Chapter 401 — Pursuit and Flight
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The war was not over.
By the standards of most noble wars in this age, the moment the Cecil people won a sweeping victory on the northern and western fronts and the southern noble coalition fled in full rout, the war ought to have drawn its curtain—what followed should have been the Cecils using their captives to negotiate with the various southern families, carving up interests through ransom and land. But that was merely the wishful thinking of the nobles who had started the war.
A war could begin on their absurd, laughable pretexts for crusade, but it would never end with a single battle or a single surrender.
The coalition's main fleeing force was the Hosman host in the north. In that battle, the fifty thousand-strong noble coalition had actually suffered fewer than ten thousand dead and wounded—their long, chaotic column, the rugged mountain paths, and their scattered, disorderly lines of march were what caused them to collapse instantly under the artillery bombardment, but they had also, conversely, allowed most of them to survive. The first round of shelling had destroyed only the coalition's vanguard (including the entire corps led by Count Hosman); over the following half day, the number who died from stampede in the rout, from the blades of the supervising knights, or from falling off cliffs during the retreat was actually as great as the number killed by the shells.
Afterward, the surviving forty thousand began a bedraggled flight by day and night.
Apart from leaving the necessary garrison troops to secure the Kant region, Sir Philip and the knight Wald Perrich led the First and Second Corps—some three thousand men in all—and hung relentlessly on the heels of the fleeing enemy.
Three thousand pursuing forty thousand—it sounded almost like a joke, yet it truly happened.
In the hills of western Carrol, Philip, clutching his lord's orders, hastily wolfed down a few mouthfuls of dry rations, then made his way to the middle of the column to inspect the emplacement of the artillery positions.
One after another, specially designed horse-drawn war chariots stood in the open ground at the center of the formation; soldiers dashed swiftly about the wagons, anchoring each chassis and checking the condition of the small rail-accelerator cannons.
The wheels of these chariots were reinforced with steel, and sturdy steel frames were welded onto the axle housings; the miniaturized "Persuader" rail cannons were mounted upon those steel frames.
These were the "bombardment chariots" the lord had designed specifically for mobile warfare. The miniaturized "Persuader" rail cannon could be easily installed on a horse-drawn wagon; when entering combat readiness, the wagon's harness would be removed, and the body would be anchored to the ground with thick steel stakes. The recoil from the rail cannon's fire was buffered through the sturdy steel frame and a specially designed "recoil mechanism" and transmitted into the earth. By means of these ingenious designs, these devastating weapons could at last break free of fixed emplacements and become terrible engines of war that moved with the army.
To keep these bombardment chariots running, each was accompanied by two auxiliary wagons: one loaded with shells, the other fitted with large mana capacitors and a magic-net apparatus—the former supplying ammunition, the latter supplying power. Three such chariots formed a "mobile bombardment unit," and in the pursuing force there were twenty such units in all.
These cannons were the root of the nightmare that plagued the still-fleeing noble coalition day and night.