Chapter 680: Triad Seven: Total annihilation of forces! Zhi Wei captured!_2
A grand army of 150,000 men, it had taken him a full seven to eight years to build this force.
Over the years, nearly a million Gold Coins had been invested in this army.
Train soldiers for a thousand days, use them for one.
Yet when it truly came time to utilize this army, it faced complete annihilation.
His seven to eight years of hard work, the entirety of the soldiers from Southeast Province, all were lost beneath the Wind Thunder Fortress.
It was not that the army lacked fighting prowess; in fact, although not the elite of the world, both the soldiers and the generals were exceptional.
On the battlefield, the soldiers were fearless in the face of death, bravely engaging in combat. Even when confronting a horrific situation, there were no significant mutinies, with surrender coming only in the final moments as they knelt.
The senior generals were meticulous, having made no mistakes in command or strategy.
The only one who erred was he, the supreme commander, time and again.
First, in his eagerness for glory, he did not wait for the arrival of Duke Turing Tuo’s army, and without even time to set up camp properly, he directly attacked the Fenglei Fort Defense Line.
After a colossal defeat, he could not accept reality. He should have led the remaining army to retreat to Baiyun County, which, although it would be a great blow to his reputation and future prospects as Zhi Wei, at least it could have saved the surviving sixty thousand or more troops.