After thinking for a moment, Old Fourth shouted to his men:

“Don’t panic! Don’t lose your heads! The enemy’s bluffing—they’re bluffing!”

At first, all Old Fourth felt was despair and panic;

but soon, driven by his desire for victory, he rose to the occasion, completing an extremely complex analysis and assessment in an instant.

Once is one thing, but twice is another. The enemy had bluffed once already—who could guarantee they wouldn’t pull the same trick again?

Perhaps they’d ordered some old and weak soldiers to hide, ready to burst out from behind the enemy lines at the crucial moment. If they were lucky, they might really scare the enemy into breaking ranks without a fight.

He had no choice but to think that way.

By now, he’d already deployed every last one of his troops on the battlefield;

if the beastkin really had reinforcements, his side would definitely lose the battle;

and even if his entire army wasn’t wiped out, the force under his command would still suffer devastating losses.

Old Fourth didn’t dare imagine such an outcome;

so he’d rather deceive himself than admit the truth. He had to convince both his men and himself—and believe that the enemy was up to some kind of trick.

With Old Fourth and his guards shouting themselves hoarse, the soldiers in the army gradually calmed down—for the moment.

At the same time, the enormous force drew closer and closer. Its deafening rumble swallowed up everything;

the earth seemed to tremble, and the sky itself appeared to spin.

At last, the newcomers’ silhouettes emerged from behind the dust cloud blotting out the sky. Every soldier who saw them went pale.

The vast cloud of dust was like the shadow of death, spreading over the entire battlefield as it drew nearer.

Staring at the dust cloud, Old Fourth fell into complete despair. He gritted his teeth and cursed hoarsely.

Whatever he did, no one could stop that charging force.

After the shadow came the great tide...

What leaped into view was a herd of cattle—huge, powerful cattle. And they were wild bulls!

If someone who lived on the grasslands saw them, they might happily grab a lasso and a bow, gallop after the herd, and get ready for a feast.

But even the finest herdsman, if they stood among the clan soldiers right now and saw those cattle, would be scared out of their wits.

That was because they weren’t approaching from the side of the herd’s path, as they would on the grasslands, where they could stay at a safe distance, shoot arrows, throw lassos, and bring the wild bulls down one by one. They were standing directly in the path of the charging herd.

There was a wide gap between each bull, but they were all connected by thick iron chains;

the bulls charged forward at full speed, heads lowered, as if they’d gone mad;

Anyone who collided head-on with such a force—even a true elite warrior—would have no choice but to meet their end.

Who’d dare face them head-on?

If you don’t want to die, run!

The fleeing soldiers all shouted the same word in unison:

They threw their swords, cavalry shields, even their armor and bows onto the ground;

the only things they held on to were their whips and reins.

In the face of a force like this, speed was all that mattered. Everything else was trivial.

Anyone who wasn’t an idiot could see the situation clearly now.

They were cattle!

Thousands upon thousands of cattle, charging like mad!

Even an actual tidal wave might not be as destructive.

The clan army, which had been riding high just moments ago, fell into chaos. Like a dam struck by a flood, it first gave way at one corner, then the breach spread, until the whole dam was overwhelmed.

The herd didn’t slow down. They hadn’t come to fight;

these innocent animals had simply been used by some ill-intentioned beastkin and forced into battle.

They had no choice but to run with all their might, trampling anything in their way;

whether it was a person, a mounted soldier, or one of their own kind.

Run!

Crash!

The wild bulls charged headlong into the battle. They plunged the Blood Clan into despair, yet rescued the beastkin from the brink of annihilation;

At first, the beastkin warriors were utterly shocked. Then they were wild with joy.

The herd picked up speed, sweeping everything in its path along with it.

The clan soldiers desperately wanted to escape, but they had very few directions to flee in. Before long, the herd cut through their formation, inflicting massive casualties in an instant.

Most of the riders were simply knocked flying. When they hit the ground, the wild bulls trampled them;

some Blood Clan warriors tried to use their superb horsemanship to leap from their horses onto the backs of the cattle;

but there were too many bulls, and their horns formed a veritable blade mountain, points thrusting upward;

as the animals raced past one another, even the slightest brush against a bull threw a rider off balance. Some fell onto those sharp horns and were disemboweled in an instant.

The worst fate befell those who were struck in the legs;

man and horse became tangled together. The bulls knocked them over, smashed into them with their powerful heads, and trampled them beneath their hooves. Their deaths were too gruesome to look at.

Old Fourth was so overwhelmed with grief that he could only seethe. He hated those beastkin to the core.

The clan soldiers who narrowly escaped the herd did at least understand what was happening in their final moments.

Drawing on their experience raising livestock, they keenly realized that only the few hundred animals at the very front were wild bulls. The rest were domesticated cattle.

