Herald of Steel

Alexander’s promise to make such a lance drew much cheer from the commanders.

While it simultaneously produced a headache for Alexander.

Because what he had promised them was the manufacturing of a sealed hollow tube that was also strong and hard.

And that was hard.

For example, the water pipes at this time were made by hammering a sheet of metal until the sides rolled over one another.

And then to seal the overlapping gap, molten lead would be poured over, chosen as the preferred metal because of its low melting point.

This would produce a relatively good seal, adequate enough to transport water, but Alexander doubted if such a weak sealant would be able to take repeated shocks a typically reusable lance would be expected to withstand.

But that was not to say that a hollow tubed lance was not possible.

In fact, the kind envisioned by Menes did exist in Alexander’s previous life.

The Stahlrohrlanze (German: “steel tube lance”) was a German cavalry weapon that was 3.2 meters (10 ft) long with a 126-millimeter-long (5.0 in) quadrangular point and was introduced in the late 19th century by the Kaiser.

And it served the German military well until that style of fighting went obsolete.

So such a lance could work no doubt.

But the problem was making it.

For that particular lance was made using Industrial Revolution-type technology.

The type where rollers would press the sides of the overlapped sheets together with so much force that the two metal sheets would melt and fuse together into one solid structure.

A type of technology Alexander did not have a fool’s chance of achieving even in the following decades.

But there was another way he could make the hollow tube, albeit a very tiny, unlikely way.

And that was using welding, or the act of using high heat to melt the parts together and allowing them to cool, causing fusion.

Now, welding would be a very hard thing to do, but Alexander imagined if he could get the coke gases, store them safely in something like a cast metal cylinder using a pump similar to what he was thinking about making for the football, then have the dandelion rubber produce sealed gaskets which could be used to safely open and close the cylinder valves, then he might just be able to introduce metal welding to the world.

But even if that was possible, it would be a very long way off, so cavalry would have to make do with using disposable wooden lances.

And for the case of using solid iron lances, a concept that briefly surfaced inside Alexander, a simple math exercise was enough to kick it out into the horizon.

For a typical wooden lance weighed around 8kg, and that was already hard enough for the men to carry.

So, given that iron is about 8 eight-times heavier than wood, that would come to a weight of 64kg.

Utterly ridiculous.

After this melee weapon’s description, ended, Alexander moved on to his last weapon, his masterpiece of sorts, the instant bow.

But instead of describing the bow, Alexander this time decided to perform a demonstration.

He wanted to see the shock and awe on the face of his military commanders.

And so he said, “The next weapon is not something you guys have seen, except for Hemicus. Mainly because I made it in my estate. It is basically another new kind of bow, a kind of a mixture between the regular bow and crossbow.” .

As Alexander was introducing the instant bow to three commanders, a bit distance from them, a small group of twenty men had lined up in two rows of ten, in a kind of checkerboard formation.

A checkerboard formation could be imagined by thinking of a cheeker board where the pieces are placed only in the same color.

In this way, all the pieces will have the adjacent tiles free and they will be able to move in all four directions unhindered.

Whereas if the pieces were to be arranged in every adjacent tile regardless of color, movement would be possible in only one direction with the only exception being the pieces on the edge, which would have two.

And the reason why Alexander arranged the soldiers as such was so that the back-row soldiers were able to fire without hitting those in the front row.

The military commanders waited with bated breath as the five large, slaughtered pigs were set up at a distance of twenty meters as targets, while the bowmen readied their bows.

They have never seen a bow like that, and they also had never seen actual pigs used as live target practice.

In fact, Alexander once had a much darker thought of using live criminals to better showcase his weapons, but quickly threw out the idea because that was just barbaric.

Anyway, back to the current time, all the observers saw the soldiers point their bows at the target, perform a strange action where they slid the wooden panel forward, again slid it backward, and then suddenly an arrow came out.

And this action was instantly repeated, and then again, and then again, as arrow after arrow was magically ejected out of the wooden slot, letting the three commanders become awe-struck at the scenery as it unfolded.

The first ten men let out one arrow every second for five seconds, and when they stopped to reload, the other ten in the back picked up the firing rate.

And by the time the second row had finished emptying their magazine, the first row was ready to go.

So the cycle continued, and for a while, the air was filled with only the dull creak of wooden panels sliding against each other, the sharp twin of the arrow string being released, and the low, thud of arrows sinking into the pig flesh, as the men launched volley after volley of deadly projectiles in a seemingly endless jet stream,

The arrow fire appeared like an approaching solid dense wall of metal and wood to the onlooker as the soldiers fired small, crossbow-like bolts, seemingly capable of mowing down death himself if he stood in the way.

This demonstration lasted only less than a minute, the soldiers emptying their quivers very quickly, after which they quickly turned on their heels to face Alexander and stood silently in attention.

A silence that was observed by the military commanders who appeared to be in shock at the events that had just unfolded in front of them.

They noticed that the target area had been saturated with chips of wood and arrowhead, while the actual targets had been turned into porcupines, red and dark red blood boozing out of the punctured holes and dying the ground below almost black, a fate that the military leaders are sure would have befallen too if they had been there.

If they had not seen it for themselves, they would have never believed that such a devastating scenery was caused by just twenty men in under a minute.

In their experienced eyes, it looked like the work of at least a hundred arches, if not a whole phalanx unit.

And they did not think that even armor and shield would have helped against such mass concentration of arrow fire, feeling that a few lucky arrows would have definitely found their way from even small openings and would have killed them by inducing bleeding and lacerations from grazing the skin at many points.

“Heavens! This is hail fire from the heavens!” Melodias was the first to break out of the trance as he let out a cry of jubilation.

This weapon was so revolutionary that he was almost tearing up.

This was just twenty men and so he could barely imagine what it would look like if it was two hundred men, two thousand.

Melodias felt that with this weapon, there would be no reason for them to use infantry, no reason for them to use cavalry, and no reason for them to use complicated tactics.

Just putting these men behind some cover and letting them do their job would destroy armies many times their size.

And in his such high of surging emotions, the man suddenly kneeled to Alexander and proclaimed, “Ohh, great divine son of Gaia. please witness by conversation to you. I’m convinced Goddess Gaia is the light to our salvation and that you are her blessed son.”

Melodias seemed to have had a profound religious experience right then.

Alexander was taken a bit back at this.

He was expecting a lot of reactions but not this.

And the others were also similar to him.

“Hahaha, welcome, welcome, brother,” Grahtos was the first to react among others and Grahtos being one of Alexander’s earliest converts. made Melodias get up as he embraced his new brother.

And soon this was emulated by Menes and at last by Alexander, who patted him on the arms and said, “Let the goddess guide you.”

With this slight diversion done, Menes then opened his mouth, “Alex…my lord,” In this excitement he committed a faux pas, which he quickly corrected, and then continued, “With this weapon employed in the battlefield, we will be able to suppress entire sections of the enemy. You have already achieved victory against Zanzan’s enemies even before the war has begun. I’m speechless.”

“That’s right. We might not be even needed. Hahaha,” Melodias was in a very cheerful mood.

And Grahtos at last joined, “My lord, there was little need for you to invent all that horse armor and crossbow. This bow makes all of them obsolete, hahaha.”

The military commanders seemed over the moon at this weapon.

A bit too over the moon one might say.