"Hold steady! It'll still take time for them to complete the encirclement. What's arrived is only part of the Persian army. We still have time to respond!"
Samael stepped forward and patted Pompey on the shoulder. The solemn tone in his voice, and the calm composure he carried, steadied the commander and helped him reorganize the troops in an orderly response.
After a brutal fight, the Roman legions, through tight coordination between their different branches, had wiped out more than ten thousand Persian cavalry and over four thousand Undead, but the price had been nearly twenty thousand casualties of their own, grinding out a one-to-one exchange.
At this point, the Roman legions had no more than forty thousand men left. The remaining thousand or so Undead had already regrouped during the chaos and were now using the narrow terrain of the valley to hold a defensive position, turning themselves into a hard bone to chew through.
If they dragged this out any longer and let the one hundred ten to one hundred twenty thousand reinforcements close in, then once the Romans were caught between them, the situation would become disastrous.
After receiving the scouts' reports and repeatedly confirming enemy movements and the surrounding terrain, Pompey came up with a bold idea.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
As the Magecraft mines laid out along the southeastern approach were triggered one after another, the already windswept wilderness erupted into a sky-filling dust storm. Gray haze swallowed everything. Without Magecraft assistance, it was nearly impossible to see a thing.
But carried in with the fierce storm was not only a hail of sand and grit. It was also wave after wave of Roman soldiers, skin flushed red, muscles knotted, bloodlust boiling off them, charging like tigers into a flock of sheep.
The sixty-thousand-strong Persian army smashed head-on into thirty thousand charging Roman soldiers.
Because they had marched in haste, the Persian army's formation had inevitably stretched out and become disjointed. The sudden sandstorm rising from the open ground only made the chaos worse.
By the time the tightly massed Roman legions surged upstream against them and smashed apart nearly half the Persian vanguard, those regular Persian soldiers, dizzy from the sand and wind, were still struggling to understand what was happening.
By the time they finally reacted, the Roman legions had already used their polished, high-level battlefield coordination to cut back and forth through the heart of the Persian army like carving melons and chopping vegetables, crushing what little will to resist they had left.
For a time, the storm-filled wilderness was full of battle cries and Romans appearing from seemingly nowhere. With their command broken and their formations shattered, the Persian regulars scattered in practiced panic. Nearly ten thousand died in the confusion, either cut down by each other or trampled to death.
If the Persians had not suddenly remembered to gather their thick-skinned elephant troops, make them kneel into rings, and form layer upon layer of living barricades, then pile chariots, baggage, and other equipment into the gaps to create a defensive wall, their last twenty thousand men would probably have turned into headless flies and fled into the sand-covered wilderness.
But when the Roman legions ran into a force that had turned itself into a field fortification on the spot, they did not stay to fight. They struck and withdrew at once, swept through nearby clusters of broken Persian stragglers like cutting down weeds, then turned and vanished into the fading sandstorm.
The surviving twenty thousand or so Persian troops looked at the corpse-strewn wilderness, the scattered baggage everywhere, and the makeshift wall of debris in front of them that would take at least half an hour to clear away. They could only stare at one another in confusion, left utterly disoriented.
Two hours later, the other Persian army of fifty thousand, more than twenty li away, was also intercepted by the Roman legions bursting out of the dust.
But because the Persian spellcasters there had maintained relatively good magical vision, the effect of this ambush was only about half as strong as the last one.
Even so, relying on the fact that they far outclassed ordinary Persian troops, the Roman legions braved the magical bombardment, rapidly closed the distance, and completed a breakthrough and penetration. After one fierce assault, swift as thunder and violent as fire, the Roman legions withdrew under cover from their own Magi and left in style.
Once the Persians managed to recover and hurriedly regroup their soldiers, they were horrified to discover during the count that only a little over twenty thousand remained.
In other words, in that single clash, nearly half their army had been lost, whether through death or rout.
By rough estimate, the Romans had left behind only around two thousand corpses across both battlefields. Even added together, their losses did not exceed five thousand.
In contrast, the two Persian armies had suffered losses of forty thousand and twenty thousand respectively. Before they had even linked up, their total force of one hundred ten to one hundred twenty thousand had already been cut by more than half.
Worse still, even if they urgently gathered the forty thousand troops they had left and advanced toward the valley to join up with the mere thousand or so Undead still there, facing more than thirty thousand Romans, they could do little but stare helplessly, and might even be eaten alive themselves.
Cold sweat poured from the two commanders' foreheads, and the backs of their necks turned icy. It felt as if the heads resting on their shoulders were already beginning to slip. Gripped by fear, they remained where they were for a time, unable to decide whether to advance the troops below.
Facing these outrageously audacious Romans, the two pale Persian generals wanted to ask just one thing.
How did they even dare?
Yeah, how did they dare? That was a question Samael wanted answered too.
