What was the greatest problem with the Wyvern Knight Corps?
Kayl Leopold believed the answer lay in their weapons.
The Wyvern Knights' greatest strength was their overwhelming mobility. Three-dimensional maneuverability, unshackled from gravity, was a force that could dominate any battlefield.
The problem was that all that three-dimensional maneuvering ultimately ended in close-quarters combat.
The Wyvern Knights had almost no ranged armament.
Some riders preferred a bow over a lance as a matter of personal taste, but firing a bow with human eyes from the back of a wyvern executing three-dimensional maneuvers was far from accurate.
It wasn't as though no one had tried mounting mages on wyverns.
But mages couldn't endure the violent maneuvers, and they couldn't properly weave spells from up there either.
Teaching knights to use magic was equally out of the question.
Magic and aura both drew on the same fundamental force—mana—but the way they manifested was entirely different.
"In the end, the Wyvern Knights' weakness has always been close-quarters combat. All that overwhelming mobility, and they can't even use it."
"Then how do you intend to solve it?"
"Give them ranged weapons."
A wyvern was a fairly massive creature. Body length ranging from 25 to 35 meters—larger than a modern fighter aircraft.
That meant there was plenty of room to mount things on one.
"Something like, say, a cannon."
A 20mm autocannon would fit with room to spare.
On Kayl Leopold's orders, the Design Bureau's engineers set to work developing an airborne variant of the 20mm autocannon.
"First things first—we need to decide where to mount it."
"What about hanging it under the belly? That'd be the easiest to design."
"Easy to design, sure, but if the wyvern dips its head at the wrong moment, it'll shoot itself in the face."
"Then what about mounting it on the saddle so the rider fires it directly?"
"You want them to grab a machine gun with both hands and fire it while executing aerial maneuvers? Even if knights are superhuman, that seems like a stretch."
"Mounting it on the wings entirely... yeah, obviously not."
Opinions flew back and forth inside the Design Bureau after receiving the order.
The 20mm autocannon itself was already an existing system, and given the wyvern's sheer size, miniaturization wasn't even necessary—but finding a suitable mounting location was proving difficult.
A 20mm autocannon was a monster that shredded everything in its path.
Attaching a weapon like that to a living creature whose every movement a human couldn't fully control required a bit of research.
The conclusion they arrived at: mount it beside the wyvern's head.
"Mounting it next to the head seems best. Nothing for the barrel to snag on up there, and the rider can fire it just like the wyvern breathing—intuitive enough that the knights can use it without thinking."
"That makes sense, but... won't the weight on the wyvern's head be too much?"
"That's exactly why we keep the magazine in the body and connect it with a feed system. The gun on the head links to the saddle on the body—that also helps distribute the recoil load."
"We'll also need noise-dampening magic and something like earmuffs to protect the wyverns' hearing. Even if they're tough creatures, an autocannon is not a quiet weapon."
The conclusion was simple.
The engineers were going to have to grind.
About a week later.
"You've finished the new wyvern saddle?"
"Yes, sirs."
The Design Bureau had successfully completed a new saddle mounting two 20mm autocannons.
The new saddle was essentially a steel armor shell fitted over the wyvern's head, neck, and saddle section. The plating was quite thick—necessary to let the wyvern's neck withstand the recoil and vibration of the autocannons.
Red eyes gleamed through the slits of a steel helm, and flanking them on either side were two 20mm autocannons.
"Oh, so this is the new saddle?"
The knights were immediately taken with it.
Humans had always been creatures who yearned for steel.
Everyone romanticized the charge of a full-plate knight clad head to toe in iron.
Even Wyvern Knights—who had sacrificed protection for mobility—couldn't help but stare.
"I'll take it for a ride right now."
The added weight meant reduced maneuverability compared to normal. That much was unavoidable.
But the frustration vanished almost immediately.
When the rider pressed the red button mounted on the saddle grip, the 20mm autocannons on either side of the wyvern's head erupted with a terrifying roar and shredded everything in front of them.
The wyverns loved it too.
The wyvern's instinct, as a creature that had always ruled the skies, was destruction—and the experience of watching everything in their line of sight obliterated was exactly to their taste.
"Ha! This is absolutely perfect. I want to use it in the field right now—anything going on?"
The knights, itching for action, were deployed to pirate suppression.
To men who had spent their entire lives fighting barbarians, pirates and barbarians looked more or less the same.
"Sweep them all out!"
So they pressed the firing button on the saddle grip without a moment's hesitation.
Bwwwwww—!
A low, tearing vibration split the air.
In an instant, countless small geysers erupted across the surface of the sea.
"Gkh—!"
"W-wait! Please—"
The pirates who had already watched their ships sink and were clinging to planks of wood could do nothing.
Weapons designed to break through a knight's thick aura dismembered the pirates in seconds.
