"Five centuries of evolution for bronze fieldpieces were climaxed by a single smoothbore. One cannon was to outperform, and during the Civil War to make obsolete, both 6-pounder guns and 12-pounder howitzers. Although officially called the 'light 12-pounder gun' in the North, this most popur smoothbore was better known as the Napoleon."
- Hazlett, J. C., Olmstead, E., & Parks, M. H. (2004). Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War.
An instant's fsh, an eruption of smoke, and the mule kick of pressure against her chest. That was how it felt to watch the old world die.
The moment Sara's cannon bucked backward, three others sounded in brutal bursts, pummeling her from all sides. She heard metal crash and screams erupt, but the immediate effect upon the enemy was hidden by a cloying white fogbank, a sulfur scent pervading her every breath.
She couldn't see a thing. She hadn't expected that. In her tests, she'd only ever fired one cannon. Not four. She didn't know if the Knights were still charging, or if they'd broken and run, or if they'd stepped behind the wall to organize.
But she did know which possibility she feared.
"Load!" Sara roared as loud as she was able, her voice echoing through the stunned silence which pervaded the artificial fog. She gripped her sword and poured more energy into her spell, enrging the illusion she'd had pying on loop from the moment the cannons had been brought out.
Following the example of the Confederate reenactors that her magic had magnified, the crew leapt into motion. It was an awkward effort across the board, their unfamiliarity clear in the way they fumbled and argued while shoving the cannon back into the muddy slot it had just recoiled from, but they worked as fast as they could.
Six soldiers were required to budge its two-ton weight, and as they were soldiers, they did it while yelling at the others to push evenly, to not set the cannon askew. Yet for all their inexperience and apparent rivalry, their intense focus was equally evident. She'd told them that every life south of Fort Midwich depended on how well they loaded their cannon, and they'd taken it as gospel truth. She even believed it herself, for once.
Sara moved to the cannon's rear, shoving the friction primer back into pce and stuffing her thumb over the hole, to prevent any smoldering bck powder from being fanned by an errant breeze. At the mouth of the cannon a young woman was shoving a damp rag on a stick down the barrel, quenching any lingering fmes on the way in, removing unburnt powder on the way out. After a half hour spent pantomiming the motion, she moved almost as a mirror image to her reenactor counterpart, giving the rag the exact same jerking twist as she ripped it free.
This was why they'd been chosen. Colonel Shale's soldiers, the Combat Engineers, the thousand members of her army that had dedicated more time to basic school lessons than warfare. Nearly everyone had called Sara idiotic for it, and rightly so, because it would have been a waste of an irrepceable chunk of her forces had the war continued traditionally.
The young woman finished swabbing the barrel and jumped aside, repced by a sprinting man holding a long package. Though he'd never done it before, he'd studied the illusion's example diligently. He carried an iron ball which sat firmly atop a linen bag, a humble package for two and a half pounds of bck powder. The man wedged it bag-first in the cannon's mouth, then also leapt aside. Another member of the cannon crew put a long pole to the cannonball and lowered his shoulder, driving it forward with all his might. Sara felt the bump of the powder charge hitting the rear of the cannon, but the man gave it a firm extra set of thumps to ensure it was in pce, exactly as the reenactors had done.
This was what the Combat Engineers were for. Constructing impromptu defenses, bridges, and siege weapons were important, but that wasn't why she'd formed their regiment.
Deep down, Sara had known she was never going to get out of this war with her morality intact. It was war. She'd sold her soul the moment she decided to stand and fight. If she'd really been worth the title of a Champion of Amarat, she would have led a revolution peaceful enough to make Gandhi weep, but she'd never even pretended to head that direction. This moment, the sound of cannonfire echoing through the skies for the very first time, was never going to be avoided. The Combat Engineers were her earliest acknowledgement of that, her attempt to coalesce the best and brightest of her army under one command, so that when the day came for War to shake the dust off its wings, they'd be ready.
The rammer pulled free and began sprinting away, hollering "Shot loaded!" as he went.
"Brace!" Sara roared.
The crew that remained near the cannon leaned away and put their palms over their ears. Sara looked down the sights for only one moment, squinting through the lingering fog. By her guess, the crew had taken just over a minute to load the cannon.
She saw metal glinting ahead of her, reflected in the fog, and that was enough. With the gap in the wall only forty feet wide, she couldn't miss.
"Fire!"
Sara ripped the cord free, jagged metal sparking deep within the bronze cannon.
