“Brace for impact, Halberdiers form up!” Fred shouted, there was a good 200 knights in this charge, “Musketeers aim for the wizards when they get in range, Crossbowmen, aim for the horses.”

The crossbowmen got one shot off before the knights impacted the line, luckily, the enemy wizards didn’t realise the range of the muskets, with a single round 40 of them fell from 200 shots, this might seem bad, but the wizards were on the edges of the range.

The knights’ impact was devastating to the Halberdiers, however, what the knights didn’t notice, was that the half-built trenches were right behind the Halberdiers, a good 50 of them crashed into the trenches felling the horses.

“Cannons’ Grapeshot onto the Enemy wizards,” Fred called out. He noticed that they were about to load the cannonballs and was just in time.

“Wizards, dispel the shields,” Jacques called out.

*Zap, zap, zap*

Within seconds, archaic blue light shot from the wizards straight at the knights.

Fred looked to the sides and noticed that a few groups of light cavalries had sallied forwards too, engaging halberdier units all down the line, however, the halberdiers were able to stand their ground easier.

Another round of cannons went off, this time there were 20 cannons in this salvo, smashing into the wizard’s unit, this time they had managed to put shields onto themselves in time, but they weren’t as resistant as before.

To the left of Fred, Jean had commandeered 20 cannons to fire on his side, they were firing at the medium infantry that was following behind the light cavalry,

On the right, Arthur had commandeered another 15 to help on his side.

The remaining 5 were just about to be loaded when a few of the wizard commanders stopped them, they grabbed a cannonball each, and Fred could see them infuse magic into them. They then handed them over to the cannoneers who was putting them in.

“Wait stop!” Fred shouted out to them, but it was too late, the highest wizard commander looked over, but two cannons went off as soon as the plungers pushed it in, killing them instantly and causing the balls to fire off into the middle of the Noble guards and halberdiers, the cannonballs exploded in a fiery frenzy, killing friend and foe alike.

Fred rushed over to the cannons crew, “what the hell are you doing.” The wizards and crew alike were shocked by the event.

“We were infusing spells into the balls,” the head wizard said, for some reason, his cannonball didn’t trigger the powder.

“The powder triggers when in contact with magic!” Fred shouted at the crew, “the Wizards might not have known but you should be well aware of this phenomenon.”

The wizards realised what he meant.

“Fuck, forget it, we don’t have time.” Fred turned to the head wizard, and the other two, whose cannonballs didn’t trigger an explosion. “Now you know what the powders do, is whatever you did to them, safe to fire?”

“Erm, mine is, I noticed Iron in the middle, I’ve attached my spell to that, the lead has no magic discharge.”

“Same as mine,”

“And mine.”

They all confirmed.

“Fine, who is the best target for your spells,” Fred asked.

“The enemy wizards, the spells should send their internal mana haywire, causing them a lot of issues.” The head wizard commented.

“You heard them men, fire at the targets,” Fred ordered.

With the shocking explosion in the centre of the noble guards and the halberdiers, the noble guards started to waver, even the Halberdiers did to an extent.

The three remaining cannons shot at the wizards, on impact, Fred saw a pulse coming from the cannonballs. Then he saw the flickering shields of a lot of knights start to spark, and then stop functioning when they were being hit. It reminded him of an emp.

The wizards, who were originally 200 strong had less than 80 now and was in retreat, the sides were starting to waver too, seeing this, a commander of the noble guards blew a horn. This caused a chain reaction to the men, as they started retreating towards the castle.

The five wizards, now understanding the cannons more, changed their spells to match, the cannon crew was still hesitant, but the wizards didn’t seem to disregard their concerns. They cast shields around the plungers.

While they were loading the cannons, the other cannons weren’t idle, they continued to fire at the enemy.

This time the magically infused cannonballs were aimed at the Noble guards, causing 20 or so casualties and many more injured in the process. Quite a number of the guards had to run back, losing horses to the charge and other reasons.

This was a huge battle for the early days, they lost 450, to the enemy’s 700, a lot of the casualties they took were from the centre, while they were able to do a lot more damage from the sides.

