Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

Chapter 448: Chapter 68: Paper-wrapped Medicine

The barbarians are mad—the Paratu People were certain of it.

The Terdon Tribe no longer distinguished between a main attack or a feint; they besieged the Bridgehead Fortress from three sides relentlessly.

More than twenty Centurion squads rotated into battle, with the Barbarian Chief personally leading his guard to supervise the fight.

The fleeing Herders couldn’t run a few steps before they were shot down by a hail of arrows.

To advance was to die, to retreat was the same; the barbarians, too, were seeing red.

With the chevaux-de-frise in the front not yet fully cleared, those at the back brought out crudely made ladders to storm the fortress walls.

At first, they tried to fill in the ditch with earth, but that was far too slow.

So the barbarians simply pushed horse and human corpses into the trenches, using ladders shielded with planks as makeshift bridges.

After all, this was just a temporary fort, with walls not tall enough and moats not deep enough.

Using their heap-of-corpse tactic, the Herders quickly made “roads,” and soon after, siege ladders were propped against the walls.

With enemies on three sides, the pressure on the Paratu army surged.

Only thanks to four Centurions, who took turns leading troops out of the fort to counterattack—slaying enemies at the foot of the wall and braving the arrow storm to clear out the trenches of corpses and dirt—did the Herder army fail to breach the city.

The results were significant, but the cost was just as enormous, as the Herders would not pass up the opportunity to fight the Paratu people up close.

Each sortie resulted in more than a fifth of the soldiers not returning, and an equal number wounded.

Of the four Centurions, Winters and Bard were consecutively injured. If not for their heavy armor, they wouldn’t know how many times they’d have died.

Ensign Sanu—Winters’ fellow townsman from Sea Blue—was knocked unconscious by a direct blow from a war hammer, and his men desperately fought to retrieve the insensate ensign, but Sanu was already incapacitated.

Lieutenant Otiba was unlucky to be pierced by an arrow under the left armpit, and before he could be taken to Priest Caman for treatment, the lieutenant had already passed away.

With two out of the five fortress officers gone, only the artillery officer Mason remained in the safest place, carefully protected.

At this moment, Mason was the most valuable human resource within this earthen fort.

On the four-cornered bastions and the triangular fort in front of the gate, the sound of guns never ceased.

The faces and hands of the musketeers were blackened with soot, as if they had just crawled out of a coal pile.

The pre-prepared priming powder was all used up; now the musketeers relied solely on feel for how much gunpowder to pour into the barrels.

With that being the case, accidents were inevitable.

During the fight, muskets exploded repeatedly in their barrels, instantly killing the unfortunate musketeers with fragments of the burst barrels.

The survivors were left with their faces and hands horribly mutilated.

The soldiers grew increasingly fearful of the muskets.

The screams of their comrades still echoed in their ears, making them hesitant to aim carefully, and more and more musketeers were simply firing their guns haphazardly to be done with it.

Winters steeled his heart and withdrew twenty of the most skilled musketeers, assigning them the sole task of preparing priming powder for the others.

Since the lead bullets had also been exhausted, the battlefield witnessed an extraordinary scene: guns firing non-stop at the front, while at the back people were busy melting lead to cast bullets and packaging gunpowder.

Thus, the lead bullets came with warmth when handed to the musketeers.

And due to a shortage of wooden tubes, the powder was hurriedly wrapped in grass paper and delivered to the walls.

One musketeer, looking for an easy job, disregarded orders to reuse paper packages—because paper was limited—and bit a small corner off the paper package to pour the gunpowder into the barrel.

According to firing procedure, a piece of muslin should then wrap the bullet and be inserted into the barrel.

But still looking for shortcuts, the musketeer had a stroke of inspiration, wrapping the bullet with paper and pushing it hard into the barrel with a ramrod.

This saved even the time to cut the cloth.

These two small improvements significantly speeded up the musket loading process.

Seeing how fast and convenient it was, this musketeer’s tentmates followed suit.

Afterward, more and more musketeers began to imitate it.

When the rear noticed that the amount of paper used for wrapping gunpowder was diminishing, they promptly reported to Lieutenant Montaigne.

Learning that someone was intentionally destroying paper packages, Winters, who was getting his wound stitched, flew into a rage, grabbed his cavalry saber, and marched towards the ramparts.

The needles and thread for suturing still hung from his leg, swaying back and forth.

“Your needle! Sir! Don’t step on the needle!” The panicked medic chased after him but couldn’t keep up with the Centurion.

The incensed Montaigne wanted to see who the damned fool was that dared to destroy “military supplies,” so he could personally deal with him.

But when Winters saw the [paper-wrapped powder] loading procedure, his anger dissipated in an instant.

Soon, Winters found the musketeer who had first invented the process.

The terrified musketeer, brought before “Blood Wolf”—he didn’t know the Centurion’s real name, only his nickname—thought he was surely a goner. At best, he couldn’t escape a lashing, but something about the atmosphere didn’t feel right to him.

The musketeer apprehensively kept his head down, stealthily sizing up Blood Wolf.

Blood Wolf sat on an empty powder keg, with his left leg propped on another, while the barber surgeon stitched up an arrow wound on his leg.

“What’s your name?” the other man asked.

Compared to all the rumors about him, Blood Wolf’s voice was surprisingly gentle.

