Several days had already passed since the battle officially commenced.
“…Anyone actually born in the Americas, raise your hand and speak up.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Does anyone know what the hell that monster is?!”
“E-Excuse me, sir.”
“Speak.”
“From what I could see, that monster appeared to be some sort of machine, Your Excellency. It certainly didn’t look like a living creature…”
“I already know that, you idiot!”
SLAM!
“Do you honestly expect me to believe those savage Native Americans built something like that?! Or the English pirates?! No, that’s impossible! We need to know who built it, how they built it, and what its bloody weaknesses are!”
Juan del Águila y Arellano, the Supreme Commander of the Spanish expeditionary force, still couldn’t erase the terrifying image of that mechanical monstrosity from his mind.
It was something entirely covered in jagged spikes, looking exactly like a grotesque deep-sea predator.
It was something significantly larger than a grown man, forged entirely of solid metal.
And that something sprinted across the battlefield faster than a warhorse. No matter how desperately they tried to capture or disable ‘that thing,’ it was completely impossible to pin down.
It was undeniably massive, leaving deep, crushing trenches in the earth wherever it moved, yet simultaneously, it possessed a bizarre, horrifying agility.
As a direct result of that single, terrifying machine, his massive army of several thousand veterans had been utterly humiliated and toyed with for several days straight. Barely managing to swallow the blinding fury boiling in his gut, Juan del Águila glared fiercely at the distant fortress of San Marcos.
It was supposed to be so incredibly simple. Once that single fortress fell, this entire rebellion would practically be over.
He had even briefly mocked the pathetic officials of New Spain for failing to accomplish such a simple, rudimentary task.
And because he had vaguely sensed that this Florida campaign would likely serve as his final battlefield before retirement, he had even spent time agonizing over how he could most honorably and gloriously conclude this war.
What a foolish, arrogant luxury.
Instead of indulging in such pathetic delusions of grandeur, he should have spent that time agonizing far more intensely. He should have seriously questioned why the massive Viceroyalty of New Spain had failed so spectacularly to suppress a simple slave rebellion in the first place.
…Of course, even that realization came far too late to be of any use now. Shaking his head, Juan del Águila addressed his lieutenants.
“Very well. If absolutely no one knows anything about it, we shall simply proceed with our original plan and expedite the schedule.”
From the very beginning, he shouldn’t have been so blinded by his arrogant greed to swiftly capture the fortress. He should have patiently held his ground and waited for ‘those things’ to be fully prepared before officially engaging the enemy.
The Supreme Commander of the Spanish army rapidly regained his cold, tactical rationale.
Fine.
If the enemy possesses bizarre, inexplicable weapons and mechanical monsters fighting alongside them…
We possess iron and bronze.
I will grind that pathetic little fortress into fine dust.
***
“Haaaawn.”
For the first time in what felt like an eternity, the guardsman standing next to Alonso let out a massive, jaw-stretching yawn.
Considering the fact that a desperate, hyper-lethal battle had been raging non-stop for days, they hadn’t exactly possessed the luxury of leisurely yawning.
At least, that had been the case until very recently.
But things had changed drastically over the past few days.
“Do you have any idea what they are preparing over there?” the guard asked, rubbing his eyes.
“…I haven’t the faintest idea,” Alonso replied grimly.
The Spanish soldiers were frantically digging trenches, piling up massive earthworks, and causing an absolute commotion on the coastal hills, yet the defenders couldn’t even begin to fathom their ultimate goal.
The Spanish infantry squares surrounding the highly suspicious construction site were so incredibly dense and tightly packed that it was impossible to see anything past them.
Over the past few days, the enemy had completely abandoned any direct assaults on the fortress walls, focusing entirely on psychological intimidation and establishing absolute dominance over the battlefield.
A small detachment of Spanish troops would occasionally march around the perimeter of the fortress, blaring their war horns in a deafening show of force… before inevitably retreating and merging back into their impenetrable infantry squares.