“Men, I want these trenches dug as fast as possible!” Fred ordered. “Start laying down the caltrops and wooden hedgehogs as well.”

Fred was not happy with the battle, yes, they did more damage, but the enemy had double the numbers, continuous fights like this would see them losing first. And with the disaster of the cannon incident, he lost 70 men to 30 men of the noble guards.

­­___

Fred returned to the command tent with the command staff on the night. Not only was it the usual lot, but the commanders of each corps were here as well. Fred was not in a happy mood.

“Fred, you need to calm down, accidents like that are common,” Jean said.

“Our men nearly broke, thinking we were using them as sacrifices to kill the enemy, those wizards were lucky the cannons didn’t blow up in their face, the men had been building the trench system half-heartedly, our cannons were barely operational when the enemy sallied forwards. We need a 1:2.1 death to kill ratio to break even. All accidents, I’m sure.” Fred bit back.

The Wizard commanders and the artillery commanders all shrunk their necks.

“Look, we will just be stuck without a plan to move forward dwelling on this matter, what is our next steps?” Jacques asked.

“First, we need the trench system, their best bet for sallying forwards is to use the cavalry to engage our ranks in the fastest time possible, so the infantry can be covered. The trench system, as shown today, screws up a knight’s charge.” Fred explained the first goal

“Right, that would take a week to prepare.” Jacques commented, “What’s next?”

“We need to put the cannons in a defensible position that is still in range, we then bombard the city continuously, until we believe we can take it. Then while this is happening, we build zigzag trenches encroaching the wall.” Fred was drawing all this on a large parchment to demonstrate.

“Why this pattern?” Mendes asked.

“It keeps the trenches almost parallel to the walls, it prevents the enemy wizards bombarding down a straight line,” Fred explained. “We can also get close enough to dig tunnels to sap the walls. And the enemy won’t figure it out hopefully, they would just think we are trying to dig the trench closer and closer to them.”

“What about if the sally out while we are doing this?” Henry asked.

“Excellent,” Fred commented “they won’t be able to get a charge on us, with or without cavalry, our cannons will have free rein without having to worry about friendly fire, while the enemy soldiers are running over at ground level. And our heavy armour should give us a better advantage.”

“isn’t it better for them if we assault the castle?” Mendes asked.

“Well, it will exhaust the enemy, they will be under constant bombardment each day, and we won’t stop until they attack the artillery or surrender, and with us encroaching on their fort, it should cause a constant dread that we are coming, they will sally out just to release stress, which is what we want, they won’t send out all of their troops and they would be at a disadvantage fighting,” Fred answered.

___

“Damn it, what is that weapon?” the commander of Normandy shouted,

“It’s those cannons, we’ve been hearing so much about,” Derek said.

Derek had been side-lined by this new commander, due to his failures. However, except for this commander’s personal fighting ability, his skills in commanding were pretty average, he had a high victory record, but most of his battles were already to his advantage.

“I know what they are called, I lost 120 wizards and 60 guards to them, not including the rest of the losses we suffered.” He snapped.

“We should sneak around the south and head straight for their towns in the west, we may be able to grab some of these weapons for ourselves” Derek commented.

“Haven’t you already failed enough times” a different commander commented, “I’m surprised a disgrace like you has the shame to show yourself here?”

“Maybe if grandfather didn’t only know how to promote retarted people, like your brother, to a command position, then we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.” Derek spat back.

“He was only in that position because you were trying to kill him off.” Another commander argued.

“He chose to take over command of the trebuchets on his own, and you, aren’t you the brother of that ‘heroic Harold’ who chose to ignore orders and charge in with 600 noble knights. Another example of grandfather only knowing how to promote braindead family members to positions of command.” Derek argued with him.

He had thrown off all decorum with the family, he would voice out his displeasures from now on.

“Enough, I don’t want to hear any bickering from either of you, we need to win this siege and that is what we are going to do!” The top commander shouted. “We will see what their plans are going forward, and then seek faults in their lines to attack.”

___

It took a week as predicted to set up the trench line, and with the cannon batteries in place, they began firing, a salvo every 30 minutes, for 12 hours a day started, this was a lot slower than their official output, but this was best for prolonged usage, and to save ammo.

