The sky was overcast, and the sea was blood-red!
Mofford clung tightly to the mast, his face filled with terror as whale sharks and great white sharks—drawn by the stench of blood—prowled across the sea's surface, fighting over severed limbs and shattered remains.
When he saw the familiar head of his family's knight, Corison, bobbing up and down in the waves before being swallowed whole by a hunting shark's gaping maw, he felt as though he had fallen straight into the Seventh Hell!
What plunged him into even deeper despair was this—his flagship, the Tidehead Isle Sea Serpent, had been struck from over a thousand meters away by two massive ballista bolts, each comparable to a dragon-slaying arbalest. The bolts pierced straight through both the bow and stern compartments.
Endless seawater poured in, and the Sea Serpent's waterline rose steadily.
"Surrender! Raise the signal flags, now!" Mofford screamed himself hoarse at the escort knights not far away. "Order our fleet to surrender immediately!"
"Send out all signals! Tell Tarth's warships to stop attacking—we surrender!"
"It's useless…" the escort knight said with a tear-streaked face. "My lord, the entire allied fleet has been split apart! None of the distress signals are getting a response!"
"Whoosh—!"
Another long ballista bolt shot through the air. Fortunately, this one missed the ship.
Foul blood sprayed everywhere! White brain matter splattered and dripped!
Unfortunately, the bolt blew apart the young knight's head. The escort knight's headless corpse fell from the deck into the sea below.
"Ah—!"
Mofford jolted awake from the nightmare, screaming. He stared blankly around the tattered tent, thick with a foul stench, and for a long time he couldn't come back to his senses.
West of Morninglight Commercial Street, the terrain sloped steadily downward. Tarth Island's largest freshwater river—the Linyin River—flowed from east to west, becoming increasingly torrential after passing through several perilous gorges.
Downstream along the Linyin River, Zhinao selected the largest plain river-bend pasture on the island and expanded it into a military camp capable of housing fifty thousand men.
"Woo—! Woo—! Woo—!"
Just as the sun crested the horizon, loud and urgent horn calls echoed across the entire plain.
In the prisoner camp beside the pasture, more than eight thousand sailors from the Royal Fleet and Dragonstone Fleet were jolted awake.
"Damn it! What the hell are they making all that noise for?!"
Also awakened, Mofford Velaryon cursed as he rushed out of his tent. Shoving aside the sailors blocking his way, he hurried to the wooden wall of the prisoner camp and peered out through a gap as thick as an arm.
Davos Seaworth and Salladhor Saan turned back just in time to see the disheveled Mofford squeeze his way forward through the crowd—no trace remained of the handsome, proud, aristocratic bearing he'd had before being captured.
Davos cried out in shock, "Seven Gods above, Earl Mofford! What's happened? How dare House Tarth treat you like this?!"
In his eyes, Mofford Velaryon was the Earl of Tidehead Isle, kin of House Targaryen—far nobler than House Tarth!
Did House Tarth really dare treat a captured noble so harshly, unafraid of condemnation from every noble house in the Seven Kingdoms?
Mofford's expression was dazed, as though the title Earl Mofford belonged to someone from a distant past.
When he finally snapped back to reality, he cursed viciously, "Don't talk to me about those lowly mongrels who've betrayed noble honor!"
He hadn't even seen the Evenstar. Like all the commoners, he had been forcibly sent to labor reform. No matter how he identified himself or protested, it was completely useless.
Clearly, those overseeing him already knew his identity, and House Tarth had long known that a noble of his rank was among the prisoners—yet they hadn't followed the customary practice of giving him special treatment and fine living.
"Which labor unit are you in, my lord?" Salladhor Saan leaned over to ask. He was a mercenary from the Summer Isles and a close friend of the Onion Knight, Davos Seaworth.
Struck by sheer misfortune, his fleet had merely followed Tidehead Isle and the Royal Fleet southward, only to be captured as well.
Likewise, after countless appeals and protests that led nowhere, he had no choice but to accept his fate for now, leading his crew in labor reform at the shipyard.
"The cement works!"
Pain twisted across Mofford's face.
His long, bright golden hair—so beloved by countless noble ladies—had been forcibly shaved off because it interfered with work.
Seven Gods, why was House Tarth's Evenstar so utterly evil?!
"I'm on the road-paving crew. Every day I have to carry—ah—Seven Gods above—!"
Davos Seaworth had just started to complain when he glimpsed something utterly unbelievable through the gap in the wooden wall.
Beyond the drill ground and pasture, in front of the opposite camp gate, a two-meter-tall wall of steel suddenly appeared—moving.
Under the sunlight, the steel wall reflected a blinding glare as it steadily advanced toward them.
"Look! What is that—?!"
"A city wall! A moving city wall!"
"Seven Gods—those are shields! Such huge shields—steel—steel shields!"
"..."
The prisoner camp instantly erupted into chaos. Every face showed either terror or utter disbelief.
"Quick, stack up! Form a human ladder!" Salladhor shouted at once. "They're definitely making a big move!"
They had only been captured a short time ago, and their authority still held. With the help of their former subordinates, they quickly climbed up the thorn-covered wooden wall.
"This—!"
The moment the three of them saw the scene across the way, they froze in shock.
Spears stood like a forest!
Blades flashed, shields gleamed!
Battle banners splitting sun and moon billowed like clouds, blotting out the sky!
Four thousand-man spear regiments and two thousand-man sword-and-shield regiments formed a terrifying formation that seemed capable of crushing everything in its path.
From the camp behind the main formation, three archer regiments carrying longbows and a flail infantry regiment marched out in an endless stream.
