Murcia

VAN NARROWED HIS EYES AND SAID IT PLAINLY: “There’s a traitor in our ranks.”

Cold sweat ran down my spine when I saw his unchildlike expression. Van was normally a kind, cheerful boy, but suddenly he seemed more like an experienced general, someone who had clawed his way through horrors beyond imagining. Had he inherited our father’s blood so strongly? Or was this part of who he’d been all along?

Either way, he possessed a knack for combat that I lacked. “But why?” I somehow managed to ask. “What would a traitor gain from contact with Yelenetta?”

Van grimaced and cast his gaze back to the approaching army. “I can think of several things, but it would all be conjecture on my part. For now, let’s just say that I have other proof of a traitor in our midst. Scuderia having been able to expand its territory for years now, for example. And the fact that our people didn’t see the first surprise attack in Scuderia coming.”

He said these things matter-of-factly, like it was all no big deal, but his words were horrifying. Only after listening to them did I come to believe he might be right. “So the reason our nation has been unable to expand in the last few years is because someone was passing information to Yelenetta? And if that is the reason for the success of their surprise attack, then there must be a spy among

Scuderia’s nobility…”

I began to tremble in fear as I spoke. Scuderia was one of the continent’s largest nations, but if we had traitors among the nobility —the guards of our borders—we were finished. The enemy would storm our territories and rip them from us. They might even invade the capital if they had the right information from the spy.

Van’s expression was hard to read. “Yeah. But I think it would be dangerous to only suspect the nobility.”

“Huh?” Just then the ground shook with a massive explosion from the wall, large enough to shake the ground itself. I ducked. Having heard this sound before, I knew exactly what it was: the black balls. “Ugh! Will the walls be okay?”

Van, meanwhile, leaned forward curiously, looking about as surprised as if a cup had fallen over on a table. He squinted, trying to see into the distance. Fierce explosions rang out, one after another, the enemy’s attacks becoming big, reckless, and disorderly.

“Ah, they’ve fallen back,” Van said. His eyes were still narrowed, even though the blasts were so loud I wanted to cover my ears. It did look like the enemy army had put some distance between themselves and the wall, perhaps to avoid being caught in their own explosions. Having confirmed this for himself, Van turned to the small castle ahead and to one side. “Are our crazy strong catapults ready to go?”

“Yessir!” a soldier shouted. “Ready!”

“Excellent! Give them a test fire!”

With this casual-sounding order, something deep within the small castle moved. It was hard to see from our position, but it seemed like some kind of object was attached to the castle’s side. Curious, I watched as something zipped through the air. The black object traced an arc, eventually coming straight down on the enemy army’s rear rank. It was like the thing knew exactly where it was going.

It landed with a cacophonous explosion. Unlike the black balls, it produced hardly any fire, but it was powerful all the same. Dozens of enemy soldiers were laid out on the ground, their formation in shambles. Van’s ballistae began to fire on them, too; I doubt the enemy knew what to do with themselves.

For a moment it almost felt like the battle was over. But then, in a curious tone, Van said, “Why aren’t they retreating?”

I looked back at the battlefield. He was right. The enemy had come under heavy fire, but they showed no signs of retreating. “Why aren’t they—?!” I was cut off by an explosion like none I’d ever heard. Not only did the castle shake, but so did the air itself. “Whwhoa!”

“Huh. Did part of the wall collapse?”

I was busy trying to stay on my feet, but Van ran to the balcony and leaned over the railing. He narrowed his eyes, assessing the wall’s condition.

“Yikes. That’s not good,” he said, his voice betraying zero urgency. Then he turned to face the top of the wall and yelled, “Is everyone okay?!”

Voices shouted back, both from the cloud of smoke obscuring the top of the wall and from within the towers. “Yessir!”

“The wall is fine, but the front gates have been breached!”

“Lord Van, please evacuate!”

