A Reality Hard to Believe
The dwarves possessed neither the superior physique of orcs and certain beastmen, nor the magic affinity of elves, nor the power of flight that some beastmen enjoyed.
What they were, however, was born technicians, designers, blacksmiths, engineers, and sappers of the highest order.
Bridges that a real-world combat engineer unit would spend days erecting, the dwarves could knock together in a single day. Without so much as a high-ground spotter, they could plot a cannon's precise trajectory from nothing more than a bearing and a range.
On top of that, Gustav had been forged from adamantium—a metal whose strength made ordinary steel look like scrap—lined internally with melted orichalcum for overwhelming heat resistance, and its ammunition handling was performed entirely by golems.
Which meant the prep time and procedures required to fire Gustav had been cut down to an extreme minimum.
"A little higher! Higher! No, too high! Bring it down a bit! There—that's the exact angle!"
We had driven the train to a point barely two kilometers from the ruined Southern Gate and begun operating Gustav on the spot.
Rondar, one of the dwarf chief artisans accompanying us in the field, adjusted the elevation of Gustav's barrel. The colossal gun, rearing skyward, cradled its seven-ton shell and stood ready to breathe fire.
The sheer size of the projectile the golems were shoving into the breech was so far beyond normal that Archduke Harth of the South asked, his voice trembling,
"Wh-what do you think you're doing?!"
"Didn't you claim I used black magic, plague, and curses? This is my tearful attempt to prove my innocence by demonstrating that I never committed such hideous heresies. I can only hope that, by this act, Your Grace will finally believe I am clean."
Rondar gave the signal.
"Boss! Target bearing northeast, range thirty-four kilometers! Objective: the southern military complex! Ready to fire!"
"Good! Everyone take the prisoners and get well clear! Kill anyone who tries to run or resist!"
Just as we had the last time, we withdrew several hundred meters from Gustav and the elves cast their auditory protection magic.
Once the spell covered only our side, I pointed at the southern prisoners.
"Put the hearing protection on them as well."
Lumina and the elves frowned slightly and grumbled.
"Do we really have to?"
"If they go permanently deaf the moment it fires and can't experience Gustav's magnificence at a full hundred percent, what a shame that would be. After that thing launches, they need to properly see, hear, and feel what happens next—what their outdated confidence and their contempt for the West actually buy them."
"When you put it that way, Your Lordship is quite right."
The elves extended the auditory protection magic to the southern prisoners as well. Everyone settled into position, lying prone with their mouths open.
"Southern dogs! Get down right now! Make one wrong move and you'll be turned into a honeycomb!"
Orcs—massive and sturdy enough not to be flung by Gustav's backblast—leveled miniguns and cowed the southern troops into submission.
"Fire!"
Click.
Rondar pressed the firing button. The magic stone buried in the shell's powder charge overloaded.
A few seconds later—
KRAAAAAAAAAANG!!!
A world-shaking roar and concussion erupted as Gustav's barrel belched flame.
An insane storm of pressure slammed into our position at once; leaves and branches shredded through the air, and tree trunks split with sharp cracks.
"Uuurgh!"
"Gyaaaaaah! Wh-what is that?!"
Hearing Gustav's report for the first time, the southerners screamed, forgot all about holding position, and bolted upright. Some were knocked flat by the blast wave and made every sort of pathetic spectacle of themselves before the orcs stomped them back into the dirt.
"All right, no time to waste! Show our dear Archduke of the South—and the highest-ranking officers among the survivors—exactly what reality looks like."
Bound hand and foot in vines the elves had summoned, Harth and the surviving field commanders were dragged forward and dumped on the ground.
I called for Abella, leader of the Birdmen.
"Abella. I'd like you and the uninjured among your people to put in a little more work. Sorry to keep asking things of you after I told you to rest."
"Pffft, don't sweat it, Lord Isaac! You heard him, kids! Anyone not hurt, get over here!"
The Birdmen streaked in, seized the vine-bound trunks holding Harth and the officers, and rocketed skyward.
"U-uaaaah!"
"Wh-what the hell are these things doing to us?!"
"Let go of me! N-no—don't let go! Whatever you do, don't let go!"
With their lives hanging from a single Birdman's grip, the southerners climbed higher and higher, screaming the whole way.
