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(A/N: Don't forget to give those power stones to Skyrim everyone!)
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What followed was a sensory overload of apocalyptic proportions. A deafening, thunderous roar erupted from the firing line, a series of sharp, overlapping cracks that sounded as though the sky itself was being violently torn in half. A brilliant, blinding flash of orange and yellow fire instantly erupted from the muzzles and the flash pans of the weapons. Almost immediately, a thick, acrid cloud of white sulfurous smoke billowed into the air, rolling across the firing line and completely obscuring the guardsmen from view.
But it was not the sound or the smoke that left the Emperor's entourage entirely speechless, it was the sheer devastating kinetic power of the projectiles.
Even before the smoke could begin to clear, the terrifying sound of shattering steel and pulverized wood echoed back to them. The raw power of these weapons completely surprised everyone present. As the white cloud slowly drifted away on the wind, Lie Fan stepped forward, his sharp eyes narrowing as he inspected the devastation.
The results were beyond catastrophic for the targets. The heavy iron chainmail, designed to effortlessly deflect sword blows and absorb the impact of traditional arrows, had been completely obliterated. The lead balls from the flintlock pistols had effortlessly torn through the thick steel plates, punching perfectly round, jagged holes straight through the impenetrable lamellar armor and burying themselves deep into the solid oak mannequins beneath.
As for the targets hit by the blunderbusses, there was barely anything left to inspect. The flared barrels had unleashed a concentrated, inescapable storm of jagged iron scraps and heavy lead balls that had completely shredded the targets.
The wooden mannequins were virtually pulverized from the chest up, reduced to a horrific spray of splinters and twisted metal. Any tightly packed infantry formation or charging cavalry unit hit by such a blast would be instantaneously turned into a mist of blood and bone.
The raw, unparalleled armor piercing capabilities of these firearms were undeniable. They had just rendered the concept of traditional armor completely obsolete.
However, as the ringing in their ears began to fade, Lie Fan's calculating, deeply pragmatic mind immediately shifted from awe to critical analysis. Once the smoke cleared, the demonstration also glaringly showed the fatal downside of the flintlocks and heavy blunderbusses, its incredibly slow, meticulous reloading time.
Lie Fan watched with a growing, subtle frown as the imperial guardsmen scrambled to prepare for a second volley. It was a painfully cumbersome process.
The soldiers had to hastily pull out their brass powder flasks, carefully measure and pour the volatile black powder down the smoking barrels, pull a piece of thick cloth wadding from their pouches, drop the heavy lead balls into the muzzles, and then frantically unsheathe their long iron ramrods to physically ram the ammunition and wadding down to the breech.
After that, they still had to prime the small external flash pans with finer powder before pulling the hammers back.
In the quiet, controlled environment of a firing range, it took them a grueling twenty seconds to reload.
Lie Fan frowned slightly, his mind instantly simulating the brutal, unforgiving chaos of a real battlefield. He noted that every single second is very important when facing a horde of screaming, bloodthirsty enemies. In the twenty seconds it took to pour the powder, pack the wadding, and ram the iron balls down the barrels, a unit of seasoned enemy cavalry could cross the distance and slaughter the musketeers before they could fire their second volley.
He explicitly put this vital flaw on a strict, mental note. Turning to his side, he looked directly at the four engineering pioneers who had birthed this revolution, Liu Ye, Huang Chengyan, Yue Ying, and Zhuge Liang.
"The destructive capability is absolute. You have given me the power of the gods," Lie Fan praised them, his voice carrying a heavy, undeniable authority. But then, his tone shifted to one of strict imperial command. "However, the reloading process is a fatal liability. In the mud, the rain, and the blood of a live battlefield, a panicked soldier will spill his powder or drop his ramrod, and he will die for it."
"I am making this your absolute top priority," Lie Fan decreed, looking specifically at Yue Ying and Zhuge Liang. "Find a way to combine the powder, the wadding, and the ball into a single, pre measured package. Innovate the breeches. Do whatever it takes so that the reloading time could be much faster in the future. Ideally, I want these weapons to be fired and reloaded as fast as our elite soldiers shooting traditional bows and arrows. If you can achieve that, the Hengyuan Dynasty will never lose a battle until the end of time."
Despite this temporary, entirely solvable flaw, Lie Fan was deeply impressed by what they had achieved. The foundation of modern warfare had been successfully laid.
He immediately ordered for the two weapons, and their highly specific black powder ammos, to be mass produced on a grand, continental scale.