Van grimaced. “Thanks, but I can’t evacuate, so we’re gonna strike back instead! Those of you in the towers and castles, attack the people entering the walls! Everyone else, keep focusing on the enemy beyond the walls! Whatever weapon they used to break down the front gates is still out there, so if you spot it, destroy it ASAP!”

“Yessir!” someone replied.

Someone else yelled, “A suspicious cylinder has been spotted in front of the gates! We’re destroying it now!”

“’Kay!” said Van. Something about his directions struck me as bizarrely casual, yet his Chivalric Order accurately deduced his intentions and moved into action. Part of this was probably Dee’s training, but even then, this would have been impossible if they didn’t have complete faith in Van as their leader.

That was when I realized that I had no idea where Dee was. “Van! My own troops haven’t gotten here yet, but I don’t see Dee either. Knowing him, wouldn’t he want to stay by your side?”

This shook Van out of what looked like deep thought. He pointed toward one of the small castles and smiled. “Dee’s over there giving orders.”

“Huh?” I turned around and saw Dee atop the terrace of one of the small castles. He was leaning forward, issuing precise orders.

“Make sure to get them all! They will struggle to climb the stone wall at the center of the fortress, so if we can hold the line here, victory will be ours! Rear units, remember to supply the others with bolts and arrows!”

I looked back at Van, whose serious gaze was trained beyond the wall. In the past Dee had often butted heads with Commander Stradale over stratagems and battlefield decisions, but here he was wordlessly leaving overall command to Van. Dee must have had absolute faith in Van’s knowledge and strategic thinking.

I knew it. House Fertio, having banished Van, faces rough times ahead. As I stared at Van’s back, a pained smile crossed my

face.

“Another strange cylinder spotted! Destroying now!”

“’Kay!” I replied breezily, though my mind was racing. I was honestly shook by the fact that they’d managed to break down steel gates. Those things were six meters tall and four meters wide! That shouldn’t have been an easy feat even with the black balls. Either the combo of successive explosions and a heavy impact bending the gates out of shape had been enough to do them in, or the section connecting the gates to the wall had been destroyed, causing them to fall over. Whichever it was, the castle siege weapon with a long cylinder that used gunpowder had to be a cannon. The timing checked out, too, with the gates destroyed right as we heard that massive blast.

Gunpowder had made its way over from the Central Continent, but its spread to our ally nations had been slow. That was bad news, because large nations from the Central Continent might come knocking. During the Age of Discovery, humanity’s range of travel expanded rapidly, but plenty of remote nations were left out, unable to access all those technological developments. Those sorts of places were ultimately turned into vassal nations and colonies. Powerful countries took over weaker ones; it was the way of the world.

It was possible that another, greater nation in the Central Continent had already turned Yelenetta into a vassal state, in which case Yelenetta was attacking Scuderia as that nation’s vanguard. This was all speculation, but on the chance that I was right, I had to teach Murcia the fundamentals of defense. Li’l Van’s weapons were awesome, but if you didn’t know how to use them, they were half as effective as they could be.

“Brother,” I said to Murcia, “this is the perfect opportunity for me to explain how to defend a fortress city.”

Murcia, who had been watching events unfold before us, stared at me. “What, right now?”

I smiled at his surprise and pointed at the main wall. “It’s simple. Going forward, we’ll enact a strategy against the enemy’s new weapon that will make it a lot harder for them to get past our front gates. While we do that, we’ll also strike with our ballistae and machine bows. That’s the gist of it. If the enemy gathers further from the wall, we’ll use our catapults. I’ve only made two so far, but I’m open to making a few more if necessary. This time around, the projectiles we used were full of bladed objects, but when the enemy is particularly strong, we can also use projectiles filled with oil. We can deal heavy damage to their forces if we shower them in oil and then shoot flame arrows. They’ll be really mad at us if we do that, though.”

“Y-yeah, I bet. What about using magic, or sending out the cavalry for a surprise attack?”

“We haven’t trained any elemental mages, and I can’t possibly engage in a fight that would result in casualties for my Chivalric Order. If we were to perform a surprise attack, it would be by expanding the city’s walls, installing a bunch of ballistae, and attacking the enemy from all four directions.”