Because the Spanish were maintaining such an incredibly passive, heavily fortified stance right outside the fortress gates, the defenders were completely stripped of any opportunity to launch a meaningful counterattack.
What the hell? What exactly are they trying to do?!
This frustratingly passive stalemate was especially agonizing for Kim Lee-sang.
For him, blindly charging headfirst into those tightly packed infantry squares was literal suicide. If he recklessly dumped the full momentum of his excavator into a formation that dense, the sheer mass of human bodies would eventually bring the vehicle to a complete halt right in the middle of the enemy camp.
That was precisely why he had previously limited his terrifying hit-and-run tactics to striking the enemy’s rear lines, specifically targeting moments when the Spanish soldiers were scattered or deeply focused on assaulting the fortress walls.
If the enemy managed to effectively surround and pin him down even once, Kim Lee-sang would instantly become their prisoner. And if that happened, it was truly game over for everyone.
Anxious and profoundly unsettled about whatever the Spanish were building on that hill, Kim Lee-sang could do absolutely nothing but aggressively gnaw on his thumbnail in sheer frustration.
Regardless of what they were doing, being forced to helplessly watch from the sidelines without being able to intervene was an incredibly unpleasant feeling.
Kim Lee-sang had repeatedly harassed the perimeter of the Spanish squares and violently chased away the small detachments threatening the fortress, but the core of the Spanish army remained absolutely unshaken.
Just as he suspected, it was glaringly obvious that some incredibly critical, secretive operation was underway inside that tight formation. But because Kim Lee-sang himself couldn’t identify what it was, the suffocating frustration only continued to build.
And then, one day.
“…Huh?”
Something unmistakably massive finally caught his eye.
The impenetrable infantry square was moving.
And in the dead center of that heavily guarded formation, they were carefully escorting a colossal, heavily reinforced wagon pulled by dozens of men.
It was entirely impossible to determine what exactly was resting atop that wagon. The object was completely shrouded beneath a massive, pitch-black tarp.
Kim Lee-sang frantically whipped out his binoculars and even desperately took photos with his smartphone to zoom in on the image, but the vague, bulky silhouette simply wasn’t enough to identify the object.
However, two things were absolutely certain.
As long as the Spanish hadn’t completely abandoned the war, that object was undeniably a weapon. A weapon specifically designed to turn the tide of this siege.
Furthermore, regardless of what kind of weapon it was, it was impossibly, terrifyingly heavy.
Those two pieces of information briefly drifted through the minds of everyone watching from the walls before…
They finally clicked together.
An impossibly heavy weapon, explicitly required for a siege.
Swish!
Cannons.
As the massive black tarps slid off, the colossal metallic beasts gleamed blindingly in the sunlight.
They were siege cannons so unimaginably massive that a single one would have posed an apocalyptic threat, yet two of them were rapidly hauled into position, aiming their muzzles directly at the fortress.
Juan de Mendoza y Luna, the Viceroy of New Spain, had originally commissioned these colossal cannons largely as an extravagant display of his own personal wealth and absolute political power. Absolutely no one could have ever imagined they would actually be deployed in a real, desperate war like this.
Breathing a heavy sigh of relief, Juan del Águila gently stroked the elegant, terrifyingly massive barrel, which was wide enough for a small child to comfortably crawl inside.
The twin behemoths, San Pedro and San Lorenzo, boasted barrels exceeding four meters in length alone.
Forged in the Royal Foundry of Chapultepec in Mexico City under the direct orders of Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Marquis of Montesclaros and Viceroy of New Spain, these devastating bronze siege cannons were absolute, undeniable monsters.
Their overwhelming, impractical size—requiring dozens of draft horses just to slowly drag them across flat terrain—often made people seriously question whether these cannons were genuinely intended for actual combat.
In fact, Juan del Águila himself had spent an agonizing amount of time debating whether it was even worth the logistical nightmare to load these colossal white elephants onto his ships.
However.
“Load the cannons!”
“Loading!”
He would finally see if his agonizing decision had been the correct one.
