Shall We Block Their Way?
"Huh? Isn't that the Lady?"
"What are you talking about? She went to the castle."
It didn't take long for the sailors swabbing the deck while waiting for the Lady to return from her outing to go wide-eyed with disbelief.
"The Lady's coming back!"
"Go tell the Captain, now!"
The moment the report reached the bridge, the Captain barked out his orders. "Sound the whistle! Fire up the boilers! Get the shells out of the magazine — move, move!"
「BWOOOOOORN」
The Whale Shark let loose its fearsome whistle.
"What!?"
"What's going on?"
"If the whistle's going off while we're docked, that means the Lady's in danger! Get up, everyone, move!"
After all, blowing the whistle while at rest could only mean one thing: an emergency. The soldiers who'd been lounging about the ship shot upright and scattered to their stations — engineers below deck, gunners to the magazine, sailors to the armory.
"Hurry! Double time!"
"Run!"
In the engine room, men leapt to stoke the boilers and shovel in coal, while the gunners and sailors hauled weapons up on their shoulders and streamed onto the deck.
"There! The kids are hijacking the ship!"
"Perfect! Then we're providing covering fire!"
God help anything that showed up in the harbor or on the river now — it would be Swiss cheese in seconds.
Which was, in a way, one small blessing of a medieval world without telephones. Even after Haneul's escape, the Portuguese royal court was still taking its sweet time confirming the fact and passing word along to their army.
"Oh! Been a while!"
"Yes, my Lady! Good to see you aboard!"
She had made it safely onto the ship before word even reached the warships still lingering in the outer harbor.
"Let's go! Wreck everything!"
"Let's go!"
"Weigh anchor!"
「BWOOOOOORN」
Who knows what had gotten into them, but even the whistle sounded positively cheerful this time.
The water was shallow, though, so the Whale Shark 1 crept forward slowly, inching her way out toward open sea.
"Huh? Wasn't that the royal palace?"
"Oh!?"
"That's the castle right there!"
"They say the King's inside!"
"Fire!"
At her single word, the sailors simply opened up with everything they had.
「THOOM THOOM」
The Tagus River, which they were descending, was quite wide.
They were drifting farther and farther away, so precision was out the window — the turrets simply blazed away at whatever they could see, hammering shells into every gap where the far-side turrets could be glimpsed. And so thirty-six shells began raining down on Portugal.
「KRA-BOOM BOOM BOOM」
Unlike at sea, once the shells started hitting land, the number of duds dropped noticeably.
"Whoa! They're all going off!"
"Now we're talking!"
Shooting at buildings was definitely more satisfying than shooting at ships — the visual spectacle alone made it worth the while.
As for the people dying inside them...
One ought to offer a moment of mourning. But with shells raining down like that, surely anyone with sense would have run? Besides, our Daehan navy friends weren't the sort to worry about such things.
「KRA-BOOM KRA-BOOM KRA-BOOM」
"Uh... isn't this a bit much? There's barely anything left of the castle."
"Wasn't that thing just built this year?"
"Yes. I remember the King bragging proudly that he had it built and moved in this very year."
Well, it wasn't our castle, but had the kids really racked up that much?
"Captain! Let's smash it to absolute pieces!"
"You bet! Sons of bitches like that deserve to be reduced to dust!"
No idea what she'd said, but apparently Mose had given the Captain quite the earful. The two of them got along like a house on fire — they looked ready to level the whole place.
「CLANG! PING!」
Not that the other side wasn't fighting back — they had cannons up on the castle walls, after all. It was just completely ineffective. The shells bounced off the deck and sailed away harmlessly, since there wasn't a soul up there to hit.
「THOOM THOOM」
I suppose if they got truly lucky and hit a gun barrel, we'd lose the ability to fire. But the kids were really putting their backs into it.
We have plenty of shells, you know. There's still plenty of places left to shell. Friends?
「RRRRUMBLE」
"Whoa... it finally came down..."
Our cannons weren't that big, but after enough repeated pounding, even that thing crumbled and collapsed.
"Tch... I wish we had at least one gun that was a proper size bigger."
"I'm a little disappointed about that too."
Excuse me? Since when were Mose and the Captain this chummy?
