Chương 29: The Time Has Come

Meng Tian did indeed have a plan in order to get revenge for his brother who died in a way only worms should, eating dirt. He knew that he, Baron, Guan Yu, and the two commanders would not be able to defeat Bai Qi. Even with their slight numerical advantage, proving just how highly Meng Tian thought of the powerhouse Bai Qi. However, that didn't mean that there was no way to beat him and the answer lied with the age old question, quality or quantity?

No doubt quality would be the way to go in most circumstances, but if quantity was large enough, quality would eventually fall to the endless hordes. Thinking of it another way, 100 of the greatest martial artists that ever lived would not be able to fight off a horde of a million enemies.

Though they may be the best of the best, numbers will trump quality eventually.

The battles that ensued were fierce, with one side battling desperately to restore their dignity, and the other side taking it slowly. A day passes, then a week. It was indeed as Meng Tian had predicted, taking Bai Qi out was not going to be an easy task to accomplish. On day 3, commander Naire made a grievous error in judgement and had gotten himself in a trap that he had no chance of escaping from.

Bai Qi's side knew it, Naire knew it, Baron's side knew it, and those soldiers who were in the mess knew it as well. Even so, with what little men he had, Naire did everything in his power to ensure that the enemy forces were ground down as much as he was able to. Even though he and his men were eventually worn down, they had made a lasting last stand against Bai Qi's men. Such was the fate of the strategists who led the vanguard. After his death though, the rest on Baron's side were reluctant to lead in the front and had resigned to focus on mainly strategizing in safety, after all if they were to lose any more strategists, they would be unlikely to take Bai Qi down.

Nothing big or eventful happened after Naire's death and so they just resorted to using attrition style warfare. This type of warfare was used when both sides had an army that was big enough for the other side to not want an all out war. So instead both sides would grind down each others numbers in an attempt to get the upper hand. In which case they would strike with all their might to deal the final blow.

The number of soldiers that accompanied Meng Tian and Baron were a little over what Vai Qi had brought with him. However, after a week of attrition warfare, they numbered only about 3 quarters of what Bai Qi had left. They were losing on the numbers side.

With a bit if strategizing, Meng Tian's side put out great effort to lower their enemy's number by doing daily night raids. They had multiple strike teams that numbered less than one hundred to go in guns blazing and there goal was to each take down either 2 men or a military aircraft then retreat into the night. For the first two nights, this worked well, bit Baron knew that by the third night Bai Qi would have cracked the intent behind their purpose and set up ample defenses that would stop the small strike forces. Thus, Baron had decided that on the third night they were going to attack not in the dead of night, but rather just before dawn.

The night attacks ceased after the success of the third night since there were extreme risks in doing it a fourth time against someone as acute as Bai Qi. With the brave sacrifices of these men, they actually managed to lessen the gap between the number of soldiers in each army to about the same, give or take a thousand. The time had come for the ace up their sleeves, they had only one goal they wanted to achieve in this tournament, and that was to get recognized. They had surprised everybody by making it this far while being a completely new group, but their achievements thus far have been greatly overshadowed by the Bair fighters. There is only one thing that they can hope to achieve if they wish to be remembered. Take down Bai Qi. If they forgot about anything else and focused only on taking down Bai Qi, they could leave having achieved their most important goal.

On the 10th night of the battle for their lands, Meng Tian gave all the other battlefield commanders the order to go ahead with operation Rattlesnake. There would be two parts of this operation to ensure the highest success rate possible. The first being the rattle part of operation rattlesnake. Each of the other major battlefields will use a distraction to confuse their respective opponents and stall them for as much as possible. Then the snake part of the operation was for every single remaining soldier not dedicated to the feint be relocated to Meng Tian's battlefield. WIth this overabundance of reinforcements that number 3 times what Bai Qi had in his army at the moment, victory was nearly guaranteed.

Most of the other battlefields opted to go with the traditional route of distraction, and that was to launch a night raid right after it got dark to put the enemy in a state of panic and invite chaos. This part required quite a few soldiers in order to cause enough disorder to stall them so nearly a tenth of their forces were used for this maneuver. Right after this began, the army and the weaponry and aircraft were all moved to Bai Qi's battlefield to do battle in the middle of the night.

In a room within Baron's camp, Meng Tian was looking out the window to look at the stars all by himself.

(MT) "Wait just a little while longer, dear brother. The time has come for us to send this world a message." Meng Tian said while holding up a cup of wine and held it up to the stars then proceeded to down it in one go.