A month had passed since the hills of Wessex drank the blood of the eastern vanguard.
Within the walls of City Titan, Ragnar stood before a massive table, examining the latest logistical ledgers.
The imdiate threat of the Tang expeditionary force had been neutralized, their decimated ranks fleeing back to the sea under the cover of darkness. Yet, Ragnar felt no complacency. Victory in a single siege was rely the opening move in a much larger geopolitical equation.
He picked up a piece of chalk, drawing a sharp line through a column of projected casualty figures.
The ironclad defense of Wessex had proven the supremacy of his modern artillery and primitive matchlock rifles. However, Ragnar was a pragmatist.
A sovereign could win a battle with five hundred elite grenadiers, but he could not occupy a continent with them. To hold territory, secure trade routes, and project continuous authority across the fractured kingdoms, the Iron Empire required mass.
He summoned his newly appointed generals, Hakon and Ulf, to the command chambers.
"We require a standing army capable of garrisoning the territories our artillery clears. Every unemployed laborer, every displaced refugee, and every able-bodied man who lacks a trade is to be brought into the fold." Ragnar stated.
Ulf, ever the traditionalist despite his recent education in explosive yields, frowned slightly. "Iron Father, drafting peasants will bloat our supply lines..."
Ragnar t the massive Viking’s gaze with confidence. "We will provide them with a guaranteed caloric intake, a warm uniform, and a steady wage of silver. In exchange, they will surrender their individuality to the Iron Empire."
The recruitnt campaign comnced the following morning. By targeting the unemployed and the destitute, Ragnar eradicated the urban poverty crippling his lower districts and transford a potential social liability into a heavily ard military asset.
Over the course of thirty days, the training camps outside City Titan operated with efficiency.
Fifteen thousand n were assimilated into the newly ford Imperial Army.
While the drilling and basic conditioning were happening on the fields, Ragnar optimized the foundries to arm them. Equipping fifteen thousand n with matchlock rifles was mathematically impossible given his current production bottlenecks for hyper-purified black powder and precision-drilled barrels.
Therefore, Ragnar deduced a logical compromise. He would arm the masses with the pinnacle of dieval technology, mass-produced through modern industrial thods.
He designed a modern iron spear. Unlike the brittle, hand-forged weapons of the local Saxon fyrd, Ragnar’s spears featured heavy, socketed heads stamped from dium-carbon Besser steel.
They were uniform, perfectly balanced, and capable of piercing standard chainmail with a simple thrust. To complent the infantry lines, Ragnar introduced the long English bow. By standardizing the draw weights and utilizing steam-pressured kilns to cure the ash and yew wood at an accelerated rate, his craftsn churned out thousands of lethal, high-tension bows.
Of course, not all fifteen thousand recruits possessed the advanced weaponry. The logistical strain of outfitting an entire army in a single month ant that the rear echelons were still equipped with older, traditional arms.
But the vast majority - the front-line pike squares and the massed archer companies - were ard with factory-grade steel.
After securing the weapons logistics, Ragnar observed the newly ford regints marching in perfect synchronization across the muddy parade grounds.
They were not the elite Viking Grenadiers, but they were 15,000 disciplined n moving to the rhythm of a single drum...
While the Iron Father consolidated his power in the damp, freezing north, the bruised and battered remnants of the eastern dragon limped southward across the churning expanse of the Atlantic.
Aboard the flagship of the Tang fleet, General Zhao Feng stood at the bow, his hands gripping the wooden railing so tightly that his knuckles were white. The journey had been a miserable, humiliating ordeal.
Of the fifty thousand elite shock troops that had confidently sailed to conquer the island of mud and barbarians, only ten thousand remained.
The mory of the slaughter haunted Zhao Feng’s every waking mont.
"General," Lieutenant Gao murmured, stepping cautiously onto the deck. The young officer’s armor was still tarnished from the mud of Wessex.
"We are entering the coastal waters of the Iberian Peninsula. The Ebro River delta is just ahead."
Zhao Feng did not turn around. His gaze remained locked on the distant, sun-baked coastline.
"And the status of the n?"
"Morale is non-existent, sir," Gao admitted.
"We are operating on minimum rations. The wounded are dying of festering infections, and the healthy are terrified of every thunderclap. They believe the northern barbarians have harnessed the wrath of the heavens."
"Gao, we underestimated their technological output. A mistake I will not replicate. We will dock at Zaragoza. Strategist Sun and his fifty thousand n have spent the last month pacifying the northern territories of Al-Andalus. We will integrate our surviving veterans with his fresh forces, resupply our armories, and formulate a new continental strategy."
Zhao Feng’s plan was logically sound. Before departing for the British Isles, he had ordered Strategist Sun to carve a new imperial province out of the fractured, warring kingdoms of northern Spain.
