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◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈

Chapter 38: The Battle of the Prague Plain (2)

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Whoooosh-

As the acrid black powder smoke was swept away by the wind, a vision of Hell emerged beyond it.

The Bavarian knights who had been sitting arrogantly in their saddles, humming to themselves only moments ago.

Now, nothing remained but unrecognizable chunks of flesh and twisted pieces of steel.

Neighhh!

Horses that had lost their riders ran madly across the blood-soaked plain, while severed limbs rolled across the ground.

Watching that horrific sight, I thought with cold, steady eyes.

'The times have changed.'

They must have trusted their outdated experience.

Cannons were powerful, but short-ranged and wildly inaccurate, useful for nothing more than making a loud noise to frighten horses.

At this distance, they must have thought themselves perfectly safe.

But that common sense was a relic of the past.

János Hunyadi stood beside me with his mouth hanging open, unable to speak for a moment.

"Your Majesty... A shell flew that far? What on earth did you do to the cannon? Did you use that chemical magic again?"

With a snort, I tapped the cannon barrel, which had not yet cooled.

"It's nothing much. I just added a little seasoning to the Gunpowder."

Medieval Gunpowder craftsmen relied on instinct.

They mixed and pounded Saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur without much care, so some days it exploded properly and other days it misfired.

It was common for unburned residue to clog the barrel.

But I was different.

I was a chemist.

'Saltpeter 75%, charcoal 15%, sulfur 10%.'

The precise, perfect chemical ratio for black powder.

When purified ingredients, stripped of impurities, combined in their ideal proportions, Gunpowder ceased to be simple powder. It became a beast containing explosive energy.

On top of that, I had put powdered Gunpowder through a granulation process, kneading it with water and dextrin into grains.

Even with the same amount, the explosive pressure was entirely different. The gas that propelled the shell expanded at a completely different rate.

The increased range was simply the inevitable result of that chemical reaction.

Of course, an ordinary cannon would have burst under this much firepower.

Bronze was expensive, and cast iron cracked easily.

But this thing I made was different.

High-quality gray cast iron, melted at high temperatures in a blast furnace, with limestone added to remove sulfur and phosphorus.

This tough metal could withstand far greater pressure than bronze.

Which meant it could handle being packed with far more Gunpowder.

Higher chamber pressure increased muzzle velocity.

Higher muzzle velocity made the trajectory closer to a straight line and increased kinetic energy exponentially.

Naturally, at that distance, a knight's plate armor would be pierced like paper.

It was neither magic nor a miracle.

It was simply Newton's second law, F=ma (the law of acceleration).

"R-run!"

"Get out of the cannon's range!"

The surviving knights screamed and tried to turn their horses.

Then I saw the surviving commander of the knights throw off his helmet and roar. Half his face was covered in blood.

"Don't run! If you show them your backs, you'll die! Don't fall for the enemy's scheme!"

The commander drew his sword and shouted at his subordinates, who were about to scatter in terror.

"Their cannons reload slowly! This is our chance! Close the distance while they're stuffing Gunpowder into them! Once we get in close, they can't fire!"

It was an accurate judgment.

With an ordinary cannon, cleaning the barrel, loading the Gunpowder, ramming it down, and placing the shell inside after every shot took an eternity.

They intended to use that opening to charge in at cavalry speed.

"No flanking! Break through by the shortest route! Spread out! If you bunch together, you die!"

At the enemy commander's order, the knights' expressions changed. Thousands of hooves struck the earth at once.

Thudududud-

The knights, who had turned their fear of death into rage, charged straight at us with bloodshot eyes. Their horses foamed at the mouth.

They did not charge in a stupid straight line.

As though they had planned it beforehand, they spread wide to either side and moved in zigzags.

They were trying to disperse their targets and minimize the damage from the shells.

"Raise your shields! Brace for impact!"

The knights in the front line raised their shields high and pressed themselves close to their horses to reduce their exposed area.

The enemy commander was quite capable. The moment he realized the safe distance meant nothing, he immediately changed tactics and ordered a charge.

It was the right decision.

If my cannons had been ordinary cannons.

I gestured to the artillerymen.

