Chereads / Crow's Lost Memories / Chapter 87 - C86- The Siege of Anfre (3)

Chapter 87 - C86- The Siege of Anfre (3)

Felyp reached the city of Ilkos, the only seaside city of the Margravate and the city at the center of the Altus navy. He gave orders to get the whole navy ready for war.

"Tch... If only we had some more time..."

Currently, the naval engineers of the Margravate were all fervently working on the first ship that would be powered by a steam engine instead of the conventional ways. However, the steam engine was new and complicated technology. It couldn't be made by uneducated fishermen like a simple sail and needed educated workers to make, let alone design a new one that was strong enough to push a ship.

Since advanced education was mostly given to noble children and commoner mages backed by nobles, employing qualified personnel was both hard and expensive. Even Felyp could only find two engineers to work on the project.

"The construction is also going to take a lot of time, so it is already too late... Educated people are getting more important... Should I just raise myself some? Just note it for later, I am busy currently..."

After noting his plans to open the first commoner school in the Empire to his notebook, he watched the navy get deployed and sailors enter the giant wooden ships. As the all the ships got ready, he also got out of his office and got into the flagship of the Empire, Harquila, a giant battleship with four masts that scraped the sky.

A day and a half later, the Altus navy was confronted by the Eidzunge navy, which was slightly smaller in size. Mages from both sides started their relentless attack at the enemy ships. The Eidzunge flagship was as big as Harquila, but the other ships were mostly smaller, so the Altus navy got daring in their attack.

The difficulty of communication coupled with the weak looking enemy caused the captains of the Altus ships to sometimes attack the enemy on their own without listening to orders. It didn't matter how much Felyp shouted and ordered, the old captains said Felyp was a land general, not an admiral, so he should just let the professionals do their job. This was mostly because most of these captains were associated with another noble family.

Since most of the ships of the enemy fleet had metal armoured tips, they moved slow and only attacked the smaller ships. Seeing this as a weakness, the old captains took risks to win against the navy that was said to be the strongest in the world.

Felyp couldn't stop the old captains from not listening to his orders, since the enemy ships were slowly retreating, and the captains were showing results without obeying orders.

But Felyp still tried to control them. He had a bad feeling, and the Altus navy didn't have the experience and professionalism of the Eidzunge navy, which was still in order even though it was damaged badly. The enemy's refusal to retreat and repair, the stubbornness of not admitting defeat, as if waiting for something was where his worries came.

And his worries weren't wrong. A couple of long hours after the naval battle started, the Eidzunge started attacking the Altus fleet. In just half an hour, over twenty small ships got irrepearable damage, and three large ships had to retreat for repairs, along with Harquila, which almost sank before it retreated back to the Ilkos port.

The Eidzunge attack was nothing like Felyp had ever seen. A few of the small enemy ships started to move at speeds that were impossible. Their sails were reefed, but they were moving faster than ever. Pointing their metal armoured tips at the Altus ships while maneuvering the ships fast enough to dogde the mage attacks, they crashed the Altus ships. Their metallic tips that used to slow them down now made excellent weapons to open big holes on their enemy.

While he used his magic to get rid of an Eidzunge ship that managed to crash into Harquila, he ordered the retreat of the navy. During the retreat, he saw the enemy king, laughing at the Altus navy while sitting on the tallest mast of the Eidzunge flagship. As he watched the enemy king open his palm and create a red glow that turned into some kind of winged monster, he understood what happened.

'A whisperer...'

The enemy king used monsters to accelerate the ships at the last attack. A move that could be countered by tactics if the captains obeyed his orders rather than chase fame.

The next night, back at his office at Ilkos, he wrote a letter to the Emperor with all his rage. The Altus navy was too inexperienced and corrupted to win the battle, and the Empire had to withstand a bit of naval blockades for now which wasn't supposed to be that big of a problem since the Altus relied on land trade more than sea.

But, this defeat at the sea had bigger consequences than expected at first.

The siege of Anfre had slowed down as the siege turned into a battle of attrition. Confident in the superior weapons and bigger population of the Empire, Terry continued the siege. After a while, problems started showing themselves.

The sea blockade of the Eidzunge could be usually ignored as most goods of the Empire came from the neighbours of the Flarum County in the northeast and and from the south, from the Werga Passage.

The passage that was between the Twin Peaks of Aos was now unusable because of what happened to them during the Horde Queen incident. Thus, the trade from the south had to change routes and go around the Werga Mountain Range. The goods that now had to cross borders many times before reaching the Altus Empire got more and more expensive. Including the sulfur that was used to make black powder for bullets.

Unable to find a replacement to sulfur that was easily accessible, Noah had to increase the price of a bullet. The increased cost of bullets increased the cost of the war, which in turn caused an increase in the war taxes that already was weighing down on the people.