am-books Chapter 1341: Stalling for Time
Chapter 1341: Stalling for Time
Charles led his main force pressing steadily toward the 5th Battalion Commander’s camp, but because they were blocked by traps all along the way, their marching speed gradually slowed down.
All these traps were very small-scale; unless you were really unlucky and stepped right on the core and got your heart pierced, the vast majority weren’t lethal. Basically as long as Charles’s team worked together to dismantle them, they could get through.
But!
There were just too many traps, way too many. One took 1–2 minutes to dismantle, ten would be 10–20 minutes, what about fifty, a hundred?
By the time the army reached the spot where the enemy camp’s Array Flag was, the soup would be cold and the day long gone.
Once Charles realized the mess he was in, his face went completely black.
Time rewinds to a few hours ago.
Back when Ji You hadn’t yet gotten the position of 5th Battalion Commander, the first thing she ordered upon returning from the enemy camp was to have Li Shanshui and the others, who had been left behind in the Seventh Team in charge of building traps and defensive works, immediately speed up trap construction.
At the time Ji You even asked, "According to the locations marked on this map I drew, I want traps in all of them. Can you pull that off?"
Li Shanshui was a boy with delicate, handsome features. His personality matched his name well—very gentle, mild, and meticulous. As soon as he saw the map Ji You had drawn, he noticed that a large chunk of the area didn’t yet fall within Ji You’s sphere of control. He frowned slightly and said, "I can build trap works on this scale, but—this territory is crossing borders. Will the other groups even let us do it?"
Ji You waved a hand the moment she heard that and said, "Don’t worry about that. You just focus on building traps, I’ll handle the rest."
After hearing this, Li Shanshui didn’t doubt Ji You’s capabilities. He nodded and said, "I understand. I can build them."
Hearing that, Ji You was very satisfied. She nodded with a smile, then said, "Can you finish in 1 hour?"
Li Shanshui: "..."
Feeling his heart jolt violently, Li Shanshui thought he’d misheard and hurriedly asked in a low voice, "Squad Leader, you... what did you just say?"
Ji You said, "In 1 hour, can you get it done?"
Li Shanshui raised a hand to his forehead. "Then, may I ask how many people Squad Leader plans to give me? If it’s twenty times my current manpower, I can try."
Ji You said, "Just the people you have now, your original crew."
Li Shanshui: "..."
Even the good-tempered Li Shanshui couldn’t help whipping around to leave. "Goodbye."
"Wait! I’ll assign you 5 more people."
Li Shanshui didn’t look back.
"10!"
"11!"
"13 and a half!"
A half person too? Hearing that, Li Shanshui stumbled as he walked, almost face-planting. Utterly helpless, he stopped, turned around, looked at Ji You, both annoyed and amused. "Squad Leader, this isn’t a manpower issue. It’s that there is simply no way to finish in that short a time."
When Ji You heard this, her expression grew very conflicted. She struggled with it for a moment, then looked like she’d been constipated for thirty years, face dark as thunder. "Then I’ll give you another half hour."
Li Shanshui said, "2 hours, and—at least 100 people."
Ji You said, "All right, 1 hour and 32 minutes, and 20 more people." Seeing Li Shanshui looking like he was about to faint from anger, Ji You hurriedly added, "I really can’t give you more. We don’t have extra time or manpower. That’s all there is. You have to make it work even if it doesn’t!"
At this, Li Shanshui was very helpless and could only ask, "Squad Leader, what kind of traps are we building?"
Unexpectedly, Ji You was totally casual. "Anything’s fine. As long as it can trip people up, make them fall down, or tumble into water or something... it all works."
Li Shanshui: "..."
A bit helpless, Li Shanshui said, "Squad Leader, with all due respect, this kind of trap work has no killing power on the enemy at all. They can even casually dismantle them."
Ji You said, "Whatever. Let them have fun dismantling stuff."
Li Shanshui: "..."
Li Shanshui felt that if he stayed any longer his heart might start having issues, so he took a few deep breaths before saying, "If it’s just for them to dismantle for fun, then I don’t see any point in building them."
Time-consuming, labor-intensive, and useless on top of that—got nothing better to do?
Ji You shot him a glare. "Kid, how are you a goofball too? Don’t tell me you’ve built so many traps your brain got damaged?"
Li Shanshui had already learned to ignore Ji You’s roasting and verbal smackdowns, just staring at her and waiting to hear her continue bullshitting.
Then Ji You said, "My goal isn’t to kill them in the first place, it’s to bog them down—to delay the time and speed of their advance toward the Array Flag."
Li Shanshui: "!!!"
Ji You said, "Whether it’s Charles’s troops or Lou’s, if they want to get close to the Array Flag, they’ll have to break through these traps on the path one by one. And while they’re spending that time, we can do a lot of things."
Li Shanshui’s pupils shrank, and suddenly everything clicked.
So that’s how it is!
Ji You suddenly shouted, "Can you do it?"
Li Shanshui shouted, "Yes!"
...
Cheng Haoyue stood on the watchtower. Even though it was very dark all around, so dark he couldn’t see the end of it, he still wasn’t at ease, carefully observing the nearby situation. Then he discovered that the Charles main force, which was supposed to have arrived by now, actually hadn’t shown up.
Cheng Haoyue lost his composure and hurriedly asked the frontline squad, "What’s going on, where’s the enemy?"
The frontline man reporting in was also a bit flustered at this point and said, "They’re... playing in the mud."
Cheng Haoyue: "!!!"
Frontline man: "Ahem... Squad Leader, that was a bad report. The enemy is currently about 50 kilometers from the Array Flag. They suddenly encountered a rockslide, and a lot of them got covered in mud. They’re looking a bit miserable."
Cheng Haoyue took a few deep breaths and said, "Got it."
At this moment, Charles had already started cursing up a storm. "Who! Who! Which little bastard pulled this shit? Once I find out I’ll personally gut him!"
Based on their previous experience, all these traps were small stuff. Some of them you could even avoid just by jumping a bit higher. But he absolutely did not expect a Big Move to suddenly hit!
When they were walking past a small slope, a mudslide suddenly poured down from the top of the hill! The scale was a bit small, so no one was injured and no one died, but just getting drenched like that in this kind of freezing temperature was enough to make anyone miserable, enough to be downright unbearable.
A team that had been marching in high spirits a moment ago instantly turned into a flock of quails shivering like sieves...
—Listening to the teammate secretly observing the enemy report the situation, trap chief designer + head of construction, classmate Li Shanshui, broke into a broad grin. He felt that his design should not disappoint Commander Ji You’s expectations.