Herald of Steel

Chapter 695 The Siege of Thesalie (Part-2)

Regarding the creation of the crossbow, its inception marked the advancement of Tibias's metallurgy by at least a few hundred years. 

This is because before that, most blacksmiths had no incentive to work with iron beyond a few very specific applications, and mostly contented themselves with bronze working.

But this time, with the influx of capital and will from the ruling class above, the blacksmiths finally got the environment to work with iron and figure out various different forging techniques.

Techniques they might have figured out in at least a few hundred years.

And they all had Alexander to thank for that.

Now, though the weapons they had created were very inferior versions of Alexander, and provisions of these among the city garrison very, very sparsely due to its cost and difficulty in manufacturing, they still appeared in the fight, wielded by a very few, very well trained defenders. 

And its appearance did cause a physiological effect, causing the opposing Zanzan soldiers to curse out loud when they finally saw what they were being shot at with.

"Thieves"

"Scoundrel!"

"Swindlers!"

All such and many more colorful words were used to describe them as Alexander's men rightfully accused Tibias of intellectual theft, while each risking tempo to try and break the other.

Now, the Zanzan crossbowmen and Tibian archers were not the only ones who were duking it out in the battlefield. 

There were the scorpions shooting huge darts trying to skewer the defenders too.

While the newly developed catapults also tried to score a hit on them.

But that was not their main purpose.

No, for their main task was to target the towers built along the walls, which had numerous arrow loops in them.

These arrow loops were basically slots cut into the wall from where defenders could shoot at the exposed enemy, while the chances of the enemy retaliating through that narrow gap was basically nil.

And Alexander wanted to try and neutralize them as otherwise, these towers would give the Tibians overlapping areas of fire, allowing them to concentrate their firepower on anyone trying to approach the walls from all three sides.

Hence he tasked the catapults with destroying these towers by trying to collapse the upper parts.

That part was much weaker than the walls themselves as it was hollow inside and Alexander hoped by punching a hole in one side, the whole thing would collapse on its own weight. 

And to do exactly so Alexander went all out, issuing his artillerymen not round stones as ammunition, but the much denser cast iron balls!

He had at first thought of using lead balls which was denser, regardless of the huge costs involved.

After all, he did not have a lead blast furnace like he had for iron.

But that consideration had long gone out the window as Alexander was willing to bankrupt himself if it meant getting the city. 

But before he went through with it, he quickly found the flaw in his thinking.

And that was though lead was much denser than iron, it was much softer too.

So upon impact, the ball would deform and absorb some of the kinetic energy itself, rather than transferring everything to the wall and causing it to break down.

So when that was taken into consideration, shooting cast iron balls made the most sense.

Thus that was what Alexander used, setting ten catapults each against the two closest towers and ordering his men to hammer away at them till they broke.

And within just one week of continuous fighting the men made quite a bit of headway in that front, as the outer surface on both towers had been completely chipped away to reveal the inner wooden and stone structure.

It seemed these towers' days were numbered, for along some points there were even holes giving one a clear view of the insides.

Those twenty kilogram 'shells' were no joke.

And those inside the towers had clearly felt the strikes, as those ten catapults combined were able to hit them nearly every single minute of the day for weeks on end.

  *Thud* *Thud* *Thud* Thud*

At first this noise meant nothing to them.

Then after a few days, it started to get annoying, as if the constant low droning irritated them.

And over the last few days, the incessant noise felt like it was giving the men a splitting headache, as they felt simply unable to withstand that cursed sound.

The noise and the ever present vibration caused by the strikes felt like an omnipresent phantom residing inside the men's heads, and they even started having dreams where they would be tormented by this sound, tossing and turning restlessly in their bed.

The men were clearly suffering from shell shock, and any modern military would have regularly rotated them out to mitigate the effects.

But clearly such doctrines did not exist and so the men were left to fend for themselves.

'Just what is the enemy using to hit us so hard!' Hence they asked among themselves, feeling it could not be stone as stone did not sound so 'heavy' and 'dense'.

And the answer could be found just at the feet of the towers, which by now were inundated with thousands and thousands of rock solid lumps of iron.

A collection that seemed to be increasing every day as Alexander's weapons would pound away at the towers from sunrise to sundown, the amount of ammunition available to them seemingly endless.

Alexander would later calculate that each of his catapults ate through almost 2 tons of iron every day at their peak.

Or a total of 40 tons when all the catapults were counted.

This was a ridiculous amount in every sense of the word.

For instance, Alexander only produced 30 tons of iron every day.

And if he did not have his blast furnace, it would have cost Alexander tens of millions of ropals per day just for this.

So it was only with Alexander's current circumstance that he was able to employ this strategy and it seemed to be delivering results, given the towers seemed to be on their last legs.

Now these torsion catapults did not only strike the towers of course.

Some were also targeted toward the walls too.

Particularly Alexander instructed the artillerymen to try and hit the battlements and crenulations and destroy them so that the wall defenders could not hide behind them.

These catapults though were not supplied with iron balls, but instead, they used the more conventional rocks and stones to try and do damage.

This was because given the nature of the target, most volleys were guaranteed to miss and shoot past the walls, landing inside the city.

Meaning if Alexander used iron balls, he would be just gifting many of these expensive lumps of high quality steel to his enemy, who could then use them to either make weapons or even just throw them back at the soldiers trying to scale the walls.

Now that would be a tragic way to go, killed by ammunition from one's own side.

Hence the prudent decision.

As the Tibians faced these attacks, it had to be noted that it was not as if they were completely helpless against it.

Because they had catapults of their own.

And though their range failed to match Alexander's, they did not need to.

Because set atop the wall, just like their arrows, the higher elation allowed them to bridge that gap.

Hence as Alexander commenced his attack, the enemy too quickly returned counterfire, thus making both sides engage in perhaps the world's first artillery duel.

But here the Tibians seemed to have a slight advantage.

Because Alexander had very little chance of actually hitting those catapults perched atop the walls, as the artillery crew had trouble even locating them clearly.

While the Tibians at least had a clear view of the enemy's ones.

And though hitting them proved very challenging given the range and the rudimentary design of the weapon, challenging did not mean impossible.

Although each individual shot had a very small, minuscule chance of hitting when they were shot in the huge numbers they were, and from multiple platforms at that, the possibility suddenly became all too real.

And this theoretical possibility did manifest itself on the battlefield, with multiple of Alexander's catapults being hit with the week of fighting, each suffering varying degrees of damage, with a few even being outright destroyed.

A result that quickly caused Alexander to issue a directive that said once the enemy fire started to land within five meters of the weapons, the crew ought to immediately move their siege weapon and change location.

It was reasoned that in that way the enemy would be never able to get a proper range estimate on them or be never able to slowly correct their aim by repeated test fires.

Thus the enemy would have to rely a lot more on luck to hit their target.

And in the following days the order went out, that was exactly what happened, as Alexander's loss drastically decreased, reaching practically zero.

While it also gave rise to a weird sight on the battlefield, which was that each catapult would have a white circle around them, that was as one could guess 5 meters in radius.

Clearly this was done to give an easier visual confirmation of whether the enemy was getting close to hitting them.

It was in such a way that the deadly exchange of arrows and stones continued for a month, and by then the battlefield had drastically changed both in sight and intensity of combat.