Chapter 271 — Defensive Strength
Blade of Dawn · Page 3 of 3
Ever since the first mutant attack, the defenses to the south of the territory had been the foremost priority among all the defensive works. The Dark Mountains were a great natural barrier, but events had already proven that this barrier was not impassable for monsters—at least in the stretch where Cecil territory lay, the Dark Mountains held one large, surveyed gap and several routes over the range. To safeguard the territory against the Gondor Wasteland, which might erupt at any moment, Gao Yang had begun a whole series of "raise walls, build towers" projects as soon as the territory's productive capacity had developed a little.
Frankly, Gao Yang had never quite grown used to this era's habit of ringing cities with one wall, or even several. An open city without walls was far better for long-term development. But he had to be practical: given the current world's level of safety and the shape war took here, walls remained an indispensable defense—so the newly built Cecil territory had walls as well.
And the wall to the south of the territory was the most solid of all the defensive works, the one best balanced between offense and defense.
Because the territory's foundations were still shallow and the output of "Rebecca cement" was limited, the city wall could not yet be built entirely of reinforced concrete, nor could Gao Yang's envisioned ideal be realized yet—"threefold walls, with troop passages inside, foundations reaching deep into the earth, connected straight down to the armory." Even so, for most of the noble territories in the south it was still a formidable barrier: the wall, built of a mixture of concrete, earth, and stone, stood over ten meters high with a top four meters across. Along it were countless firing emplacements prepared for the soldiers, with large reserves of medicine and combat crystals kept ready at all times. The city's mageweb ran all the way to the foot of the wall, ready at any moment to replace the mana crystals the defenders exhausted, and after the mana obelisks appeared, Carmel had set two crystal towers at the base of the wall as well—so that even the top of the wall enjoyed uninterrupted mana coverage. Thus, until the defenders' weapons overheated and failed or overloaded on spent energy, their firepower could keep pouring out without pause.
Besides the wall proper, Gao Yang had ordered a series of triangular outworks raised outside it. At the apex of each outwork stood a small tower, and on each tower was mounted a small catapult.
That series of triangular outworks was modeled on the bastion: they guaranteed that once the enemy rushed to the foot of the wall, they would be caught in crossfire from the flanking walls on either side. At the same time, the triangular outworks themselves added strength to the wall, and the towers at their apexes could serve as watchposts. As for the catapults on those towers...
To be honest, Gao Yang knew very well that the thing did not quite match the style of the magi-industrial course the territory was pursuing. But until he had solved the problem of propelling solid shells, he had no usable "artillery" on hand, so he could only settle for the next best thing—marrying this world's original technology to the new magi-industrial techniques, and using small catapults to approximate, however crudely, the effect of mounting cannon on the walls.
What the catapults flung were crystal bombs the size of a human head.