As the Supreme Commander of the Spanish army, and a battle-hardened veteran who had survived countless brutal campaigns across France, the Netherlands, Milan, Sicily, and Malta, a cold smile spread across his face.
For some reason, he had a very, very good feeling about this.
Soon, a deafening, earth-shattering roar violently shook the very foundations of the world.
Several Spanish soldiers standing too close to the blast collapsed in shock or violently clutched their bleeding ears, screaming in agony.
Peering through the thick, acrid cloud of white gunpowder smoke, he could finally see it.
“…Finally!”
That cursed, infuriatingly impenetrable transparent barrier, and the incredibly frustrating fortress walls holding it up, had been violently blown in half.
Roaring in euphoric triumph, the Spanish soldiers charged toward the gaping breach.
Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Florida ‘Rebel Army’ were brutally crushed, shredded, and violently scattered amidst the torrential spray of blood.
It was a horrifying moment where the distinction between human beings and mangled chunks of meat became entirely blurred.
Simultaneously, the distinction between the once-proud fortress walls and a chaotic pile of rubble vanished entirely.
“W-Weapons! Pick up your weapons!”
They screamed in sheer, absolute despair.
And they desperately fired their muskets into the endless, surging tide of Spanish soldiers swarming up the siege ladders.
This time, absolutely no one was safe.
A horrifying, blood-drenched melee erupted.
***
“…What the hell is that?”
Exactly like a fragile sandcastle effortlessly washed away by a crashing wave, a full third of the San Marcos fortress wall had been completely and utterly obliterated in an instant.
When a few terrified, shell-shocked defenders frantically attempted to flee, the others violently grabbed them by the collars and physically forced them back onto the firing line. Barely managing to maintain their crumbling formation, the desperate soldiers stood atop the mangled corpses of their own comrades and fired their muskets with absolute, blinding madness.
Thanks to the sheer volume of lead tearing through the air, several unlucky Spanish soldiers were struck by the blind crossfire and collapsed into the moat. Yet, there were simply far too many Spanish soldiers remaining.
They numbered well over six thousand men.
The defenders had barely managed to survive the brutal, desperate hand-to-hand combat on the ramparts by heavily relying on their Lexan glass shields and the overwhelming reload speed of their flintlock muskets.
Violently kicking away a few siege ladders, and watching their comrades brutally gunned down in the ensuing crossfire, the rebels were barely, just barely managing to hold back the overwhelming Spanish advance through sheer, desperate willpower.
And.
“…”
Watching the horrific slaughter unfold through my binoculars, I was momentarily struck completely speechless.
If the enemy possessed weapons of that apocalyptic caliber, it was fundamentally impossible for us to win this war. Even if we miraculously managed to hold the line today, absolute despair would inevitably bloom the moment those colossal siege cannons roared to life again.
Bit by bit, inch by agonizing inch, the walls would be brutally chipped away, exposing catastrophic weaknesses. No matter how frantically we reinforced the breaches with wooden palisades or desperately tried to patch the holes with packed earth, there was a hard limit to what we could withstand.
There was absolutely no way we could survive until tomorrow.
That was the undeniable reality.
The moment those colossal monsters officially entered the battlefield, our defeat was fundamentally guaranteed.
I suddenly realized I was grinding my teeth so hard my jaw ached. I was clenching my fists so tightly that the veins in my forearms were bulging violently.
I was furious.
I should have figured out what the hell they were hiding inside that infantry square far earlier.
No, even if I hadn’t figured it out, I should have recklessly charged my excavator headfirst into their formation and smashed whatever they were building before the situation devolved into this apocalyptic nightmare.
If the Spanish were going to such extreme, paranoid lengths to guard that specific spot, it was blatantly obvious something incredibly vital was hidden inside.
I should have… I should have just…
Meaningless, agonizing regrets rapidly blossomed in my mind. Violently shaking my head to physically banish the useless guilt and frustration, I raised my binoculars and peered back into the enemy camp.
Still heavily guarded by their impenetrable infantry square, the colossal siege cannons were already being methodically prepared to unleash hell once more.
