To Defeat a Sword Master (1)
To defeat a Sword Master, first I needed to assess the current situation and figure out what could actually be improved.
Personnel was already out of my hands. I'd have to trust the 1st Prince and the 3rd Prince on that front.
So what about increasing the firepower of a single Altar Cannon?
...That wasn't going to be easy to improve significantly either.
Of course, if I dumped enough money into it, anything was possible. But hiring people with that same budget would be far cheaper—whether mages or freelance knights.
Then maybe apply different magic to the Altar Cannon?
It was technically feasible. We'd already created a training version that used the 2-circle spell Energy Bolt.
But in the end, it would probably still come down to Fire Ball. When you assumed mass firing, no other magic offered better cost-effectiveness against infantry.
The primary physical damage from the explosion, the secondary burns, and the terror it inspired—it was hard to find magic that delivered so much value.
Naturally, 4-circle and 5-circle spells would be far more powerful. But if I built an Altar Cannon that used that kind of magic, where was I supposed to find mages capable of casting it?
The whole point of the Altar Cannon was that its production cost had been slashed dramatically by designing it around operators who could already use the spell in question. A 4-circle or 5-circle version would require 4-circle or 5-circle mages.
Recruiting people like that on short notice would be difficult, and even if I managed it, getting them to join the mage unit would be nearly impossible. Most mages at that level belonged to the Magic Towers.
It was even rarer for field mages to reach those heights. Me? I was an exception.
But the reason exceptions received special treatment was simple: they were rare. By definition, they couldn't be common.
In the end, the only way to operate high-circle Altar Cannons was to hire mages from the Magic Towers.
...And that probably wasn't going to work.
To understand why, you had to know how the Magic Towers operated. Put simply, they were essentially city-states founded by mages. They collected taxes from surrounding lands, exploited peasants, and behaved exactly like feudal lords.
The Towers sustained themselves through revenue from those territories, plus profits from selling artifacts created through mercenary work, research, and development.
Authority within a Tower was determined by circle rank. The exact rules varied between Towers, but the core principle remained the same: higher-circle mages received more resources, and better ones, than everyone else.
The mages I would need to recruit were high-circle. Up to 4-circle was one thing, but 5-circle marked the threshold where someone was truly considered a high mage.
Would mages like that really join us? These were people already enjoying the abundant support and ideal research environment of the Towers, living in comfort.
Why would they abandon that honey pot to join a mage unit with no clear vision or future?
This was exactly why mages were so rarely seen on battlefields. The problem was structural from the start.
The Magic Towers didn't want to burden their affiliated mages with excessive risk, while employers who paid premium prices couldn't justify not using them. In the end, mages had become siege specialists through a combination of these circumstances and battlefield demand.
For the employer, it was convenient to smash through defenses with powerful magic. For the Tower, it was ideal to fire one big spell, collect payment, and withdraw without exposing their mages to real danger.
Wasn't there no siege mage at Hartzfeld Castle? That was only because the capital conspiracy had spiraled out of control and escalated into a full siege. Under normal circumstances, they would have hired one.
Anyway, the conclusion was the same: putting high-powered magic into the Altar Cannon would be extremely difficult, whether due to rising costs or the circle requirements of the operators.
Hmm. What exactly did I need to improve to stand a chance against a Sword Master? Should I develop some revolutionary new artifact?
Wait. If the Altar Cannon is too much, what about improving the Communication Magic Tool instead?
The unconscious connection from Altar Cannon to artifact sparked a small epiphany.
We already had a Communication Magic Tool developed and in use—something that functioned roughly like a walkie-talkie. But its range was mediocre, and it was heavily affected by ambient mana, which made the signal unreliable. Active use had been difficult.
In the last operation we'd relied on knights acting as human relays, but we couldn't keep operating that way forever.
Besides, this might be the perfect opportunity to defeat a Sword Master.
Just improving communications? How would that let us beat a Sword Master?
Was real-time remote communication really something that could be dismissed as "just"?
Let's think it through.
Suppose an enemy Sword Master launched an assault on the mage unit. Traditional mage unit tactics required them to stay clustered together. Their strength came from saturating a wide area with simultaneous strikes to maximize damage, which meant they had to remain in formation to receive commands.
