Weapons of the Third Era (1)
After Gustav was completed, we had put it through a few trial firings.
I had only ever heard about the thing in the most extravagant terms — I had never, of course, actually experienced a live shot for myself.
Still, my time in the military had taught me just how punishing the noise of rifles, grenades, and mortars could be, and Gustav's bore was nearly ten times that of an 81mm mortar, a weapon whose report was already loud enough to leave a man speechless.
Even without firsthand experience, I could estimate the scale of that detonation well enough, so before the first test firing I had taken every precaution I could manage.
What I learned was that every last one of those precautions barely registered as the barest minimum before Gustav.
After Gustav's first test shot, forty-six elves, seventeen orcs, fifteen dwarves, and sixty-one beastkin ruptured their eardrums, blood pouring freely from their ears. We had fired across open flatland, yet every twig on trees hundreds of meters away had been stripped clean, and countless trunks had been split straight down the middle.
Dozens more suffered ruptured organs from the shockwave alone. If this world had not possessed the convenient, near-instant healing of magic, every one of those people would have been left permanently deaf — or dead.
The demi-humans who inspected the impact site dozens of kilometers away were struck speechless with awe. From that day forward, not a single soul in the West doubted that the Third Era was about to begin.
We still had not developed a proper remote firing switch, so for the time being we overloaded a magic stone mixed into the powder charge to trigger the shot — which meant several seconds of delay before the shell actually left the barrel.
"Prepare for firing!"
At my order, every soul present flattened themselves against the ground, bellies lifted slightly off the dirt, hands clamped over their ears and mouths held open.
A few seconds later.
KRAAAAAAANG!!!
The earth itself heaved under a report that could have come from hell.
Even with hands over our ears and the elves' protective magic layered on top, the sound was so vast that a ringing filled my head.
Moments later an ungodly gale slammed into us. We clung to the ground for dear life as the storm hit and vanished almost as fast as it had come.
As the wind died and the echo of the blast faded into the distance, we all rose. The area erupted into chaos at once.
"Hahahaha! No matter how many times I hear it, it's still breathtaking! We built this!"
"Hey! There's no time! Grab me and fly! I won the rock-paper-scissors earlier! I have to see that thing hit the target with my own eyes!"
Those who had won the privilege of being carried aloft by the birdfolk called for them at once. The birdfolk, equally unwilling to waste a second, scooped them up without delay and launched into the sky.
I stayed behind on the hill, training a telescope on the Southern Gate, a faint smudge in the far distance, and muttered under my breath.
"The first step of the Third Era starts with you — you bandits wearing knights' helms."
Something large and long mounted on the train angled toward the sky and held there for a long while.
Then every observer in the watchtower — and every defender waiting atop the walls of the Southern Gate — witnessed the same anomaly.
The clouds began to slowly spiral around a single point in the sky.
To the troops on the wall, who could not even see Gustav from their position, it was merely a curious weather phenomenon. To the observers who could see Gustav through their telescopes, it was something that stirred a strange and uneasy dread.
"Something… something's wrong. This isn't ordinary weather. It's as if the clouds are spinning around that black train thirty-five kilometers out front… I can feel some kind of enormous power gathering."
But even after the observer relayed the situation through the crystal communicator, Simon, commander of the Southern Gate garrison, remained unmoved.
"So they're preparing some kind of enormous magic from thirty-five kilometers away, is that it? Observer, try making a report that makes sense. Even if they were preparing such a spell, at that distance they can't even see us. How exactly do they plan to fire it? Going to drop a meteor from the sky or something?"
"That… wouldn't be it, sir. But I'll continue monitoring."
A little more time passed.
The observer watched as the something rising from the train spat fire.
A colossal plume of smoke billowed upward, and he saw with his own two eyes the shockwave expanding in a perfect ring around the train. He urgently called headquarters.
"H-Headquarters! Just now, that long thing mounted on the train spat fire! I believe it's a cannon! Prepare for bombardment!"
