Chapter Forty-Eight: Battle in the Night

“Damn it, how can there be pirates?!”
Constable Chen burst out of the house in panic, his face pale as death.
If the village were attacked by mountain bandits, he wouldn’t be so flustered; but these were pirates!
Pirates, who commit every imaginable crime, leaving fields strewn with corpses!
Every time they landed ashore, it was a massacre beyond words—a storm of blood and carnage! These vermin, like locusts, kill every person they see, slaughter every village they pass, utterly ruthless! The coastal folk suffer terribly at their hands, and even county towns are not immune to their calamities!
“It’s been years since pirates caused trouble here—why must it happen today, and to me?!” Constable Chen cursed furiously, and the yamen runners behind him were all equally terrified.
Pirates are fierce fighters, far from ordinary soldiers’ match.
Especially now, when the Great Shang is locked in battle with the northern barbarians, all the county troops and even the provincial soldiers of Jiangnan have been called away, leaving only a handful of guards—hardly enough to form a fighting force, let alone repel pirate raids!
If things go badly, the entire coastal county could be wiped out!
At this moment, Qin Zhen also rushed out of the house, crossbow in hand, catching a member of the village watch who had sounded the alarm. He asked calmly,
“How many are there?”
“A black mass, couldn’t see clearly—at least a hundred,” the man replied, his voice trembling, clearly terrified by the pirates. “They’re attacking the village gate—Captain Chen Shu has already led people over. I reckon they’re already fighting.”
Just then, the old village chief came running from the other side, not even fully dressed, hurriedly throwing on a thin robe.
“Pirates are not to be trifled with—we must escape now!”
The villagers around them were thrown into chaos, memories of the sorrow and terror from ten years ago, when pirates invaded, flashing vividly in their minds.
Countless people met brutal deaths at the hands of these damned villains!
“Climb the wall, climb the wall and run!” Constable Chen shouted.
Hearing the call to flee, everyone began to scramble in panic, and the situation was on the verge of total disorder.
“The pirates are everywhere outside—where can you run?” Qin Zhen’s furious roar silenced them all.
If they ran, the fishing village he had painstakingly built would be destroyed.
Qin Zhen would lose everything, and he could not accept that!
“We have crossbows, we have so many men, and traps and ditches—what’s there to fear?! Our home is here, where else can we go?”
“The village watch and the fishing crew are already fighting—not more than a hundred pirates, but we have four or five hundred villagers! Five men can take down one! One round of crossbow fire and they’ll be dead—what’s there to be afraid of?”
Qin Zhen climbed high and called out.

“Our loved ones were murdered by pirates—we have a blood feud! If you have guts, take up your weapons and follow me to the village gate! Today, they will pay their debts in blood!”
At that moment, the villagers’ courage was kindled.
The grisly scenes of loved ones butchered by pirates flashed through their minds.
“Qin Zhen’s right—this is our home, we cannot run!”
“A scar is all that death leaves—let’s fight them!”
Watching the villagers shout and rally, Qin Zhen felt a surge of relief.
“All men, grab anything you can and follow me to the gate! Juan, you lead the women and children to hide in the cellar…”
“I won’t hide! I’m coming with you!” Liu Juan said firmly. “If all the men die, we won’t survive either! Didn’t you always say women hold up half the sky? Today, we’ll fight the pirates together!”
“That’s right! We’re coming!” Even Aunt Wang, normally the most timid, stepped forward, gripping a rolling pin thicker than her arm.
The other women echoed her resolve.
Qin Zhen waved his arm and, without delay, led the crowd toward the village gate.
Constable Chen was deeply shaken by the villagers’ wild resolve.
Usually, when pirates came, not only commoners but even soldiers often fled. He couldn’t understand—outside were over a hundred gleaming Japanese swords, yet these unarmed villagers dared follow Qin Zhen straight into battle.
“Boss, what do we do? Should we still run?” a yamen runner asked timidly.
They were yamen runners, after all, with a duty to protect the people. Though they’d often bullied the weak, at a moment of life and death, a bit of courage stirred in their hearts.
“Run? Run for what?!”
Constable Chen steeled himself.
“Even old women wielding rolling pins dare to fight, and we, with swords, are less than village women? Didn’t your sister die at the pirates’ hands? Don’t you want revenge?”
He spat fiercely, his face stern.
“Everyone, come with me! We all know pirates kill without blinking—today, I want to see what beasts they really are!”
Meanwhile, Chen Shu was leading the village watch atop the earthen wall, shooting arrows.
A dozen villagers fought desperately alongside Li Han to hold the gate.
The pirates had come so suddenly that the crossbows hadn’t had a chance to make use of their range—the pirates were already at the village’s edge. With the darkness hampering vision, the village watch fired blindly, accuracy poor.
Fortunately, Qin Zhen had earlier ordered a deep ditch dug outside the wall against mountain bandits—originally meant to be lined with sharp bamboo and filled with water as a trap, but time had been too short to finish.
So only water filled the ditch.

Thanks to that ditch and the height of the low wall, those short pirates couldn’t scale it, forced instead to gather at the wooden gate and break it down, or who knew how many would have already poured into the village!
But this meant enormous pressure on the gate.
The gate, made of tree trunks as thick as bowls, could not withstand the pirates’ violent hacking—the sharp Japanese swords fell again and again, splintering it, and through the cracks you could glimpse the pirates’ ferocious faces.
“We can’t hold it!”
Li Han shouted, as a Japanese sword stabbed through a hole in the gate, piercing a villager’s chest.
Shrill screams and desperate cries made the battered gate tremble ever more precariously.
“We must hold!” Chen Shu’s eyes were bloodshot.
These pirates all wielded Japanese blades!
For villagers lacking iron weapons, if the pirates got inside, sticks alone could never fend them off.
If the first line of defense broke, these bloodthirsty pirates would cut through the fishing village like a knife, and disaster would fall upon them all!
“Everyone, over here!”
Qin Zhen’s voice cut through the night, calm and steady, giving everyone a pillar to lean on.
The scene made his scalp tingle.
Had he not once served in the military, he might have been cowed by the pirates’ brutality.
“All crossbows, gather and form three lines! Aim toward the gate!”
Firing at random was useless—the crossbows were Qin Zhen’s only strength, and must inflict real damage on the pirates!
“Chen Shu, take men and haul timber—lay it at the gate, as much as possible!”
“Lay timber? Why not just block the gate with it?” Uncle Li, limping, asked in confusion.
“It won’t hold,” Qin Zhen snapped, no time to explain. “The gate’s about to collapse—go!”
Chen Shu immediately led men to move timber. Fortunately, the village was building houses lately, so ample wood and stones lay stacked nearby.
“What should we do?” Liu Juan’s voice trembled.