However, with the first shots, they saw a massive dome shield surrounding the city, “Crap, what is that.” Fred complained.

“It’s a wall made out of money,” the wizard commander said.

“Made out of money,”

“It is a force field, used to protect very rich and important cities, it burns through mana crystals to keep it operational, I’m surprised the city had one. Ah, there look,” the wizard pointed, “there is one of the towers, they act as beacons to prop up the force field.”

“They weren’t there when I came last time,” Fred commented.

“Looks like it’s true that Normandy planned to leave.” Jacques commented, “only their capital on the mainland has one of these.”

“But Derek isn’t the duke, how could he claim princedom,” Fred asked.

“He was probably a puppet in this.” Jacques explained. “if he succeeds his grandfather probably has a way to take it from him, if he fails, the family can distance themselves from a ‘Rogue’ family member.”

“It felt to me that Derek knew this, in our first battle, and had designs of his own,” Fred commented.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Jacques said.

“So, how we bring something like this down?” Fred said.

“Well, there are 4 main ways, but only two are probably optional to us.” The Wizard said.

“Which are?” Fred asked.

“So, the first two, which are not available to us, destroy the towers from the inside, or use magic to corrupt shield from the outside.” The wizard mentioned.

“Why is the second option not available?” Fred asked, ‘corrupting it, is that like magic hacking.’

“We don’t have the preparations; we didn’t know about it in the first place.” The wizard commented.

“Ok, so what about the two available options?” Fred asked again.

“So, there’s the crude way, I reckon, each of those cannonballs could burn up 7-8 mana crystals.” The Wizard answered.

“We just burn them out?” Fred asked, “Makes sense.”

“Or the last, which you could switch between the two, a big enough shock could cause a feedback issue, the towers might only be able to process so many mana crystals, causing a tower array or two to burn out. This would cause instability issues; they could only fix so many towers before they ran out of resources.”

“How would we go about doing that?” Fred asked.

“So, we would have to try and aim for the area closest to the tower, this way, it more likely the feedback would only be dealt with one tower, and we would just have to hit it with as much as we got in a short amount of time.”

“I see,” Fred answered.

“They would work to improve the system each time we destroyed the tower, however, if we can knock out those two towers next to each other, in quick succession, it would create a weak point in this area, allowing cannonballs to get through, as well as putting more stress on other towers, at that point each cannonball would probably burn through 30-40 mana crystals.”

“I see, alright let’s position all the cannons into the middle of them,” Fred was starting to give out orders.

“Wait, if we supercharge the cannonballs with our magic, you will probably only need 20 cannons on each tower, then we can destroy 3 towers together.”

“Hmm, fine, but be careful with your spells, I don’t want another accident.

It took them two hours to dig out battery pits for the cannons and set up everything.

“Are we ready,” Fred asked.

“Yes, commander” the captains shouted out.

“Fire!” Fred ordered.

The salvo slammed into the shields, its magical charge causing all sorts of mystical displays. By the end of it, the 3 towers were smoking, and there was flickering on the shields.

“Commander we should do another round and keep going until the towers fall.” The wizard mentioned.

“Ok let’s do that,” Fred liked the effect, not only was it causing smoke, but he also saw the troops on top of the walls starting to panic.

Another round went off and the three towers started smoking, even more, the two towers on either side of the three started to smoke.

At this, the closest gatehouse opened up, with a sea of cavalry charging out.

“Sire the enemy are advancing,” an artillery commander exclaimed.

“Ignore them, focus on your task, they want you distracted.”

With another round, all five towers exploded. Causing sparks all over the force field.

“All cannons, switch to grapeshot, target the Noble guard.”

This time, there was over 400 Noble guard, flanked by 300 knights on either side and 800 medium and light cavalries on either side of them.

The wizards overcharged the grapeshot’s, due to their designs the grapeshot’s themselves didn’t touch the powder, it was a thin wooden disk that did.

“Fire!”, “Fire!”, “Fire!”. Fred heard the orders from the artillery commanders.