Up on the walls, Kesten bit back his fear as he barked orders. The impossible had become possible. He maintained his outward composure as he searched for his next target.
He held a club in his hand, and when he found an approaching monster, he slid off its top, revealing a red light which he shone on the monster. Once he did, the bowmen under his command loosed countless arrows. The monster crumpled to the ground. As he watched the battlefield, he kept his terror well hidden.
This device was a club-shaped magic lamp fixed with a thinly cut gemstone that would shine colored light, which he used to pick out the archers’ next target.
During defensive battles, bows could be used in two ways. Either skilled shots would snipe their enemies, or volleys of arrows would be shot in a line to prevent enemy soldiers from approaching. Broadly speaking, those were the only two strategies. It was one of the disadvantages of fighting on the defensive. Put simply, you couldn’t bark orders at the entire archery squad.
Battlefields were filled with screams, war cries, the metallic clanking of swords hitting armor, the twang of archers’ bows, and the thumps of both stones and people tumbling to the ground. Should their commander order them to shoot, only the few bowmen in his vicinity would hear. Thus, there had been no way to focus attacks on a specific individual down below from atop the ramparts.
This posed a significant problem. Targeting your foes’ commander was the quickest way to collapse their battle formation. For efficiency’s sake, it was best to target leaders or other enemies in the vanguard. However, a talented archer wasn’t necessarily a talented strategist, and even a skilled bowman might not realize the ideal target.
This rang especially true for mages. Those ill accustomed to the battlefield would give general commands like to pick targets with the toughest armor, or to unleash the strongest magic they had all at once. An eye for strategy came from long experience, if not rare talent.
But Werner’s invention of this laser pointer allowed leaders to pick out individual targets from atop the walls. Archers were briefed in advance to prioritize targets picked out by the light, so even soldiers outside of earshot and those who had yet to nock their arrows could focus their attacks on a single target. It drastically increased the number of archers who could be coordinated against a specific target. Until that point, there had been no way to focus an attack from afar, but that was rightly in the past tense.
Werner’s innovation allowed his soldiers to eliminate even the toughest, most enduring enemies, even as they kept to the walls for protection. With the elderly serving as shot-callers, and novices wielding crossbows and catapults, even common folk could muster the power to fight against Demons.
For a while, this tool and method remained clandestine, but two decades later when it was used in a border skirmish to turn the commander of the besieging army and younger brother of the crown prince into a porcupine, it became known as “the Zehrfeld Beam-Guided Barrage.”