Chapter 4 Unexpected Engagement
"My lord, we don’t need those crappy short swords. We have our own sharp hunting knives. Those heavy javelins are not suitable for us. We have sharp arrows smeared with demon blood. As long as there are enough arrowheads, we can shoot all the throats of the enemy!" The hunter leader Crow Sartre said to Du Yu who was about to return to the hall.
As the leader of a mountain hunter, Crow Sartre led his mountain hunter tribe to hunt in the nearby mountains. Recently, he heard that the local leader had put out a heavy reward to gather some soldiers, so he led a dozen of his tribe members to earn this reward. Winter was coming, and this money was just enough to let his tribe survive the severe winter.
"Demon blood?" Du Yu looked at the muscular hunter leader Crow Satre for a moment. What was the demon blood mentioned by this hunter leader? Was this a fantasy world? After coming here for a few months, Du Yu didn't realize that this world was not much different from his original world, at least there was no mysterious existence beyond the scope of his own knowledge.
"This is the demon blood. We hunters usually carry some with us. As long as we dip the arrow in the demon blood before the battle, the enemy shot by the arrow will not die, but the injured part will have to be chopped off." Hunter leader Crow Satre saw the confused look on Du Yu's face, took a long hollow wooden barrel from the waist, and uncovered the cork plugging the barrel. The pungent burnt smell from inside made Du Yu frown immediately.
Seeing Du Yu stare at the demon blood with a strange expression, Crow Satre smiled unconcernedly. What he didn’t know was that Du Yu almost couldn’t contain his excitement.
The familiar pungent smell that made Du Yu feel nauseous was the smell he was familiar with in his previous life. It was the smell of raw tar. He didn’t expect that there was oil exposed on the surface in the mountains nearby.
He asked anxiously, “where did you get this? Does the place you get this from also have some kind of boiling black liquid?"
"My lord, how do you know this! Have you also been to the demon’s valley before? But that's a place that can only be reached by mountain hunters." Crow Satre looked at Du Yu with a panic expression. That valley was the biggest secret of the hunter tribe. It was said to be the place where the world connected with hell. Did this lord also know about this place?
"I will give you one hundred gold coins, and you will prepare five hundred barrels of demon blood for me within half a month!"
"Really? My lord, Are you sure what you need is demon blood?" Du Yu’s words made Crow Satre shout out in surprise.
Many nobles despised hunters for using such evil tricks, and it was even more unlikely for them to show such a great interest in demon blood like Du Yu.
"Yes, I need this demon blood! I will keep this barrel as a sample, lest you cut corners." Du Yu closed the cork of the small barrel, although Crow Sartre was a bit reluctant, he still let him take it.
‘With these raw tars, I can organize a phalanx infantry capable of throwing incendiary bombs. When the time comes, no matter what kind of heavy cavalry or the elite infantry other people have, I will roast them all like pigs.’ Du Yu weighted the little wooden barrel with his hand. Hearing the moving liquid sound coming from inside, he felt very excited.
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"Hold shield! Three steps forward! Strike!" Under the command of Thun Starr, two hundred peasant soldiers arranged in ten rows on the castle training ground lifted up the huge shield in their hands uniformly, forming a tight shield wall and pushing forward. Although these peasant soldiers had only been trained for less than a month, they now looked more like an army.
"Everyone, remember that when moving close to twenty meters, throw javelins. Draw your short swords when close to two meters, and stab your short swords when you hit the enemy. Do not check if the enemy is dead or not, just stab them ten times as quick as possible and then retreat." Thun Starr shouted to the peasant soldiers, these standardized movements were thought of by the idiot lord who he looked down on.
Although Thun Starr believed that an outstanding warrior should be a brave warrior, not a soldier who only knew how to make uniform actions in accordance with instructions, he had to admit that for these farmers who had never been on the battlefield, the various fighting skills he learned as a squire was not as easy to learn as the movement thought by the idiot lord.
"Adjutant Starr, will we really be able to survive on the battlefield by just following the command?"
Although Thun Starr was still a young man, after the peasant soldier knew that this kind of limping disabled young man once fought the most fierce Khuzait cavalry in the north, no one dared to look down on this adjutant who was yelling at them all day.
"Yes, as long as you follow the method taught by the lord, I believe you will come back with a lot of gold coins."
As the departure time approached, more than a dozen farmers sitting around Thun Starr during the break asked Thun Starr anxiously. The worries in the eyes of those people made Thun Starr lie against his will. But after nearly a month of training, Thun Starr found that he had developed some trust in the peasant soldiers he had trained.