A gout of fire ripped through the air, sending the earth leaping up to meet her. The cannon recoiled violently, rolling back six feet, its concussion closer to a physical shove against her chest than any true sound. Sara almost thought she could hear the cannonball fly, her ears tracking a quarter-second buzzing hiss, a snake's lethal warning, followed by a hideous crash.
And this time, by virtue of a sudden kick to the wind, Sara saw the cannonball's impact.
A charging Knight's chest simply... opened up. The enchanted chestpte gave way like paper, a gout of blood erupting in every direction, even forward. Pieces of his armor were dragged along with the shot, becoming shrapnel that tore through his body as easily as the cannonball itself, adding to the hail of bloodied debris that showered those behind him. Though he'd been in a dead sprint, the impact reversed his direction, throwing him onto his back in a broken posture.
He did not struggle. He y motionless in the acid-eaten mud, dead.
A second cannon roared, obscuring the sight once more, but not before Sara saw five more Knights ying behind the first, the cannonball's path through their ranks traced by cavernous chunks torn from their bodies.
A third cannon erupted, and that finally knocked Sara from her revery. "Load!" She bellowed, her voice muted and ringing after each successive bst.
The cannoneers rushed to comply. Sara put her thumb back over the fuse hole, watching for signs of Knights approaching through the putrid mist. It wasn't impossible; cannons certainly weren't all-powerful, and they wouldn't have swept away all the enemy in one go.
Sara had called for the crews to fire roundshot, twelve-pound balls of iron, instead of canister. If she'd ordered canister to be fired, there was no doubt that every st Knight in the gap would have been struck by a brutal shotgun bst of lead pellets, saturating the entire area in lethal projectiles, but that wasn't without risk. She didn't know how strong their enchanted armor was, and if they'd been capable of shrugging off lighter projectiles, that would have been the end of Tulian. The Knights would have run the cannons down before they could reload.
"Brace!" Sara roared as the loading finished once more. She crouched down behind the cannon, looking down its primitive sights for a target. When the cloud of bck powder failed to dissipate, her impatience got the better of her.
"Firing!"
She moved aside and ripped the cord, sending another cannonball screeching through the air, her crew's third shot in as many minutes. Once more, she couldn't see its effect, but seeing as no Knights had come to gut them like pigs, she intended to keep up the shots.
The other three cannons had fired nearly as often, leaving the air choked with a bitter haze. Sitting low in the valley as they were, the smoke was collecting faster than it could be blown away. After twelve cumutive shots, she could barely see more than fifteen or twenty feet in any direction. The sun itself was fading to a dull pallor, its golden tones choked to grey.
Evie's turning me into a fucking poet, Sara growled as she helped her crew heave the massive bronze cannon back into its firing position.
With all her crews having fired successfully, she thought they ought to have the routine down. She took a step back and put a hand on her sword's pommel, adjusting the illusion she'd conjured. A different set of reenactors took their pce, and Sara paid the illusion only enough attention to ensure it was looping properly before returning to her cannon.
----------------------------
Colonel Shale
----------------------------
Colonel Shale saw the Governess's illusion change to the very image that had taught her how to load her own weapon, and turned to it with a stern expression, pointing.
"Follow the illusion, troops," she barked, calling loudly to be heard. "Load your weapons, listen to your sergeants!"
She turned away as the entire squad she'd been instructing jumped at the appearance of a fifteen-foot man, one dressed in a foreign world's uniform, holding a foreign world's weapon. Quick on the uptake, they immediately began copying the illusion, imitating the same loading process Shale had been showing them.
The Governess may have founded the Combat Engineers with the explicit purpose of gobbling up the army's least half-witted soldiers, but that didn't mean they knew how to do things right off the block.
Speaking truthfully, it was proving to be a trip through the hells to get them to follow her instructions. They were convinced the strange-looking weapons were some type of Champion-imbued relic, and they wanted to treat them with an according reverence. Being selected for their smarts also meant most of them knew more about artificery than the average soldier, including the fact that most enchanted weapons required near ritualistic handling and upkeep. It was commonly "known" that spell-slinging weapons were easy to ruin, and even easier to ruin you if you didn't treat them with the proper respect.
I'll take discipline over recklessness any day, she thought as she ripped a paper wad open with her teeth, dumping the pre-packaged powder load down the barrel of her own musket. She tossed the bullet in next, yanking the ramrod out from underneath the barrel and driving it forcefully home. It took an awful lot of force; she'd been given one of the rare rifled muskets, more accurate and more powerful. They couldn't be fired quite as fast, on account of how tight the barrel's fit was, but they shot three or four times as far.