"Ha. All that bluster, and what they've prepared is a cannon? A conventional weapon from the tail end of the First Era? Not aura, not magic — some obsolete relic. Ridiculous. Though… what kind of cannon fires from that far away? Are they just doing a test firing?"
"The power looks anything but ordinary, sir! Every tree around it snapped clean, and I clearly saw the shockwave spreading!"
"Of course we won't drop our guard. Mage corps! Deploy barrier shields across the entire Gate!"
At once a vast barrier sealed the entire Southern Gate.
Layer upon layer of magic cast by countless high-ranking mages — with a ward like this, even if the extinct dragons of the First Era returned from the dead, they would not break through in short order. That was the confidence they held.
The South's forces, which controlled the empire's corridor to other nations, were that strong.
About thirty seconds after the mages had stacked their barriers into a full ward, nothing happened. Simon called the observer.
"Observer, what's going on? Nothing's happening. Are you sure you saw it correctly?"
"I-I saw it with my own two eyes! I really watched that cannon spit fire!"
"Over thirty seconds and nothing! A cannon that size should have made a sound we could hear, and we heard nothing. Are you filing a false report?"
No one in this world had ever experienced a shell arriving from a distance of thirty-five kilometers.
Cannons themselves were regarded as little more than relics of the First Era, and to people living in such an age, the common sense of a cannon was that the sound of the shot arrived at the same moment as the firing.
To claim you had clearly seen a firing, then have thirty seconds pass with no report of the shot at all, was more than enough reason to suspect a false report.
Simon waited another thirty seconds without dropping his guard.
One minute from the first observation report.
Simon finally lost his patience and called the observer again.
"You're filing a false report! A full minute and nothing's happened!"
"I-I'm really not filing a false report! I truly saw it with my own eyes! Why there's no sound and nothing is happening, I don't understa—"
Then, from the sky above, a sound arrived.
Shiiiiik—
A strange whistling of wind.
At the same time, every bird near the observation tower took flight at once and fled.
A wave of dread hit the observer. He looked up — and screamed as he called headquarters.
"H-H-Headquarters! Above you! Something is falling through the sky right above headquarters' position!"
Shiiiiiiiik—!
The wind-sound swelled at a terrifying rate, and the falling object closed in just as fast.
When the wind became so loud that no other sound could be heard at all, the observer felt, with pure instinct, that something had gone catastrophically wrong.
A wind-sound that set a man's knees trembling.
The observer knew, with a certainty that needed no reasoning, that the thing falling toward them — utterly unlike the cannonballs of the First Era he had only ever seen in books, different in both size and shape — was the shell that had been fired from that train.
How it had flown this far, why the report of the shot still had not arrived — none of it made sense. But every survival instinct in his body was screaming emergency.
"Barrier—@#$%!"
Even Commander Simon's voice was drowned out by the wind the falling object was generating.
Overwhelmed by the roar, the observer could do nothing but pray to the gods.
Meanwhile, knights and mages on the wall who had also spotted the falling object fell into chaos.
"Hold the barrier! It's still just a cannonball in the end! Knights, draw your mana and brace yourselves for any contingency!"
Simon, too, felt on instinct that this was no ordinary cannon.
The shell was arriving before the sound of the shot? What kind of cannonball looked like that, and why was it so enormous?
And how, for that matter, could anyone hurl a cannonball this far?
Full of unanswered questions, Simon drew his mana.
Just before the shell touched the mages' barrier—
Kigigigigik—
Not the earlier wind-sound, but a metal-on-metal screech that seemed ready to tear the ears apart.
Every nerve in his body screamed danger on a scale that made the previous warning feel trivial.
"Mages, pour everything into the barrier! The barr—"
In that instant, the shell touched the mages' barrier.
KWAJIJIK—!
As if the barrier had never existed at all, it punched through dozens of layered shields as though they were tissue paper and plunged toward the ground.
And the moment that monstrosity of a shell struck the earth—
the Southern Gate vanished from the map.