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1229 Words
Matt reran his modification simulations and gave a conservative estimate. “Five, if we’re unlucky. Ten is when I’d be really careful about firing them. After that, they’ll turn into bombs if mana is poured through them.”
“I’ll send you two of them. Don’t worry about the siege equipment. The shielding can last a while. You need to take out the formation pillars that are going to be set up to lock down real space. The smaller the circumference they have, the cheaper the mana cost. If you let them mostly set up and then break it, we can force them to dig it all up and relocate. That will buy us more time. The more time we have the more we can funnel reinforcements, the better our chances of defending are.”
There was a pause and he thought Juni was done, but the man added, “Please don’t waste the cannons. They are f*****g expensive. But if you can stall for a while, it will be worth it.”
Matt failed to find a flaw in that reasoning and signed off the command channel.
Not five minutes later, two people ran up to Matt with a wooden crate between them, carried on poles.
By their sweating faces and trembling muscles, they were carrying quite the load. After Matt identified himself, they scurried away. He pried open the crate and found that it was spatially expanded. Inside, a singular mana cannon and its disassembled stand were nestled in straw.
Matt needed to activate [Mage’s Retreat] to lift the heavy metal tube out of the crate by himself. Conor, seeing him struggling, quickly moved to help. Carefully, they set it down and assembled the stand. Once it was all put together, he carefully inspected the runes on the weapon.
Or at least, he tried to. It was far, far more complicated than anything else he had ever seen. There was no way that this Tier 6 cannon was made by anyone less than Tier 15. Matt knew without a doubt that even Kelley couldn’t create runes this small or interlocked.
The runes were like twisted braids of rope the size of a human hair, and they crisscrossed the entire length of the barrel. It didn’t help that obscuring runes were also placed throughout the rear of the cannon, where the mana conversion happened. Thankfully, he didn’t need to affect those runes.
His target was the barrel.
Normally, the barrel simply focused the mana in whatever spell was used. The propulsion was all handled at the base of the cannon, where the spell was generated. He didn’t need to, or want to risk modifying those runes. What he intended to do was empower the spell throughout the entire length of the cannon.
It wasn’t a new strategy, but it was rarely done, as it increased the mana cost by tenfold and reduced the life span of a cannon. It would go from being able to sustain thousands of shots to a few dozen. It was a textbook example of what not to do with sensitive equipment.
Matt was only willing to do it because the enemy was outside of cannon and ballista range. The Tier 6 trebuchets had a greater range than their defensive equipment, but that was to be expected. Their effectiveness was pretty much limited to walls and battering them down. They were mostly useless against small and mobile targets.
With his AIs help, Matt carved runes into the free spaces between the braids of runes that lined the weapon. He was fairly confident that he hadn’t messed anything up, but his clumsy work was far worse than what it could have been. Each of his runes were crammed into the space between formation lines, and more than one had bled over. If the change wasn’t a simple, singular, empowerment rune, he would have never been able to get this to work.
The empower rune would just add more mana to the attack spell as it traveled down the barrel. Which, in theory, should increase the range, since the spell could travel farther before it dissipated. As he was carving, he also realized that he only knew the Tier 5 version of the empower rune. It only made everything worse, as the Tier 5 rune was a mismatch for the rest of the runes and material.
A second team of men brought up the second cannon, but he only made the modifications then stored it back into its crate. He was essentially going to be the only one able to fire this thing, and not just because of the mana cost. That could be made up for with more mana stones.
He was much more worried about the likelihood of the cannon exploding, and [Cracked Phantom Armor] had a pretty good shot at resisting the worst case scenario.
Half an hour later, Matt and his party watched the first column go up. It was a fifteen-foot tall metal structure that was sunk into the ground. There was a slight glow as it was placed upright, and it felt like the air became more restrictive. He almost felt like the air was resisting his movements.
When each subsequent pillar went up, the pressure increased as they locked down real space.
Matt was watching as the readout from the teleporter showed the mana cost for each teleport increase. When it was getting to the point that teleportation was becoming unstable, he charged the cannon and readied it to fire.
It took nearly three and a half minutes and 15,000 mana, but the cannon drank it all in and started to glow. As the glow spread up the barrel, he winced.
There shouldn’t be that much wasted mana to make the metal glow like that.
Having already aimed the cannon in the general direction of the pillar they were targeting, Matt fed mana to his AI. There was no way he was going to trust himself to fire at a target he could barely see, especially with a weapon this unstable. He wasn’t Tara; he didn’t have a Talent for these things.
He made minute corrections to the aiming equipment in the cannon as his AI registered everything in his spiritual sense. Air temperature, air density, and wind speed and direction at the top of the city wall. Angle and elevation, the rotation of the planet, and their latitude were calculated over the course of a minute.
Matt made the corrections that his AI indicated, and then waited for the conditions to line up.
Liz called out to him as he seemed frozen with his hand hovering over the firing rune. “Everything okay?”
“Just waiting for the perfect moment.”
As the wind slowed, his AI flashed green once the parameters lined up, and he sent mana into the fire function.
A [Mana Bolt] the size of a horse raced out of the cannon in a gentle arc, and into the base of the space locking tower.
It seemed almost gentle as the light blue mass of mana lashed out from atop the city’s walls.
That image only lasted until it landed.
The explosion from the overcharged [Mana Bolt] was so large, it blew down the nearby copse of trees as the impact released its stored energy.
I hope the army was ready for that one.
- Writer