Shale and a few others were the only ones trusted with them, not on account of any particur skill with the weapons, but the unlikeliness of their being captured. The Governess was paranoid beyond belief about letting her more advanced weapons into enemy hands, understandably. Per her orders, only the colonels would get rifled muskets, along with a select few lieutenants, the ones who both knew how to ride a horse and owned an animal, so they could flee with the weapon, if need be.
She frowned to herself as she stomped up the wall, moving to one of the squads that couldn't see Sara's illusion. Teaching her troops how to use them in the middle of a battle was not what she had pnned on. As she went, she was passed by a runner carrying a bundle of five or six muskets, panting heavily. Each of the things was nearly as tall as the poor d, and weighed more than ten pounds each. Add to that the bundles of pre-packed gunpowder and lead balls, and she would guess the child was boring under eighty pounds of equipment. The fact that he passed her by was fairly remarkable, actually.
"Hey!" She hollered. "Musket-runner! Get over here!"
The kid teetered to a stop, nearly spilling his pile of muskets across the steps. Shale jogged a few steps, snagging the back of his tunic to steady him.
"We're changing destinations," she said, snatching a pair of the muskets and tucking them under her arms.
"Hey!" He protested. "Governess said these're for the troops up on the wall!"
"And where exactly do you think I'm going?" Shale asked, grabbing some of the ammunition pouches on his waist. "I'm a Colonel. You're to follow my orders."
The kid scowled his indignity at her, but didn't argue. Shale ended up with four muskets and her rifle, bundles clutched awkwardly under either arm, bags of ammo dangling from her hip. She and the kid continued their march up the wall, this time without the d almost falling over every step.
"We're going to the squad over there, see?" Shale said, nodding her head.
"Governess said to start in the middle and work my way out."
"And now I'm saying we're going over there." Shale's lips pursed, growing irritated.
"And why's that, huh?" He challenged. "Tryna steal the things?"
Shale rolled her eyes. The child had been working with Sara too long, clearly. They always ended up like this, after a while, especially the younger ones. Her habitual disrespect for authority, even her own, was contagious.
"Because I'm training the troops on how to use it, and the ones near the middle can watch her spell for lessons, while the far-off squads can't. Now follow me."
The child groused a bit longer, but didn't break off. When she reached the squad of combat engineers she'd ordered up onto the wall, she was pleased to see that they'd already set their halberds aside, piling them up neatly behind their ranks. Shale began passing out muskets alongside the child. As soon as he had handed out his st one, he bolted, and Shale called after him.
"Bring the next load here, too!"
"Fine!"
She shook her head. As long as he actually does what I say, we'll be fine.
She set her personal rifle to the side, ordered the squad to form up in a semi-circle, and began walking them through the loading process.
Sara had made a big deal out of it, like it was some awful complicated process, but truth be told, Shale thought the muskets were refreshingly simple. One bit off the end of a paper packet, pouring a little spsh of it into the priming pan and snapping it closed, and then one crammed the rest down the barrel, stuffing the paper, ball and all. The paper would serve as wadding, so the powder wouldn't leak around the loose-fit ball, and it would either burn up or fly out when the gun fired. She grabbed the ramrod and shoved the ball home, which required several adjustments of where her hand held it, seeing as the barrel was three and a half feet long, with the entire gun a whole foot longer. She repced the ramrod in its holder beneath the barrel, cocked the flint-tipped hammer back, and put it to her shoulder.
What greeted her down the sights was her first proper look at the battle since the cannons had started firing. The open hole in the wall was leaking white smoke, the Knights having pulled back and to the sides, so they were no longer exposed to the shots pouring to the gap every twenty seconds or so. Lost in the fog as she was, Sara clearly couldn't tell her shots were hitting nothing but air.
Or maybe not, Shale thought. Another earth-rumbling boom rocked the wall, a gray blur punching through the cloud. Shale lost track of it all the way until a sudden gouge in the earth appeared a few hundred yards away, the ball tearing a trench through the soil in a blink of an eye before bouncing up and away, skipped off the grass like a stone. Bent and distorted by the impact, it sailed over the mass of peasant spear blocks, hundreds of them betedly ducking as they heard it whizz over their heads. Judging by the few chunks of empty space in their formations, several of the shots had coincidentally found a target. Maybe she should be telling Sara to aim up a bit, to let the cannons loose on the spears.
