Thursday night, the battle raged again.
The Gaunt army seemed to possess astonishing combat stamina, engaging in large-scale, high-intensity combat for four consecutive days yet remaining full of energy.
The Gaunt army also boasted considerable numbers, with more artillery regiments, guerrillas, regular troops, and transport units deployed for Thursday's battle.
The Gaunt army attacked a total of six border military bases, capturing five of them within a mere four hours. By dawn, only the Kuifeichi Base remained standing. "Standing" here meant it had not yet fallen; the main structures, airfield, and even the nearby mountains had been ravaged by artillery fire.
Soon, the tropical regions of Wheeler Star erupted in celebration. Gaunt convened a rally of two hundred thousand people to address the new recruits of the Gaunt Shock Army. Members of the Gaunt Shock Army were all youths under twenty, fanatically devoted to Gaunt. As Gaunt strode into the venue with his chest puffed out, the two hundred thousand youths roared with thunderous cheers, many moved to tears upon seeing him.
Subsequently, Gaunt took the stage to deliver a speech, as imposing and powerful as ever, his presence seemingly capable of overcoming all obstacles.
"Young people of Wheeler Star! Young people of the Tropics!"
"You are the future of Wheeler Star! You are the flesh and blood of Wheeler Star! The soul of Wheeler Star!"
"You must obey me, and I will lead you to unify this world!"
"Our former sworn enemies, they claim to represent Wheeler Star, but they surrendered with ease. They are spineless, they have become Jiang Ye's lackeys! They sold their dignity as Wheeler Star people for a pittance, groveling and subservient, born to be slaves, becoming Jiang Ye's dogs!"
"We issued a public notice, appealing to them to maintain their human dignity. But they insisted on becoming dogs, so let us expel them from the human race! This is not our humiliation; it is their self-inflicted disgrace. The blood flowing in their veins is the blood of dogs!"
"In the past period, Jiang Ye built military bases in the tropical border regions, stockpiled heavy troops, and deployed his elite weapons, hoping his new lackeys would sit in the bases to deter us!"
"Look at how we responded! Our valiant army fought for four days and nights continuously, destroying dozens of enemy bases! Annihilating a million enemies! Jiang Ye prepared a million enemies for us, thinking this would bring eternal peace, but these million men couldn't even hold out for four nights!"
"Our strength is invincible! Our offensive has only just begun. The God of War has descended upon us, and we will make Jiang Ye tremble in fear every night! Our enemies will pile up like mountains, and ultimately, we will conquer the entire Wheeler Star!"
While Gaunt delivered his fervent speech, Jiang Ye was not in low spirits; on the contrary, he felt invigorated.
The reason for his invigoration was that he felt he might have discovered a brilliant general.
Among all the military bases attacked by the Gaunt army, the Kuifeichi Base bore the brunt of the assault, with a total of eight divisions, nearly ninety thousand men, attacking this single base. Yet, it was not captured, and the attacking Gaunt forces suffered over thirty thousand casualties around the base.
The Kuifeichi Base managed to hold out and withstand the human wave assault of eight divisions because the base had adopted an extremely audacious new tactic.
Other bases were defended by their full complement of troops within the base itself.
The Kuifeichi Base, however, left only one-tenth of its forces within the base, dispersing the remaining nine-tenths to lie in ambush in the tropical rainforest within a radius of four hundred kilometers.
That night, as the Gaunt army's artillery regiments were moving towards the vicinity of Kuifeichi Base, they encountered the defending forces in a skirmish that took place a full four hundred and twenty kilometers from the base.
Following the skirmish, both sides began to move their troops intensively. Due to the low defensive capabilities of the artillery regiments, the Gaunt army attempted to reinforce and relieve the engaged area. The defending forces, on the other hand, used military aircraft for rapid reinforcement and, upon detecting enemy forces along the route, directly relayed their positions to the base, allowing the base's artillery regiments to provide long-range fire support, a rain of iron cleansing the enemy reinforcements.
The Gaunt army reacted swiftly, beginning to break up their formations, sacrificing pawns to save the king. However, nearby defending forces began to concentrate their superior strength for a sweeping sweep.
The two sides went back and forth, constantly changing strategies, annihilating each other in mobile warfare, infiltrating, withdrawing, encircling, and launching assaults. For hours, they engaged in a dazzling struggle within the vast rainforest, with some units even receiving orders to change their attack direction more than forty times, leaving the infantry themselves disoriented.
The final result was that, although many buildings of Kuifeichi Base were destroyed by enemy fire, the vast majority of enemy forces near the base were annihilated, while the defending forces suffered only one-sixth of the casualties.
After dawn, the Gaunt army gradually retreated. The defending forces pursued and annihilated several enemy companies before changing direction, reorganizing their units, and re-entering ambush positions within the four-hundred-kilometer radius rainforest, constructing temporary fortifications and awaiting further engagement.
In summary, judging by the battle reports, the command level in this engagement was nothing short of miraculous.
Jiang Ye could barely make sense of the maps; it was as complex as a tangled mess, yet the commander of the defending forces was able to accurately predict the enemy's movements on the rapidly changing battlefield, making his units as slippery as loaches, evading enemy attacks and infiltrating enemy vital points.
The most climactic part of the report arrived several hours later: during the previous night's battle, in addition to killing tens of thousands of enemies, the local defending forces had actually captured two entire divisions as prisoners!
Jiang Ye was both surprised and angry, sternly questioning why such a significant event was not reported immediately and was delayed for several hours.
The defending forces explained that they had been busy for those hours counting the prisoners and their identities, adjusting their strategies based on intelligence from the prisoners, and escorting the prisoners back to the base.
The prisoners were not captured in a single sweep but were taken piecemeal by various units during the frequent movements of the previous night, with large units encircling small enemy detachments.
After being captured, these prisoners were put to work as free laborers for the various units, carrying ammunition or quickly building roads. Some units found them to be cheap and useful and did not want to report them immediately, preferring to use them for a while longer. It was only when all units had some free time to tally their numbers that they discovered with alarm how many they had actually captured.
While the number of enemies killed might contain a significant margin of error, the number of prisoners was almost concrete proof of a great victory. This was because the bodies of killed enemies, left to rot in the wilderness, were difficult to collect and verify. Prisoners, however, could be ordered to be sent to the rear.
The person who commanded the battle at Kuifeichi Base last night was undoubtedly a military genius.
Jiang Ye was extremely excited. Armies are easily obtained, but a true general is hard to find.
Initially, Jiang Ye assumed this genius was the defending general, Kuifeichi.
However, after making a phone call, he learned that the true genius was someone else entirely, a completely unfamiliar name.
Yu Xiangyang.