Chapter One: The Fortress

After Sun Li returned to the Great Song, he threw himself at once into expanding the army. The British Empire’s envoy was detained outright by the Embroidered Guard, and the envoy, staring in astonishment at the man he had once met on British soil, found that the modest steward of Lord Sun Li had risen in a single bound to become the spymaster of the Song Kingdom. The envoy of the British Empire knew at once that he had stepped on a mine this time.

Although the British envoy had been seized, the Empire still outwardly claimed it was merely engaged in diplomatic maneuvering, so it did not alarm the British troops in the Caracas region. After all, British intelligence within Song territory was utterly blind; to expect them to realize in such a short time that their envoy had been detained would be asking too much.

While Sun Li was busy preparing his forces, nearly two hundred thousand troops from the British Empire and the Frankish Empire slowly arrived beneath the fortress complex of the Madrid Empire on the European continent. Just before war broke out, the Frankish Empire finally completed its domestic military mobilization, and the frontline army expanded from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand men. These were the Frankish Empire’s main forces, stronger than the British Empire’s veteran mobilized troops.

Though the Emperor of the Madrid Empire was foolish and decadent, after a decade of civil war among humankind, and after being repeatedly crushed by the two rising great empires, he had come to understand deeply that the gap in strength was no ordinary one.

A string of defeats several years earlier had forced the Emperor of the Madrid Empire to abandon the idea of meeting the British and Frankish armies in open field battle. Back when he still held a numerical advantage, he had already been beaten into collapse again and again. Now that the nation’s strength had bled away, the Madrid Empire did not dare face the combined armies of the two great empires head-on.

With wealth extorted from the common people over the course of several years, along with the old reserves of earlier times, the Emperor of the Madrid Empire built a vast fortress complex at the entrance to the Iberian Peninsula.

In this era, large-scale fortification projects were usually undertaken by the weaker side. Nations with strong power spent their days fixated on foreign conquest and naturally would not pour most of their wealth and manpower into fortress construction.

There were two purposes in building fortresses:

To secure the most favorable conditions for weapons.

To protect barracks, arms, and daily supplies.

In the fortress system built by the Madrid Empire, in order to better withstand artillery bombardment from the hostile powers, massive bastioned works were adopted.

A bastion fortress was a kind of ancient stronghold. In essence, it transformed a fortified city from a convex polygon into a concave one. This improvement meant that no matter which point of the fortress was attacked, the attackers would expose themselves to more than one bastion face, usually two or three, allowing the defenders to strike repeatedly with crossfire.

With such bastions in place, the Frankish Empire’s cuirassiers were rendered nearly useless. If cavalry charged such works, it was like a dog meeting a hedgehog: there was nowhere to bite. They could only circle the bastion while being shot by muskets and blasted by cannon.

The bastions were covered with artillery of every sort, and soldiers armed with flintlock muskets held every position in defense. If anyone tried to bring up ladders, battering rams, or other old-fashioned siege equipment, the crossfire points atop these bastions would certainly teach them why flowers bloom red in such a way.

The bastion was the pinnacle of fortress construction. Under layers upon layers of defense, even if the enemy piled up bodies to seize it, it could not be broken. Once a wall was taken, the front, left, and right would all be covered by ample firepower, slaughtering the enemy who occupied that wall until corpses lay everywhere.

The bastion defense system could be said to have achieved, for the first time, a truly three-dimensional form of firepower assault. The Emperor of the Madrid Empire believed that this fortress zone would surely make the allied armies of the British and Frankish empires bleed to death.

To prevent a prolonged siege by the enemy, the Emperor of the Madrid Empire stored enough grain in the fortress complex to feed one hundred thousand troops for three years, and stockpiled nearly half the empire’s gunpowder and weapons. He even built an arsenal within the complex that could perform simple repairs and manufacture firearms damaged for various reasons. As for cold weapons, there were even more of them, beyond counting.

It could be said that this fortress system was a monster created by the Madrid Empire with all the strength of the nation. In the history of the European continent up to that point, no country had ever spent so much effort building such an enormous fortress network. Powerful nations disdained such labor; nations without strength lacked the money for it. Only the Madrid Empire, once glorious and once rich with accumulated wealth, could have emptied its old coffers to erect such a grand defensive system.

The Frankish Marshal Max lowered the telescope in his hand and sighed in admiration. “What a magnificent architectural wonder. The people of Madrid are truly rich. This kind of bastion will render most of the old siege experience useless.”

Beside him, the British commander, Marshal Gatdo, smiled and replied, “The defenses of the bastions are certainly strong, but the real issue is the men. If these fortress lines were all held by those religious maniacs from the Holy God Kingdom, it might be a hard fight for us. But the people of Madrid? Their army now, when it meets us in the field, mostly collapses at first contact. All they can do is huddle behind the walls and fire a few shots from afar to steady their own nerves.”

In the allied army of the British and Frankish empires, because the Frankish troops were more elite, the military nobility of the Frankish Empire, led by Marshal Max, fought to seize command of the coalition. This was also one of the reasons the Frankish Empire had sent reinforcements of its main forces once more.

In past campaigns, the British Empire had always relied on its vast numbers to take the lion’s share of the spoils. This time, in the attack on the Madrid Empire, the Frankish Empire clearly wanted a greater haul of the plunder. As for the British Empire, already well fed and well supplied, and with territory far larger than that of the Frankish Empire, it did not press the matter this time. So long as the Madrid Empire could be destroyed and a major stronghold of the Church of Light uprooted, other matters could be yielded.

Victoria’s gaze had long since turned to the struggle for supremacy across the whole of Europe. Among the human powers, only the Sacred Order of Knights was qualified to become the British Empire’s greatest threat.

“This kind of bastion is very difficult to take by direct assault. Those timid people of Madrid, even if they only fire from behind the walls, can still inflict heavy casualties on us. I think we should move closer to the bastions. So long as the fortress line lies within range of our artillery, we will not be far from victory. I would like to see how many rounds of cannon fire those ratlike Madridians can endure,” Marshal Max said confidently.

“Haha, it seems this merit will belong to the infantry and engineers. Marshal Max’s cuirassiers can only rest in the rear,” the two had long since settled on their siege strategy, and now exchanged harmless jokes with complete ease.