After the Qing army in the bitter battle heard General Hu's shout, their spirits were lifted, Hu Wenke was afraid that his voice was not loud enough, so he hurriedly asked the soldiers around him to shout together, encouraging the soldiers to persevere, and victory was just around the corner.

"Yuan thief defeated!"

"The Yuan thief ran away!"

Hu Wenke's guards had the same good voice as their generals, and soon the Qing troops in the center and on both flanks knew that Daniel Zhang had arrived to reinforce them.

Some soldiers even spontaneously shouted again: "Capture the thief alive, and reward one hundred taels of silver." ”

After hearing these shouts, Yuan Zongdi's face suddenly became gloomy, just now he could still assemble and retreat, but in a blink of an eye, this opportunity was lost. Yuan Zongdi did not have the ability to clone, nor did he have time to appear everywhere on the battle line, and personally commanded every soldier to retreat and assemble. Now although the Qing army is shouting and shouting, but the Ming army is still advancing step by step, even if the soldiers are suspicious in their hearts, at most they will be suspicious, if Yuan Zongdi sends heralds to inform all places to retreat, then the soldiers will immediately believe that the Ming army has been defeated, and Daniel Zhang's army is behind them.

Located in the hilly and jungle terrain where communication is difficult, it is difficult to say how even Yuan Zongdi's most elite troops will react, not to mention these recruits under him.

"Stop backing off!" Yuan Zongdi immediately made a decision, and ordered the guards around him not to rest, and all the pressure to supervise the battle: "Kill Hu Wenke first!" ”

"Too careless." After sending almost all the guards around him, Yuan Zongdi sighed with remorse, he finally realized that he was too underestimating the enemy. It was precisely because of the light enemy that Yuan Zongdi not only divided his limited forces into two batches, but also the most elite battalion of soldiers and horses in Wanxian County was actually still in the rear instead of taking it with him.

Before meeting Deng Ming, after more than ten years of turbulent displacement, Yuan Zongdi's backbone elite was left with little left, and the last battle of Chongqing was betrayed by Tan Yi, and most of the last 200 elite soldiers were lost. Under normal circumstances, Yuan Zongdi may never be able to recover his vitality - the barren output of Dachang made it difficult for Yuan Zongdi to launch an offensive, and it was even more difficult to provide equipment, and Yuan Zongdi had no resources for training troops, no opportunity to substitute training for battle, and it was even worse to die when he took soldiers with no equipment, no training, and no combat experience to fight.

But Deng Ming's appearance gave Yuan Zong the first huge surprise, and more than a thousand Dachang soldiers followed Deng Minglian Ke Tan Hong and Tan Yi. In the first battle, there was a huge disparity in the strength of the enemy and us, the Ming army was bare-handed, unclothed, and hungry, while the enemy was not only fully equipped, but also sat in a warm camp and fed, as a result, the Ming army not only escaped from this mortal situation, but also completely annihilated the powerful enemy soldiers; The second battle is also the enemy is strong and I am weak, after Deng Ming left the city, Xiong Lan was even more frustrated to put up a flag and surrender, which was comparable to the sinister Cheng dù of the previous battle, and it was completely a situation of death and no life, but the Ming army once again wiped out Tan Yi's entire army with insignificant losses.

Most of the Dachang soldiers who fled with Deng Ming were previously minfu brought by Yuan Zongdi to carry food, and they could be frightened when they heard the sound of golden drums, and the rest were also recruits left behind in the battalion, and many were sailors and shipwrights. After returning to Dachang, this group of rabble was already a veritable soldier who dared to fight, and twice turned defeat into victory in a desperate situation, so that these Dachang soldiers did not know what defeat was.

In addition to the high morale and confidence of victory, the equipment of the more than 1,000 soldiers was also extremely luxurious, and Deng Ming divided all the equipment captured from Liang Tan equally among the soldiers who fled with him. These 1,200 soldiers were all organized into soldiers by Yuan Zongdi, and the few warriors who followed Deng Ming to lure the enemy, Yuan Zongdi did not give them to Deng Ming like Wen Anzhi, but promoted them to officers of this battalion.

Bai got a battalion of soldiers, and Yuan Zongdi's thank-you gifts were Yuan Xiang and Zhou Kaihuang -- when Yuan Zongdi, who was ashamed in his heart, still carefully left all the soldiers in this battalion at home when he sent troops to Huguang, he was a little worried that Deng Ming would ask for some of them to go -- life was so hard that Yuan Zongdi, who had been struggling on the line of life and death for more than ten years, couldn't help but be stingy.

After returning from Hubei to fight Hu Quancai, Yuan Zongdi selected the best equipment to further strengthen his main battalion, which was already Yuan Zongdi's heart long before he moved to Wanxian County. This sortie was too underestimated for the enemy in Zhongxian, so Yuan Zongdi did not let the main battalion rush to the front, but planned to use new recruits to open the way and let them see blood. The soldiers of the main battalion have killed the enemy on the battlefield, especially in the first battle of Wanxian, and they have killed twice as many enemy soldiers as themselves, and without the merit of three or four beheadings, they do not want to become officers in this battalion at all. Before, Yuan Zongdi thought that Zhongxian was a third-rate army of thousands of Qing troops, and there was no need to use a knife to kill chickens, and he was even more worried that there would be losses.

If Yuan Zongdi's side had not been accompanied by 1,200 recruits but his main battalion, then perhaps the battle would have ended long ago.

The Ming army pressed on the whole line was three times as large as the opposite, although it was not elite, but it also beat Hu Wenke to a whine.

