Three Times the Army, Same Result
Why on earth did they even come here?
KWANG! KWA-GWANG! BANG!
Still the crusaders kept pressing forward, dying as they came.
“I did hope they'd know when to quit and pull back.”
Was money really that good? Those knights and soldiers down there had come to take the city and plunder it for themselves, hadn't they?
“Miss, I don't think they intend to retreat.”
“Begin firing.”
“Yes, ma'am!”
Seeing soldiers squeeze their way forward in a groaning, shuffling mass, we hadn't even opened up with rifle fire yet, but it did look for all the world like a horde of fanatics truly gathered in God's name.
I'd met a god myself, after all, and even so I doubted He'd bother with something like this. More of an administrator type, you know?
“None of you have the faintest idea what God actually wants. This is what happens when you wage war in His name.”
“Ignorant wretches, all of them.”
“You lot had better never end up like that.”
“We merely follow the will of Haneul-nim, my lady.”
Could you maybe just... not follow it? Once in a while?
TATATATATANG-TATANG!
Ever since they'd added rifling to the barrels, the gunfire had taken on an entirely different character. With aimed fire, their effective range was simply the distance at which you could pick out a target with the naked eye.
Aim, shoot — and the enemy started dropping right before our eyes.
All we needed to do was clear out the dead angles behind that far wall. Just how many people did they think were manning our ramparts anyway?
“Seriously, why won't they just turn around and go home?”
“Do you suppose they really did hear the voice of God, ma'am?”
“Oh, come off it.”
If it were really true, though, I'd have to hand it to them.
“Wouldn't it be smarter to at least run? Is the distance still too far?”
“If they start running now, with armor like that, wouldn't they just exhaust themselves?”
By the time they get close, less than half of them will be left.
And so the enemy came creeping and shuffling ever nearer.
“They don't have a single siege engine. What exactly do they plan to do once they're pressed up against the wall like that?”
Oh — the lads with the ladders are back there in the rear. What is this supposed to be?
BANG! KWA-GWA-GWANG! BANG!
“AAAGH!”
“GRAAAGH!”
“What is that?!”
“SAVE ME!”
Apparently they'd been expecting arrows or something of the sort. Our Fist Potatoes were slaughtering the crusaders to their evident delight.
“Run, you fools... run...”
BANG! KWA-GWANG!
A Fist Potato was simple: light the fuse, throw it. Sometimes the poor sap it landed on would pick it up and turn it over, wondering if someone had lobbed a rock at him — and then it went off, blasting him and everyone around him to pieces.
PABABAK! PAK!
“Urk!”
“Watch the shrapnel, you idiots! What are you poking your heads out for!”
The fragments from our own thrown Fist Potatoes were a far bigger threat to us than anything the enemy's arrows could manage.
Their arrows, for their part, just bounced clean off our armor.
Stamping out steel plate in Moda had become almost trivially easy by now, and with the railways nearly finished, the leftover production capacity had been redirected into armor — and plate harnesses started pouring out in a veritable flood.
Daehan's strapping young lads could trot around carrying two of me without breaking a sweat.
Compared side by side with whatever the crusaders had arrived wearing, ours were probably a good deal thicker, too.
“Just in case — keep your eyes peeled for arrows!”
“Yes, ma'am!”
If only they'd cut their losses and gone home. And yet they just had to crawl all the way up to the walls.
The commanders were all tucked away safe back there in the rear, so of course they had no idea what was happening to their front line.
“Do we have any marksmen up here?”
“A few, ma'am.”
“Even if it's a miss, have them all target the tall-looking ones back there in the rear.”
“Understood.”
Once the bigwigs started dying, maybe the common soldiers would finally feel free to run for it.
Scopes hadn't been distributed yet, so the sniper units were made up of soldiers with exceptional eyesight. Would they manage?
“About eight of them, I'd say?”
Roughly eight men clustered together on one side, whispering among themselves, and then began firing at a single target in unison.
Whoa. That's actually clever. Fire like that and at least one shot has to connect.
Sure enough, looking out over the wall, I could see the men back there dropping one by one.
“Ha! Well done!”
“Seems at that range you have to shoot together, ma'am.”
“We haven't managed to make telescopic sights for the rifles yet — that's why.”
“The sooner those come out, the better.”
Genuinely impressive. I'd only worried about missed shots, and here they are canceling the misses out by having a whole squad pile onto one target. My kids are no ordinary bunch.
