Chapter 276 — Shortcomings and Inspiration

To many, the development of Cecil Territory was already a miracle—even the administrators of Cecil Territory themselves could not help but think so. True, compared with most noble domains of this era, Cecil Territory had surpassed common sense in every respect, whether in the construction of its people's livelihood or in the transformation of its military strength. But Gao Yang had never seen it that way.

The imaginary enemy in Gao Yang's mind had never been those mediocre frontier nobles, nor even the long-entrenched old powers of the royal capital. From the day he inherited Gao Yang Cecil's memories, from the day he learned of the existence of the magic tide, his imaginary enemy had already been something beyond the present power of humanity—and against such enemies, the strength currently in his hands was far from enough.

"Those monsters have intelligence," Hetty said the moment Gao Yang's voice fell. "Their thinking doesn't seem very strong, but they clearly possess some capacity for thought. On the battlefield they judge the situation, they judge the attack range of the catapults and gather their strength to strike from safe zones—they can even command an 'army.' If their command ability grows any stronger, we won't win so easily."

Amber, seated on Gao Yang's other side, could not help saying, "I didn't find any intelligence in them when I was scouting."

"That means their intelligence is incomplete, or their behavioral patterns differ from humans'," Gao Yang said, unsurprised. "Mutants are creatures with a clear objective—that much won't change. So before they encounter an attack target, even intelligent mutants won't do anything superfluous, which makes them look no different from other monsters before they launch an assault. Still, after this incident, we've gained a measure of experience."

"Beyond that, this battle also exposed a problem," Gao Yang continued. "When dealing with those big fellows, ordinary soldiers clearly lack attack capability, and the catapults... their accuracy is far too low."

In the latter half of the battle, three giant monsters had crossed the middle of the battlefield—already within range of the thermal ray guns. But the scorching rays, so effective against ordinary mutants, revealed their shortfall in firepower when facing those enormous creatures: they could barely penetrate the enemy's bodies, and even when they did, the tiny wound area could hardly harm monsters the size of small houses. The mutated creatures seemed to have quickly figured this out, which was why they dared to stop brazenly before the city gate and gather their strength to attack. Frankly, without Rebecca's final super-gigantic-gigantic-gigantic fireball, if those three large "mutants" had actually unleashed their black lightning, things could truly have turned dangerous.

As for the crystal grenades that served as individual secondary weapons... their power posed a certain threat to the giants, but insufficient attack range was one issue, and the stamina drain on soldiers was another. Moreover, crystal grenades had delayed detonation and slow flight speed—against giants that already possessed some intelligence, the effect was truly far from promising.

Facts had proven that only the crystal bombs hurled by catapults could easily destroy those giants, but the catapult's drawbacks were all too obvious: poor accuracy, narrow range, slow loading, and heavy stamina consumption for the soldiers (though this could be solved with mechanical power). Before crystal bombs were used as ammunition, it had not even possessed decent power. One could say that letting such a wildly incongruous thing appear on Cecil's southern wall was purely a forced compromise born of inadequate technical conditions.

And all these shortcomings were only the parts Byron and the others could understand. In fact, Gao Yang knew the catapult's flaws went far beyond these: a catapult that could only lob munitions had no armor-piercing property whatsoever, and whether it threw stones or bombs, so long as it lacked direct-fire capability, it could hardly be effective against sturdy walls. Lofting bombs over a wall into an enemy city sounded wonderful, but so long as the walls of traditional noble castles could still stand, the form of warfare would not change.

Although Gao Yang's ultimate imaginary enemy was the magic tide and the disasters that accompanied it, he was well aware that before facing the forces of nature, he must first face the secular powers of this world—and given the current continental situation, which was by no means stable, he must first build weapons capable of contending with traditional fortresses.

Otherwise, his Cecil Territory might not live to see the day it fought the magic tide.

"A catapult that can lob crystal bombs is already the most powerful weapon I've ever seen," Philip the knight could not help saying when he heard Gao Yang's words. "Unless... we can build a new weapon as easy to operate as the thermal ray gun, but on a far larger scale."

In a world where gunpowder-propelled weapons had never appeared, it was hard for Gao Yang to explain the concept of "cannon" to others, but he could describe its characteristics—and after hearing his description, everyone fell into thought.

Hetty was the first to break the silence. "The key is to launch the 'shell' in a straight line at extremely high speed. We've already built shells of great power, but we have no way to 'launch' them. Is that what you mean?"

"Exactly. And I've considered repulsion arrays," Gao Yang nodded. "Only repulsion arrays lack burst power—it's hard to impart enough initial velocity to a shell. If we used something like an acceleration track, setting a large number of properly angled repulsion points along the shell's acceleration path for continuous acceleration, that would in theory be feasible. But I've roughly calculated that even with the most efficient repulsion base plates and optimal spacing, this acceleration track would need to be ten-odd meters, even dozens of meters long for the shell to have sufficient lethality and range. Otherwise it's no better than a catapult."

At this point, Kamarel, silent for a long while, suddenly spoke: "Must it be a physical 'shell'?"

Gao Yang's eyebrows rose, his tone expectant. "You have another idea? If you have another idea, so much the better. A physical shell is only one approach—so long as it solves the problem, any approach will do."

"In the Gondor era, we had a weapon called the arcane pulser. It compressed powerful arcane energy into a focusing device, then released it in a directed fashion—enormous power," Kamarel said. "In essence, it was somewhat like a gigantic arcane missile."

Gao Yang could not help frowning. "The arcane pulser... frankly, I know of it. But you should also know that the arcane pulser was driven by the mana of the Deep Blue Mana Well—its ammunition was pure mana crystals, crystals storing the pure mana drawn from the Deep Blue Mana Well. Every shot expended a crystal. That's simply impossible to achieve in this era."

"Yes, the Deep Blue Mana Well—that pure and powerful mana is our greatest constraint," Kamarel admitted. "But today I saw something that may... partially solve this problem."

Everyone present immediately fixed curious eyes on Kamarel, and Amber could not help asking, "What thing?"

Kamarel raised his arm; a mage hand formed and brought over a pile of unremarkable metal devices from nearby.

Gao Yang leaned in to look, and saw a strange belt-like contraption formed from a series of rune base plates linked together, with some rune structures of unclear purpose on the "belt"—structures that were clearly his own private modifications. He was briefly taken aback at the sight, but quickly reacted. "Isn't this the thing Rebecca was wearing back then?"

Amber also stared at Kamarel in surprise. "Wow, so you have a habit of pocketing things too?"