"Qi Yu Guogong." While Yuan Zongdi was engrossed in observing the battle situation, another scout rushed to report that the Qing troops on the riverside had clearly noticed the battle here, and they found that an unknown number of Qing troops were heading towards the battlefield.

"Hmm." Yuan Zongdi nodded strictly, and someone asked the eight hundred armor soldiers hidden in the south to launch an offensive to contain the reinforcements of the Qing army.

But Yuan Zongdi couldn't make up his mind for a long time, and the 800 armor soldiers there couldn't compare with his main battalion, once the position was exposed, they would be immediately besieged by the superior enemy, and the recruits would probably panic and collapse quickly, and they would not be able to hold on to Yuan Zongdi defeating Hu Wenke first and then reinforcing them.

"Nope! Stay hidden. Yuan Zongdi finally shook his head, he felt that it would take some time for the Qing army to drive over, and he didn't want to exchange the eight hundred armor soldiers of the previous army for Hu Wenke's troops: "Don't worry about the enemy in the south, quickly defeat Hu Wenke!" ”

"Yes!"

The scout took the order and left.

Yuan Zongdi refocused his attention on the north side until he was interrupted by another scout.

"Guogong! The general trend is not good! This scout rushed to Yuan Zongdi with a sweaty face, and reported to him that a large number of Qing troops had suddenly appeared in the southeast direction of Yuan Zongdi's general banner, apparently some Qing troops by the river were outflanking, and it was less than two miles away from Yuan Zongdi's position, and it was intended to encircle and annihilate Yuan Zongdi.

The difficulty of terrain guidance and reconnaissance has greatly increased. Take Hu Wenke as an example, in fact, there was a scout of Yuan Zongdi who once discovered his troops, but when the scout went to report to Yuan Zongdi, he ran into some other Qing army detachment, had to make a detour to avoid it again, and then almost collided with a pathfinding scout to whom Daniel Zhang belonged. By the time this scout finally found Yuan Zongdi's location from the hills and jungles, the battle with Hu Wenke had been going on for a long time.

It was the same now, the march route of the Qing army, which had bypassed the Yangtze River, was covered by the hills to the west, and the Ming army did not discover them until much later. The last few guards standing beside Yuan Zongdi also stared at Yuan Zongdi's lips with stern faces, waiting for his order to remove some of the soldiers from the battle.

"Bitter, bitter." This time it was Yuan Zongdi's turn to cry out loud, and he thought nervously: "How many people are in this Tartar?" What is their purpose? Is it to come for reinforcements or to outflank? How many people are behind them? Does Daniel Zhang want to catch me all or join Hu Wenke? ”

The scout couldn't answer Yuan Zongdi's question at all, he only knew that there were a lot of Qing soldiers, and it was definitely not a reconnaissance detachment, but the specific number and movement were still unknown.

"I don't know the movements of the Tart, and the Tartary should not know my strength and movements, if I were Daniel Zhang, how would I judge now?" Daniel Zhang was a veteran of the Qin army, and Yuan Zongdi had fought him decades ago: "If I were Daniel Zhang, then I would not know how many Ming troops there were in the forest, and he might not even know who had the upper hand." If I were in a hurry to mobilize troops to resist, not only would Daniel Zhang discover the limited strength of the Ming army earlier, but I might also lead to a failure in Hu Wenke's offensive. ”

"Nope! Ignore them! Yuan Zongdi said loudly: "We continue to attack Hu Wenke, and we must defeat him first no matter what." ”

Yuan Zongdi ordered to continue the all-out attack on Hu Wenke, and only let a few scouts go to the forest to set up a suspicious formation, trying to delay the movement of the Qing army in the southeast.

Although Yuan Zongdi admitted that the strength of the Qing army was far greater than he initially thought, Yuan Zongdi also found a better opportunity from it. The front army of the Ming Army in Wanxian County was not fast because it was responsible for reconnaissance and road opening work; Although the rear army moved late, it was eager to catch up with the commander-in-chief, and the speed was much faster than that of the front army, and Yuan Zongdi estimated that his main battalion and nearly 2,000 soldiers were not too far from the battlefield now.

If Hu Wenke was defeated, Yuan Zongdi was confident that he would be on par with Daniel Zhang with the troops in his hands, and when his rear team arrived, Yuan Zongdi was convinced that the Ming army would have a two-to-one advantage over the Qing army, not to mention that he still had a trump card in his hand; It should not be a big problem to annihilate Daniel Zhang in front and back, and this means the destruction of the main force in Chongqing. Thinking of this, Yuan Zongdi said loudly to the last few guards around him: "There is nothing great about Tartars, if we win today's battle, we will win Chongqing!" ”

……

"There's nothing remarkable about your family!" On the west side of the battlefield, a Qing army was galloping eastward, and Wang Mingde was introducing Yuan Zongdi's situation to Zhang Jing, the Eight Banners of the Han Dynasty. This Zhang Jing took ten Niu Lu and one thousand officers and soldiers of the Han and Eight Banners to move with the front army. Sun Sike has long said that Zhang Jing, who is also a white flag with him, is still an artillery expert; After arriving in Chongqing last month, the Zhang Jing publicly assured the governor of Sichuan and Shaanxi that if he was to be put in charge of the cannon casting in Chongqing in the future, he would be able to achieve great success and that the entire Yangtze River would be blocked in five months.

This Zhang Jing of the Eight Banners of the Han Dynasty looked like he was in his thirties and less than forty, and he glanced at Wang Mingde coldly: "He is not my family. ”

"I'm sorry," Wang Mingde knew that he had lost his words, and hurriedly apologized: "I'm sorry, Yuan Jia is the deputy commander." ”