*Lucas Jaeger*

“As I was saying,” the commander delivered the bad news to Lucas with a sigh. “The issue with your plan, and those weapons, is that the nature of this city makes it impossible to defend without full support from the army on the front.”

“In the event that the army is unavailable, the outer walls are meant to buy time for the people to flee inward.” Another officer chimed in, “given the area that the wall covers, it can’t do anything else.”

Lucas had not really thought about it originally, but the layout of the city made it virtually impossible to defend. The plan to plant fertilizer bombs in the path of soldiers and ambush them was far more useless than he had realized. Since the city was divided by three walls, and the outer wall was designed to protect the farms that fed the city, it was a gargantuan construct.

Gargantuan to the point of being unmanageable. They had enough people to watch the whole thing, but not enough to defend it against a besieging foe. There was no reason for the enemy to pick a specific point to attack from, and ergo, no way to predict where to plant the bombs. Even if they got lucky, the army could simply walk around the bombs after the first few went off.

Lucas rubbed his head in a futile attempt to assuage the growing headache, his mind briefly distracted by the thought that he would probably kill for coffee at this point. How the hell does anyone manage anything without caffeine?

“Ok,” he said, thinking out loud. “They have to come from somewhere, right? I do not know much about military matters, but I would presume they would gather at a point and then march here, as opposed to all hoping to arrive here at the same time if they came alone?”

“It depends on the situation,” the commander replied. “However, in this situation I would say that is quite likely, yes.”

“Then our only real chance is to ambush them outside the walls.” Lucas said firmly, but saw that everyone around him blanched as the words came out of his mouth.

“Lord Hero,” the commander- whose name Lucas did know at one point, and then promptly forgot, spoke up. “With the difference in our numbers, what you are saying is tantamount to suicide! We should retreat to the second wall and utilize your plan there, where we have the ability to do so!”

Sound advice- from a military perspective. From Lucas’s point of view, surrender was a better option than that though. Having an army march across the farmlands Lucas had only just begun to improve would not just send that whole area back to square one, but likely make it far more work to even get it back to this world’s version of ‘normal’ production. True, he would only lose the portions that the armies moved through at first, but any extended occupation would burn through supplies and damage the city on a scale that Lucas did not want to deal with.

In other words, he had to stop them from breaching the outer wall, the outer wall could not be defended, and thus he had to stop them from reaching the outer wall altogether. To do accomplish this he had a miniscule amount of soldiers, some of which likely hated him for killing their friends during the coup not long ago, and a few improvised explosives that were honestly more scary than damaging to the forces that would be coming against him.

Complicating this was the fact that the city was situated on a plain, there was nothing like a convenient valley or choke point that Lucas could use as a force multiplier. It was just open space as far as the eye could see. Briefly, he considered setting the plain on fire, but he doubted that would really work all that well. Plains could be burned, sure, but these plains lacked the long grasses and shrubs that would actually make that effective. For that matter, the plain made ambush essentially impossible, so the plan he had conceived just a few seconds ago was useless too.

Well then, the only thing left to do was to be an ass, he certainly had time to prepare.

*Lord Charles deVon Antoine*

Charles sighed, wishing he was anywhere else but here. It wasn’t that being in the vanguard of this conflict was dangerous- at least, not for him, but that he had to come to the ass end of nowhere and bother with this border town at all. It was beneath him, and would be beneath his caring if not for orders direct from the royal family. That the city was even called a duchy was laughable, he would be unsurprised if the vanguard alone was able to take the ‘duchy’ before the main force even arrived.

However, Charles mission was not to attack or lay siege, but a simple recon-in-force. He and his fifty men on horseback would simply menace the wall a bit- while staying out of the range of archers, and ride along the wall to see the distribution of soldiers and their reaction. Charles could only chuckle at the new ‘Duke Are’s’ foolishness, most of the forces Charles would see today would be from the main army, and take no part in a political dispute. Well, at least not without an order from even higher up in the royal family, but that was not going to happen- couldn’t in fact, unless they had sent the messengers and convinced the family before their ‘coup’ even began!

“My Lord,” and aide rode up to Charles side. “Shouldn’t we move faster? Surely we are in view of the sentries by now, the men are nervous moving at this pace.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

No, you are nervous, Charles thought to himself and instead said what should have been obvious. “We need to be cautious with our horse’s stamina in case they send their own forces to chase us away. Moving faster than a trot at this point would simply be dangerous.”

Not to mention he was saddle sore. Charles was comfortable on a horse, but weeks of riding for someone more accustomed to a dueling ground was bound to hurt. He kept that to himself though, he was not like the pathetic sycophants that most nobles had devolved into, no he was a warrior and a knight. A few weeks of riding were not going to-

*Lucas Jaeger*

Lucas watched as the lead horseman essentially vanished- unfortunately, the human eye is not that well designed for seeing great distances, and while the point of impact was visible, actually making out the results were somewhat difficult. Around him, the soldiers were once again in awe- though less so than the first time they had seen this demonstrated a week ago.