It was almost as if the horrifying, bloody assault the Spanish infantry had just launched was nothing more than a casual warm-up.
Yet, the defenders inside the fortress had been forced to sacrifice absolutely every ounce of their strength and countless lives just to barely repel that ‘warm-up.’
The moment those cannons fired again, the game was permanently over.
Florida would inevitably be plunged back into the brutal hell of slavery. Furthermore, the Virginian Agricultural Knight battalions scattered defensively across Florida would be systematically isolated, hunted down, and utterly annihilated one by one.
And if Florida fell completely back into Spanish hands… the Florida colony would no longer serve as a mere defensive buffer for New Spain.
It would become the ultimate staging ground for a massive, full-scale invasion of Virginia.
And our community, boasting a meager population of roughly a hundred thousand people, fundamentally lacked the military capacity to repel such an apocalyptic assault. There was absolutely no way we possessed the means to survive a full-scale invasion orchestrated by the most powerful military empire in contemporary Europe.
The ultimate fate of countless lives hung entirely in the balance right here, right now.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment… and carefully weighed the scales.
I meticulously weighed the absolute worst-case scenario that could result from my reckless actions, against the guaranteed, catastrophic sacrifices that would occur if I did absolutely nothing and we lost this battle.
In the absolute worst-case scenario, I am captured by the Spanish army.
If we lose this battle by doing nothing, tens of thousands of people will be brutally slaughtered and enslaved.
…
…
…
I opened my eyes again.
I have never once believed myself to be a man possessing extraordinary courage or profound moral superiority.
I am nothing more than an incredibly lucky—or perhaps incredibly unlucky—ordinary grape farmer who accidentally plummeted into the 16th century armed with a ridiculous assortment of reality-breaking cheats. Anyone placed in my exact same shoes, possessing the exact same advantages, would act the exact same way.
“Hah… To hell with it. What’s the absolute worst that could happen? Dying?”
Well, that logic only applied to a man destined to live forever, who literally had absolutely nothing to lose.
I completely discarded any lingering hesitation.
For a man explicitly promised eternity, every single form of physical agony is nothing more than a fleeting, momentary discomfort. It is something that will inevitably pass if I simply grit my teeth and endure it for a brief second.
Viewing the world through that lens, saving people from a deadly hurricane, and absolutely everything else I had done up until now, were merely things I did simply because I physically could.
I violently yanked the control levers.
And I never once decelerated, nor did I deviate from my path.
In a perfectly straight line.
I fired myself directly at the target like a massive, steel bullet.
***
“Please, Lord, please… if we can just hold out a little longer…!”
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
Another man died.
He had recklessly charged forward holding only his musket and a shattered Lexan shield, and was inevitably gunned down in a matter of seconds by the relentless crossfire pouring in from every direction.
However, those few, bloody seconds were more than enough. It was just enough time for the other soldiers to frantically stack the remaining Lexan panels and shattered wooden planks to hastily reconstruct a meager defensive barricade.
And then.
KABOOOOM!
The barricade was instantly obliterated.
BANG-BANG-BANG!
More men died.
“G-Get up! Get the hell up! Bring more planks! Hurry!”
They built it again.
It was destroyed again, and they died again, repeating the horrific cycle over and over.
It was profoundly, agonizingly desperate.
A defensive line drawn with the precious blood of human beings was effortlessly, insignificantly trampled and erased in the blink of an eye.
An individual’s entire life, their hopes, their dreams, were violently and meaninglessly concluded by the deafening crack of a few gunshots.
The agonizing cycle of building, dying, and collapsing played out over the span of mere seconds and minutes.
The sheer futility of it all was agonizingly painful for Alonso to watch. His hands completely dyed in dark, sticky crimson, he frantically wrapped bandages and tied splints onto the horrifically wounded men dragged to the rear lines, but he honestly had no idea if any of his desperate actions held any actual meaning anymore.
It felt as though every single person trapped in this fortress was destined to die today.
It felt as though the entire world was about to violently regress back to the hellish era before the rebellion.