All that cleverness and it goes straight into dirty tricks, does it? Well, fine — as long as they're good at something! At least they won't be the ones getting shot out there.
BANG! KWA-GWANG! BANG!
The follow-up volley of Fist Potatoes cut down the men at the foot of the wall, and the crowd far in the back began to murmur and shift — and then poured away like water draining from a burst dam.
“That's a rout, right? They're running?”
“Yes, ma'am. They're abandoning all their heavy equipment.”
“What about their own people down here? Running off and leaving them behind?”
“They should have at least sounded the retreat first. No conscience among them at all.”
“Cease fire. Take the ones who remain prisoner — we'll have them clean this place up.”
“Yes, ma'am!”
Honestly, this cleanup was going to be no joke. I'd seen something like it once before, back in Japan, and it genuinely made me want to vomit.
We'd had the Japanese do the work back then, and I'd felt guilty even ordering it — so I'd let them keep every bit of the salvage income. Lugging a pile of worthless scrap iron all the way back to smelt it down again is a monstrous job, after all.
Scrap recycling is only worth doing in places like this where you actually have railroads, really.
Weapons and armor were piling up like mountains. No plate armor among it yet, apparently — the chain mail was truly staggering in quantity.
“How did they manage to make this much armor and these many weapons?”
“They still hammer theirs out by hand. That lot would fetch a pretty price if you sold it.”
Some poor artisans must have linked those chain rings together one painstaking link at a time. Ugh. Just imagining it makes my skin crawl.
Us? We stamp out sheet steel, cut it, punch holes, fix it with rivets, done. And we really do turn it out in enormous quantities.
“How expensive would our armor fetch over there, do you think?”
“Couldn't sell it.”
“Huh? Is it a secret weapon or something?”
“No — it's too heavy. They couldn't wear it.”
It's only because you lot are you that you can wear it at all. Give it a generation and they'll be lucky to lug around two-thirds that weight.
Selfish little creatures, humans. Not one of them thinks to consider another's circumstances.
“Weaklings, aren't they.”
“That's what happens when you eat well and exercise, that's all.”
“So exercise really is essential after all.”
Eating well matters more, though? Once everyone eats properly, it'll all even out, won't it?
Perhaps it was the decent meals we fed them, but the prisoners weren't attempting to escape at all — they were working hard, no less.
“How should we send them home?”
“Shall we look for merchants willing to take them?”
“Yes, put out word. They have homelands and families too; we can't keep them penned up here forever.”
Do that, and they'll spread word of this place for us — and no one will so much as dream of attacking again.
About a month had slipped by, perhaps, when another horde came swarming up to our gates.
Once again, the parley was held at the midpoint between the two camps.
“You're back again?”
“...”
Conrad what's-his-face had returned, army in tow.
“I am Louis the Seventh, King of France.”
“I am Conrad the Third.”
“And I am Shin Ha-eun.”
What exactly do they expect this little pageant to accomplish?
“Surrender.”
“Excuse me?”
“This time we have brought three times as many soldiers as before.”
What kind of horseshit is that? Not one of them got over the wall last time — did they come up with some new trick or something?
“You're aware that not a single man got anywhere near the wall last time, yes? Have you produced some remarkable new weapon?”
“What nonsense is this?”
“A few rocks struck our wall and your entire army was wiped out, remember? Last time?”
And that had been us going easy on them. This time it would be annihilation right from the opening move.
“Not one of the soldiers defending our wall was so much as scratched. I rest my case, don't you think?”
“LIES!”
Our French king, it seemed, could not bring himself to believe it.
“We were already due to send back the prisoners we were holding. Take them with you. Then ask them yourselves.”
“Conrad! What is the meaning of this?”
Had that man actually lied to him? Louis's head snapped around, and he rounded on the other side.
“You wretched creature — you have spoken falsehood to the King of France!”
“You told me the fortress was on the verge of falling!”
“That woman is the one telling lies!”
France glared at the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire shouted at me, and the whole thing was a complete circus. And this is what a gathering of the heads of half the nations of the world calls diplomacy.
“Sort out your own affairs. Just so we're clear — this time, I won't be going easy on you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you'll want to be standing a great deal farther away than you are right now.”
Last time I'd let them be purely because I wanted a look at their trebuchets up close — but our weapons outrange theirs anyway, and if we simply hauled off and let fly without caring whether we hit, everything they had would be smashed to splinters.