She'd deal with that only after she got this squad firing their muskets, though. Shale gauged the distance to the spear blocks as about two hundred and fifty yards, the tail end of what Sara cimed the unrifled muskets could reliably hit. Approximately as far as a good longbow, if one were appropriately skilled. Shale had fired the regur muskets a number of times in practice, and thought she had a decent grasp on their handling, but the furthest she'd ever aimed was about fifty yards, which had been the limit of their practice space in the University courtyard. At two hundred and fifty yards, she worried the ball would be close to dropping uselessly out of the air.
Then again, we're thirty feet up a wall. That might help the range, no?
She hoped so. She lined her sights for the rearmost line of soldiers and squeezed the trigger, sending the flint forward. A fsh and kick followed, smoke puffing out. She tried to track the shot, but all she saw was white.
"Hm" she hummed, waving the resultant smoke away. "Did anyone track that shot?"
The squad looked at each other uncertainly.
"Hm," she said again. How could she tell if she was even aiming at the right pce? It wasn't like an arrow, where you could track the flight with your eyes, and at this range she had no hope of spotting its impact. Even if she could've picked out the three-quarter-inch ball at a few hundred yards, it moved too quick to follow. She chewed her cheek for a second, then raised her voice. "Alright, everyone with a musket, after me! Load!"
Shale led the eight soldiers with muskets through the loading process, then was interrupted halfway through by the arrival of a second runner carrying six more, so she restarted the process. When she finally had all fourteen muskets loaded, she raised her own, aiming down the sights.
"Keep the metal bead at the end of the barrel between the two prongs located at the rear of the barrel, so all pieces of metal appear even! With one eye closed, keep it as straight as you can! I want everyone holding their shots, we're doing a volley!" Shale jogged several steps to the side, upwind, so she'd hopefully not get her vision obscured by the smoke. "Aim for the farthest rank of the spears, dead ahead of us, and pull the trigger when ordered! Everyone ready?"
"Ready!"
"Loose!"
A rippling crackle of pops sounded, their shots not quite synced up, despite the Champion's abilities influencing them. She chalked it up to differences in the muskets and powder loads, but she couldn't be sure, because she didn't watch the fire. Her eyes were locked onto the point she'd had the squad aiming at, waiting for impact.
Almost a full second ter, there was a spray of dirt thirty feet in front of the spear block, a recognizable sign of a smattering impact of the musket balls. The front ranks flinched in surprise, and to Shale's mild shock, she watched one of the soldiers go down, their leg taken out from under them. A ball must have ricocheted off the ground to hit them, judging by the angle. Incredible luck, frankly, considering the puffs of dirt were spread over an area the size of a city block.
"Load!" Shale yelled, beginning the process herself, calling out what she was doing through each step. The soldiers followed along, and when they were ready, she called out once more. "Aim again! Imagine another two lines of spears behind the first and put your shots there! Ready?"
"Ready!"
"Loose!"
Another volley cracked through the air, Shale's own shot added to the deluge.
Another impossibly long second ter, and there was a sudden ripple in the crowd of spears. The shots were so dispersed that it would have been impossible to tell if they impacted, the dropped soldiers lost among the crowd, save for the fact that those nearest them recoiled in horror, opening gaps in the line. They'd seen no arrow, watched no projectile, and suddenly the fellow standing next to them was on the ground, a fist-sized chunk torn from their body. It had to be an awful, baffling shock, as if an invisible monster had infiltrated their ranks, tearing bloody heaps from those around them.
All told, she counted only three spots in the enemy formation which indicated a shot hand nded, spread out among several hundred feet.
Considering the range at which the shots had been fired, even the desultory filled her with a vicious satisfaction. It wasn't quite as far as a longbow could reach, but an archer pulling off a simir shot took months of training, assuming one even had the strength to even draw back the massive bow. She'd just taught her troops how to do it in five minutes.
"Keep loosing at that range!" She barked. "Remember your aim point, show the others how to fire when they get here! Sergeant Drar!" The catfolk leapt forward, saluting. "Keep them firing in volley, and keep everyone else that gets a musket on target! You understand how to aim these things?"
"Yes ma'am!"
"Good. If you start missing your shots, stop loosing. We may have plenty of ammunition, but they have nearly as many soldiers."
Sergeant Drar saluted once more, then, oddly, sneezed. Shale had never seen a catfolk sneeze before, which she was suddenly thankful for, because it was an ugly sight. The snot got caught in the poor fellow's fur, making a mess of his muzzle. The smoke must not be agreeing with his sensitive nose, she supposed.
Thinking nothing more of it, Shale snagged her rifle and headed farther down the wall, searching for the next group of troops holding muskets without a clue of how to use them.
