Building a Viking Empire with Modern Industry-Chapter 257: Siege of Wessex (2)

Exactly one mile separated the iron-reinforced gates of the city from the vanguard of the Tang expeditionary force. General Zhao Feng had forcefully reorganized his remaining forty-four thousand imperial troops, strictly ensuring that his pavilions and supply wagons were situated safely beyond the maximum parabolic trajectory of the Iron Empire’s heavy siege mortars.

The Eastern commander had already paid a catastrophic price of six thousand elite soldiers to learn the exact range of industrialized artillery.

Within the high walls of Wessex, the macroeconomic reality of a prolonged siege was beginning to dawn on the local nobility.

Standing near the primary command post on the elevated ramparts, Lord Ealdred nervously twisted a silver ring on his index finger. The elderly Saxon noble looked down at the courtyard...

"Iron Father," Ealdred murmured, "The supply chains cannot endure this stagnation. Our wool exports to the Frankish kingdoms have completely ceased. The harbors are blockaded by their sheer numbers. If we do not force a decisive engagement soon, the regional treasuries will completely empty. We will be forced to melt down our ancestral chalices just to purchase salted fish for the militia."

Ragnar kept his eyes locked on the distant Eastern encampment.

Far out on the plains, the deafening, rhythmic booming of massive war drums signaled the commencement of the second assault.

General Zhao Feng had meticulously restructured his offensive doctrine. He understood that a blind infantry charge was entirely useless against high-explosive fragmentation grenades.

Therefore, he brought forward his most specialized, highly classified alchemical division.

Ten thousand imperial archers marched to the absolute front of the Tang formation. They halted with terrifying precision, forming dense, overlapping blocks of men. They were not carrying standard broadhead arrows.

Bound tightly to the wooden shafts of their projectiles were small, hollowed bamboo tubes packed with a highly volatile mixture of raw saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal.

Zhao Feng’s strategy was brutally simple and completely devastating by ninth-century standards. He intended to utilize a massive, synchronized volley of rocket-propelled incendiaries to completely incinerate the wooden infrastructure of Wessex from a distance.

He would turn the city into a towering inferno, forcing the Iron Empire to abandon their fortified mortar positions or burn alive.

Back on the ramparts, the Wessex lords watched the enemy archers preparing their chemical fuses.

"They intend to burn the storehouses!" Ealdred shrieked, "The granaries will catch fire! We must loose the cavalry! We must interrupt their archer lines before they light those fuses!"

Ragnar completely ignored the hysterical nobleman. The enemy was currently standing outside the effective blast radius of the mortar shells, and sending expensive, Bessemer-clad cavalry into a dense formation of ten thousand archers was a fiscal irresponsibility Ragnar refused to entertain.

Instead, Ragnar simply raised his right hand.

Down in the courtyard, the five hundred men armed with the primitive prototype rifles immediately snapped to attention.

"Open the primary gates!" Ragnar stated.

The iron portcullis shrieked as the mechanized winches pulled it upward. The massiv doors swung outward.

Without a single battle cry, the five hundred riflemen marched in perfect columns directly out of the fortified city and onto the open plains.

Panic immediately seized the Wessex nobility. The ninth-century tactical mindset dictated that whoever abandoned their high stone walls to face a numerically superior enemy on flat ground was committing absolute suicide.

"What in God’s name are they doing?!" Ealdred bellowed, rushing to the edge of the parapet and gripping the stone until his knuckles turned white.

"You are sending five hundred unarmored men against ten thousand archers! They will be slaughtered before they cover half the distance! Iron Father, I demand you call them back! You are throwing away our defenses!"

Ragnar did not offer a single word of justification. The panicked shouting of the Saxon lords simply washed over him like meaningless background noise.

Out on the battlefield, the five hundred riflemen marched exactly four hundred paces away from the city gates. They were now standing entirely exposed in the open field, drastically closing the distance between themselves and the massive Tang archer blocks.

General Zhao Feng observed this bizarre deployment from his distant command tent. He stroked his braided beard, deeply perplexed.

Sending a tiny, unarmored detachment forward without shields was an insult to basic military logistics. He assumed it was a sacrificial vanguard meant to draw their fire.

"Ignite the fuses!" Zhao Feng commanded, refusing to alter his grand strategy for a mere five hundred men.

"Burn them, and burn the city behind them!"

The Tang archers struck their flint sparks. Ten thousand slow-burning chemical fuses began to hiss and spark, filling the enemy ranks with a localized cloud of acrid, sulfurous smoke.

They raised their heavy composite bows, preparing to unleash an apocalyptic wave of rocket-propelled fire.

The riflemen did not flinch. Upon the barked command of their designated foreman, they seamlessly transitioned from a marching column into three perfectly horizontal rows.

The first row dropped to one knee. The second row remained standing. The third row stepped slightly to the right, finding their firing lanes between the shoulders of the men ahead of them.

"Present arms!" the foreman roared.

Five hundred smoothbore iron pipes were instantly leveled directly at the packed ranks of the Tang archers.

The matchlock mechanism was a crude, highly temperamental piece of technology, but its application on this specific battlefield was about to alter the trajectory of human history.

The riflemen lowered their serpentine levers, bringing the glowing, smoldering slow-matches directly into contact with the exposed priming pans.

A deafening thunderclap ripped across the muddy plains. A blinding, impenetrable wall of white smoke instantly engulfed the five hundred riflemen, entirely obscuring them from view.

Five hundred spherical lead balls, propelled by the sudden, violent expansion of ignited corned powder, crossed the battlefield at speeds entirely incomprehensible to the medieval eye. They possessed a kinetic force that rendered boiled leather and hardened silk completely irrelevant.

The lead projectiles slammed directly into the densely packed ranks of the Tang archers just milliseconds before they could release their bowstrings.

The physical trauma of the bullets was devastating, but the secondary chain reaction was entirely apocalyptic...

Dozens of the supersonic lead balls struck the highly volatile bamboo powder tubes strapped to the drawn arrows of the Tang vanguard.

The kinetic friction and localized heat instantly detonated the volatile chemical mixtures before they ever left the bows.

A massive series of localized explosions violently ripped through the eastern formation. Tang soldiers were instantly engulfed in their own alchemical fire as their incendiary payloads detonated directly in their hands.

The shockwaves ignited the fuses of the men standing next to them, creating a horrifying, self-sustaining firestorm that rapidly consumed the entire archery division.

Screams of agony replaced the disciplined silence of the imperial army. The ten thousand archers instantly broke formation, dropping their bows and frantically attempting to smother the alchemical flames that clung to their silk uniforms.

The vanguard completely collapsed, transforming into a burning stampede that crashed backward into their own supporting infantry lines.

Up on the ramparts of Wessex, the local nobility stared at the distant inferno in disbelief. Five hundred men had just broken a division of ten thousand without sustaining a single casualty!