The mud of the northern fields sucked at the hooves of Count Boso’s warhorse.

The Frankish commander sat tall in his saddle, his eyes locked on the walls of Calais in the distance.

He raised a hand, signaling the vanguard to halt.

Behind him, twenty thousand exhausted soldiers finally stopped marching.

However, Boso wasn’t looking at his infantry... he slowly turned his horse around, looking back at the center of his marching column.

"Keep moving, you lazy bastards!" General Hugh roared loudly, "Pull! Put your backs into it!"

Thousands of peasants were groaning in agony, their bare feet sliding in the mud.

They were dragging iron chains attached to a wooden cart the size of a small longhouse.

The wheels of the cart were monstrous - nearly thirty feet high, reinforced with iron bands just to keep them from cracking under the immense weight of their cargo.

"General Hugh," Count Boso called out, riding closer to the men. "We are two miles from the Viking walls. They are well out of range for their little repeating toys. This is a good spot for the camp."

"Finally..." Hugh grunted, wiping the sweat from his balding head. "If we had to drag this bronze whore another mile, the wheels would snap."

Thus, the grand Frankish vanguard began to settle.

"Cut the ropes," Count Boso ordered.

Dozens of soldiers scrambled up the cart with daggers... they slashed the ropes, grabbing the edges of the black canvas and pulling with all their might.

What sat underneath the canvas was a bombard.

The barrel alone was nearly twenty feet long... the mouth of the cannon was so impossibly wide that a fully grown man could easily crawl inside it without touching the sides.

What the Franks didn’t fully realize was the absurdity of this machine existing in 870 AD.

In the real timeline, it would take centuries for the Ottoman Empire to forge the Great Bombard, the Dardanelles Gun, to shatter the impregnable walls of Constantinople.

But because Ragnar had introduced explosive black powder and repeating rifles, the timeline had fractured.

The centuries had been dragged forward by more than four hundred years in a bloody arms race.

Emperor Louis didn’t have the advanced industrial foundries of City Titan to make highly accurate steel cannons...

So, the old Emperor had simply ordered his blacksmiths to scale the primitive bronze casting up.

He went bigger, heavier, and completely insane...

"She is a nightmare, isn’t she?" General Hugh laughed deeply, slapping the bronze side of the bombard.

"She is heavy and incredibly slow," Boso muttered, crossing his arms. "What is the tactic, Hugh? We cannot just aim this monster quickly."

"We don’t need to aim it quickly," Hugh smirked. "The Emperor’s orders are highly specific. We build earthen ramps right here. We pack the dirt tight. It will take the men a day and night to build the firing platform and secure the recoil logs... we only need to fire it once."

Boso raised an eyebrow. "Just once?"

"Look at the size of the barrel, damn it," Hugh pointed a finger at the black hole.

Even so, building the dirt platforms was a dangerous task.

For the rest of the day, the Frankish vanguard simply dug.

Thousands of men used shovels, helmets, and bare hands to pile tons of dirt and rock into a sloping hill.

Up on the high stone battlements of Calais.

Bjorn stood still at the edge of the parapet... he was looking through a spyglass.

"Bjorn." Hakon whispered, standing right beside him.

Hakon didn’t have a spyglass, but the bronze cannon was so large it was clearly visible to the naked eye even from two miles away...

"Please tell me that is just a really big log painted bronze..."

Bjorn slowly lowered the spyglass. "It’s very clear that it’s not a log."

"...what in the name of the gods is that thing?" Gurvand, the Breton general, muttered.

Bjorn rubbed his face.

He expected the Franks to roll up standard artillery and try to trade shots with his guns.

"They are digging in," Bjorn stated firmly, "They are spending the day building a dirt ramp to angle the barrel at our main gates."

"Can our wall cannons reach them?" Hakon asked quickly.

"No," Bjorn shook his head slowly. "Our heavy steel cannons are powerful, but that bombard is sitting two miles away. If we shoot at them, our iron balls will just bounce in the mud a hundred yards short of their camp."

"So we just have to sit here like sitting ducks and watch them load it?! Let me take the Breton knights and the repeating riflemen out there. We can charge their camp right now and spike that bronze before they finish the dirt ramp."

"Absolutely not." Bjorn snapped harshly, grabbing Hakon by the front of his tunic. "Look at the fields between us and them, they have twenty thousand spearmen entrenched behind wooden stakes. If we march out there, we lose our height advantage."

"Then what do we do, Bjorn?" Hakon yelled back, pulling away. "...you know as well as I do that no stone wall can stop a boulder that size."

"They are working fast." Hakon muttered. "Look at them. They look like little ants piling up dirt."

Bjorn narrowed his ice-blue eyes. "I see them."

"...we are just going to stand here and watch them?" Hakon asked, "We are just going to politely wait for them to load a boulder the size of a fucking house and smash our walls to dust?"

Bjorn turned sharply on his heel, Hakon blinked in surprise before quickly hurrying after him, closely followed by the Breton general, Gurvand.

"Leif!" Bjorn roared loudly.

A tall man quickly scrambled out from underneath a gun carriage.

Leif was the master artillery engineer of Calais, a man who had spent the last year studying the exact mathematics of Ragnar’s explosive black powder.

"Yes, Lord Bjorn?" Leif saluted.

"I need you to tell me what these steel cannons can handle," Bjorn demanded, pointing a finger at the iron barrel resting on the wall. "Ragnar always said our steel is vastly superior to southern bronze."

"It is, my Lord," Leif nodded. "If they pack too much powder into that giant bombard, the pressure will shatter the barrel and kill everyone standing around it. But our steel? Our cannons can withstand a high amount of internal gunpowder pressure before they even begin to stress."

Even so, Hakon crossed his arms, confused. "That is a lovely blacksmith lesson, Leif, but our guns still cannot reach them."

"Only if we fire the standard heavy iron balls..." Bjorn interrupted.