One low pass, and every pirate floating on the surface was wiped out entirely.
Where thirty Wyvern Knights had swept through, nothing remained but a sea stained red.
The knights then drew their communication Crystal Orbs and contacted the submarine unit—to deal with the Abyssal Monster Corps approaching unaware of what had just transpired.
"This is Roen, commander of the 23rd Knight Corps. Surface hostiles eliminated. Requesting position of approaching Abyssal Monster Corps."
"U-7 Captain Ethan here. Enemy position on the ship's mana/sonar reads three-three-zero from true north. Estimated range approximately 3 kilometers."
"Confirmed."
The deep sea had never been humanity's domain.
It was a realm ruled only by mages who could control monsters—and no matter how formidable the Wyvern Knights were, they had no way to strike beneath the waves.
Not until a means of anti-submarine warfare anyone could use arrived. Not until the Depth Charge.
The knights flew to the coordinates marked by the submarines.
For men accustomed to forming tight lance-charge formations, maintaining an orderly flight at a set distance was trivially easy.
"Adjust altitude to within 50 meters of the surface! Prepare to drop Depth Charges!"
Flying in formation at a steady speed, the knights released the safety locks on the crates strapped to their wyverns' backs.
The Depth Charges, their timers already set, slid one after another down the rails fitted to the sides of the crates and dropped into the sea.
Half a beat later—
BOOM BOOM BOOM—!
Geysers erupted simultaneously across every point within a 300-meter radius.
Massive creatures on the scale of the Tusoteuthis might have survived it—but smaller monsters like drowned dead and merfolk had no chance of enduring that pressure wave.
Evasive maneuvers?
Against a carpet bombing that obliterated an area rather than a single point, it was nothing but meaningless thrashing.
The successive geysers subsided, and the churned sea gradually went still.
The dead monsters floated to the surface of a sea that had returned to calm.
For pirates who had once ruled these waters, it was a rather miserable end.
***
"Enemy sailing fleet destroyed. Abyssal Monster Corps annihilated. New weapon performance test concluded successfully."
"Good. Then let's go finish the battle."
Approximately 10 kilometers from where the fighting had taken place.
The bridge of a massive warship floating quietly on a calm sea began to stir once more.
If the submarines and Wyvern Knights had handled the underwater threat, the surface fleet's role was the destruction of the Eastern coastline and securing a landing beachhead.
They had run plenty of landing drills up to this point—but that was no reason to pass up a safe live-fire opportunity like this.
"All hands, battle stations!"
The great warship's engines pulsed, and the sea shuddered. The converted merchant vessels refitted as Landing Ships fell into formation behind the warship and cut through the water.
The sight of tens of thousands of tons of steel vessels advancing in line was more than enough to break the pirates' nerve.
"The sailing ships! Where are our sailing ships!"
"Bring up the coastal guns!"
"We'll fire if you come any closer! Stay back!"
The pirates had propped muzzle-loading cannons against the outer walls of the harbor, screaming desperately at the warship drawing steadily nearer.
But the warship came on without a word in reply. As though it intended to simply crush the port itself beneath that enormous hull.
Finally, unable to bear the pressure of the warship's relentless approach, the pirates gave the order to fire.
"Fire—!"
BANG!
Fifty muzzle-loading cannons roared in unison from 600 meters.
Firepower sufficient to blow apart a 5,000-ton wooden ship-of-the-line in a single volley—the kind the Eastern forces were said to operate.
There was only one thing the pirates had failed to account for.
The Dreadnought's armor was on an entirely different level from a medieval wooden warship.
Ting—
The cannonballs, launched with such bravado, bounced harmlessly off hundreds of millimeters of hardened steel plate.
The pirates' faces went pale as they heard the feeble sound—barely even worth calling a ricochet.
***
Ting—
The sound of cannonballs glancing off the forward armor plating stirred the officers on the bridge.
"They actually fired cannons at a regular military vessel?"
I had no intention of cooling the mood.
Instead, I turned to the captain and spoke.
"We received fire. Return it in kind."
The two 305mm main guns at the bow trained on the center of the harbor.
"Fire!"
A thunderous detonation—incomparable to any muzzle-loading cannon—shook the sea.
Two streaks of orange light punched through the harbor's main gate and buried themselves in the center, destroying everything in their path.
Watching the warships land troops through the breach the Dreadnought had made, I felt a certainty settle in.
We were ready. Ready to contest a naval blockade.
A few days later.
"My lord, a communiqué has arrived from the Eastern Duke's residence."
"Thank you, Lucilla."
A document had arrived from the Eastern Duke's residence.
The lengthy contents boiled down to something simple.
"Cease the annexation of the West, or we will impose maritime passage restrictions... is it."
Conflict with the East was now directly ahead.