Reydra surrendered without much fuss. Anyone would have in their position, given their overwhelming numerical disadvantage and the breaches in their walls.
The peace talks were resolved quickly too, with our only condition being that the city would need to allow the rest of its walls to be demolished. No punishment would be levied upon the viscount who governed it, nor its residents.
The terms were relatively generous for a city that had defied the emperor, but the total demolition of the walls had been the sole thing I hadn’t budged on. The viscount had looked reluctant, but had capitulated easily after being presented with the alternative option of a reparations fee, obligatory food contributions, and the confiscation of his noble title. The negotiations only lasted an hour.
Since we’d be vacating Reydra once the enemy arrived, we had the option of poisoning the wells or taking all of the city’s food for ourselves, but while those were viable military strategies, they were poor political ones.
While the self-proclaimed Duke Raul’s army could pillage the emperor’s direct holdings, I could not do the same to his due to the difference in our political objectives—he wanted to stabilize his territory and safely inherit his father’s title, while I wanted to unify the Empire. It didn’t matter to him if the citizens of the throne’s holdings hated him, because he had no intention of governing them in the first place.
Meanwhile, any negative sentiment the people had for me would rear its head later on during my reign. Reaping short term gains now at the expense of my people—and my future self—was too shortsighted to be an option. The enemy, however, was not bound by such restrictions, which was the whole point of the defensive encampments we’d set up at the borders of the territory we controlled.
Regardless, we had now received consent to destroy Reydra’s walls, and I likely didn’t need to tell you how we were going to do it. The test firing of the cannons continued, causing a horrible din, but eliciting no protests from the city’s people. This was, after all, the kind of world where it was considered extremely merciful for the victors of a battle to spare the lives of the losers at all.
Reducing the size of the gunpowder charge for each shot with the flock cannon meant it couldn’t damage the city’s walls, although it still barely managed to reach them once the angle was adjusted. However, it did reduce the heat output somewhat, and more importantly, slowed the stone projectile down enough to be useful for what I had planned for it.
Regarding the cannons’ durability, the barrel of the flock cannon developed fissures the very next day, while the same happened to the carver in another two. Both were declared too dangerous for use and discarded. We had spares in reserve back at Chelán Hill, so it wasn’t much of a loss.
Given the extensive damage, the cannons would be unusable even if they fell into enemy hands, but just to be doubly sure, we destroyed them first. The flock was left to the battle mages, who set about the lengthy process of melting the iron body down, while I destroyed the carver in secret, using Flamma Lux to slice through it like it was butter. Since the spell allowed me to fire the heat lasers from any point I designated in the space around me, the work was done in a handful of seconds.
Flamma Lux proved every bit as effective on metal as I had suspected. As a laser, though, I knew it would have trouble with water, mirrors, and fog. That last one was a bit of a crippling weakness; it wasn’t uncommon for battles to be fought in inclement weather.
Incidentally, the official explanation was that Vera-Sylvie had performed the cannon’s dismantling. No one would seek to question that, with the reputation she’d won recently.
As for the sections of the city wall the cannons hadn’t managed to blast to smithereens, we’d demolished them with good old manpower. Well, if the definition of manpower involved a group of coordinated battle mages. Vera-Sylvie had been the star of the show, though, making it look as easy as a child knocking down a tower of toy building blocks. It had been kind of scary to watch. And for posterity, we’d transported the debris of the walls back to Chelán Hill, rather than leave it around for the enemy to use.
Not that I hadn’t been convinced already, but this whole endeavor had really sold me on the value of battle mages. The Belvérian contingent had taken the wall down quickly and easily with a similar tunneling method to the one they’d used during the siege. Their productivity would’ve given Earth’s modern technologies a run for their money—for as long as there was available mana to use, at any rate.
Such grand spellcraft probably wasn’t a common sight in a real battle, though, since distance would increase mana expenditure by exorbitant amounts. The only reason they had been so efficient in taking down the wall was because they’d performed the spell right next to it.
