Steel, Explosives, and Spellcasters

Both the Venetians and the Tanilians could clearly feel it—the final moments were approaching.

The grueling siege was a tremendous torment for both attackers and defenders; everyone longed to see the end of it all, yet they also feared the arrival of that final moment.

The battlefield was quiet for the first time, the previous night's unceasing thunder of cannon fire had quieted for the first time. But everyone understood that this brief calm foretold the spilling of more blood.

Grindstone met sword and sparks flew, as the Venetians sharpened their weapons over and over again. The musketeers were also meticulously grinding their lead bullets so they would fit snugly into the barrels of their guns.

Upon the walls, the garrison busied themselves in frantic preparation, tirelessly moving stones, sulfur, bundles of arrows, and barrels of pitch to the ramparts through the night.

By dawn the next day, the Venetians had begun to assemble, and meat rations were distributed directly into the hands of each soldier for the first time.

Every soldier, whether deeply religious or not, knelt to pray and receive blessings before the chaplain accompanying the army. The chaplain moved among them, sprinkling Holy Water over everyone.

The intense bombardment had been going on for eleven days.

In that time, the garrison tried everything they could to reduce the damage to the walls from the cannonballs:

They smeared the external surface of the wall with a mixture of lime and mud to add a protective layer;

They hung wood, bags of wool, and even precious tapestries outside the walls, in hopes of absorbing the impact of the cannonballs;

They piled up earth behind the walls to effectively thicken them;

They worked through the night to repair breaches with wooden palisades, earth, and stones, using barrels filled with earth as makeshift merlons.

However, all these measures were to no avail; the walls were inexorably crumbling to pieces.

The Venetians, taking their cue from the attackers at the siege of Constantinople, improved their artillery tactics, making the impact points form a triangle: first, two horizontal breaches were created about eight or nine meters apart with cannons, then the heaviest artillery delivered the finishing blow.

When a thirty-two-pound iron ball hurtled into the wall, it triggered a chain reaction, creating a larger breach on top of the damage from the previous two shots.

This kind of damage caused the still-connected parts of the wall to endure tension beyond their limits, much like a tree with a V-shaped notch cut into it, collapsing thunderously amidst a terrifying sound of fracturing, as if the once impregnable walls had crumbled.

From the fourth day of the heavy bombardment, the speed of destruction of the walls had already surpassed the repair speed of the garrison. Even if the Tanilians managed to repair the breaches, they couldn't clear the rubble from beneath the walls under Venetian gunfire.

Although piling earth behind the walls slowed down their destruction, once the wall collapsed, the mound behind it would too. The spilling earth and rock formed a gentle slope in front of the breach, which inadvertently aided those attempting to scale the walls.

The Venetian forces also launched incessant probing attacks on various breaches, one of which even managed to plant a battle flag atop the wall, but the attackers at the walls were ultimately driven off by the defending forces that rushed to the site.

The Venetian soldiers were left wringing their hands in frustration, but the senior officers remained unmoved.

Given the tenacious spirit shown by the Tanilian defenders, no one expected that such small-scale attacks would capture Tachi, nor did anyone believe that planting a flag on the walls would collapse the Tanilians' morale.

None of the probing attacks captured the walls, but Antonio and Layton remained unswervingly determined to launch the next one, using this method to whittle away the defenders' spirit, energy, and manpower.

Perhaps it was the cruel spectacle of the stakes execution that had deterred the defenders, or perhaps they simply had no more strength to spare; William Kidd no longer sent men to night-raid the Venetian artillery positions.

On the sixth day of the massive bombardment, two companies that went around to the rear hill successfully intercepted the stream flowing into Tachi from the crater lake, cutting off the defenders' water supply.

By the seventh day of the massive bombardment, the defenders had almost given up on repairing the walls. Venetian soldiers could brazenly walk up to the wall at night, remove the barrels serving as merlons with long poles fitted with iron hooks, and even retrieve the unexploded cannonballs from the wall's base.

The Tanilians... seemed completely exhausted.

On the twelfth day after the massive bombardment, the twenty-eighth day of the siege, and the thirty-ninth day since Winters landed on Red Sulfur Island, the final assault on the last stronghold of the Confederacy on the island was imminent.

After praying, being blessed, and receiving communion, the Venetians with weapons in hand began to move into their assault positions. The Tanilians, who hadn't slept a wink on the walls, first heard a cacophony outside the city and then a deathlike silence.

It was the sign of an impending attack.

Everyone clenched their weapons tightly.

At dawn, with the simultaneous firing of all the cannons as the signal, the Venetians launched an all-out assault on the seven breaches in the walls amid the sound of war drums and bugles.

The terrifying yells of the Venetian charge made every living person inside the city tremble incessantly.
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Under cover of cannon, musket, and crossbow, the Venetians crossed the trench and rushed to the wall breaches with their Siege Ladders.

The soldiers in front climbed the ladders onto the parapet, while those behind worked fervently to dismantle the temporary wooden barricades blocking the breaches.

In the darkness, the two armies clashed in a brutal melee.

As stones were hurled from atop the wall, the ones that directly hit the Venetian soldiers snatched their lives in an instant. The stones that missed their targets bounced off the slope at the base of the wall, striking the Venetians so hard that they spat blood.