Not that I have any thoughts on the matter, but it seems I'll probably never be married off to anyone.
Having prettily demolished someone else's home on the way past, we drifted around mid-river and started smashing every ship we came across.
"There sure are a lot of ships coming and going in this country?"
"Even I didn't expect this. It's insane."
We'd spent about three days puttering along the coastline and had already sent more than forty ships to the bottom. Plenty more had fled.
And then the Portuguese war fleet appeared.
"Wow, they really came in force, huh?"
"No need to worry, my Lady."
"I'm not worried. They're getting beaten this badly, so I was just wondering what crime they'd committed to deserve it."
"They are the shameless wretches who dared sully your name, my Lady..."
Mose? I told you to stop growling like that. When you do it, it's genuinely terrifying.
Over the horizon, thirty ships that looked like warships had appeared all at once — but as we'd seen plenty of times by now, they were simply no match for us.
Our ship was faster, and since we used turrets, we could fire in pretty much any direction.
「THOOM THOOM」
When we fired with such glee, the enemy gleefully fired back — though only about one shell in a while actually came anywhere near us.
「CLANG! PING!」
And even those arrived with their momentum spent from the long flight, bounced off the turret armor, and splashed into the water.
Hit the stern and the shell just rolled off the slope into the sea.
"GWAAAAGH! It's chipping the paint off! You bastards, can't you even aim straight?!"
All that accomplished was piling up the Deck Boss's rage.
「KWOOOOOM!」
"Whoa... what just exploded?"
"The ship just... disappeared?"
A ship practically flew into the sky as it detonated? Well, it scattered as dust, but still. A warship would have been fairly big, and yet a whole vessel simply turned to powder and vanished.
Emergency bells rang throughout the Portuguese harbor. The royal palace had been attacked and destroyed.
"All ships, prepare for departure with all haste!"
Supplies were partly loaded just before departure, since managing them aboard ship was difficult.
The sailors scrambled busily, but an immediate departure proved impossible.
"We sail first!"
"Yes, sir!"
With word that there was only a single enemy vessel, the thirty-four ships that finished preparations first set out of the harbor as a stopgap.
"Only one enemy ship, they say. This should be plenty."
What they found when they arrived at the waters off the Tagus was utter chaos. Ships were still sinking, and the sea was littered with an enormous field of wreckage and floating cargo.
It was a serious problem that alongside the Portuguese ships, there were heaps of vessels from other nations too.
Merchants believed these waters were safe; they gathered here for trade. That unspoken trust had just been shattered.
"That the one?"
The Captain ground his teeth. As a soldier, watching the front yard of the capital be violated like this, fury was the only natural response.
"No sails, yet nothing but black smoke billowing out. A strange ship indeed."
"Could that be the ghost ship from the rumors?"
"Who knows?"
It was true that a lucky survivor from Carib on the Eastern Continent had come back raving about monsters living in the western seas.
A ship faster than any sailing vessel despite having no sails, lobbing shells from extreme range — shells that exploded, no less.
Europe had more or less dismissed the man as insane, writing it all off as the ramblings of a madman.
"One ship is all it is, whatever it is! Unfurl the sails!"
The wind was at their backs — a fortunate tailwind. They believed this was their golden opportunity to sink that ship and win undying glory for themselves.
Right up until they chased it and got their teeth kicked in.
"What! Why aren't we closing the distance!"
"That ship is faster, sir!"
"That ship is sailing diagonally — how is it still faster than us!"
The Portuguese sailors were going out of their minds. Speed was the bare minimum for a warship. Go too slow, and you couldn't seize a favorable position — couldn't even run away.
「BOOM! Splash! KRA-BOOM!」
"What in blazes is that!"
"The shells are exploding!"
"AAAGH!"
Exploding cannonballs — had anyone ever heard of such a thing, let alone seen it?
"Damn it all! Return fire!"
"How shall we engage, sir?"
"Run out the bow chasers!"
"Yes, sir!"
It was desperation, plain and simple. That thing was a ship too, after all.
Convinced that a cannonball must punch a hole in anything it struck, the sailors ran out their bow guns and opened fire first.