"Change ammunition."

My command was brief.

"Load grapeshot."

The artillerymen's eyes changed. They took out the distinctive ammunition they had prepared in advance.

Not ordinary round iron balls, but grotesque bundles of hundreds of small iron pellets tied together with cloth and rope like clusters of grapes.

This was the decisive anti-cavalry weapon that turned a cannon into a giant shotgun.

The reloading time the knights relied on did not exist for me. I had prepared cartridges beforehand.

Since the Gunpowder had already been measured out and packed into cloth bags, loading was finished as soon as they shoved one into the muzzle.

It was an overwhelming speed, incomparable to the old method of scooping up loose powder and ramming it down.

"Loaded!"

"Take aim!"

Three hundred meters. Two hundred meters.

The distance closed in an instant.

János Hunyadi shouted urgently.

"My lord! They're coming!"

"Stay calm."

I raised a hand to stop János Hunyadi.

"Not yet. Let them come closer."

Leaning against the railing of the Panzer, I watched the knights charging toward us.

One hundred meters. Fifty meters.

They were close enough for me to see their eyes. The tips of their lances seemed aimed at my heart.

Delight showed on the enemy commander's face.

The certainty that they had almost reached us, that they could cut down those arrogant heretics.

"Kill them! Those heretic bastards...!"

But that certainty was the very moment I had been waiting for.

"Now. Fire!"

Kwwaaang!

Thirty cannons roared at once, shaking the plain.

This time, it was not the sound of a single heavy iron ball flying through the air.

Shwaaaak!

A dreadful tearing sound, as though a giant had scattered a fistful of steel sand, no, as if space itself had been ripped apart.

Tens of thousands of lead pellets and sharp iron fragments poured from the muzzles in a broad fan, engulfing the knights who had charged in scattered formation.

They were not arrows one could dodge. They were not spears or swords one could block.

It was violence spread across the entire area ahead, erasing every inch of space before them.

Thud! Crack! Crunch!

"Aaaagh!"

"Argh!"

The leading horses and knights collapsed at once.

A horse's head burst apart, and the enemy commander's body was torn to rags and flung backward.

Neighhh!

The knights behind them suffered the same fate.

Scattered formation? Zigzag maneuvers?

They were useless. The killing radius of grapeshot far exceeded the range of their tactical movements.

There was nowhere to avoid the dense rain of iron pellets.

When a pellet pierced armor, bone and flesh that could not withstand the kinetic energy turned to pulp and burst apart from within.

An arm holding a shield was torn off along with the shield, and a helmeted head was crushed like a watermelon.

Even our soldiers were sickened by the brutality.

"Oh, God..."

Sir Kuno muttered as he made the sign of the cross.

The sight revealed through the thick gun smoke went beyond horrific. It was grotesque.

Horses crawling across the ground with their entrails spilling out.

Knights with severed limbs, foaming blood from their mouths as they called for their mothers.

All of them had been reduced equally to unrecognizable piles of meat scattered across the earth.

The main force of the Bavarian knights, who had charged in so boldly only moments before, had been erased in the truest sense of the word.

The handful of knights who had miraculously survived trembled with vacant expressions.

Chunks of their comrades' flesh and blood clung to the gaps in their armor.

"W-what is this...?"

"Demons... This is an army of demons...!"

The will to fight vanished from their eyes, replaced by primal terror.

Courage? Honor? Faith?

No human could speak of such things after seeing the comrade riding beside them vanish before their eyes as a pile of meat.

The sound of lances falling broke the silence.

Clang! Clatter!

One knight dismounted and fell to his knees.

"I surrender! I surrender! Please! Please don't fire!"

That was the beginning. The surviving knights hurriedly dismounted and threw down their weapons.

"I'm a noble! I'll pay ransom!"

"Please, spare my life!"

It was the sound of the age of knights coming to an end.

"Waaaaah!"

"Warriors of God! Did you see that?!"

Our soldiers erupted in wild cheers.

The fear in their eyes had vanished completely at the sight of the Empire's supposedly strongest knights being ground down without being able to do anything. In its place came fanatical confidence.

I turned my gaze toward the main force of our army, which advanced slowly but without stopping.

