Though the pirate reinforcements rode no horses and marched on foot, each pirate’s legs churned like fiery wheels, racing toward Suzhou City’s east gate with desperate haste, kicking up a rolling trail of dust behind them.
“Boys, ahead’s Suzhou City! Leader Xu’s already taken it, he’s got the east gate under control! If we get there fast to back him up, Suzhou’s ours! The women inside are yours to pick—long as your hips hold up and your kidneys can take it, forget just two swallows, you can have a whole flock!”
Chen Dong led his pirates toward the gate, laughing raucously, spurring them on with promises of women.
“That’s right, the gate’s wide open—like a woman with her pants down! All we gotta do is charge in and take her! Countless soft-skinned little ladies in there, endless piles of shiny gold and jewels—rush in, the women are yours, the gold and jewels too!”
Ma Ye chimed in with crude words, firing up his pirates with talk of women and riches, urging them to speed up, faster, faster.
“Women, women, gold, gold, roar, roar, charge, charge…” The pirates, whipped into a frenzy by Xu Hai and Ma Ye, howled, their legs flying as they sprinted toward the gate, as if they weren’t rushing to a battlefield but to a pleasure den to snatch women and silver.
The pirate reinforcements tore forward, a cloud of dust billowing behind, the distance to the gate shrinking fast.
From the city wall, Prefect Shang watched the pirate reinforcements close in at a visible pace, as if the doom of a breached city and slaughtered people loomed nearer. Cold sweat poured from his face and back like a torrential rain.
“We’re doomed, we’re doomed…” Prefect Shang muttered in restless panic, wishing he could slap himself repeatedly for not heeding Zihou’s words.
But it was too late for regrets now!
The only way to save Suzhou City and himself was to swiftly crush the pirates wreaking havoc inside and shut the gate—whether the Zhejiang troops made it in or how many, he couldn’t care less.
But…
Gazing at the pirates fiercely assaulting the wall, slaughtering freely and inching upward, Prefect Shang felt like weeping without tears. Forget crushing the pirates inside—holding them off from storming the wall was already a stretch.
Wipe them out?! Hah, the reward for killing a pirate had soared to a staggering five hundred taels, yet his side was still being beaten back, battered and teetering, barely keeping the pirates on the stone steps.
To eliminate these rioting pirates inside, his current troops couldn’t do it—only reinforcements could make it possible!
But damn it, the pirate reinforcements were getting closer and closer—why were his own still nowhere in sight?!
Prefect Shang scanned the horizon, seeing no trace of his reinforcements, and gnashed his teeth in fury. A thick, uncontrollable despair sprouted wildly in his heart. It’s over, it’s over, this time it’s truly over…
While Prefect Shang drowned in anxious dread, the graver the crisis, the calmer Zhu Ping’an became.
“Outer ranks hold them off, inner ranks load muskets now!” Zhu Ping’an ordered coolly, directing the Zhejiang troops.
The outer three ranks of Zhejiang soldiers struggled to fend off the pirate onslaught with bayonets, while the rest swiftly loaded their muskets—biting open paper cartridges, pouring powder into barrels, tearing open lead shot packets, ramming them down with rods, and priming the pans. These seemingly tedious steps, drilled countless times, were second nature, completed in mere breaths.
“Ammunition loaded!” the soldiers reported.
“All muskets, ignore the outer pirates—aim at the ones from the gate and hit them hard!”
Seeing the troops fully loaded, Zhu Ping’an ordered them to concentrate fire on the pirates at the gate.
In an instant, a thousand muskets roared—bang, bang, bang—dense and uniform, smoke swirling thickly.
The pirates who’d rushed out from the gate were fierce individual fighters but lacked organization and discipline. Though they’d initially inflicted losses, they couldn’t breach the Zhejiang troops’ tight, orderly bayonet formation.
Since they hadn’t mixed into the ranks, they became live targets for the Zhejiang muskets.
After the synchronized volley, a huge swath of these pirates fell.
This group totaled just over four hundred; after a brief clash, they’d lost dozens, leaving just over three hundred. A thousand-odd shots meant each pirate faced two or three rounds on average.
At such close range, with muskets nearly firing point-blank, the hit rate wasn’t perfect but easily reached seventy to eighty percent.
Of the three hundred-plus pirates, this sudden barrage dropped around two hundred.
Only a sparse handful—less than a hundred—remained standing, most wounded, their positions scattered.
Strike while they’re down.
“Bayonets, charge!” Zhu Ping’an pointed forward, ordering the Zhejiang troops to rush with bayonets fixed.
Instantly, the Zhejiang bayonet formation surged toward the fewer than one hundred surviving pirates. Still reeling from the volley, they faced a wall of gleaming bayonets. No matter their skill, against so many blades, they could only struggle desperately—block one, not two; block two, not three…
At the same time, Liu Dadao, holding the gate, led his hundred Zhejiang troops to join the fray, hitting the remnants from behind as the main force pressed from the front.
This time, it was the pirates—now less than a hundred—caught in a pincer.
The pirates wore almost no armor, while the Zhejiang troops were clad head-to-toe in cotton armor.
Pirates fighting to the death, once struck by a bayonet, were either dead or crippled. But their blades, slashing at the Zhejiang troops, were mostly deflected by the cotton armor.
The Zhejiang armor covered a wide area, with gaps between plates well-protected. In life-or-death combat, the pirates struggled to exploit those gaps.
Only a few fearless pirates, willing to take multiple bayonet thrusts, could ram their blades into a Zhejiang soldier’s face for a fatal blow.
But such death-defying pirates were rare—only a handful had that resolve—and the Zhejiang troops weren’t sitting ducks, dodging when they could.
In the end, only three pirates managed to take Zhejiang soldiers down with them.
In less than ten breaths, at the cost of a dozen men, the Zhejiang troops wiped out the pirates who’d rushed from the gate.