If, hypothetically, this had been a real battle scenario, arrows and other projectiles would have been flying at them from the walls, hence why it was considered a fundamental war strategy to have one’s mages safely behind one’s infantry. Needless to say, that came at the cost of one’s wall-breaking ability, which was why cannon technology had developed over time.
It also bore mentioning that battle mages tended to be better at destruction rather than creation. Magical constructs such as golems, after all, had the weakness of returning to dirt without a mana supply. This was why I hadn’t put any of our mages to work in the construction of our Chelán Hill encampment. Some were probably capable of building dirt walls that wouldn’t crumble after they stopped channeling mana, but others definitely weren’t. Powerful, but subject to many limitations—that was the essence of battle mages.
But I digress. As the work to strip Reydra of its defenses continued, the armies of Marquess Mardrusa and Count Ethaiq finally linked up with us.
Marquess Mardrusa was the individual the Count Palatine had been wary about. Formerly of the Chancellor’s faction, he’d been second in influence only to the Chancellor himself. His marquessate spread out to the west from the County of Pildee, where the imperial capital was located, and in fact, the pincer it had created with the eastern Chancellor’s faction territories we were currently in could be described as one of the former pillars of the Chancellor’s power.
However, after I had executed the Chancellor during my coronation, that situation had turned on its head, with the Marquessate of Mardrusa finding itself semi-encircled by the throne’s direct holdings and the County of Nunvalle. The marquess had chosen to abandon the self-proclaimed Duke Raul and join the emperor’s faction, and so far, he had shown no sign of any suspicious behavior. The army he had brought—with himself at the lead—numbered three thousand five hundred men.
On to the Ethaiq army, which, as previously conveyed, was not accompanied by its young head. It numbered two thousand soldiers in total—a figure that I took to be a sign of their good faith, since Count Nunvalle, a noble of the same rank, had only managed to scrounge up a thousand. Count Ethaiq had also dispatched two noblemen to act as substitutes: Viscount Tristan le Fourdrain, and Baron Samuel le Bocuse.
Tristan le Fourdrain was the count’s legal guardian, and oversaw all of the county’s domestic affairs. That had surprised me, because I’d been expecting a military officer rather than a civil official. He gave me an impression halfway between Count Nunvalle’s and Charles de Agincarl’s: calm, possessed of presence of mind, and somewhat sickly.
Apparently, Tristan le Fourdrain had come as a show of the comital house of Ethaiq’s sincerity toward the emperor. He wouldn’t be leading the Ethaiq forces, though—he’d outright said himself that he’d only get in the way—but traveling to stay in Keighamer after paying his respects to me. It seemed he handled not only the County of Ethaiq’s administrative affairs, but House Ethaiq’s as well, and he’d offered his services as an adviser-slash-assistant to Nadine, for which I was rather grateful.
The other Ethaiq vassal, Samuel le Bocuse, was a military man through and through—and apparently a rather famous one among the nobility, at that. Our seasoned veterans, like Joel de Bourgault-Ducoudray, Hervé de Cédolin, and (to my surprise) Balthazar had already heard of him. They’d described him to me as a gambler: Whenever he took command, the result was always a landslide victory or a crushing defeat.
That seemed less than desirable to me, but further explanation revealed that he wasn’t the type to disobey orders, but rather the type who, if given the freedom, would make risky choices without a shred of hesitation. If we bound him up with detailed orders, he’d apparently be a perfectly acceptable, middle-of-the-road commander.
Incidentally, according to Samuel le Bocuse, Count Ethaiq viewed me with admiration and very much wanted to meet, but had been thwarted by the county’s nobility, who wanted the opposite. What was this, a helicopter parent situation or something?
Anyway, with the addition of another five thousand soldiers to our ranks, our combined force was bordering on twenty-five thousand strong. Neither the new recruits of the emperor’s host nor the commoner laborers were exhibiting any unease. If anything, morale was rather high after the taking of Reydra.
In the tent where I had gathered my lords for a war council, however, the mood was quite the opposite.
✦ ✦ ✦
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“Fifty thousand?! Fifty?! You cannot be serious!”