Rumble-

The roar of three hundred steel carts filled the battlefield again as the cannon fire died down.

It must have looked strange to the enemy. Those enormous masses of metal had taken cannon fire without damage and kept coming, too heavy to believe that men alone were pushing them.

No horse or ox pulled them, so how could such massive chunks of steel be rolling forward? Was it the magic of demons?

But that secret was simple as well.

'Steel is lighter than they think.'

The carts were not covered in brutally thick wrought iron.

They were covered in steel stripped clean of impurities through refining and forging.

Where wrought iron needed to be ten millimeters thick for the same protection, steel needed only three.

Its specific strength, its strength relative to its weight, was far superior.

As a result, the carts looked like massive fortresses, but their actual weight was far less than the enemy imagined.

Of course, they were only lighter than expected. That did not mean they rolled easily.

Creak, screech-

A desperate struggle raged out of sight behind the carts' steel plates.

"One, two! One, two!"

"Push with all you've got! The Lord is watching!"

Soldiers planted their feet and shoved with their shoulders in time with their commander's calls.

They were drenched in sweat as they gripped the long handles installed inside the carts and pushed with all their weight.

Eight soldiers per cart.

Even then, they were not particularly fast.

At most, four kilometers per hour.

No faster than the pace of a grown man walking slowly.

But a tank's greatest asset was not its top speed.

It was the power to break through without stopping, even under a rain of arrows, cannon fire, or a knight's charge.

In the distant future, the British Mark I, the first tank deployed in combat, had an average speed of six kilometers per hour on flat ground and two kilometers per hour off-road.

Even so, that lumbering monster crushed the barbed wire and trenches of no man's land, changing the course of the First World War.

And now, my steel carts were fulfilling that very role.

"All forces, keep advancing!"

Clank, clatter!

Slowly but surely.

To tighten the noose around the terrified Imperial army.

The knights had fallen.

The hammer aimed at our flank had broken, so now only chunks of meat laid upon the anvil remained.

I turned to János Hunyadi and gave a short order.

"Move the cannons forward. It's time to crush their main force."

* * *

Sigismund's lips trembled.

"What... is this?"

The sight before him was too surreal to be real.

The Empire's proud heavy cavalry.

The invincible spearpoint that had shattered enemy formations and brought victory on every battlefield.

It had vanished in a single bombardment.

Literally. It had not been defeated. It had disappeared, reduced to a handful of torn flesh.

Frederick of Saxony, the Elector of Saxony, screamed beside him in terror.

"Magic... Yes, that is black magic! How could iron pellets rain down like that unless it was Satan's sorcery?!"

But Sigismund knew.

The acrid smell of sulfur. The smoke of black powder. The explosive sound that tore at his eardrums.

That was not magic.

It was human technology, created through meticulous calculation.

Technology that was incomprehensible, generations ahead of the Empire's own.

Sigismund gritted his teeth.

Fear washed over him, but he was the Emperor. One hundred thousand soldiers still remained. He could not collapse here.

"Do not panic! We still have infantry! Our numbers are overwhelming!"

Gripping his command baton with a trembling hand, Sigismund shouted.

"All forces, close formation! Overlap your shields! Their bombardment takes a long time to reload! Exploit that opening! Overwhelm those carts with numbers!"

The Emperor's command was textbook strategy.

If cavalry had failed, force a war of attrition by pressing forward with overwhelming infantry numbers.

But.

Rat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang!

The front ranks of the Imperial infantry advancing at his command fell one after another.

Flames flashed constantly from the firing ports placed along the gaps in the carts.

Reloading? The enemy stood in three ranks and fired in rotation. Their barrage never stopped.

What was even more terrifying was that the carts kept advancing without pause.

Rumble-

Slowly but surely.

Like a colossal grape press, the walls of steel were squeezing the Imperial army.

"Trebuchets! What are the trebuchets doing?! Throw stones! Break those carts!"

"They're already firing, Your Majesty! But trebuchets are even slower and less accurate than cannons, so they aren't accomplishing much!"

Sigismund roared.

"Then bring more cannons! Gather every cannon in the Empire here!"