“What?”
“You've been warned. When I leave here and the sun has sunk another half its span, we attack. Go quietly home. That is my advice.”
That Conrad character really is a piece of work. Abandons his own men and runs, then comes back with fresh lies to drag someone else into it?
No — wait. It only took him a month, so he was one of the ones from last time after all, wasn't he? Bandits, every last one of them.
How am I going to pay them back for this?
“Conrad, is what she says true?”
“...”
“Speak honestly, man!”
Back in his tent, Louis pressed Conrad hard. He had found it difficult to believe, in truth. Not merely a defeat, but an annihilation — without so much as reaching the wall?
And now that he thought on it, that oaf was suspicious in his own right. They had agreed to attack together, yet he had gone in first.
At their first meeting, the man had lost his entire army and fled pell-mell — then returned within a single month. Why had he fled in the first place?
“It is true.”
“Then you are saying that if we attack, we can win?”
Everything was out in the open now. Conrad's face darkened, and he began confessing in full.
“With a host this size, surely we cannot fail?”
“You truly believe so?”
He had led an army this vast all this way; he, too, had to come away with something. To withdraw now would be humiliation beyond bearing.
He knew the stories as well. The greatest trading city in the world, they said. Wanting for nothing, its gold piled mountain-high. Mudo.
“Most likely. It can be done.”
“Then I will trust you.”
And with that, they strode out of the tent and began making ready for battle. The trebuchet — the longest-ranged weapon they possessed — would have to be erected here before they could strike at all.
“Does it truly fly farther than a trebuchet?”
“Its accuracy is not so very high, so you needn't worry...”
Conrad trailing off at the end of his sentences did nothing to inspire Louis's confidence. So what he's saying is that something will come flying our way — he just won't say what.
A trebuchet was less a machine than a building assembled on the spot. The artisans labored away at their siege engines.
KUGUGUGUNG.
“What was that?! What is that sound?!”
“That is it!”
Looking toward where the sound came from, they found the fortress wall shrouded entirely in white — nothing to be seen at all.
“What in God's name is that!”
“It is their weapon!”
“I asked you WHAT it is!”
“How should I know!”
“You said—!”
SHIIIING — KWA-GWA-GWANG!
“AAAAAGH!”
Something like an enormous log came cleaving through the air, and wherever it fell — on men, on horses, on siege engines — it swept everything before it clean away.
“Damn it all! What IS that thing?!”
“I told you, I don't know!”
Louis cursed himself for ever having trusted such a fool. After only a few rounds came screaming in, the chain of command was already a shambles.
The knights who ought to have been rallying the men were among the first to spur their horses and bolt.
“It's over. We're finished.”
“Damn you.”
“That's rich talk coming from you!”
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?!”
KUGUGUGUNG.
“Hyaaah! Fall back! Everyone fall back, NOW!”
“This isn't over, mark me!”
Snarling at one another as they scrambled to withdraw, they found yet more logs raining down upon them without pause.
“I told them to just go home quietly. Did they really have to make me spill blood over it?”
“They're flying awfully far, ma'am. We won't even get prisoners out of this — and who's going to go collect all that now?”
The effective range was short, sure — but the sheer distance these things traveled was genuinely terrifying. You couldn't even see where they landed with the naked eye.
And now this one was staring straight at me. Rather intently, at that.
“What? You want me to go pick them up myself?”
“Wouldn't it be convenient if we could just tuck her in a pocket, sir?”
“So you'd like to be the defenders' first casualty of the war?”
“...”
Well, true. I suppose we could afford to let exactly one of ours get sent up.
“I'll go, ma'am!”
“Yes. And you'll go alone.”
“But the others—”
“Yes. No. You. Alone.”
This little rascal, trying to pull a fast one on me.
“I'm sorry, ma'am!”
“Give it twenty years or so and you can have the whole pile, hm?”
“AAAAGH!”
That didn't look like running away, exactly — where on earth was he sprinting off to?
“CEASE FIRE! Cease fire, you little brats, I said CEASE FIRE!”
Ah. He went off to stop the ones still shooting. Right — the mercenary lads are down there cleaning up the Islamic army and making their way up.
Parts of the wall had crumbled, so I'd hand the salvage over to them — let them haul off the supplies and put them to use.
Oh! I should have asked them that instead. This is hardly any holy land — what on earth drove them to come clawing their way up here?