Chapter 557 — Cutting Edge

"The live broadcast of the Pioneer's launch is already playing across the whole territory, and the special edition of the newspaper will be published tomorrow," Hetty said from nearby. "According to your plan, the ship will continue west, first putting in at Tanzan Harbor for half a day to carry out mechanical inspections, then turning northwest to pass through the Horsman border, the Luan region, and the Kalor region, finally stopping at Rock Fortress for three days, where it will undergo thorough inspection and testing before turning back."

"Very good," Gao Yi nodded slightly, then looked toward the middle-aged knight standing not far from the captain's chair. "Byron, I'll be putting you through some hard work these next few days."

Byron, now the Pioneer's temporary captain, grinned broadly and answered loudly: "Don't you worry, sir—I definitely won't let you down!"

Philip, standing nearby with a sour expression, could not help shaking his head. "Getting all excited—utterly undignified."

Byron caught his old partner's muttering and shot him a glance. "You're just jealous. Not everyone has the talent to be a captain..."

Philip straightened up and spoke primly. "As a knight, I am more interested in charging into battle on solid ground."

Byron shook his head and muttered under his breath: "So he threw up the moment he got on board—what's so hard about admitting it... Now his face is white as paper."

Gao Yang noticed the exchange between the two, but he only smiled and shook his head, saying nothing.

That Philip—always young, promising, and steady—should turn out to be somewhat seasick was something he had not expected. But by the same token, Byron had adapted to his new role remarkably well, and that was a good sign.

People cannot be forever confined to land, and Cecil's army least of all. As new shipbuilding techniques kept developing, Gao Yang would inevitably have to fill in the "surface forces" gap that every nation of humanity shared. Even before the Pioneer was built, he had drawn up plans to establish a navy—though for the present-day Duchy of Cecil, "navy" was more aptly described as a river flotilla, but at least it was a foundation—and for its first sailors, he had to start from nothing.

He still remembered the so-called "fleet" the noble coalition had assembled last year, remembered that rabble in armor who could not swim and knew nothing of water warfare, more than half of whom had been wiped out by cannon fire while still aboard their ships. In this age where cavalry reigned supreme, where the seas were sealed off by natural disaster, and where surface combat was held in contempt, even though he had inherited the entire Southern Region's noble legacy, he could find scarcely a few men with any grounding to train as sailors. So he could only recruit a batch of "talent" from the fishermen of the west and the hands of the cargo boats, and train them for the better part of a year on sampans, fishing boats, and freighters before he had soldiers barely fit to serve aboard ship—and a great many of those soldiers now stood on this cutting-edge magic battleship.

Byron was the captain of this vessel and the commander of the sailors. Over the past six months, besides continuing to handle part of the land forces' affairs, he had also been responsible for training the newborn sailors.

This middle-aged knight was no expert in water warfare, but in the Southern Region of this era there were no experts in water warfare at all. At least Byron had commanded a half-finished magic battleship, had used one to assault Rock Fortress, and had the rich experience of facing every kind of combat environment during his mercenary days. He was the only candidate Gao Yang could find.

After all, one cannot reach the goal in a single step—that is how it is in most fields built up from nothing.

Under Sir Byron's command, Cecil's newborn "flotilla" would complete its final training aboard this ship. These sailors, trained on sampans and fishing boats, would come into contact with a true magic battleship for the first time; before them would be no models or theoretical documents, but real steel machinery and control mechanisms. They would learn how to handle a vessel driven by magic machinery, learn how to deal with every kind of problem on the water—and this ship, over the course of this half-month training voyage, would sail a full circuit along the Whitewater. Its passage would be watched by countless settlers along the banks, printed in the newspapers, broadcast over the magic net. This was not merely a training exercise, but a demonstration and a deterrent—

The order of the Southern Region was already tentatively stable, but not entirely at peace. Remnants of the old nobility and the Church's armies still lurked in some of the mountains and wild forests of the west and north. These outlaws, now turned bandits, were committing robberies, and Sir Philip had been organizing campaigns to wipe them out, though the clearing was not yet complete.

Gao Yu said that the most stubborn and most naive of the remnants still dreamed of the day when Cecil's rule would suddenly collapse and the old order be restored, while others had already taken to the bandit life and reveled in their lawless days—the cutting-edge magic battleship was meant for their eyes.

Without question, the gun mounts of the cutting-edge magic battleship shone with the radiance of art, and art has always been used to move the human heart.

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