After you fired a carver, you ordinarily had to cool it—usually using oil—repair any fissures, reload it, and adjust its angle of fire and orientation before being able to fire again. The cooling in particular was vital, since you couldn’t even touch the cannon until that was done, lest you suffer severe burns.
However, we were forcibly cooling the cannons with water, ice, and wind magic, which allowed us an ordinarily impossible rate of fire. The thing was, we weren’t firing at that rate. Instead, we were exploiting the extra time it allowed us to wheel the cannons to a different gun platform before firing again.
There were two reasons for this. The first was that, in the event the enemy had intel on the number of cannons we’d brought, this would mislead them into thinking we’d deployed all of them on the eastern side of Byner Hill. After all, there was a chance that they’d gauged how many we’d brought during our taking of Reydra, even if they didn’t know what model we were using. Naturally, this would be wasted effort if the enemy had spies among us feeding them the intel, but there was no harm in going to the extra effort.
We’d gone to all this trouble because we were wary of the enemy’s cannons. Our initial plan had assumed defenses on three hills—having to work with two instead made us more vulnerable to the enemy pinpointing our gun platforms.
Of course, our strategy had its own issues. For one, the rapid cooling would more easily lead to fissures in the metal, and cannons were expensive pieces of ordnance. They were ordinarily cooled with oil to preserve them for as long as possible.
However, I intended to finish this battle today. And even if we won, the cumbersome siege weaponry wouldn’t be able to keep up with our advance regardless. Every last one of them could break, for all I cared.
Another potential issue was that unlike oil cooling, water cooling created steam, which could obstruct the view of our other units. This wasn’t a concern for us, though, since our militiamen and fresh soldiers weren’t capable of precise shooting in the first place.
Thus, we had our freshly recruited battle mages cooling the cannons, while the veteran Belvérian battle mages protected them from the enemy’s spells with barrier magic. In other words, we weren’t responding to the enemy’s magical offensives with our own.
The enemy must have believed this to be a lucky break, because they advanced aggressively. The militia in the center of their formation began a charge on the hill, while the mages behind them used them as shields, approaching as close as they dared to further unleash their arcane might.
Our defensive force on the hill—composed of militia and new recruits—replied by rolling leftover logs from the construction and stone that hadn’t been worked into cannonballs down the side of the hill. For good measure, they also threw bricks that had once made up Reydra’s walls.
You might wonder whether such makeshift munitions could actually kill a person, to which I would say: Yes, of course they could. The existence of weapons tended to make people forget, but humans were surprisingly fragile creatures. If you looked at the history of humanity, thrown stones had a fair claim to being our kind’s chief weapon of choice, and were quite possibly what had claimed the most lives in total.
Altogether, it was the final nail in the coffin that served to make the eastern slope of Byner Hill unassailable. Any enemy soldier that slipped into the dry moat we’d dug would find themselves impaled by the stakes within. If they were lucky enough to survive and attempt to climb out, they’d only be crushed by the rocks and logs falling from above. And if they survived that, they still had a despair-inducing steep hill slope awaiting them, with more falling rocks to deal with during the climb. It was nothing short of hell.
Nevertheless, the enemy’s militia continued to advance, and continued to die.
If you were wondering why they kept charging to their deaths, it was because they literally couldn’t stop. They were being pressed forward by those behind them, who were being pressed forward by those behind them, and so on and so forth, until all the way at the back, there were soldiers with their weapons ready to execute any deserters.
The point of this charge by the enemy was to wear away at our defenses. And since they weren’t losing any of their career soldiers, they likely didn’t give a damn about the casualty count. Wave after wave, they sent the militia to their deaths.
Unfortunately, this was just how things worked in this world. You put your militia in the front and made an example out of any deserters to keep them in line. I’d ordered for these encampments on the hill expressly to avoid that, but it seemed that in the end—even if it was technically the enemy’s fault—many citizens of the Empire would be dying today.
Such was war.
Of course, the enemy’s charge was far from pointless. It achieved its objective of providing cover for their battle mages with flying colors. While our men were focused desperately on the enemy militia climbing up toward them, the enemy’s mages were slowly but steadily wearing away at our defenses: filling our dry moats, destroying our chevaux-de-frise, and working the hill slope to make it easier to scale. On top of that, they were also periodically firing offensive spells to keep our soldiers’ heads down.
In response, we were concentrating our cannon fire on the enemy mages’ suspected positions. No matter how good their barrier magic was, it wouldn’t stop a full-velocity cannonball at this distance.
All in all, it resembled a repeated game of cat and mouse, with the enemy battle mages evading our firing lines as they assaulted us, while our cannoneers did their best to track them. But that was fine with me. We didn’t need anything more than that out of the eastern slope cannons.
Incidentally, the enemy mages also fired periodic spells at our command center. I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard for them to figure out that the emperor was probably here, what with the raised flag and all. However, Vera-Sylvie and I were enough to shut down those attacks. It wasn’t too hard; the only spells that could reach us at this height came by their range in the first place by giving up much of their stopping power.
Meanwhile, oblivious to everything, the gawking lower gentry cheered at every cannon shot or enemy spell offensive. I was this close to kicking them down the slope.
Those wasteheaps in human skins weren’t the only ones in a good mood, though. As the battle progressed, our men at the front began to cheer with every enemy wave they eliminated. Even the militia, who had looked so nervous to begin with, were going out of their way to kill any enemy unfortunate enough to catch their attention now. That was the effect of good morale, I supposed.
As for the battle outside, the right flank of our forces had begun a slow retreat, pushed back by the enemy’s left. It was all according to our plan, of course, but there was no denying how formidable the Raul army was. Even if you didn’t factor that in, it was their fifteen thousand men—all career soldiers to boot, rather than militia—against our eight thousand. It would’ve been stranger if they weren’t pushing us back.
Nevertheless, it seemed we were giving as good as we got. Of considerable note was how we were managing to successfully avoid the Raul army’s cavalry charges.
You might think that the propagation of firearms would make cavalry obsolete, but it was actually the exact opposite: The interval created by matchlocks needing to reload represented an excellent opportunity for a cavalry charge. You only had to look at the battles of the Sengoku period as an example—despite the rapid popularization of guns across Japan, they only became usable in battle when one also had anticavalry palisades and spear lines.