

Pushing with sheer numbers would only increase casualties, and even if he deployed Champions and War Chiefs, or went himself, the enemy could counter by deploying their Masters and Heroes.

‘But why should I fight by your rules?’

In the command tent with tactical maps spread out, Orhan smiled like a hungry predator, looking down at the map where dozens and hundreds of dots were marked along the long line representing the wall.

‘Concentrating forces for a breakthrough is the Western way, not ours. Now, face the Eastern style of siege warfare.’

The basic Eastern tactic was to use mobility advantage to scatter the enemy and then annihilate them sequentially. In Orhan’s mind, this plains battle tactic was being reborn as a siege tactic.

—-

“The White Banner Army will guard this area and attack the center of the wall. There’s no need to struggle to cross the wall; it’s enough to keep their main forces tied down here.”

“Yes!”

Since nine years ago, when he invaded the Empire by bypassing the wall only to be surrounded from both sides and forced to retreat, Orhan had concluded that attacking the Empire was impossible without breaking down the wall.

The problem was that breaking through the wall was impossible even with all the forces at his disposal.

Even if he concentrated tens of thousands of troops in one place, the enemy could simply block with tens of thousands of Imperial soldiers. The Ka’har warriors, lacking experience in siege and infantry warfare, couldn’t break through defenses with similar numbers.

“The Black, Yellow, and Green Banner Armies will move in units of a thousand. Assign one Champion to each of the sixteen thousand-man units as commander, and Glar, you will directly command the First Thousand of the Black Banner Army. As always.”

“I will follow your orders, Khagan.”

He couldn’t train his warriors in siege and infantry warfare either, as it would require enormous time and there weren’t suitable training opponents.

The prairie tribes, his main enemies, didn’t build walls, and if he attempted unfamiliar infantry tactics against cavalry, he would face certain defeat.

“Targiyan, Hatan. Lead the Red Banner Army and strike the Danes. You started this fight, so you should resolve it.”

“Leave it to us, Father!”

Therefore, Orhan had spent the past several years pondering how to overcome the wall with his current forces. Since eleven years ago, when Imperial forces crossed the wall to attack the Aishan, he had not forgotten his grudge against the Empire.

Even if it was just vengeful spite.

“The task for your sixteen thousand-man units is simple. Fight scattered, withdraw when the enemy approaches, and attack when you see an opening. Prioritize wearing down the Imperial dogs rather than killing them. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Like hunting a herd of beasts?”

“Exactly.”

Orhan nodded with satisfaction at the question from Glar, the War Chief of the Black Banner Army.

‘The wall is incredibly high and amazingly sturdy, but… it’s too long. Can you defend the entire wall with just tens of thousands of troops, Ludwig?’

A scattered siege utilizing mobility advantage. That was the strategy Orhan had devised. If he divided his forces into thousand-man units and attacked various parts of the wall simultaneously, the enemy would have to divide their forces to defend.

He was changing the nature of the war from tens of thousands against tens of thousands to dozens of battles of a thousand against a thousand.

‘My soldiers can move five times faster and ten times farther than Imperial soldiers. Because they’re all cavalry.’

Can’t conduct a siege with cavalry because you can’t climb walls on horseback? Orhan didn’t think so.

‘Try to block us with your slow infantry, Ludwig. By the time your forces arrive, our forces will already be attacking elsewhere.’

The difference in speed had always been capable of overturning differences in strength.