Chapter 77 - Ambush!
Yang Xiu was not happy. The bandits had prepared an ambush that she and Zou Tian had scouted. When she’d told the others about it, she had advocated for leaving the non-combatants behind with the wagons while the rest took the fight to the bad guys.
Yang Ru hadn’t liked that idea, and he had the right to make the decision since it was combat related. Surprisingly, both Xun Wu and Ye Zan sided with her brother, feeling uncomfortable either leaving the children essentially unprotected or splitting their forces.
Which was a stupid opinion. She, Yang Ru, and Zou Tian could beat a bunch of mortals all by themselves. Sure, there might be seventy-three of the gang, but what were mere numbers compared to the might of cultivators?
At least, she and Zou Tian had been allowed to split their forces in order to get in position before the fight. The two of them had taken to the woods on the side of the road opposite the bandits’ camp and looped way around to come back from the other side of the spot of the ambush. With their ability to move silently, none of the mortals had noticed a thing.
She climbed a tall tree that gave her a perfect position to snipe most of the bad guys, and Zou Tian, armed with two daggers, hid behind the mortals’ main position. He didn’t have either a technique or much experience with the weapons, but they weren’t exactly hard to use. The plan was for him to use his stealth to stab people in the back, a tactic that seemed dishonorable but that Master had insisted he employ.
Of course, it took forever for the caravan to actually come into view, as it moved so slowly. They had all decided that it was far better for the two of them to have to wait than for the caravan to arrive first.
In a slight departure from the caravan’s normal operation, Yang Ru and Ye Zan walked in front of the first wagon, and the children and Xun Wu’s wife had been moved to the mobile cultivation platform, which now assumed the trailing position. Yang Xiu found it difficult to believe that the mortals would pick up on or care about such minor differences.
Besides, they hadn’t gotten anywhere close to seeing the wagon train. She and Zou Tian had made sure of that by just happening to traipse loudly nearby when they tried.
She studied the enemies below her. They consisted mainly of spearmen and swordsmen. If the bandits would have had a lot of archers, the group would have gone with Yang Xiu’s plan, but training to accurately shoot a bow took a long time. A peasant could learn to at least swing a sword at an enemy, even if very unskillfully, quite quickly and be effective in ambush tactics like the ones they apparently used. To actually be able to hit someone in a fight with an arrow absent massed volleys was quite a different story.
At least, that was what Ye Zan said. It could just be that the bandits ran out of arrows. Learning to shoot a bow hadn’t seemed difficult at all to Yang Xiu.
She huffed. Well, she did have the advantage of having an apparently heaven-grade technique crammed into her mind from a jade slip, but she was sure it was mostly her natural talent.
The long and short of it was that she and Zou Tian had only identified four bandits who used bows, and those were her primary targets. She’d already noted their locations.