Does he want to get his hands on the snow powder? Garcia frowned, that stuff has a large power, and its strong enough to be the trump card in a hopeless war and alter the outcome, it absolutely cannot be allowed to spread out.
At the time, she was about to declare her refusal, the other opened his mouth again, “If you grant me this request, I am willing to return to court and serve you. The silver heron family will fully support your ruling over the Kingdom of Eternal Winter.”
This sentence then made Garcia swallow her words. At the time, the Church executed the Queen; they also killed some chief ministers. Here, the Marquis of Bodø has a lot of prestige, if he were to serve as my Prime Minister, all the remaining nobles would follow along. To some degree, it can also make up for the deficient administration and also turn around this awkward situation.
“This request is not too much,” she thought for a while, then after finally coming to a decision she said, “But I cannot put the alchemy powder directly into your hands. When you require it, I will send a special alchemist who will provide you with assistance to blow open the hole.”
…
After the end of the court session, Garcia returned to the back room, where Ryan was already waiting for her with a cup of warmed fruit wine, “Thanks for your trouble, Your Majesty. As expected, those nobles were all taken over by you. In this way, even if we don’t depend on the Wolf King, you can still swallow the entire Kingdom of Eternal Winter slowly.”
“As long as there is no Church,” the Queen said as she shrugged.
The Church, in their act of striping the nobles of their rightful inheritance, had pushed them to her side. Now, with the support of those very people, coupled with the crippling of the Church’s former base of power, it had been very easy for her to gain a foothold in the capital. But if she wanted to control the Kingdom of Eternal Winter, she still had a long way left to go — it was here where the people were influenced by the Church the most. When she’d dispatched her Black Sail Fleet to wipe out the Church’s bases in other major cities, they had continually suffered under the attack of the believers. Therefore, it was crucial to form a coalition with the Wolfsheart Kingdom. Not only so that they could resist the Church together, but also to weaken the influence the Church held over the population by accepting people from Wolfsheart Kingdom.
As for those stubborn civilians, it will be alright if they are just cleanly killed off.
“Oh, by the way, a messenger from the Wolfsheart Kingdom has arrived with a letter for you,” Ryan informed her, as he took an envelope from his pocket, “Because you were dealing with government affairs, I didn’t dare to bother you.”
Garcia opened the envelope, took out the letter, and began to read the letter carefully.
“Is it bad news?”
“The Church has sent out troops once again,” she said in a low voice, “They’ve taken the land route and are heading straight for Wolfsheart City. They’ve already broken through several of the recently set up defensive lines.”
“What?” Ryan started with big eyes at her in disbelieve, then he said, “The Months of Demons will be coming soon, don’t tell me they’ve set out while completely disregarding the New Holy City?”
Showing a frowning expression, Garcia sat back in her desk.
She knew that the Church would never let them go, but she hadn’t expected that the other side would move so fast. If they had just waited with the war until spring next year, her preparation would have been complete. However, the enemy apparently didn’t want to give them any space to breathe — if she just sat idly while the Wolfsheart Kingdom asked for help, and the kingdom got destroyed as a result, it wouldn’t be long before it would be her turn to disappear.
But this also contained an opportunity.
If she could make the Church waste its forces on the city walls of the Wolfsheart City, they would be facing a great disaster when the demonic beasts invaded Hermes at a large scale.
They might have sent out the God’s Punishment Amy, but by now, she also had formidable weapons like the snow powder, the hard to extinguish black river water, the demonic fire powder, as well as Wolfsheart City’s towering city walls. With all this, she would surely be able to consume a large number of their vital forces.
Thinking until here, Garcia commanded, “Pass along my orders, the Black Sail Fleet is to get ready for battle! This year, we will be spending the winter within Wolfsheart City.”
Chapter 303 Preparation for the Air Raid
After going through a week of assembling and testing, Roland and Anna together completed the development of an impact detonator.
Compared to the fuse of the artillery shells, it does not need to withstand high temperature and pressure, and there was also no high-G overload when it left the chamber, so the structure was very simple. However, due to the necessary precise constitution of the firing pin and the spring, the two had to test many variations before they finally succeeded.
The main problem was that no one knew how much elasticity the spring needed, to make sure that it wouldn’t go off it it accidental fell. While they also needed to guarantee that it would always trigger when it was launched normally.
He and Anna only changed the thickness and hardness of the spring a little before testing it once again.
Fortunately, Anna and Lucia had done a lot of the required work in advance. As a result, Roland had more and more high-quality materials available at hand. Ultimately, after a lot of testing they’d chosen to use steel alloy No. 1365, which had a relatively high hardness, but a toughness that was on the lower side. Even if the bomb fell from one meter, it wouldn’t be compressed to the end.
After the selection of an appropriate spring, the rest was easy. Just like the saying: where water flows, a canal would form. Even though Roland had never seen the look of a real detonator before, he could still rely on his work’s experience to come up with a design by himself.
Compared to modern ones it was certainly lacking, but for the current crude big black bombs, this would be enough.
The finished version of the impact detonator was in the form of a cylinder, twelve centimeters long, about five centimeters in diameter, with a spiral pattern on the underside which could be screwed into the opening at the top of the bomb.
The interior looked like a downwards convex groove, while the firing pin shared a similar appearance, so that it could also fit into the groove. In its normal state, the spring would lock the upper part within the indentation, while the striker would land right inside the indentation, only one finger apart from the primer. For the purpose of taking precautions, Roland had also made a hole in the head of the firing pin, so that a bolt could be fixed on top of the ammunition case. Thus, before the bombing, they first had to pull out the bolt, only then could the strike move up and down.
The simulation test was held on a sunny afternoon.
Because this bomb which filled with a padding of gravels instead of black gunpowder, had already reached five times Nightingales weight, Roland decided not to board the hot air balloon, and instead watched the process with an observation mirror from three hundred meters away from the impact location.
Apart from himself, there was also the Commander of the Fist Army Iron Axe and the Chief Knight Carter Lannis, who were here to watch this first test.