"We already have! But..."

"But what?!"

The artillery officer could not bring himself to continue and turned away.

Sigismund's gaze reached the artillery positions. The bronze cannons he had purchased at great expense lay there as heaps of scrap metal.

They had not been destroyed by enemy bombardment. Their barrels had overheated from repeated firing and burst on their own, unable to withstand the internal pressure.

Sigismund felt his vision turn white.

"This can't be... This can't be..."

He tried to devise hundreds of tactics.

Fire attack?

Steel did not burn.

Trenches?

There was not even time to dig.

Flanking?

The cavalry, with the greatest mobility, had been erased in an instant.

Even if the infantry tried to flank them, they would only become victims of the shells pouring from the sides of those moving fortresses.

A night attack?

How could they endure until night when the enemy was advancing on them right now?

There was no answer. No matter what he tried, there was no way to stop the approaching wall of steel.

"Your Majesty."

At that moment, a cold voice came from above him.

When he turned, the Empire's great princes, including the Elector of Saxony, the Duke of Austria, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, were already mounted.

The arrogance had long since disappeared from their faces. All that remained was the cowardly instinct to survive.

Sigismund asked in a trembling voice.

"What... are you planning to do?"

Avoiding his gaze, the Elector of Saxony replied.

"The tide has turned. Further sacrifice is meaningless. I... have a duty to preserve Saxony's soldiers."

There was no loyalty to the Emperor in the Elector of Saxony's voice, nor any passion for the holy war.

Only the cold calculation of a merchant weighing profit and loss.

"Are you saying you'll run away and leave me here? Abandon your oath to the holy war?!"

"Run away? This is a strategic withdrawal."

Frederick replied shamelessly and pointed ahead.

"Look, Your Majesty. Is that a battle? That is not war, but one-sided slaughter. The knights have been annihilated. Do you think the infantry will fare any differently? If they smash their heads against that wall of steel, only corpses will pile up."

"And you would turn your back? You, an Elector of the Empire?"

The Margrave of Brandenburg added his own words.

"Your Majesty, if I lose all my soldiers here, who will defend my domain? Will Your Majesty protect it from the hyenas waiting to prey upon an empty house?"

"Y-you dare...!"

Sigismund trembled with rage and gripped his sword hilt, but the princes had already made up their minds.

"Please preserve your health, Your Majesty. We shall take our leave."

"Let us meet again in the future."

As the princes turned their horses, their standard-bearers inverted their banners and began sounding the retreat.

Bwooooo! Bwoo!

That sound was a death sentence for the Imperial army.

The infantry at the front turned around in shock.

The banners of the lords who were supposed to protect them were moving away.

"T-they're running! The Electors are running!"

"We've been left behind! We're all going to die!"

Morale collapsed miserably in an instant. When one man threw down his weapon, ten followed, and tens of thousands of soldiers turned their backs at once.

Sigismund watched blankly.

His army of one hundred thousand was flowing away like an ebbing tide.

It was not an orderly retreat, but an ugly rout as soldiers trampled and shoved aside their own allies to flee.

"Your Majesty! You must withdraw!"

The captain of the Hungarian guard urgently seized Sigismund's reins.

"The enemy carts are right before us! If you hesitate here, you will be taken prisoner!"

Rumble-

The ground-shaking vibration reached beneath his feet.

Through the smoke of the Gunpowder, the wheels of blood-covered steel carts crushed corpses as they rolled closer.

It felt as though the shining eyes of enemy soldiers beyond the firing ports were taking aim directly at him.

'I... I, the Emperor, before peasants like them...'

Humiliation surged through him, but his survival instinct was stronger.

Biting his lip until it bled, Sigismund glared at Prague's walls.

"...Just you wait. Ulrich von Sternberg, I will cut off your head with my own hands! I will never forget the humiliation of this day!"

"Your Majesty! Hurry!"

Bang!

A bullet grazed over Sigismund's head. Startled out of his wits, the Emperor hastily pulled his reins.

"G-go! To Hungary!"

In the end, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire fled the battlefield.

The golden banner that had once shone so brilliantly was buried in the mud.

Footnotes:

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