As she went, she spared a gnce for the breach in the wall, double-checking that the Knights hadn't resumed their charge. She found them still huddled to either side of the wall's opening, avoiding the cannonballs. A sizable group of them were clustered up around something, leaning in like children prodding a strange bug.
Shale shouldered her rifle, squinting down the sights. Two hundred yards off, she guessed. The Knights were just a blur, obscured by the tiny metal bead of her sight. She squeezed the trigger, lobbing a musket ball downrange, and moved on without bothering to check her shot.
-----------------------------
King Sporatos
-----------------------------
The King y on the ground, gasping for breath. The pain was nearly overwhelming. His chestpte had caved in, a ten-inch dent dug into his sternum. He could feel broken ribs grinding against the steel, and he could only draw the shallowest of breaths, each one of which brought extraordinary agony.
Though his thoughts were a pain-filled haze, a distant part of his mind still registered his Knights crowded about him, arguing.
"Just heal him already!" One insisted to the robed mage off his left.
"And fuse his flesh to the metal, you fool? The armor must be removed!"
"You wish the King unprotected among the enemy?"
King Sporatos could contribute no more to the debate than pained rasps, his lips forming shapes without sound.
Beneath the nearly all-consuming pain, he raged. They needed to resume the attack, damn it all! The wall was open, the Champion within arm's length! The war could end, here and now, and yet they surrounded him like doddering nursemaids, achieving nothing other than wasting their breath!
Just as he took the deepest gasp he could manage, preparing himself to give the order, a Knight's head exploded.
Gore spattered the front of King Sporatos's armor, wetly smacking the steel. The Knight's body slumped forward, thumping onto his chest, and the sudden shift of his armor had him thrashing in even greater agony, hollow groans squeezed from his throat. He felt things grind beneath his armor, the gravel that had once been his ribcage rolling in his chest.
"Get her off, off of him!"
"What in the hells was that?"
"She's crushing him, damnit!"
The Knight's armor was lifted off of him, relieving some of the horrible pressure on his chest once more. His vision began to gray. He could no longer summon the effort required to take a deeper breath or even gesture, so great was the pain.
He had been wounded before, but never like this. The few times he had suffered injuries in battle were flukes, the result of an enemy blessed with pure luck finding an infinitesimal gap in his royal armor. The armor that had been the product of master smiths and archmages working in conjunction for years, the greatest talents of his Kingdom brought under one banner to create a singurly exceptional suit. He had never, not once in his life, believed there was a weapon capable of truly damaging it.
His Knights began to lift him, preparing to move him, and the sudden nce of agony the motion drove into his body was too much. The darkness tugging at the edges of swept inward, dragging him far too soon into insensibility.
-----------------------------
Evie
-----------------------------
Evie's opinion had not yet settled on the weapon Master had provided her.
On one hand, its efficacy was undeniable. Modeled after a variant nearly two decades newer than the simpler muskets presently being distributed amongst the army, the Springfield Model 1861 fired the considerably more deadly "minié ball." The conical lead bullet allowed it to consistently hit a man-sized target at four hundred yards, with a more inaccurate range of little over a thousand. That made it the only firearm thus far produced in this world which was directly superior to a trained user of a longbow, as what it cked in an archer's rate of fire, it more than made up for in range.
On the other hand, it was far from a duelist's weapon. As she loaded another round down its barrel, crouched behind the wall, she found herself supremely dissatisfied. As was to be expected from such a revolutionary tool, it was without equal on the field of battle. When Evie rolled out from behind the creneltions to select a target, it was without fear for her life, without any sort of consideration for what pn an enemy might concoct to counter her. She simply selected her target, adjusted her sights for the appropriate range, and pulled the trigger.
Unlike the rest of the army's muskets, her weapon did not have a smaller fsh before it fired. The Model 1861 of Master's world had used a device called a "percussion cap" to detonate its charge, rather than the more primitive piece of flint. As the Tulian industries were presently incapable of replicating the cap's complex chemical makeup, Master had commissioned a simple solution: two crystals, one upon the hammer, one set in the barrel, the tter enchanted to spark when put in contact with the former. Much like a percussion cap, it was more consistent than any bck powder charge, and could work reliably in any weather.
Evie's rifle proved such with a violent buck, its precision round slicing through the air. Even through the thick wadding stuffed in her ears, there was a sharp stab of pain, though she could ignore it.
She had been aiming for the head of one of the retreating Knights, but her shot went ever so slightly low and to the side, instead striking the arm of a different Knight.
The individual's elbow was abruptly shattered, deep crimson spraying the left side of their body. White bone was visible for a brief moment before a torrent of blood covered it, the lower half of the Knight's arm attached only by ragged tendrils of flesh.