As far as the eye could see, every single soldier was clad in full-body silver steel armor. To the three men, it looked like a vast silver ocean rolling forward in waves.
"Look—there are—there are two thousand-man knight orders as well!"
Their eyes were immediately drawn to the knight regiments sweeping in from both flanks—tall warhorses, iron hooves, heavy armor—like two even more ferocious torrents grinding across the muddy drill ground.
"Hah—!"
The loud, urgent horn calls continued to echo across the plain. What nearly tore their eardrums apart was the unrestrained battle roar surging from the spear and sword-and-shield formations.
"Boom—!"
Perhaps because the steel shields were simply too heavy, even though every shield bearer was built like a small giant, they still had to plant their shields on the ground every hundred steps and rest for two sand-timers before continuing their advance.
When the shields struck the earth, the ground shook as if mountains were trembling!
The wooden wall quivered with the vibration, and the three nearly fell. Strangely enough, the same thought arose in all their minds at once:
"In a frontal engagement, any army facing several rounds of this kind of intimidation would probably collapse!"
"The last unit moving in looks like light infantry from the Unsullied Legion," Davos Seaworth said, gripping the wooden wall, his calves trembling violently.
"Heh—nearly twenty thousand well-trained soldiers, all superbly equipped!"
Mofford's eyes bulged so wide they looked ready to pop out as he cursed aloud, "Has that eight-legged spider's brain been blown away by the wind?!"
Salladhor turned back to his two fellow sufferers, took several deep breaths, and announced loudly, "Mm—gentlemen, later on I'll be applying to swear allegiance to House Tarth."
Below the wall, all the prisoners showed signs of wavering as well.
When Tarth Island's navy ambushed the Royal Fleet, they had only revealed their extreme-range catapults and ballistae, along with close-combat weapons like boarding poles and wildfire.
Coupled with their strange and innovative tactics, they had used just over fifty warships to defeat more than ninety Royal Fleet ships within half a day, capturing sixty vessels that surrendered.
But Tarth's army—was simply invincible!
He could easily imagine that the two thousand-man infantry regiments at the rear, guarding a hundred four-wheeled wagons, were definitely the long-range assault units operating catapults, dragon-slaying arbalests, and other massive siege weapons.
"Salladhor, you—"
"Don't try to persuade me yet. What I want to remind you of is this—Tarth Island has only been developing for a little over three years! And have you seen a single slave anywhere on the island? What that represents—I don't need to explain it, do I?"
"Pff—!"
As his words fell, Mofford seemed to envision an unimaginably terrifying future. He spat out a mouthful of old blood that flew three meters before he collapsed from the wooden wall into the crowd below.
Davos's eyes dimmed. His body swayed as he turned back to look at the many prisoners who were likewise wavering. Gritting his teeth, he said, "I—I'll go with you!"
Everything that happened in the prisoner camp was already within Garidun's expectations. Using overwhelming military might to intimidate and subdue these prisoners was one of his key objectives in fully displaying that might.
The steelworks lay close to the military camp. Six ten-meter-tall dark-red brick blast furnaces stood on both sides of the Linyin River.
Ten days earlier, the steelworkers had stopped adding materials to the furnaces. By now, the entire furnaces had cooled down to ambient temperature.
"Just refining ten thousand tons of iron has caused such massive damage to the island's ecology!"
Garidun led many knights from the Ministry of War, Kennedy—the chairman of the Tarth Chamber of Commerce—and the steelworks supervisor as they climbed the barren hills around the plant.
This area had once been a vast stretch of lush green forest, home to countless animals living at ease among the trees. Now it was desolate and jagged, with nothing but rugged stone in sight.
This world had no industrial energy sources like coal. Charcoal was the only substitute, and felling beautiful forests was the most helpless choice.
Even though the blast-furnace smelting technology provided by Zhinao was equivalent to early twentieth-century methods from Garidun's previous life—about two hundred years ahead of this world—
—and even after every possible improvement adapted to this world's backward technology, the six furnaces together produced only a bit over ten tons of iron per day. It had taken nearly three years to finally reach ten thousand tons.
In his previous life, with the same level of technology, a single furnace could easily produce several hundred tons a day—ten thousand tons in a single month.
Now that ten thousand tons had been completed, he immediately shut the furnaces down!
Only after he took the Stepstone Islands would he consider reopening the steelworks.
Of the iron already produced, five thousand tons had been used for military equipment, forged into "patterned steel" using water-powered hammers along the Linyin River—that is, the legendary Damascus steel used to make weapons.
One thousand tons were used for tools of production such as farm implements and axes, while four thousand tons were stored as reserves.
As for special products, nearly a hundred tons of lighter, tougher, high-hardness alloy steel would continue to undergo forging, to be used for ship rams or experimental new weapons.
"Grandfather, Koda—the restoration of the forests is in your hands!"
Garidun took a single step and leapt five meters into the air, landing atop a massive boulder on the mountain peak. From there, he gazed at the river-bend military camp below, where the formations were gradually taking shape.
Below the boulder, a dozen people halted, faces filled with reverence. One elderly and one younger official stepped forward, bowed, and acknowledged the order.
The original Tarth militia had been a semi-professional force. Their armor, their weapons—including those of the knight orders and Tarth's three fleets—had all been forged from nothing by these twelve thousand men.
Now the steelworks were closed, and more than eight thousand captured sailors had been assigned as labor-reform workers to replace them.
The Ministry of War's original plan happened to link up perfectly at this moment.
...
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(End Chapter)