Returning with the army, Pompey looked at the six or seven hundred black-clad Undead who had charged out of the ravine, then at the few hundred Roman soldiers crawling up from heaps of corpses and pools of blood to regroup. His lips pressed tightly together, his gaze heavy and subdued.
Before taking the main force away, he had left behind thirty centuriae. Now, not even three full centuriae could be scraped together.
After a brief silence, Pompey sent men to gather the wounded, steadied his emotions, and explained his reasoning to the god at his side.
According to the scouts, the two Persian armies moving in to encircle them had been separated by twenty to thirty li, too far apart to see or support one another. And judging by their marching formations and the appearance of their troops, it was clear they were only regular forces, with no Undead mixed in.
More than that, scouts extending thirty to forty li farther along the southeastern line had found no sign of any additional Persian armies.
And when Pompey recalled the lizard-cutting-off-its-tail strategy they had discussed earlier, leaving part of the force behind to pin down the pursuing Undead while the main body withdrew, a bold idea immediately took shape in his mind.
A lizard that loses its tail still has its body. It can still climb walls, slip through cracks, and hunt flies.
So he decisively left behind three thousand men to hold the entrenched Undead at all costs, then concentrated over thirty thousand superior troops, wrung every last drop out of the Magi and priests to layer the soldiers with Magecraft and divine blessings, and used the cover of the sandstorm to pull off a beautiful divide-and-destroy maneuver.
And such a dangerous move naturally brought astonishing returns. Not only did they devour the twenty thousand cavalry concealing five thousand Undead, they also crippled two Persian encirclement forces.
By rough estimate, the Persian army had lost one hundred thousand men over the last two days.
Now that Pompey had cut away the threats on both flanks, whether to fight or withdraw, the initiative had once again fallen into the hands of the Roman legions.
Now they should have been able to calmly sweep the battlefield, withdraw to the Ninth Legion's camp, enjoy a good hot bath, eat a hearty dinner, and tell their friends and comrades of this thrilling, brilliant battle.
Samael agreed completely with Pompey's decision to withdraw at this point.
It was certainly no small thing that the Persians had suffered well over a hundred thousand casualties, but the fifty thousand reinforcements drawn from near the royal court, along with the nearly twenty thousand men of the Tenth Legion, had also taken devastating losses, leaving only half their numbers.
On top of that, the priests and Magi, pushed to the limit, were practically collapsing. And after battle after battle, with the effects of Magecraft and divine blessings fading, the Roman soldiers had gone pale and unsteady, kept upright by nothing but sheer will.
Withdrawing to recover and fight another day was unquestionably the wisest choice.
And yet, as the legion collected the belongings of their fallen comrades and slowly withdrew from the ravine, one question still lingered in Samael's mind.
Where had the remaining hundred thousand-plus Persian troops, and the most elite Undead, gone?
Just as the Ancient Serpent was unable to make sense of it, the earth began to shake violently once more, and a dense tide of figures rolled forward like a black flood.
A white bull... a spear wrapped in a slender serpent and leaves... it was the banner of the Roman Tenth Legion!
Pompey and Samael looked at the battle standard raised high and both felt a wave of relief. But as it drew closer, Samael's instinctively opened cross-star eyes suddenly contracted, and his face changed drastically.
No. The edges are curled and torn, and there's fresh blood still on it...
This is... a trophy.
The Tenth Legion is finished...
At that moment, having reached the same conclusion, Samael and Pompey exchanged bitter smiles as a powerful sense of absurdity and frustration rose in them.
Now there was no need to wonder what those hundreds of thousands of Persians had gone off to do.
On this side, the Roman legions had waited in readiness, first killing off the Persians' twenty thousand cavalry, then seizing the opportunity to shatter the reinforcements one by one. One road had collapsed into three, and it could be called a great victory.
On the other side, the Persian army had split off, circled around, and quietly struck at their base. With overwhelming numbers, they had rolled forward and pulled out the thorn that was the Tenth Legion.
In a sense, both sides had won. Won big.
But the outcome was not what either side had expected.
Here, the Roman legions had lost the fortress garrison that should have served as their buffer. The thirty thousand soldiers still able to rest and regroup had lost their line of retreat and now faced a difficult road ahead.
There, the Persian army's grand strategy of encirclement and multi-front annihilation had collapsed along three lines. What should have been an inescapable net was now full of holes.
This exchange of peak moves from both sides had left the battlefield in an extremely delicate state.
But as Samael and Pompey looked at the thirty thousand soldiers, pale, staggering, and on the verge of collapse, the gloom on their faces only deepened.
By comparison, the Persians still held an absolute advantage. Their margin for error was far greater. The Romans' situation, on the other hand, was far more urgent.
The Roman legions could no longer withstand another great battle, especially with nearly half of the enemy's Undead still intact, that monstrous weapon of war.
This was turning into real trouble...
Samael tightened his grip on the Spear of Nation Building, his eyes dark and his expression shifting uncertainly.