The Knight stumbled and grasped their arm for a moment, nearly falling, but managed to remain on their feet. With what Evie imagined was a great effort of will, the Knight stopped holding their ruined arm in lieu of retrieving a health potion from their belt, lifting their visor for a moment to bite its cork off and hurriedly down the draught. Their retreat continued, tendons reknitting.
Evie frowned, stepping back into cover while she reloaded. She was not as proficient with the 1861 as she would have preferred. After nearly ten years of honing her skills with a rapier, transitioning to a wholly different kind of weaponry was exceptionally difficult. Next to none of her Skills transted, save for some elements of her Levels which involved sharpening her eyesight. Master had trusted her with the Tulian Army's most advanced rifle, and so she would use it to the best of her ability, but she did not necessarily enjoy it.
Master, ever perceptive, had tried to mollify her with tales from her old world. She promised Evie that here did exist forms of duelists who utilized firearms. As the weaponry had continued to advance, there had apparently been a role of soldier who operated nearly alone, favoring accuracy and seclusion over rate of fire. These "snipers" could, through dint of superior marksmanship, prevent the free movement of a much greater number of troops. In order to counter such a problem, other snipers were often employed, creating what Master cimed to be a "sniper duel." The two combatants would shift from position to position with the utmost stealth, attempting to locate and strike their opponent before the other could do the same to them. The victor would earn an unparalleled dominance over the battlefield, for as long as the battle remained within their reach.
While such a role certainly appealed to Evie's desire to test herself against an equal foe, there simply didn't exist such a counterpart to her 1861 in this world. She held the only example, and thus would never engage in such a duel. Master had also told her of other duelists, of an earlier age, but Evie yet cked the appropriate weapon to replicate those "gunslinging" tales.
Her rifle reloaded, Evie rolled back out of cover, selecting another target. The cluster of Knights and mages had nearly reached the spear blocks, the mage's shields shining bright. With their formation disrupted by the hasty retreat, not all of the Knights were under the protective glow. Evie slid her 1861's sight from its 100 yard mark to the 300 mark, setting her aim on one unfortunate individual who had gged slightly behind.
The crystal of her rifle clicked as the hammer fell, the minié ball unched with an ear-splitting crack that signaled its acceleration beyond the speed of sound itself.
As she'd partially expected when firing at such a range, the round went off track, instead striking the rear breastpte of the Knight above her target. The minié ball shredded itself against the metal, spraying gray lead in a cone about their body. The Knight was shoved heavily forward, nearly toppling, but was caught and dragged back up by a fellow beside them.
Evie's frown deepened. This was one of the other problems she had found with using the muskets against Knights: the variance in their armor.
Nearly every noble of means commissioned their own set of armor, tailored in form and function to their exacting preferences. Some nobles were more concerned with the dangers of encountering an enemy mage, and so had their artificers emphasize protection against the energies of spells, while others feared being overwhelmed by a swarm of traditional foes, and so reinforced the purely physical qualities of their equipment.
As a result, Evie's shots thus far had been frustratingly inconsistent, with some punching directly through the thickest part of a breastpte, others bouncing off even the weakest of chainmail joints. She had found the greatest success with shots that struck the helmet, seeing as the base steel was thinnest there, but it was an accordingly difficult target. Beyond a hundred yards or so, she thus far had the skill to aim only for the entire Knight, not a specific body part.
As the Knights merged back into the lines of peasant spears, Evie shouldered her rifle, forgoing another reload. While she could have kept firing at the rge formations without issue, she was only one woman, and there were over ten thousand peasants. She would not be contributing much.
Instead she pulled the strap of her rifle over her shoulder, depositing the load of bck powder in her bag of holding. She was utilizing Master's older, smaller bag of holding, purchased before they had met Vesta. It allowed her to carry a great deal of ammunition without the burden of weight that came from such a volume of dense lead, as well as prevented errant sparks from igniting the rge container of powder that would have otherwise been dangling from her hip.
She turned to the center of the wall, where the greatest cloud of bck powder smoke lingered. Master was still firing the cannons wildly into empty space, and as Evie put a hand to her colr, she could feel why.
Master was enraged. Even briefly touching the emotion through her colr's bond had Evie's lips sympathetically curling into a snarl, a heady rush threatening to overwhelm her. She only barely shoved it down, as she had to, lest she end up leaping from the wall to charge the enemy alone.
From the moment the acid smoke had begun to eat away at the wall, it was as if every ethical value Master held dear had been under assault. Evie could not understand it fully, not without the context of having lived in the strange world Master had grown up in, but she knew her well enough to understand its basic elements.