Still, the musketeer involuntarily shivered, “Nemi.”

“You’re not from Wolf Town, are you?” Blood Wolf sucked in a breath of cold air, clearly pained by the stitching, “I can name everyone from Wolf Town.”

“No.”

“You’re not in my centurion’s division either, right? I can almost name all my men.”

“Not in it.” Nemi felt like he had gotten his life back, “I’m in Centurion Otilba’s division.”

“Oh.” Blood Wolf’s expression dimmed slightly, then he asked, “Were you the first to start using torn paper as wadding, using paper wrappers as cartridge cases?”

Nemi’s heart tightened instantly, he swallowed and stammered, “Reporting to the officer, I…I don’t know…”

Seeing the other person’s flustered appearance, Winters figured he hadn’t found the wrong person.

“You did well, I called you here to commend you.” Though he said he intended to commend, Winters couldn’t find any money on him after searching from head to toe.

However, having said so, he really couldn’t bring himself to say “I didn’t bring any money today, I’ll give it to you later” and the like.

Looking around, Winters had a stroke of inspiration and grabbed a cavalry saber to hand to Nemi.

Seeing Blood Wolf reach for the sword, Nemi shuddered with fear, then he realized Blood Wolf was handing the cavalry saber to him.

“No, no, no.” Nemi backed away repeatedly, waving his hands frantically.

“What’s the matter with taking it?” Winters explained, “The sheath is ornamented with gold and the blade itself is of fine quality. I didn’t bring any money today, so take this cavalry saber as a pledge. Once this battle is over, come find me with it. If I’m dead, then keep the saber. That way you won’t be at a loss. What do you think?”

“I can’t, I dare not take it! I simply dare not accept this.”

“Paying a debt requires collateral; it’s perfectly just. Take it,” Winters stuffed the cavalry saber into Nemi’s hands, “Take your tentmates with you, teach the other musketeers, get all of them trained up. I’ll go get you some more paper.”

…

“What are you trying to do?” Father Caman, clutching a folio, eyed Winters warily and stepped back, “Don’t come any closer.”

“I need to requisition it temporarily.” Winters pressed forward, promising earnestly, “When we return to Paratu, I’ll buy you another one.”

“This is a folio!” Caman exploded with rage— it was the young priest’s first time to lash out at Winters.

[Note: A folio is a book made by folding a single sheet of paper in half, forming four pages, and is often reserved for the most important of documents.]

“Folios are great! They have lots of paper, and the quality is good.”

“Have you lost your mind? This is scripture! Do you dare have your men stuff pages of the scripture down their gun barrels?”

“No problem, if you don’t tell them, they won’t know it’s scripture,” Winters replied earnestly, “They can’t read.”

“Don’t take this one, this one is a manuscript copy.” Caman retreated to the corner of the tent, trapped with nowhere to go, pitifully pleading, “I’ll find you other books, I’ll give you everything, just leave this folio for me.”

“You’ll also give me the scripture?’

“Even the scripture.”

Winters considered for a moment, then nodded, “Alright… but if need be, I will still come back for it.”

…

While Winters was frantically looking for more paper, Mason on the rampart identified a serious problem.

Before this, Mason’s greatest fear was the cannons bursting.

A musket explosion might kill one or two people, but a bursting cannon could obliterate everyone on Bastion.

Therefore, Mason strictly controlled the firing frequency of the cannons, personally supervised the cooling process, and all the gunpowder charges were weighed by him personally.

But now, a bigger issue than bursting cannons was the gunpowder.

The gunpowder was consumed faster than Mason had anticipated, with reserves visibly depleting.

They were also running out of cannonballs; solid shot had been depleted long ago and there was no time for recovery.

They were now using lead as canister shot, a wasteful expenditure that risked ‘leading’ the guns.

At this rate, by nightfall, Bridgehead Fortress would be out of powder.

Without gunpowder, the Herders could just rely on numbers to bury the Paratu People alive.

The battle had progressed to a point where it resembled a personal vendetta. No one cared about the original cause anymore; both sides were only focused on one thing: total annihilation of the other.

The small fort held by Jeska’s tribe was like a magnet, firmly holding thousands of Herder cavalry in its grip.

The will of the Terdon Tribe was astonishingly tough; they attacked the Bridgehead Fortress wave after wave.

The cheval de frise had been pulled out, trenches were filled, breastworks completely overrun, and siege ladders were now able to be placed against the walls.

And Mason had no doubt that they could maintain this assault until sunset.

The few remaining able officers urgently convened, and their conclusion was singular, “The plan must change.”

The back door of Bridgehead Fortress stealthily opened, and a light Dusack Cavalryman galloped out, heading straight for the southern shores of the Confluence River.

When the light cavalry returned, he came back with Andreya Chelini leading the cavalry troop, each cavalryman’s horse carrying two kegs of gunpowder.

Among the nearly a hundred cavalrymen, there was one old soldier wearing common soldier’s armor but with graying at the temples.

As soon as the old soldier entered the fortress, he strode directly towards the battalion headquarters on the southern wall of the fortress.

The moment he entered the battalion headquarters, the old soldier roared angrily, “Jeska! How big you’ve grown!”

The one-eyed lieutenant colonel leaped reflexively from his chair.

General Sekler had arrived.@@novelbin@@

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