By the time they did, eight ships had already gone under. Twenty-six remained.
「BOOM BOOM BOOM」
And so the Portuguese ships, somehow managing to reload, began firing their cannons.
Accurate gunnery was nearly impossible at that range to begin with, so they simply blazed away wildly.
"We hit them every single time — why can't we hit them back!"
The distance between the fleet and the Whale Shark was a mere few hundred meters.
Far if you called it far, close if you called it close — but the Whale Shark's accuracy was in another league entirely.
There were two reasons. One was the rifled barrels. The other was the ship's stability. She was a heavy iron ship to begin with, and now she rode low with a full hold of cargo besides.
"Drive her faster!"
"This is top speed, sir!"
Even to the Captain's eye, the sails were straining against the wind to the point of tearing.
"Damn it! What do we do!?"
Splitting the fleet for a blocking maneuver at this point wasn't really an option, was it?
No — it was impossible. The enemy was simply faster.
「BOOM! BOOM!」
The two bow cannons fired valiantly. But all that came back was a faint metallic ring.
「PING! PING!」
"Damn it! The shots are flying true, but they're not punching through!"
They could plainly see the shots land — only for the cannonballs to bounce off with an odd metallic clang.
Just as the gunnery officer was grumbling to himself, an ominous sound reached his ears.
「VWEEEEEEEEN」
"Huh?"
「BOOM!」
"You son of a—!"
A shell had landed directly behind the gunnery officer, who had instinctively ducked at the strange, ominous whine.
It had grazed right past his hair. Just as goosebumps prickled up his spine at the realization that his head could have been blown clean off—
「BOOM!」
A Daehan explosive shell detonated. Every soldier nearby died instantly. Perhaps that was a mercy.
「KWOAAAANG! KUWAAAAAH!」
The powder barrels stacked behind the cannons exploded, the deck shattered, and the magazine beneath it went up as well.
The Portuguese warship, fully thirty meters at the waterline, turned to dust on the spot, spraying fragments in every direction.
"Whoa. Fireworks?"
"What blew up like that?"
"Beats me?"
"Hit a weak spot somewhere, maybe?"
"Oh! The magazine! Their magazine went up."
"The magazine?"
"Yep. Unlike us, they have to store their powder and their shells separately, so they lug the powder around in barrels."
If our own magazine ever went up, we'd look exactly like that. Secondary detonations are terrifying — if it happened to this ship, everyone aboard would die except me.
"They live awfully inconvenient lives, don't they? Why don't they use cartridges?"
"They can't, not that they choose not to..."
Our Mose... turns out she's more ignorant than I thought?
Anyway, give it up already and go home. They're still following us.
"At this point, they'd be better off just running..."
"Heh. A soldier mustn't do such a thing, my Lady."
"Why not? Soldiers are people too. They'd want to live."
"There are things they must protect."
What was that saying again? Oh, right — their lives come second.
"You all, don't do that."
"That's precisely what makes us soldiers, my Lady."
"No, at the very least pick a decent place to die. That right there is a dog's death. A nighttime ambush would serve them better."
They can't even keep up with us, and their cannons barely reach — they should fall back and strike by ambush or something.
What even is that? They're nothing but live-fire practice targets.
That was roughly a month ago.
The poor Portuguese soldiers kept pouring in in droves after that, but it meant nothing. Whenever they tried to surround us, we simply punched straight through one side and sailed out.
"Hasn't it about time they gave up?"
"You think they intend to keep going until their nation actually falls?"
In these waters alone, we'd sent nearly three hundred ships to the bottom — merchantmen and warships combined.
A vast graveyard of ships had been born off this coast.
"At this rate, we're going to run out of coal and shells and have to head home."
"Yes. We've used about half the shells."
See? This is, to put it again, a transport ship loaded to the gills with cargo — and we've dumped the entire load overboard as ordnance.
Who knows how many times we've swapped out the gun barrels by now.
Just as we were worrying about running dry, the thing we'd been waiting for finally arrived.
A ship was approaching under a white flag — holed all over here and there, apparently a vessel that had fled mid-battle.
"Haah... they finally came. The sunken ships alone would more than cover any indemnity they'd owe us."
Let's hear what they have to say.