"We will not wait for perfection to begin arming our legions," Lie Fan announced, turning to his scribes who had followed him into the proving grounds. "I am officially decreeing the rapid construction of a massive, brand new industrial factory on the outskirts of Xiapi. It shall be heavily guarded by the aoriole Agents and Elite Imperial Guards, specialized just for safely creating these two firearms and mass producing its volatile ammos. The foundries will burn day and night until every infantryman in my vanguard carries the thunder in his hands."
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away back on the blood soaked, rain swept island of Kyushu, the Hengyuan war machine was accelerating with a terrifying, unstoppable momentum.
With the highly accurate geographical layouts and detailed military informations recently gained from the terrified middle level commanders of Yamato that were captured during the initial beachhead landings, the fog of war had been completely lifted.
The island was no longer a mysterious, treacherous jungle; it was an open chessboard, and the Hengyuan commanders knew exactly where every single enemy piece was hiding.
Zhang Liao, his black armor constantly slick with the island's frequent rains, began to ruthlessly command the massive Hengyuan army to march aggressively to the north.
They did not march blindly. Utilizing the flawless, interconnected strategies and highly sophisticated tactical maneuvers carefully made by the peerless minds of Guo Jia, Xi Zhicai, Sima Yi, and Jia Kui, the Hengyuan forces completely bypassed useless skirmishes.
The native Yamato warlords had desperately attempted to set up deadly ambushes deep within the winding mountain passes and the suffocating, dense bamboo forests, hoping to bleed the invaders with guerrilla tactics. But the Hengyuan strategists simply ignored them. Sima Yi and Guo Jia analyzed the captured maps and realized that a fortress in the mountains meant absolutely nothing if the soldiers inside it had no food.
Instead of marching into the native traps, the Hengyuan army executed brutal, surgical precision strikes. They heavily concentrated their marching columns and siege artillery, taking down only the most important logistical towns, the fertile rice producing valleys, and the most heavily defended, centralized military fortifications to systematically pacify each region.
When a major supply town refused to surrender, Zhang Liao would simply order the Hwachas and the heavy Cannons to level its walls in a matter of hours. Without their granaries and armories, the samurai hiding in the mountains were forced to either starve in the cold or abandon their ambushes to desperately try and retake their burning towns, only to be effortlessly slaughtered by the disciplined, rapid firing crossbowmen waiting in the valleys.
This brilliant, utterly cold blooded strategic maneuvering sped up the army's northern advance massively. They were carving a direct, heavily garrisoned highway of destruction straight through the heart of Kyushu, crushing the native resistance before it could even properly form into a unified army.
Village by village, domain by domain, the island was forcefully brought to its knees. Jia Kui followed right behind the vanguard, aggressively installing imperial magistrates, seizing the local treasuries, and forcing the surviving populace to immediately supply the advancing mainland troops.
The relentless, mechanized march continued unabated until, finally, the endless sea of black and gold Hengyuan banners crested the final hill. The ground shook beneath the boots of hundreds of thousands of men, and the massive invasion force finally arrived right at the towering wooden gates of the capital of Yamato.
The sprawling, ancient city, nestled between the mountains and the sea, was now completely surrounded by an impenetrable ring of iron, siege engines, and the apocalyptic threat of total annihilation.
At the exact same time, as the land army tightened its suffocating noose around the capital, an equally devastating maneuver was taking place on the water.
In the treacherous, narrow, and incredibly volatile ocean strait located between the northern tip of Kyushu and the sprawling, massive island of Honshu, a naval chokehold was perfectly executed. The waters here were infamous for their deadly whirlpools, hidden reefs, and unpredictable, violently shifting currents that had protected the islands from invasion for centuries.
But the Hengyuan navy was not bound by the whims of the wind or the currents.
The legendary, peerless admirals Zhou Yu and Gan Ning had swiftly led hundreds of heavily armed Hengyuan warships, spearheaded by the monstrous, smoke belching vanguard steam ships, directly into the jaws of the strait.
Ignoring the treacherous whirlpools that their steam powered paddlewheels easily powered through, they moved with absolute, predatory precision. They completely blockaded the strait, dropping their massive iron anchors in a perfectly spaced, staggered formation.
They formed an impenetrable, floating wall of steel, thick wood, and hundreds of heavy black powder cannons. The broadsides of the towering galleons were pointed directly across the narrow waters, creating a kill zone that absolutely nothing could survive.
Zhou Yu, standing on the deck of his flagship with his spyglass in hand, and Gan Ning, pacing his own deck with a savage, bloodthirsty grin, strictly patrolled the waters. They did not allow a single boat to pass through.
