V1.Chapter 97

The Jackal's attack took much longer than Murphy had expected.

It seems that the jackals spent a lot of energy on the March last night. It was not until 11 o'clock at noon that the jackals began to move forward. They are all made up of adult male jackals, about two meters in size, and are equipped with weapons and leather armour. Some of them are equipped with modified half body armour, but the number is small. Generally speaking, the elite human troops are only equipped with half body armor. Judging from the defeated human troops on the front line, the number of half body armor captured by the jackals should not exceed 3000.

The Jackal group is a loose system.

As Murphy has met several times, every army of jackals has one of the strongest and tallest jackals as its leader.

That is, a general similar to human beings.

But jackals are not intelligent creatures. They are used to obeying power, that is, the strongest.

And that leads to a little bit of lax discipline.

The structure of fortifications is not complicated, such as resisting horses, ravines, resisting horses, poison sticks and earth walls. The depth of the whole fortification is 100 meters, that is to say, the purpose of these fortifications is to slow down the advance speed of the Jackal within 100 meters, and to gain time for the archers to shoot.

At noon.

The jackals line up in front of the canyon.

In terms of equipment alone, they are much better than the scattered clan jackals. However, in terms of fighting methods, the gap between them is not big. At least Murphy hasn't seen a very obvious tactical style from them.

The jackals are made up of three echelons.

The first echelon is composed of male jackals who are generally more than two meters tall with shields. They wear leather armour, part of which is equipped with half body armour, and hold human shields in their hands. It is similar to the square shield in the Roman military system. It is made of wood and covered with a layer of iron. The length is about 90 cm. If this kind of shield is used by smaller human beings, it will not be a big problem. But these jackals, who are generally more than two meters tall, don't look at them enough.

Can barely block the vital part of the chest.

The number of jackals in the first echelon is not much, less than a thousand.

The second echelon is made up of more well-equipped jackal heavy infantry. They are generally equipped with inlaid leather armor, which is a kind of simple armor sewn with some iron pieces to protect the key points such as heart position. This is very common in this quite primitive era. Even in the human city states, there are many leather armor. In terms of weapons, the jackals in the second echelon are equipped with heavy weapons. At least Murphy didn't see the jackals with daggers.

The number of jackals in the second echelon is quite large, close to 2000.

The third echelon are the adult jackals equipped with ordinary equipment. They have skin armor, weapons in a mess, and some even use short swords plundered from human hands as weapons. But in their hands, it's more like a dagger. At present, there are only two cities attacked by jackals. It is obviously impossible to arm 100000 jackals with their military reserves. What's more, even in a human city-state, ordinary soldiers are only equipped with short swords and long guns.

There are more than 5000 jackals in this echelon.

In addition, they are the elite jackals who are all equipped with half body armor and armed with tomahawks, hammers and other weapons. The number of them is about 500, and they are all escorted by the high jackal leader.

But in terms of equipment, this army of jackals is not as dangerous to Murphy as the elite wolf cavalry.

There's a little bit of trouble.

Some of these jackals are archers.

They used the bows and arrows plundered from human hands to train a group of archers, the number of which is about 1000.

Mixed between the first and second echelons.

Although jackals are hunting and fishing people, they are not good at archery.

The reason is that their claws, with sharp claws on their hands, are not suitable for bow and arrow.

However, it seems that all the newly trained jackal archers have cut off their long and narrow claws. Otherwise, it's not easy to shoot with their hand shape.

The Jackal army began to advance.

The jackals of the first echelon hold the square shield high in front of them and March quickly, while the jackals of the second echelon follow.

Due to the terrain of the canyon, only more than 1000 troops can be put into battle at one time, because if they are too dense, they can't be separated at all.

From the first sight of this army of jackals, Murphy knew that there was little difficulty in this battle.

Because these are not the main force of front-line jackals at all.

Murphy learned from the intelligence of the human city-state that the elite front-line jackal troops should be a top heavy infantry composed of about 3000 armored jackals and about 2000 wolf cavalry. The wolf cavalry was partially defeated by Murphy yesterday, and the high jackal heavy infantry with full body armor should still be on the front line against the human city-state.

It's 200 meters closer.

Murphy orders the archers to shoot before the Jackal approaches the first line.

The width of the wall built by sandbags is about four meters. It can stand on two rows of archers. With 640 bowmen in Athens, it means that the jackals of the first exploratory attack will advance 200 meters under the fire of more than 2400 archers. Then he arrived in front of the Greek heavy infantry and fought with the enemy who had been waiting for a long time.

The average speed of archers is about six seconds.

That is to say, you can concentrate on shooting about ten times in a minute.

Two hundred meters away, from pushing off the horse, across the gully, to reach the front of the defensive front.

The jackals took about three minutes.

In three minutes, even one shot 10 arrows. The amount of ammunition that 2000 people dump in three minutes is more than 20000 arrows.

In fact, the battle is much simpler than the data.

Because the square shield, which is only 90 cm long, can't completely protect the Jackal who is 2 meters tall. And they can't use the square shield to form the famous tortoise shell array like the Roman Legion!

Especially under the shooting of 640 bowmen, the jackals with shields in the first row are just living targets.

The Centaur Longbow can penetrate the ordinary half body armor within 200 meters, while the Athens imitation longbow is a little worse, but its strength is much stronger than the ordinary bow and arrow.

It can be summed up in one sentence.

"The art of Crete archers is famous all over the world!"

In fact, before the jackals were within the range of 2000 Aboriginal archers, the first wave of exploratory jackals fell to the ground under the fire of longbowmen. When they reached the range of the indigenous archers, they were only thrown three times, and then they broke up completely. They didn't even have a close combat with the Greek heavy infantry, so they directly retreated. As for the Jackal archers, they didn't have many chances to shoot under the pressure of Crete's long archer. Their range and power are not at the same level at all.

The canyon has a space of less than 500 meters and bears the shooting of 2640 archers.

The density of the arrows is quite imaginable.

After leaving more than 600 dead jackals, the high jackal leader who commanded the army wisely gave up the attack.

The wolf army retreated two miles and camped under a mountain.

"Take back the arrow." Murphy looks at the retreating jackal and orders to the herald.

Naturally, these jackals could not retreat so easily.

A part of the Greek heavy infantry crossed the front line, took back the arrows scattered in front, and patched the jackals who had not yet breathed. In fact, most of the jackals who were shot were not killed immediately. Most of them were shot with several arrows and lay dying on the ground.

The Greek heavy infantry cut off the heads of the jackals and pulled the arrows from their bodies.

The bodies were stacked together, the weapons, the armor and the shields were recovered and thrown inside the canyon.

In such an afternoon, there was no movement in the army of jackals.

It was about three o'clock in the afternoon.

The light cavalry that Murphy sent out to investigate the Jackal's movements brought back a message.

"Your Excellency, the jackals are cutting down trees in great numbers!" The soldier in charge of investigation came to Murphy quickly and said in a deep voice.

Cutting down trees?

Making siege facilities?

Murphy looked at the earth wall built with sacks under his feet and frowned slightly.

"Keep investigating!" Murphy ordered in a deep voice.

"Yes The soldier answered.

By late afternoon, the message was finally clear.

Those jackals are really cutting down trees to make a more primitive siege equipment.