“I see.” He turned his gaze to one of my ballistae. “It’s true, those ballistae of yours are astounding. Not just in power, but also in range. It would be difficult for even a mage to close the distance.”

It seemed like he understood how our defensive operations worked. Now he just needed to recruit enough people to form his own Chivalric Order, and I could rest easy.

But that wasn’t enough. If I were Yelenetta’s tactician, I would gather all the cannons together and bombard from afar. Not even a fortress city made by Li’l Van, local genius, could power through that. Preventing that worst-case scenario required a plan that allowed us to take down the Kingdom of Yelenetta swiftly. Our goal wasn’t just an invasion, but also a path to the Central Continent. I was going to smash through every fortress and stronghold between me and the ocean. Only then would I reach my goal.

“Murcia, I’m going to need you to work super hard.”

“Hm? Did you say something?” Murcia turned to me and blinked, at which point I realized that, with so many plans racing through my brain, I had accidentally voiced my thoughts aloud. I smiled back at him and shook my head.

“Oh, no. It’s nothing.”

“…Are you sure? Something is telling me I should be worried.”

His smile looked more like a grimace. I returned it with a silent smile of my own and went back to assessing the combat situation. It looked like our people had succeeded in destroying the enemy’s new weapon, and the enemy didn’t send any reinforcements. Meanwhile, over on our side, the small fortress Dee was stationed at was doing a bang-up job repelling enemy forces. Few managed to reach the gates, and those who were close to the main walls were gradually retreating. It seemed like victory was ours.

But no sooner did I have that thought than I heard a shout from the wall.

“Lord Van! The enemy has deployed another suspicious cylinder!”

“Destroy it!” I ordered reflexively.

“Yessir!”

My soldiers promptly fired their ballistae. In a normal battle, the enemy would deploy mages, forcing their opposition to follow suit to fight back. In all our battles with Yelenetta, though, that hadn’t happened; instead of mages, they’d used black balls. It was possible that they had a different use case for their mages, but for now, at least, they seemed to be leaning on dragons and black balls as their primary weapons. Whatever the reason was, once our invasion had penetrated deeper into Yelenetta, I was confident I would find out.

I noticed then that there were no more Yelenetta soldiers within our walls.

“Do not pursue the enemy!” Dee yelled. “Keep firing from atop the walls, towers, and smaller castles!” You would never hear these sorts of commands from any other Chivalric Order.

I turned to Murcia. “Brother, we’ve successfully defended the fortress city! Now it’s time for you to put together your own powerful order!”

Murcia blinked at me, then ducked his head and smiled.

Early the next day, I brought Murcia, Arte, Till, and Khamsin over to the destroyed front gates. I rubbed my sleepy eyes and looked up at the distorted steel gates and the precarious part of the wall. The wall was awe-inspiring at this distance, but I’d gone through all the trouble of repairing the thing, and now part of it was busted again. It honestly bummed me out that the Yelenetta-facing side of the wall and the unique gates I built for it were in tatters.

“I’ve got no other choice, so I’ll just think of it as a necessary sacrifice to protect us from the cannons,” I said to myself. “I need to come up with a way to handle those incessant cannon attacks.”

I headed through the busted gates to look over Yelenetta’s territory and the road heading deeper into it. From here, it was impossible to see the path they took to catch us off guard. Now that I thought about it, maybe this was important land that had belonged to some other nation before it became part of the Kingdom of Yelenetta.

“Lord Van, these cannons you speak of…” Till wore a puzzled expression. “Are they the cylindrical weapons the enemy used? I do not understand how they work, or how we could ever stop them.”

Khamsin drew his chin in, looking troubled. “I was operating a ballista in the castle when they deployed the cannon, so all I could see was smoke as something smashed into the gates. I think they used black balls.”

“Ooh, correct!” I answered in surprise.

Murcia cocked his head curiously. “It is? You know about their new weapon?”