When a desperate Yamato messenger ship, a fast, sleek wooden vessel, attempted to slip through the blockade under the cover of the morning mist to beg for reinforcements from Honshu, Gan Ning didn't even order his men to fire the cannons. He simply ordered one of the massive steam ships to ram it. The iron plated prow of the Hengyuan vessel cleaved the Yamato ship completely in half, sending its crew into the freezing, churning waters to drown.
This absolute naval supremacy effectively ensured that the terrified Yamato Royal family, and the remaining nobles trapped in the northern capital, could not flee across the water to their allies in Honshu. The trap that Sima Yi and Guo Jia had envisioned was now flawlessly sprung. The islanders were now trapped in their besieged capital, surrounded by a mountain of artillery by land, and an impenetrable wall of cannons by sea, with absolutely nowhere to run.
Inside the heavily guarded, opulent palace of the Yamato capital, the illusion of safety had been utterly pulverized.
The atmosphere within the royal halls was one of absolute, suffocating, apocalyptic doom. For generations, the palace had been a place of serene rock gardens, whispered poetry, and highly refined, delicate political maneuvering. Now, it felt like a tomb waiting to be sealed.
The sheer, terrifying reality of their situation was impossible to ignore. Hearing the deep, deafening war horns of the massive Hengyuan army echoing outside their city walls, a sound that vibrated through the wooden floorboards and shook the delicate paper screens, the entire court was paralyzed with fear.
But it was the arrival of a final, blood soaked scout that completely broke the spirit of the kingdom. The scout fell to his knees in the center of the grand council room, weeping hysterically as he delivered the grim reports that their northern naval escape route, their final, desperate hope for survival, was completely cut off by a fleet of towering, smoke breathing iron ships.
Hearing this, the supreme ruler, the King of Yamato, King Tarashihiko, completely lost his mind.
The terrifying realization that he was going to die, that his ancient dynasty was going to be erased from the earth by a foreign emperor he had never even met, shattered his royal composure into a million jagged pieces.
In a fit of sheer, unadulterated, desperate rage, King Tarashihiko leaped up from his elevated dais. His face was purple, the veins in his neck bulging as a primal scream tore from his throat. He threw everything he had at hand. He grabbed a priceless, ancient celadon pottery vase that had been in his family for three hundred years and hurled it violently across the room, shattering it into dust against a wooden pillar.
He stormed down the steps of his dais like a madman, his royal robes tearing as he grabbed the edge of a heavy, solid oak map table and, with a surge of hysterical strength, flipped it entirely over, sending maps, inkstones, and wooden tokens flying into the faces of his cowering generals.
"Fools! Cowards! Incompetent swine!" King Tarashihiko roared, his voice cracking with sheer hysteria as he grabbed his heavy gold and jade royal cups from a serving tray and began throwing them violently at the walls.
He paced back and forth in front of his kneeling, trembling council, his eyes wide and bloodshot, looking completely unhinged. He viciously and loudly berated his entire assembly of the greatest lords, generals, and admirals the island had ever produced.
"You promised me the mountains would protect us!" King Tarashihiko , kicking a kneeling general in the shoulder, sending the armored man sprawling across the floor. "You promised me that the warriors of Kyushu would bathe their blades in the blood of these mainland invaders! You told me their ships would sink in the straits! And yet, I hear their horns at my very gates! I see their black smoke choking the sky above my own palace!"
He grabbed his senior military advisor by the collar of his silk robes, hauling the terrified old man half-way up from the floor, shaking him violently.
"How does an kingdom fall so fast?!" King Tarashihiko shrieked, tears of absolute rage and terror streaming down his face, his spit flying onto the advisor's face. "How do you let an ancient, sacred kingdom, protected by the gods and the sea, fall in a matter of weeks?! You have failed me! You have failed your ancestors! You have failed Yamato!"
He threw the old man back onto the ground and collapsed to his knees in the center of the ruined council room, his hands tearing at his own hair. The deafening, rhythmic booming of the Hengyuan war drums outside the city walls grew louder, a steady, terrifying heartbeat of industrialized death that promised no mercy, no quarter, and no escape.
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Name: Lie Fan
Title: Founding Emperor Of Hengyuan Dynasty
Age: 36 (203 AD)
Level: 16
Next Level: 462,000
Renown: 2325
Cultivation: Yin Yang Separation (level 11)
SP: 1,121,700
ATTRIBUTE POINTS
STR: 1,010 (+20)
VIT: 659 (+20)
AGI: 653 (+10)
INT: 691
CHR: 98
WIS: 569
WILL: 436
ATR Points: 0