Whether firing sequentially or all at once, they needed to be grouped up. That made them easy prey for a Sword Master—they'd all get cut down and it would be game over.
Why not have them scatter and fire individually? Sure, a Fire Ball was powerful. A direct hit on infantry would probably mean instant death or critical injury.
But could scattered individual fire achieve efficient destruction? At best you'd have overlapping shots, but when firing from more than three kilometers away, even hitting anything with unaimed shots would be questionable.
This was an arm that only displayed its true power with precise fire control from the very beginning. It was exactly like modern artillery, which made sense since I'd based the tactics on it.
But what if we added long-range remote communication?
If long-distance communication becomes possible, we could maintain the same simultaneous strikes even with a dispersed unit.
That one change would drastically reduce the threat posed by an enemy Sword Master.
If the unit could maintain the same firepower while spread out, we could deploy mage teams across a wide area without worry. No matter how insanely fast and strong a Sword Master was, he was still just one person. One man couldn't do everything.
The time it would take him to wipe out the mage unit would inevitably increase. Which meant the enemy would lose their means of annihilating our mages.
And if the mage unit stays operational, the longer the battle drags on, the more it favors us.
Of course many people would die in the meantime. But if we could hold out until the enemy main camp suffered irreparable damage, victory would be ours.
And that wasn't the only benefit.
It wouldn't be limited to the mage unit—the entire army could operate with far greater coordination.
But the biggest advantage was something else entirely.
If I just get a little more comfortable with flight magic... aerial reconnaissance would become possible.
Now that we had real-time long-distance communication, if I simply relayed everything I saw to the ground commander, it would be like observing the battlefield as if it were an RTS game or a board game.
I'd done something similar during the previous surprise attack, but the tool's performance limitations and my own inexperience with flight magic had kept me stuck in stationary observation.
If the Communication Magic Tool's performance improved, I wouldn't be limited to hovering in one spot. I could fly over the enemy encampment, scout, and report back with ease.
In a pinch, I could even rain attack magic down from above their heads.
That would basically make me an attack helicopter.
Of course, striking key enemy personnel would still be difficult. Important commanders would certainly have defensive artifacts, and if the enemy learned we had mages in large numbers, they'd naturally pay whatever it took to secure even better ones.
Even so, the combination of one-sided information gathering and the possibility of striking their core would be enough to severely limit the enemy's options.
Take their key facilities—like a supply warehouse, for example. If I approached from the air at night, invisible, and dropped a single Fire Ball on it?
One boom, and the enemy's supplies would be wiped out.
Even if it wasn't the supply warehouse, simply repeating irregular power reconnaissance would fray the enemy's nerves badly. Their morale would plummet naturally.
That alone would be a shortcut to victory.
And there were countless other possibilities that came to mind.
Of course, all of this assumed the enemy had no mages of their own.
Until now it had been normal for mages not to appear on battlefields... but since we've deployed them, wouldn't the enemy do the same?
Even if they did deploy mages, they probably wouldn't use the same tactics and methods. Those ideas only existed because of my previous life's knowledge.
At best, they'd probably just fire one massive spell at the army like a siege engine and call it a day. The damage would be enormous, of course, but it would lack sustainability and tactical flexibility.
And if, giving a hundred concessions, they somehow came up with the exact same tactics from a complete blank slate?
Then Count Windtshafen would have to be the reincarnation of Han Xin or Napoleon. In that case, losing would be the polite thing to do.
No matter how much people talked about how isekai reincarnation made modern genius theories meaningless, the knowledge accumulated over years inevitably became part of a person's common sense and experience.
How many scholars' research and effort had gone into establishing the common sense that seemed obvious to a 21st-century person? Concepts like the Big Bang theory or heliocentrism that appeared in middle school textbooks had taken decades—or even centuries—to become accepted knowledge.
Of course, the reason any of this worked was because this world was strangely similar to the medieval period of my previous life.
The units of measurement felt subtly metric, and the titles were copied straight from medieval Europe. In many ways, it was a world with numerous parallels. Sure, there was magic and fantasy creatures, but still.
Since it was a place where human-like beings lived, maybe it was just societal convergent evolution.
Or maybe not.