Someone had blindfolded the cattle and tied torches to their tails, leaving them no choice but to charge forward as if they’d gone mad.

And the enormous force wasn’t made up of cattle alone. There were camels, horses, sheep, deer, and other animals...

These animals couldn’t hit with the same force as the wild bulls, but following behind them, they made the whole charge even more imposing;

of course, they didn’t hit as hard as the bulls, but getting run over by them was still a disaster.

In short, this “animal killing formation” was so powerful that no one could possibly stand against it head-on.

There were plenty of wild bulls on the grasslands. If you were lucky enough to find a herd, catching them wasn’t too difficult;

but even on the grasslands, tens of thousands of animals were a considerable fortune. They couldn’t just appear out of nowhere.

Bai Shui had brought all these animals from home when he set out on campaign;

to gather such an enormous herd, the beastkin royal family had called on plenty of people across the country for help, and had even hired human hunting parties.

The animals that had come to the wasteland alongside the beastkin army had been intended for war from the very beginning;

in other words:

Bai Shui had been preparing for this very battle ever since then.

Of course, these animals were living creatures, and they needed a considerable amount of food every day.

Bai Shui had been fairly lucky.

If the clan army had arrived a few days later, the beastkin army would have had no choice but to slaughter some of the hungrier animals and turn them into food for themselves.

If the charge had consisted only of the wild bulls at the front, there’d have been nothing particularly frightening about it. What made it so hard to stop was the tens of thousands of animals following behind.

It was like a few hundred elite troops charging into battle with tens of thousands of rabble;

the elite alone might break through the enemy lines, but they couldn’t press the advantage any further;

the rabble alone wouldn’t have the force to break through the enemy’s formation;

but together, the two became truly unstoppable.

Tens of thousands of charging animals trampled Old Fourth’s four thousand cavalrymen flat. Without losing any momentum, they bore down on the infantry under his command like a moving mountain.

Everyone in the clan army agreed: the situation was truly dire.

“My lord, there must be people driving those animals from behind. We could...”

One of his subordinates offered Old Fourth a suggestion in hopes of turning the tide.

“No! Absolutely not!”

Old Fourth shook his head so hard it was like a rattling drum.

“That’s right, those animals aren’t running wild. Someone must be controlling their direction from behind. If we kill or drive off those people, maybe some of the animals will stop.

“But look at our army! It’s already in chaos. Even if we ordered the soldiers in the rear to come help, their own comrades would knock them down, and they’d be trampled to death.”

Old Fourth understood the situation all too well.

No matter how much he hated to do it, he could only order the troops in the rear:

“Go! We can’t keep fighting! The troops up front are finished. I won’t let the men behind them be wiped out too.”

Before his entire army was wiped out, Old Fourth immediately ordered the troops in the rear to withdraw from the battlefield;

with their comrades at the front acting as a one-use shield, the clan soldiers farther back still had a chance to escape.

But that meant the soldiers at the front had become expendable.

It went without saying:

Those troops were limited in number and even more limited in strength. There was no way they could withstand the charge.

Forget Old Fourth’s army—even if Ye Chuxue’s Flamestrike Knights had been there, they’d have had to split up and scatter. They wouldn’t have chosen to face the herd head-on either.

No one in their right mind would fight a pack of rampaging animals.

Like hot soup poured over snow, the army Old Fourth had left on the battlefield was soon plunged into the most desperate moment of its life.

Some soldiers were lucky enough to be hit only in an arm or a leg by a bull’s hoof, and at least managed to survive;

the unlucky ones were crushed in the chest, or worse, stepped on the head and killed on the spot. The blood spattered by the hooves made for a grisly sight.

The soldiers who weren’t in the herd’s path escaped with their lives. The iron chains swept past just behind their heads;

for a few of the larger soldiers, the size that had once given them an advantage now became a deadly liability;

their bodies were dragged dozens of yards by the chains, or the backs of their heads were sliced right off.

Those who ran too slowly were trampled or knocked to death;

those who ran fast enough to get clear of the herd’s charge were left weak all over, slumped on the ground.

Whether they were about to be struck down or taken prisoner, they didn’t want to get back up and face that nightmarish scene again;

Some Blood Clan warriors, driven to desperation, fled straight into the beastkin army’s ranks and begged to surrender. The beastkin were too busy cheering to pay them any attention.

Normally, a pitched battle involving tens of thousands of soldiers couldn’t be decided without fighting from dawn till dusk, until the sky itself seemed to darken;

just moving troops back and forth took a great deal of time;

neither side was a row of wooden stakes. To overwhelm the enemy—or be overwhelmed—would naturally take a long time and many repeated clashes.