By all calculations, Zaragoza should be firmly under the control of the Tang Dynasty, transford into a heavily fortified forward operating base bustling with eastern logistics and stolen Iberian grain.
As the deep-water Junks slowly navigated the mouth of the river, pushing against the current toward the inland port of Zaragoza, Zhao Feng felt a brief flicker of relief. The familiar sight of the ancient, towering stone walls of the city ca into view.
From the highest towers, the crimson and gold banners of the Tang expeditionary force fluttered proudly in the warm southern wind.
Strategist Sun had succeeded. The city was theirs.
"Signal the fleet to drop anchors!" Lieutenant Gao shouted to the deck crews, a sudden burst of energy returning to his voice.
"Prepare the landing ramps! We are ho, brothers!"
The surviving Tang soldiers crowded the decks of the massive ships, letting out exhausted cheers. The nightmare of the frozen north was behind them. Here, in the sunlit heart of their newly conquered western province, they could finally rest, eat, and hide behind walls that did not explode.
However, as the flagship drifted closer to the primary stone docks, Zhao Feng’s keen military instincts began to scream a warning.
The tone of the city was wrong.
A conquered, occupied city should be a hive of logistical activity. There should have been patrols of Tang halberdiers marching along the seawalls.
here should have been local conscripts hauling crates of supplies, the sound of blacksmiths repairing armor, and the chaotic din of a massive occupying army.
Instead, the docks of Zaragoza were ominously, terrifyingly quiet. The massive wooden cranes used for unloading cargo sat motionless. The warehouses lining the waterfront were shuttered and dark.
"General..." Gao whispered, the cheer instantly dying in his throat as he noticed the unnatural stillness.
"Where are the dockmasters? Where are Strategist Sun’s welcoming parties?"
Zhao Feng narrowed his eyes, tracking the layout of the port. The Tang banners still flew from the highest keep, but smoke was lazily drifting from the lower districts, not the smoke of forge fires, but the thick, black smoke of burning thatch and wood.
"Halt the mooring process!" Zhao Feng barked, spinning toward the helmsman.
"Keep the ships in the deep channel! Do not drop the gangplanks!"
But the order ca too late. The massive inertia of the heavy Junks carried them forward, their reinforced wooden hulls grinding against the stone pylons of the Zaragoza docks. Deckhands, desperate to reach dry land, had already thrown the heavy mooring ropes over the iron cleats, locking the vanguard of the fleet to the shore.
It was in that precise mont, as the first wooden gangplanks slamd down onto the cobblestones, that the silence of the city was violently shattered.
It did not begin with the blast of an artillery shell or the crack of a matchlock rifle. It began with a deep, rhythmic trembling of the earth. The sound grew exponentially, a rising, thunderous drumbeat that vibrated through the stone docks and echoed across the surface of the water.
From the wide, paved avenues leading down to the port, a massive, billowing cloud of dust erupted into the sky.
Zhao Feng stepped forward, his breath catching in his throat.
Bursting from the city streets and pouring onto the expansive waterfront like an unstoppable tidal wave were horsen. Thousands upon thousands of them.
They were not the heavily armored, slow-moving Byzantine Cataphracts, nor were they the primitive, scattered cavalry of the northern Christian kingdoms. These were the elite, unified forces of the Umayyad Emirate. Driven by the existential threat of the Tang invasion, the fractured Arab and Berber factions of Al-Andalus had temporarily ceased their internal squabbling, massing an unprecedented coalition of light and heavy cavalry.
They rode magnificent, selectively bred Arabian warhorses, their hooves striking the cobblestones like a localized earthquake. The riders were clad in shimring chainmail and flowing desert robes, wielding curved Damascus steel scimitars that caught the harsh Iberian sun.
"Archers to the rails!" Lieutenant Gao scread, drawing his own sword as panic instantly consud the Tang fleet.
But the surviving ten thousand Tang soldiers were exhausted, malnourished, and psychologically broken. Their weapons were still stowed below decks, and their formations were entirely dissolved in the chaos of the docking procedure.
Zhao Feng watched in cold, pragmatic horror as the vast sea of Arab horsen rapidly enveloped the docks, completely cutting off any avenue of escape or deploynt. Strategist Sun had indeed taken Zaragoza, but he had clearly failed to hold the surrounding plains. The 50,000 Tang soldiers inside the city were likely trapped within the upper citadel, subjected to a massive counter-siege by the unified might of the Andalusian caliphate.
And now, Zhao Feng’s battered fleet had just moored itself directly into the jaws of an entirely new, heavily ard at grinder. The general drew his blade, listening to the deafening roar of the Arab war cries, realizing that the geopolitics of the western world were far more volatile than the Emperor had ever calculated.
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