Master had thought this world was less violent than her own. The horrors of wars in her old life had been so great, so inconceivably vast in their ramifications, that Master had viewed this conflict as something almost quaint. Innocent, in a way, categorized by an ignorance of the suffering that could truly be unleashed. It was this belief that had lead her to hold back her knowledge, to shield the "innocence" of this world from the barbarity of her own. In the histories of her home, the wars of antiquity had been comparatively paltry affairs, the battles less lethal, their effects more constrained.
Yet as the siege had begun, Master had been forced to confront the discrepancy in her world's history and her new reality. The sughter Master had feared she would unleash already existed, but unlike her home, it had been reserved as the privilege of the elite. Skills and Levels allowed the rich and powerful, who Master already despised more than anything else, to monopolize violence in a way that had been impossible in her own world. When that acid had begun to eat away the wall, burning through the flesh of Master's troops, she had been forced to confront that fact in a most unpleasant way.
And it had, predictably, enraged her. A burning, bubbling hatred had crystalized before her eyes, proving once and for all that no, there would be no peaceful resolution to this conflict. What Evie had already known, and what Master had refused to believe: so long as Skills existed, the elite could never be overthrown. While the poor toiled, the rich ascended, their power growing until any thought of resistance was a hopeless fiction.
Unless, of course, weapons can be forged for which Skills have no answer.
Evie watched two more cannonballs soar blindly through the smoke, Master's rage precluding a halt to the barrage, no matter how obviously it was having no effect. She was stirred into a frothing fury, even the faintest chance of striking an enemy enough for her to order the fusilde to continue.
As Evie approached the cannons, she saw Master tearing at their barrels between shots. Each weapon had been decorated with faux crystals and engraved runes, such that from a distance it would seem their lethality was the result of artificery and spellcraft, rather than pure chemistry. Knowing that she could not hide the effort required to create the weapons needed, Master had decided instead to mislead enemy spies into thinking the cannons and muskets were magical tools. From employing an exotic alchemist for simple chemical work to overtly using Garen's university to test the cannonry, she had hoped the spies would fail to recognize the weapons for what they were. While it wouldn't have worked forever, leading the Sporaton forces down the wrong trail in their effort to replicate the tools could have deyed their development for at least the course of the war, and perhaps even years afterward.
Evie watched her Master pry the fake crystals off the barrel with harsh, ripping motions, throwing them to the ground. She even grabbed her own rifle and used her dagger to scrape jagged marks into the beautifully engraved stock, making it clear to even a casual observer that there was no spellcraft powering the device.
"Master!" Evie called, wading into the fog. "Master! The enemy is no longer present! You are wasting ammunition!"
The same message had been repeated many times through the speaking crystals, but it was to be expected that they couldn't be heard over the cannons. As Master's crew reloaded, the Champion continued to rip away her weapon's disguises, so fevered in her actions that she was all but gnawing at them like a dog. As Evie neared the cannons, she pressed the wadding in her ears deeper, raising her voice further.
"Cannons! Cease fire! Every cannon, cease fire!"
That, at st, got Master's attention. She whirled on Evie, dagger still scrabbling at her rifle's stock, shoulders jumping with each ragged pant.
"What?" She called, bewildered. "Evie? What are you saying?"
"The enemy has retreated!" She shouted, jogging lightly to close the distance. "You are firing at nothing, Master."
"How do you know that?" She demanded.
Evie blinked. Master was shaking.
"I saw it from the wall, Master. The Knights have already reached their own lines, and the peasant levies have begun to withdraw."
Master turned to the gap in the wall. "What if they've come back? How long did it take you to get here? We should keep shooting."
"Master," Evie said, stepping closer, her voice lowering. "They are gone. I assure you, you are only wasting powder."
Sheathing her dagger, Master took a step back from the cannon and lifted her visor.
Evie took a reflexive step back. Master's smile was brilliant, beaming, a picturesque depiction of childish glee.
"Fucking finally!" Master crowed. "Little fucking pricks ran off with their tails between their legs! How many of the fucking bastards do you think we mowed down? Dozens, right? Gotta be! They had no goddamn clue what hit them!" Master bounced up and down, rolling her shoulders. "You think we got the King? Little pussy is probably sitting his royal ass back in camp, but if he actually had the balls to stick around I hope I blew that stupid bastard wide open!"
"We do not wish to kill the King," Evie gently reminded her. "He would be revived shortly, and that would only escate the war beyond our ability to control."
