Chapter Forty-Four: Naval Guns Versus Fortress Guns

Boom, boom, boom! The coastal defense batteries of a large port in the Fornibo region were enduring a relentless baptism of fire. Dwarf soldiers, their faces blackened with soot, bustled back and forth in a frantic state of high activity, locked in a fierce and difficult artillery duel with ten ironclad warships anchored just a few hundred meters away.

Indeed, having steeled his resolve to face the difficulties head-on, Sun Li chose to disregard potential casualties and directly targeted this large port city to facilitate the fastest possible landing. A major port of this scale would allow for the rapid offloading of vast numbers of Song imperial troops, while the pre-existing docks would provide the era's technologically lagging transport ships with a much faster means of unloading supplies. In short, once this major port was captured, the Song army would instantly possess a fully functional logistics base capable of swiftly handling massive quantities of supplies!

While the advantages were numerous, there was only one distinct drawback: ports of this caliber were invariably fortified by the Dwarf Empire with heavy coastal defense batteries and guarded by thousands upon thousands of soldiers!

Determined to eliminate the problem once and for all, Sun Li refused to bow before such trivial difficulties. He issued only a single command: spare no cost, seize the artillery batteries with utmost speed, and prevent the main armies of the Dwarf Empire from coming to the rescue!

"Quickly, load the ammunition!" A dwarf artillery commander barked out orders beside a heavy gun that had just fired its payload. Two dwarf gunners, stripped to the waist to reveal their robust, blocky muscles, heaved a massive shell into the yawning muzzle. This was a large-caliber fortress piece; while its reloading time was somewhat protracted, its firepower was fully comparable to naval artillery. Coupled with the Dwarf Empire's advanced exploding shells, a direct hit on a Song ironclad would inflict catastrophic damage!

"Load complete! Lower the muzzle and take aim!" Maneuvering the colossal fortress gun, several gunners tracked the nearest Song ironclad.

"Fire!" Seeing that the weapon was properly sighted, the dwarf commander gave the decisive order. A soldier hastily thrust a burning fuse into the small vent at the breech of the cannon.

"Boom!" A tremendous explosion rent the air, wrapping the entire battery in a thick cloud of white smoke. In the distance, towering columns of water erupted around one of the Song ironclads.

Realizing that the enemy fortress guns posed a genuine threat to the survival of the ironclads, the commanding admiral of the Fumando naval fleet concentrated his firepower and unleashed several consecutive broadsides directly at the position.

"Reload! Get your sights on them and fire!" the dwarf officer yelled in fury upon seeing that their fortress gun had once again missed its target.

Thanks to the lamentable accuracy of muzzle-loading artillery in this era, the Song ironclads suffered minimal losses under the bombardment of the various coastal defense guns. By comparison, moving warships were far more difficult to hit than fixed artillery emplacements.

This time, the dwarf commander seemed to realize that his battery had successfully drawn the intense hatred of the Song ironclads; rolling up his sleeves, he personally stepped up to take charge of the sighting.

The experienced dwarf commander adjusted the elevation angle just as the opposing ironclads unleashed a synchronized row of shells.

"Fire!!!" the dwarf officer screamed at the top of his lungs. Unfortunately, the adjacent ignition soldier was clearly slower than the enemy's incoming projectiles. Amidst a rolling sequence of shrapnel detonations, the shockwaves sent the dwarf gunners reeling in dizziness. Fortunately, it was not a direct hit, and some managed to retain consciousness!

Seeing stars and half-blinded, the dwarf commander took an unknown length of time to slowly drag himself up from the ground. Surveying the sprawl of fallen dwarf soldiers around him, he stumbled forward to pick up the ignition tool and staggered toward the untouched fortress gun. Across the sprawling battery, he was now the only one still capable of movement—a grim testament to the devastating power of the exploding shells!

Just as a grim smile touched the dwarf commander's lips and he moved to ignite the cannon, another coordinated broadside accurately landed right upon his position. This salvo was markedly more precise than the last. The massive muzzle of the entire fortress gun was blown completely inside out, while the dwarf commander vanished without a trace. On the churned-up earth ravaged by high explosives, only a single arm remained, tightly clutching an unlit fuse...

The concentrated firepower of dozens of guns firing simultaneously from the ironclads was simply more than a single fortress battery could endure!

Under the flexible command of the Fumando naval admiral, the Song navy leveraged its superior number of cannons to systematically root out and destroy each and every threatening fixed battery. After two ironclads were sunk in desperate resistance by the dwarf gunners, every single battery in the port was blasted to smithereens. Not only were the gunners wiped out, but the artillery pieces themselves were reduced to useless shells of scrap copper.

In half a day's time, the Song navy defeated all the coastal defense artillery through superior gunfire. Then, employing overwhelming suppression fire, they drove the port city's garrison troops step-by-step back into the interior of the city. Ultimately, within the effective range of the naval guns, not a single organized formation of the dwarf army remained in sight!

Clack, clack, clack!

Ramps were thrown down by the soldiers onto the stone platforms of the port, and the Song troops carried by the transport vessels finally set foot upon the soil of Fornibo.

"Move, run, keep up! Everyone form up in the open area ahead, make it fast!" Hu Hei and a group of junior officers hurried back and forth along the shoreline, urging and organizing the disembarking troops to fall into formation. The enemy was waiting in the city just a few hundred meters away, and a defense had to be organized immediately.

Meanwhile, the ironclads under Fumando's command were far from idle, continuously extending their firing range to shell the distant city and prevent the enemy from launching a sortie!

However, the Song generals had clearly underestimated the fighting resolve of the dwarf army. No sooner had the Song soldiers begun their landing than troops were swiftly mobilized within the city to mount an immediate counterattack.

Because of his outstanding performance as the vanguard commander earlier, Hu Hei had been assigned as the commander of the landing vanguard force. True to his bold and fierce nature, Hu Hei led the charge himself, stepping off the very first infantry boat to personally direct the defense against the enemy's initial wave.

To Hu Hei's astonishment, the dwarf soldiers—who had only just been driven back by his side's artillery moments before—surged out of the city just as the Song landing troops had managed to assemble barely enough men for a single infantry regiment and clumsily formed a few ragged squares.

Braving the dense shrapnel shells fired by the ironclads, these valiant dwarf soldiers charged heroically toward the Song troops on the shoreline, who heavily outnumbered them. The commanders of the dwarf army knew all too well that once they closed into hand-to-hand combat with the Song soldiers, the naval guns of the ironclads would have to cease their heavy bombardments to avoid friendly fire, and the battle would undoubtedly tilt in favor of the dwarves!

It was Hu Hei's first time witnessing the attire of the dwarf soldiers, and they appeared to be dressed quite differently from the human armies he had encountered before.

Although these dwarf soldiers were also charging with flintlock rifles equipped with socket bayonets, every single one of them was surprisingly clad in full plate armor complete with steel helmets!

Hu Hei stared ahead at the thousands of dwarf soldiers, outfitted like ancient heavy infantry, who were pumping their short legs and running forward at a frequency that far surpassed human stride rates. At that moment, only a single thought echoed in his mind:

What the hell, with all that iron strapped to their bodies, how on earth do these dwarves still have the stamina to run this fast!