Arte smiled at Murcia. “Lord Van knows everything,” she said meaningfully. I smirked and narrowed my eyes.

“Well, the first time I saw the black balls, I thought about the many ways they could be used,” I explained, my eyes locked on the road ahead. “They have lots of practical uses, but in combat, if you stuffed a cylinder with them and then placed an iron projectile over them, you could send the projectile flying. According to my calculations, you could send a super-heavy object flying at the same velocity as a bolt. And if you loaded one of those cylinders with a sphere filled with black balls, then fired it at the enemy, it would explode on contact. Its destructive power could even eclipse a firstrate fire mage’s.”

Murcia froze, wide-eyed. After several seconds of silence, he said, “I think you’re the only one who would come up with an idea like that.” Till nodded, looking pained, but Khamsin’s eyes gleamed.

“I don’t quite understand all the details, but what you’re saying is that you can do incredible things with them,” Khamsin said.

Arte, for her part, frowned disbelievingly. “Can the black balls be used for things other than combat?”

I got where she was coming from; it was hard to look at those explosions and see how the black balls could be viable for anything but war and bloodshed. I nodded. “For example, if you had access to the black balls, you could use them to open a hole in the hard rock surface of the mountain range.” I pointed at the Wolfsbrook Mountain Range, and everyone looked over at it. “Passing all the way through such a large range is difficult, but the black balls would let you open a hole in a mountain and build a road through it. You could also use them to increase the width of rivers to prevent flooding. Honestly, there are all sorts of useful… What?”

They had all turned away from the mountain range to give me weird looks. As I trailed off, Murcia’s expression turned exasperated. “You thought of all of that the first time you saw the black balls?”

“Well… Yes. A new tool like that would have all kinds of uses.” Obviously I couldn’t tell them that I already knew a little about gunpowder from my previous life, but I remembered belatedly that I wasn’t even ten yet. Genius or no genius, this was unnatural for someone of my age. Anxiety set in and I tried to come up with some excuses. “I mean, ever since I became a lord, I’ve had to put thought into so many things. Flood control, road construction…” Unfortunately, my excuses did nothing for me. I was trying to figure out my next move when a messenger showed up, saving my butt.

“Lord Van! Aid has arrived from Seatoh Village! Adventurers and Sir Rango from the Bell & Rango Company!”

“Really? Thank goodness!” I felt bad for Murcia, but I really wanted to go home to Seatoh Village and take a bath. There was no shopping here and hardly any options for food. I wanted to get clean, eat a good meal, and walk around Seatoh Village. I smiled and turned back to everyone. “Let’s spend the next couple days remodeling! Murcia, I’m going to present you with the greatest fortress city ever made!”

Murcia blinked, then offered me an awkward smile that mirrored the ones I so often saw from Till and Arte.

Strengthening the fortress city. Fortifying it against this new cannon threat.

What was a cannon? To put it broadly, it was a tough steel gun barrel that you loaded with gunpowder and detonated, firing a heavy projectile at high speed. If you used enough gunpowder, launching a projectile through a stone wall would be a breeze. A cannon fired into a Chivalric Order’s formation would produce horrific results; even heavy infantrymen or soldiers with large shields would be annihilated, hit with a chunk of steel at that velocity. Mages were no different: say goodbye to their walls of ice or stone. If we wanted to stay safe from such a terrifying weapon, we’d have to ensure that the enemy couldn’t use it in the first place.

“Cannons are heavy. They must be attaching wheels and using horses to pull them, huh?” I mused.

“Yes,” Paula replied. She pointed to one of the destroyed cannons and a batch of spears. “And they had a carriage nearby for transporting stone and iron spheres.” She and her machine bow squad had investigated the weapon for me before I got there.

The thing was bigger than I expected, over two meters long, and the iron spheres were bigger than bowling balls. It would be difficult to adjust the firing angle for projectiles that size, never mind transporting them. I was already constructing a prototype in my mind. If I were to make one of these…

Larger wheels would make it versatile on all kinds of rough terrain. I would also extend the barrel to make its shots more accurate, then give the barrel’s interior a spiral shape so that the projectiles would spin on their way out. If I could fully harness the gunpowder’s explosive power, I could create a cannon with several times greater range and power than Yelenetta’s design—all depending on the shape of the projectile, of course.