Master rolled her eyes. "Oh, c'mon, let a girl dream! If we hit him hard enough, there might not even be enough left for the mages to glue back together. That'd be one hell of a way to win the war, yeah?"
Evie moved another step closer, putting a hand on Master's hip. "It would, but I doubt the cannon would do the requisite damage, Master. But even if it could, before continuing the barrage we must first consolidate our forces, yes? To ensure the enemy does not counterattack."
Her eyes bzed. "Fuck that! If we roll the cannons out through the gap, we can mow down the whole fucking army! Knock 'em all down like bowling pins, gun down whoever's smart enough to run, and leave 'em hanging by their neck on the border so none of the evil bastards ever come crawling back!"
"Master, we have only four cannons," Evie whispered harshly. "Emeric's cavalry would run them down without effort. You must call for a consolidation of our forces. You know this."
Master blinked rapidly, her expression gzed over as violent fantasies danced behind her eyes. "The muskets, then. If we put the muskets and halberds in front, the cavalry will never be able to get to the cannons."
"The ncers would penetrate our lines with ease on the open field, Master." She put her other hand on Master's shoulder, slowly turning her away from the gap in the wall, where the smoke was finally clearing. She didn't think it would be good for Master to get a glimpse of the enemy army at the moment. "You need to order our forces to return to defensive postures, Master, and to fortify what we can in the wall's absence."
Master tried to turn back towards the cannons, but Evie's hand held firm, keeping her facing away. In fact, in a fit of inspiration, she pushed Master's gaze even further, towards where white sheets covered the bodies that had not yet been buried.
Master stilled, catching sight of them. Through her palm, Evie could feel her still trembling beneath her armor.
"Fine," she eventually snapped, the word bitter as any medicine. "Fine, we'll hunker down."
"Thank you, Master."
Evie stepped back as Master began rattling orders off into her speaking crystal, responding to the various Colonel's reports for the first time in nearly half an hour. Evie watched her do so with a swirling mixture of satisfaction and concern.
Satisfaction, because Master had finally brought herself under control. Concern, because her fury had nearly cost them everything. Evie had no doubt that any assault would have failed. The cannons were too few, the muskets inexperienced, their army too small. Evie usually considered Master her superior in strategy. The fact that she had been even considering abandoning the walls was profoundly disturbing.
Evie touched her colr once more, focusing on what she felt coming through the bond.
Master was filled with anger, yes, but there was an undercurrent beneath it, barely perceptible. A sort of... relief, Evie supposed. A sudden lifting of a burden, a part of her overjoyed for having drawn some conclusion, a gut satisfaction that some decision had been made. Not unlike the feeling she sensed from Master when a difficult governmental issue was resolved, but much grander in scale, as the problem dealt with had been far more fundamental.
Evie couldn't be certain what that decision was. Judging by the way Master had begun ripping apart the cannon's disguises, she could hazard a guess.
Evie stilled, watching her Master work. Dressed in her dark armor, the only woman in all the world to have bent bcksteel to her will, she moved with a lightness to her step beyond what should have been possible. Her orders were followed with crisp salutes and earnest nods, not a one of the soldiers under her command questioning her judgement for a second.
It was a strange thing, to know one was witnessing a turning point of history. Surreal, as if Evie were floating beyond her body, watching the scene from above.
Evie looked to the left, where the remains of the Knightly charge were being absorbed by the rger mass of their army. She shivered. Had the tides of fate ebbed ever so slightly in another direction, she very well may have been a member of that force opposing Tulian. If her mother had died without implicating Evie in her crimes, she certainly would have utilized her status to be Knighted, seeking distinction through conquest.
And I would have been met on the field with roundshot and fire, Evie thought. I have spent months adapting to the idea of Master's world, to the devastation it could unleash. How would I have responded without that context, facing such weaponry for the first time?
She thought of the Knights that had just been scattered like so much chaff. Their reactions had been diverse.
Would I have assumed it was simply a mage's spell and charged on, only to be struck down? Would I have panicked and fled, bringing shame to my House? Or would I simply wait beneath the walls with the rest of the Knights, our numbers slowly whittled by attacks we could not comprehend, waiting like hapless sheep for someone to follow?
Evie did not know. Truthfully, her experiences at Master's side had changed her so fundamentally that she could only wonder what it would have been like, living the life she'd once anticipated for herself. She already knew that her current self was decidedly not looking forward to receiving a simir barrage of gunfire. That was a distant concern, but not an impossible one. Only time would tell if the Sporaton forces would be capable of bringing it to bear.