The Birdmen snickered and jammed observation caps fitted with dwarven spotting lenses onto their heads.
"Shut your mouths and watch nicely, okay~? Start thrashing around and we might just accidentally drop you."
It was a height that meant certain death if you fell, so the southerners froze solid and didn't dare move a muscle.
Once the magnifying caps were on, the Birdmen pointed far off toward the northeast.
"From now on, keep your eyes on that. See what the Gustav Lord Isaac designed can actually do."
A little over a minute later, Harth and the officers witnessed a colossal explosion bloom across the densely packed military complex far to the northeast—and screamed.
"Hahk…!"
"How… how is this even possible?! That explosion…"
Harth in particular went completely blank, staring in vacant horror.
"Don't tell me… that thing you fired ages ago only just arrived…?!"
Abella, still holding him aloft, let out a peal of laughter.
"Bingo! Lord Isaac and the dwarves say a seven-ton shell packed full of powder climbs to a height even we Birdmen can't reach—then comes screaming straight back down! That's why it takes so long! You heard the noise when it launched, right? The explosion's a bit quieter than that, but still nothing to sneeze at. I wonder how the cities near that impact are doing right about now?"
A short while later—
KUUUUUNG!
A thunderous boom rolled in from the far distance.
Harth, who had heard that sound before, began to shake violently.
"Th-this is… the same sound I heard the day the South–West Gate came down…"
"Ohhh, so you heard it then too? Now you know what it was, right? Time to head down and have a little chat with Lord Isaac, don't you think?"
Abella giggled with pure, childlike delight as she made a gentle landing.
The officers still clutched in the other Birdmen's hands could only glance around with faces full of raw terror.
Harth felt the world spinning. Cognitive dissonance had him in a chokehold.
"So then—has our dear Archduke of the South finally decided to believe in my innocence? That I never once laid hands on black magic or curses?"
Having watched the entire firing process with his own two eyes, he could no longer force out the claim that it was black magic or some kind of curse.
But accepting it was equally impossible.
"How… how can something like this even exist?! It's a cannon! Just a cannon! A rusty, obsolete conventional weapon that was already obsolete in the First Era!"
"You saw correctly. It is a cannon—an absolutely enormous one. For reference, we have enough capacity left to fire dozens more shells, and with them we can wipe every city and every person in the South off the map without leaving a single trace."
"This can't be happening…! This is a dream!"
Thud!
I drove my boot into the face of the kneeling, screaming Harth.
"Ghk…!"
"If it were a dream, you would have woken up by now. Unfortunately for you, Archduke, this is no dream you can wake from."
"This can't be real… none of this can be happening… that thing earlier… and this just now… just what…"
The Archduke of the South looked completely broken.
And who could blame him?
In an age when the world had grown so peaceful that most nations had slashed the cost of maintaining armies, a force of over fifty thousand was genuinely immense. With only a little exaggeration, it was the equivalent of scraping every active knight and mage the South possessed clean off the board.
The only powers capable of mobilizing anything larger on short notice were a handful of foreign nations—and within the Empire itself, only the Imperial House at the center and the North, whose military scale was in another league entirely because of their endless war against the monsters of the North Sea.
He had marched out at the head of a force that massive, in person… and this was the result.
Over fifty thousand troops brought to the field. Fewer than five hundred survivors.
Ninety-nine percent of his army wiped out in under five minutes—and not a single southern soldier had managed so much as an attack on our lines. They never even got close.
Staying sane under those circumstances would have been the stranger outcome. Still, broken or not, we had work to finish.
I crouched in front of Harth so our eyes met on the same level.
"See, if you'd just accepted the West's terms from the start without any backtalk, none of this would have happened. Why did you have to dig in your heels and force things this far? Did I make unreasonable demands?"
"……"
"The whole mess started when the South began collecting illegal tolls in the first place. I didn't ask you to hand over anything extra—I asked for exactly what you'd already taken, nothing more. And you still refused, forcing people to go to these lengths. I truly cannot understand it."
"……"
After mocking him to my heart's content, I swept a glance over the despairing southern officers and made my declaration.
"Harth. You're finished."
In that moment, the South fell completely into the West's hands.