Herald of Steel

Alexander's search for stone ammunition led his men to raid places like temples, the town square, and even the lord's manor and unilaterally stripped them of all the stones they were worth.

But even these were hardly enough to sate Alexander's ravenous appetite.

His need for projectiles was so vast that one had to see it to believe it.

The roughly 30 catapults he had were capable of launching around two projectiles a minute, or an insane 3,600 shots per hour!

And assuming each shot was 20 kg in weight, this was 72 tons or around 12 elephants!

This was for only one hour, not a day.

To get that, you would have to multiply the number with the average hours- 8, giving you 576 tons or 100 elephants per day.

No matter how many villages were raided, there was no way, they could produce nearly 600 tons of stone, even if everything there had been made of stone, rather than mostly earth and timber.

In fact, not even the world's largest quarry could do this.

Of course, Alexander would never fire these catapults at their maximum rate for the whole day. That would have been insane.

The people operating them would long have had their arms drop off from sheer exhaustion and the strings operating the catapults would likely long before that.

In fact, such a prolonged burst of fire would not have been even possible in modern times.

Even the country with the largest amount of artillery- the Soviet Union, which had huge artillery barrages before a major offensive only used them for half an hour to at most one and a half hours to soften up enemy strong points.

And that was an industrial nation producing millions of shells per month.

Typically a modern artillery used ten to twenty shells a day, and even that was when the fighting in the frontlines was heavy.

So Alexander's attack on the wall was really perhaps a few hundred shots a day, averaging to a single catapult firing once or twice in an hour.

The firing mission would either be done by pounding a select stage of the wall constantly using a couple of catapults, each shooting once and then waiting for all the others to finish before firing again.

This would go on for hours, with the crew operating them and the catapults used changing after a few hours, the latter being done to decrease the wear on the ropes operating the machine.

In this way, by keeping the weapons firing periodically nonstop, it helped to keep the defenders on edge and slowly wear them down.

The problem was such wearing down took time, months of time.

So sometimes a different tactic was used.

Here, the entire stock for the day would be shot out as quickly as possible, possibly within an hour, as a way to shock and awe the defenders by killing some of them or trying to exploit a crack in the walls.

The idea for the latter was to deny the defenders any chance to try to repair the damaged walls while expanding the wound.

It was a tactical doctrine proposed by Alexander and it involved first opening a shallow crack that did not seem dangerous and hence was not worth the hassle of repairing for the defenders.

Only for them to be suddenly exploited by a heavy concentrated firepower out of nowhere that caused the entire section to suddenly collapse.

The strategy's efficacy was still in the testing phase, but hey, in the absence of a coherent plan, anything that was organized was better.

Given the developing circumstances, Alexander tried his best to collect as much ammunition as he could and reduced the firing rate to the bare minimum that was needed to keep damaging the walls without letting it 'heal itself between turns', i.e.- the efforts of the masons working tirelessly up in the walls.

And to do this, Alexander even allowed the firing of a lot of what he would call 'subpar ' munitions, which were a lot of the stones gathered from the village.

Almost as much as half of the gathered projectiles from there were considered unsuitable to be used as missiles due to them being either too small, cut, and shaped too weirdly making their aerodynamic path too erratic, or simply too light to make launching worth the effort.

However, throwing something was better than nothing and so Alexander let the men make do with whatever they do.

However, even such a sluggish pace soon proved too straining on Alexander's supplies.

Thus after a few days, it became standard practice for the attackers to shoot whatever ammo they had in the morning and then sneakily approach the walls at night to retrieve them.

These 'retrievers' were not Alexander's men, they were Metztil's.

For the siege, Alexander had cleverly divided the labor between the two parties, his experienced men who had the expertise would use the 'sophisticated' catapults, while the simple Helvati would go fetch the thrown ammo.

Of course, he put the thing much more nicely to Metztil, and the prideful tribal chief seeing that his men were not doing anything to contribute to the siege but eating and sleeping like sloths, quickly agreed.

For him this battle was as much about winning as it was about earning glory and honor while his men were also very eager to show their worth to these outsiders, to show off their courage.

As a gift for their enthusiasm, Alexander would offer these 'naked' men some of his spare armor and shield, hoping that the bronze cuirass, the metal chainmail, and the much larger and heavier shield would protect them from all the dangers of approaching the wall.

And it was good that Alexander gifted the collectors good, heavy armor because it did not take long for the defenders to catch sight of these intruders.

A group of men sulking around dead at night in the middle of winter with lit torches was after all like a lighthouse.

Then as a response, the Heeats too began to place small scale ambushes, shooting arrows and raining rocks down below in an attempt to get back as their enemies for all the misery they caused during the daying.

Because these men were virtually defenseless then, as they had no answer to the catapults.

Their bows could not really damage these siege machines, while the catapults the Margraves had lacked the range even when placed atop the wall to give it extra reach.

The one prototype that was capable of hitting the attackers, the one that was taken from Alexander as a war trophy, was kept in the back as study material.

So suddenly the collection of stones became a deadly and deathly game of tag at night, as the Helvati had to try and find all kinds of creative ways of approaching the wall without getting shot, while the defenders up top had to try and foil the disguises.

The wind, at last, shifted to Alexander's favor because since it was night, the chronic lack of visibility made such skirmishes launched by the defenders hardly ever successful.

Also, after a whole day of guarding the walls, these defenders hardly had the energy once again to wait at night in the dead of winter looking for an elusive enemy who might come whenever they pleased.

Sometimes, if it was too cold, Alexander would even postpone the attack, thus making those watchmen go without sleep for an entire day.

In this way, the attackers slowly began to get the edge over the defenders.

However, even with this modest success, Alexander found the speed of progress too low.

He found that there was no possible way he was going to break through the wall any time soon.

He would at least need a few months, two in the most optimistic sense.

But he was not willing to stay here for so long.

It had already been nearly five months since he came here and he intended to be in Zanzan, by the end of the sixth, travel time included.

Hence unable to wait any longer, he turned to Metztil with a cruel proposal.

With a sunny grin, Alexander chimed,

"Chief Metztil, it seems our enemy is too cowardly to meet us in the field. And cracking the hole he has hidden himself in is proving to be a very tedious affair. Problem is my quartermaster says we might not have enough grain to last until the end.

So why don't you and your men take a long around the countryside? Help us gather some of it from the people!"

This was Alexander not so euphemistically giving Metztil permission to raid and plunder the nearby Sybarians.

And Metztil's eyes instantly lit up with joy hearing this

"Heh heh, indeed, indeed Lord Alexander. Sometimes to catch a rat by its tail, you need to set fire to its home,"

His voice sounded unusually excited.

So without further ado, Alexander set about 5,000 of these rabid natives into the surroundings, with the single task of causing as much destruction as possible.

Within a week they produced results, as the entire province of Caira began to burn, and soon messages began to flock to Miss Linda from various nobles, begging her for help.

Yes, this was Alexander's way of forcing a battle.

Let us say no to piracy! Don't take part in a crime! Don't patronize thieves!

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