“Ah, but with this design, the wheels and frame might take damage from the recoil,” I murmured. “Oh, what if I build supports to keep it in place when it fires? That should stabilize it for successive shots, too.”

I kept modifying my creation until I landed on a solid design not much like the original model. The longer and thinner barrel looked remarkably stylish. Li’l Van’s amazing taste was at it once again.

Li’l Van’s style is nothing if not explosive. Get it? Explosive? That stupid thought circled my mind while I admired my new cannon. Until I noticed everyone staring at me, that is.

I laughed. “Ah, sorry! The whole point of this is to figure out how to defend against their cannons, not make cannons for ourselves!” This prompted the usual looks of disbelief from the peanut gallery. They moved with such synchronicity, in fact, that I wondered if they had practiced for this moment. It made me feel strangely isolated. “…Ahem. Anyway, this is only my opinion, but I’d like to lay out my ideas for how to enhance our new fortress city going forward.”

My attempt to change the mood was successful: I was met with staggered applause. Thank you, thank you very much.

“The nature of a cannon is such that it can fire directly at a target. Well, actually, if the cylindrical portion of the weapon wasn’t built correctly, there’d be no telling where its projectile was going to fly—but they did in fact take care designing this thing, so that’s not something we have to worry about. I would like to start by altering the terrain so that our enemies can’t aim at us at all.”

Paula went bug-eyed. “Wait, you want to alter the terrain?” The rest of the group wore similar expressions.

“Yup. Sloped terrain and mountains make it impossible to fire cannons. In fact, depending on the position they’re fired from, they could even explode from the recoil. For example, imagine if the weapon fell over on a slope and caught friendlies in an explosion?

We’re going to make it so they can’t use their cannons.”

I asked the still-confused group to get some people together for me. Paula and Dee scouted the road ahead, checking the area.

A member of the order called to me from the nearby forest,

“Yelenetta’s army invaded from over here!”

I looked in his direction. “Ah, I see.” Indeed, there was a small gravel path wide enough for a single carriage to pass through. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it must have been to traverse in large numbers. They must have known we only had a small group present at the fortress. Otherwise, why take such a risk?

I was consumed by the desire to find the traitor and pinch their butt. But for now, my main objectives were to perfect this fortress city, go home, and take a nice long bath.

“Could you guys gather timber for me?” I asked everyone. I’d get my hands on more materials and make Yelenetta’s secret road visible at the same time. Two birds, one stone.

At this point, cutting down the trees of the forest was little more than a bonus stage for the Seatoh Village Chivalric Order. With all their practice and training under Dee’s watchful eye, they’d basically perfected their lumberjack skills. This was nothing to them. They swung their axes with perfect form, then used their incredible strength to transport the timber for me. Normally you’d have to cut off the branches; Li’l Van’s talents at arts and crafts made that unnecessary. In the end, the area alongside the road was nice and clear.

And of course, the timber changed form with a touch from Li’l Van’s divine hand.

I changed the shape of the road, adding uneven terrain and even walls. The enemy would be unable to fire their cannons with their view obscured, and the trajectory of their projectiles would change if they had to pierce walls before they could get to us. I also created a relatively clear downward slope so that we could easily target them from our position. This was bait: while they adjusted the trajectory of their cannon fire, we could rain hell down on them with our ballistae.

“All right,” I said finally, “this should do the trick.” It took a full day, but we were finally finished adjusting the road in anticipation of a Yelenetta follow-up attack. I sighed, letting satisfaction settle over me.

Murcia, meanwhile, gazed at the unfamiliar road, a serious expression on his face. “I see,” he said reflectively. “Your magic is amazing, sure, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to accomplish something like this. It’s your creativity that has led to your success.”