Thun Starr didn’t say it clearly, but he also knew that this time it was a fight against the Locke barbarians occupying the western mountainous area. According to this training method, they might actually be able to get something from those barbarians who fought without tactics. But if it was fighting against Khuzait’s cavalry, then what was waiting for them would only be death.
‘I wonder if the mountain hunters’ training is going well.’ Thun Starr looked at the sun above his head. In a corner of the castle in the distance, dozens of mountain hunters who had been recruited were being trained by the fat idiot lord. Thun Starr really didn’t know why the lord had to train for these hunters who had been hunting using bow and arrows since they were young.
Because they were being trained at a corner that was slightly far away from other people, Thun Starr did not find that all the hunters’ arrows were wrapped in a small bag. The original arrows were hidden inside.
Because the original sharp arrows were changed, these hunters were still unable to control this new arrowhead very accurately. Arrows would often fly around due to insufficient estimation of strength and wind speed.
This made these hunters who are proud of their mastery of archery call this special arrowhead "the arrow of the wanderer"
Although the hunters were still unable to master the arrowheads that were used to launch tar bombs, Du Yu was very satisfied with the arrowheads that could fly nearly a hundred meters.
This was originally an area attack weapon. As long as the arrow collided with the target, the small bag of tar would be pierced by the sharp arrow inside, and the tar inside would be scattered and splashed. With the fire arrows, the unquenchable fire caused by tar could definitely catch the enemy by surprise and make them suffer a great loss.
"How are the supplies prepared? We will leave in a few days." Du Yu returned to the bedroom and checked the list of supplies sent by the old butler.
According to the practice of the kingdom, the army of the nobles should bring their own food for ten days. But if the war lasted more than ten days, the king would have to bear all the additional food supply for the noble army. So, a kingdom’s war often didn’t last long. The longest one was only ninety-eight days.
The thousands of nobles’ armies gathered that time not only ate all the food of His Majesty the King, but also took a lot of things from the royal castle to repay debts.
This system had effectively restricted His Majesty's right to levy lords from all over the kingdom at will. It could be said that it had contributed a lot to the stability of a kingdom.
"We have prepared food for two hundred people for twenty days. Tomorrow I will ask the kitchen to load the dried food onto the supply wagon. Just now, Lord Lato Cato came with his two daughters. I have arranged them in the guest rooms of the castle. I wonder if you have time to meet them in person?" Old butler's eyes flickered as he looked at Du Yu who was flipping through the list and said in hesitation. It made Du Yu curious about his hesitant expression.
The old butler had rarely arranged his itinerary, but this time he unexpectedly asked if he wanted to see the other party's messenger. This obviously meant that there was something he must hear.
"Lato Cato? Why are they here? Take me to see them." Du Yu still had some impression of this Lato Cato. It was a small lord on the edge of his own territory, and there were only a few villages under his control. Moreover, he was only a little lord, it was far from his title, which was marquis.
"I think they might be here to discuss the marriage arrangement." Seeing the puzzled expression on his young master's face, the old butler looked at Du Yu hesitantly. The old butler's words made Du Yu who had just stood up to stand there.
"Marriage arrangement? With who?" Du Yu looked at the old butler with an embarrassed expression.
"Last year, when the old master was seriously ill, he had arranged a marriage for the young master. Although this caused great opposition in the house, the old master still insisted on arranging this marriage with the Cato family.” The old butler explained.
After thinking about it, Du Yu figured out what was going. In order to avoid his idiot son becoming a puppet of the future wife’s family, the old man of his body resolutely made a decision to arrange a marriage with the most impoverished family of Cato near his territory. So that even if the daughter of the Cato family became the mistress of the Falcon House, she would not be able to completely control the entire house because she was not noble enough.
This was probably also a kind of helpless fatherly love.
"Since it was set by my father, you can arrange it. I will meet them in the hall tomorrow!" Du Yu waved his hand to the old butler.
"Okay, I'll tell Lord Lato, I think his two daughters will be very happy." The old butler let out a sigh of relief. Since the young master was no longer an idiot, the old butler was not sure if this marriage arrangement would still be valid.
"You haven't told me which daughter I was engaged to?" Du Yu looked at the old butler who was about to leave.
The old butler looked at Du Yu with a weird expression. Finally, as if he had made up his mind, he said, "Master, it was both."
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