NOVEL FROG Chapter XCII – Thy artillery be done.
It’s not the 63rd of Summer 5859 anymore, it’s the 64th of Summer 5859
The walls of Casamonu, Casamonu
Things weren’t looking so brightly for Sir Corvus. He had gone to sleep last night hoping that the situation would get brighter, but the only thing to brighten had been the sky and nothing else.
There were no Dongs in open sight, no cultivators who’d save him, only the siege camp which had surrounded the walls and blocked an easy escape for Sir Corvus. He was about to curse the fool who had made the decision to mount a defense, before he realized that he was about to curse himself. Not wanting to curse himself any further, he saved his curses for the Demon King, that damnable commander of savages. Staring down from the walls, he saw the savages down below who looked no different from ants. Oh, how he would love to crush them…
Sir Corvus had, of course, been busy with things other than fantasizing about crushing his enemies while standing atop a wall. While he didn’t think that the savages mounting a successful siege was possible, he also wanted to be ready for any surprises like the one which had happened yesterday. He had commanded his troops to position what few cannons he had around the walls and fill them with shrapnel in case the savages tried to go over the walls. Casamonu didn’t have much gunpowder in storage, nor could they get more when they were surrounded by enemies, so those cannons would only fire if the enemy got close enough to secure a hit. The garrison was marching 24/7 to make sure that nobody could even get close to the walls without being pelted with arrows until they were buried six feet under.
Corvus had also considered arming a militia composed of the citizens of the town, but then the concept of arming the common people made him a bit too scared to even think further about trying it out. He did still plan on looting the town of everything valuable when he left, and doing that would be hard with an armed population to resist him. For now, he was content with letting himself be seen as the last line of defense before the savage forces of the Demon King, nay, he was the last line of defense before the savage forces of the Demon King. As his noble blood demanded he’d defend the people of this town, and then leave after taking his just due. The ever-so noble Sir Corvus had already made all the justifications he needed to make himself feel good about being a glorified bandit. Perhaps, in another world, he would have become on Olympic-level mental gymnast.
With the ants below scurrying to conduct their pitiful siege, Corvus couldn’t help but feel relieved and let out a boisterous laugh. “Ha! What was I worrying about?” What were these savages going to do, run up the walls and enter the city from above?
Suddenly, a BANG, and the earth below shook along with the heavens above. Corvus almost fell butt-first on to the ground. He looked below from his high walls, to where the explosion had come from. There was a newly-formed smoking crater down below. Was it some sort of magic summoned by the Demon King? He looked intently at the colony of ants down below. Where was the magic coming from?
All Corvus saw was a black blur pass above his head before he heard another explosion right above his head. This one grounded him and everyone around him as shrapnel whizzed past or into them. Corvus had gotten lucky and his helmet had blocked a broken shard of clay from shattering his cranium. A poor soldier right next to him hadn’t been so lucky, and his brain wasn’t functioning at all anymore. Those who had been injured were crying out in pain.
It was pure cacophony, one which Corvus had to quickly retreat from back to security. He crawled on the ground with his ears ringing, swearing to crush the dirty ants below him who had forced him to such an embarrassing position.
64th of Summer 5859
Below the walls of Casamonu, Casamonu
Ayomide squinted her eyes, trying to get a good view of the explosion which was very far away from her. She, and the others around her, only saw a distant brief fiery explosion followed by a cloud of thick gray smoke above the walls. It was so far away that she couldn’t hear the explosion. “…did that even do anything?”
Brown nodded with satisfaction at the results of their artillery test. “I can assure you that they aren’t too happy about the fireworks show that we are putting on, young lady. Load up another round, gentlemen!”
There was a veritable artillery crew around a copper tube which looked far from a proper piece. The tube was affixed on top of a few bags of grain held steady by planks. A few of the more muscle-laden soldiers had been tasked with repositioning the artillery every time it fired, and Rabanowicz was in charge of mentally doing ballistic calculations to make sure that they were positioning everything correctly. Watanabe was right next to her, drawing calculations on the earth with a stick to verify Rabanowicz’s mental math.
However, theory and math alone were far from being enough to fire this cannon, or any other cannon for that matter. Bilal had sent a team of skilled kiln workers along with the cannon delivery to set up a kiln. Brown had originally requested cannonballs to be made at Libertycave, but Bilal had decided that it’d be far better to set up a simple kiln in the camp itself to make the cannonballs. The cannonballs in question were clay balls packed with pebbles, metal scrap, and anything else which would potentially hurt a person. Inside them were also a whole load of gunpowder, courtesy of the smugglers which had left the gunpowder in an unmarked location near Casamonu for them, and a fuse (hemp rope doused in oil) sticking out ready to be lit.
A soldier rolled a newly-baked cannonball into the copper tube. It rolled down the tube, eventually seating itself with a loud thunk at the bottom. Rabanowicz ordered some last-minute adjustments to the angle and position of the cannon before it was ready for fire. Firing the cannon was relatively easy: Ayomide first shone a concentrated beam of light to light the fuse and then, before the cannon exploded in their faces, she cast a very strong gust of wind right inside the cannon itself. The compressed air, stuck between the walls of the cannon and the cannonball, pushed the cannonball with great force that launched the cannonball fast enough to reach the walls. There was another flash of light and more smoke as the cannonball hit the wall directly this time. Unfortunately, the blast great enough to immediately bring down the walls, gunpowder as an explosive wasn’t too strong and the clay cannonball itself wasn’t hard or fast enough to do much damage, but the explosion by itself was enough to demoralize the garrison up above the weakening walls.
“We need it a bit down, to damage the foundations of the wall. Also, the explosion is too early, we need it to explode right next to the wall. Get a longer fuse.” commented Rabinowicz, watching the explosion do its thing. Immediately the cannon was lowered and a longer fuse was attached to the cannonball. This was far from an exact science, with the cannon being wildly inaccurate and the fuses varying wildly in how fast they burned. Sometimes it was too early, sometimes it was too high, sometimes the fuse refused to light up.
Still, it was much better than having no cannon at all no matter how odd the cannon was compared to its contemporaries. Almost all cannons in Gemeinplatz would propel a cannonball through the explosion of gunpowder and break down walls with sheer kinetic force from the speeding hunk of metal or stone. However, the League didn’t have enough bronze or iron to cast any cannons capable of handling an explosion inside its chambers. Therefore, they were using wind magic to propel a lighter projectile with explosives inside it to try and get a similar effect to a conventional cannon. It wasn’t proving to be as effective, but the walls would have to come down eventually once they were pounded on enough. Probably. Hopefully.
The artillery crew loaded another cannonball into the Libertycave cannon, and the people on the wall got ready for another explosion. This was going to be a long siege.