On the other hand, Lucas felt only bitter relief that his idea had actually worked as intended. He wasn’t a physicist, so working out how to deliver the explosive to the enemy had been a pain in his ass, he had literally torn some of his hair out in frustration! The idea had seemed so simple too!

As a bit of a nerd regarding Greek and Roman history, Lucas was familiar with some of the more interesting applications siege weapons had been used for, and to his delight, the ballista had been invented in this world as well! Thinking of it as a large crossbow would not be entirely wrong, except that some of the larger versions could fire projectiles around twenty six kilograms nearly fifteen hundred feet. And, after a few days of trial and error, plus a little elementary level physics knowledge, Lucas had tripled that.

-At the cost of basically knocking himself out using it.

“Are you alright?” A concerned soldier rushed up as Lucas doubled over, managing not to puke on this shot having learned the hard way not to eat before firing.

“I’ll be fine,” Lucas said, panting and occasionally retching and dry heaving. “It just takes more out of me than I have…”

The principle was simple, in theory anyway. Though it was a struggle, Lucas was able to remember most of the math regarding projectiles, gravity, and flight- probably, actually he was sure he had missed a few things. But fuck it, how the hell would he have known that it would be life or death someday?

Regardless, math is beautiful tyranny. With those equations, one can always arrive at an answer with enough data- but that answer does not care about what you want it to be, it is what it is. Or it was in his world, this world had magic. While Lucas barely understood magic, he did understand science, and so far that seemed to be more relevant to using magic than Julian’s lessons were.

In this case, Lucas had played around with air resistance and lift, allowing the projectile- a barrel of ANFO packed with metal bits, fired from a modified ballista, to fly a whopping four thousand five hundred feet and surprise the force that had thought itself safe. Even now, the survivors were fleeing into the distance- hopefully bringing tales of terror with them.

How had he achieved this? Probably the most inefficent way possible, if Lucas was honest. Actually, he suspected that what he was doing could probably wipe out a city somehow, but he had nothing to back that suspicion up other than it essentially broke physics and that should allow someone to find a way to blow something up.

Lucas had ‘moved’ force.

Newton’s third law, ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.’ An inviolable rule, but one that can apparently be bent and stretched in this world. Essentially, Lucas had changed where the ‘force’ of the air in front of the projectile and part of the ‘force’ on the air traveling above the projectile was going. Magic allowed connections through another dimension, so Lucas had allowed the forward and upward ‘forces’ to remain, while intercepting the others and redirecting them through magic. At least, he was fairly sure that was what he did- if he was honest, he was basically giving a hand wave explanation for what was probably beyond his ability to understand the full import of.

However, Newton had the last laugh, because his law truly was inviolable. The force had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the other end of the magical connection- Lucas. At first glance, he was curious why he had not killed himself. When he had first tried this experiment, the unexpected force on himself took him off guard, and he had to admit that he wasn’t entirely sure why the force didn’t kill him. After all, being hit by the barrel would, but that was probably him missing something basic. The real problem was his projectile vomiting from the sudden vertigo that had come with it.

And fortunately, he actually knew why that was occuring!

Unfortunately, he had to wave away help every time- because he couldn’t do shit about it.

The forces were redirected on to him as a downwards force, as if a heavy weight had fallen on his shoulders, or rather, everywhere on his body at once. Lucas didn’t actually have trouble with the feeling of weight, humans were well designed for handling downward force- no, the issue was the removal of the weight, or more accurately described, pressure, afterwards.

Lucas was suffering from decompression sickness, or the ‘bends’ as it would be known to deep sea divers. Decompression sickness normally arises from breathing air from a tank deep underwater, where it is more highly compressed than air on the surface. As the diver then ascends, if they go too quickly, the pressure will drop dramatically and the gases will ‘outgas,’ causing bubbles to form in- well, everywhere. There are ways around this, using decompression chambers and such, and accidents with those have sometimes resulted in explosive decompression- which in the worst case, literally involves a human being exploding.

However, in this case, Lucas was fairly sure it was arising from ‘isobaric counterdiffusion.’ Or, as he had tried to explain to the people around him, the pressure was not just on himself, but the air he was breathing. This likely affected the gas mixture, somehow, resulting in his vestibular system being shoved over a barrel and fucked.

When that met with confusion and blank stares, Lucas had simplified it too, ‘it makes me dizzy and throw up.’ To be fair, almost no one would have known what he was talking about in his world either.

However, it worked well enough for him to bluff his way into suing for peace, and that was all he needed for the moment. If he made it through this, he wouldn’t need to bluff again.