Overwhelmed by the crushing, suffocating sorrow of that realization, Alonso couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down his face as he wept uncontrollably.
Covered head-to-toe in the blood of his comrades, Alonso slowly, unsteadily staggered to his feet. He had just realized the horrifically wounded patient he had been frantically bandaging and trying to stop from bleeding out was already dead.
Leaning his violently trembling body heavily against the cold stone of the fortress wall, he slowly trudged up the stone steps. Though the relentless hail of Spanish bullets was undoubtedly still tearing across the ramparts above, he desperately needed to see it for himself.
He needed to see exactly how the battle was unfolding, and exactly how their impending doom was crashing down upon them.
Half-delirious from sheer exhaustion and despair, he finally reached the top of the stairs and cast his gaze out over the fortress walls.
And then.
“…Huh?”
He saw it.
The meticulously organized, impossibly dense infantry squares of the Spanish army.
The colossal, undeniably cursed bronze siege cannons nestled securely within the center of those formations.
And.
VROOOOOOM!
‘His’ chariot, violently smashing straight through the impenetrable Spanish lines like a demonic battering ram.
Something completely, utterly illogical was unfolding before his very eyes.
Something… completely illogical…
…
…
…
Absolute, primal terror bloomed in the eyes of the Spanish soldiers.
***
“T-T-There! The monster is coming! Stop it! Stop it right now!”
“Aaaargh! Fire! Fire at will! Aim directly for the driver!”
“The bullets are bouncing off!”
“Climb on top of it and drag him out if you have to—AAAAARGH!”
It was a literal scene from hell.
Countless men were screaming in sheer, mind-breaking agony as they were brutally crushed and swept beneath my treads. The barbed wire, viciously lined with razor-sharp spikes wrapped around the entire exterior of my excavator, was violently tangling with human skin, torn flesh, and geysers of blood, creating a horrifying, stomach-churning spectacle.
Yet, I continued to charge forward.
BANG!
“Urgh…!”
Just now, a bullet violently punched completely through my chest for the second or third time.
I suppose even the Lexan glass inevitably gets shredded to pieces when hundreds of muskets are firing at it from point-blank range.
CRUNCH!
For the umpteenth time, I violently collided with a cluster of human bodies, sending the brutal shockwave of a horrific traffic accident violently shuddering through my entire frame.
The sickening, thoroughly unpleasant sensation of my spine violently snapping out of alignment and instantly fusing back together jolted my mind completely awake.
Gritting my teeth so hard my jaw ached, I violently yanked the control levers again. Regardless of what—or who—was currently being brutally crushed beneath my heavy tracks, regardless of whether the long-broken windshield wipers could even smear the thick blood obscuring my vision anymore, I slammed the accelerator.
“F-F-Fire!”
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
A bullet violently grazed my temple, turning a chunk of my brain into a bloody, pulverized slurry before it instantaneously regenerated. The muscle fibers in my forearm were completely shredded to ribbons by another bullet, only to instantly knit themselves back together.
My hands, gripping the left and right control levers with a death grip, trembled violently. My arms completely locked up in agonizing rigor mortis, only to forcefully loosen, repeating the horrific cycle endlessly.
I violently rotated the upper carriage of the excavator back and forth over and over again, brutally flinging off the screaming Spanish soldiers desperately clinging to the exterior. Temporarily letting go of the levers, I hefted my heavy chainsaw, violently revving it to physically butcher a Spanish soldier desperately trying to squeeze his way through the shattered Lexan windshield.
In doing so, I became completely, entirely drenched in blood.
Even completely drenched in gore, I never stopped advancing. I vaguely noticed thick, black smoke beginning to billow from somewhere deep within the excavator’s engine block, but I refused to stop.
It’s not like I’m actually going to die.
I am… I…
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
“Ghk…!”
Another bullet violently punched straight through my throat, instantly filling my windpipe with hot, choking blood. Blood pouring steadily from my mouth and dribbling down my chin, I pushed the accelerator to the absolute maximum limit.
And just like that.
“S-S-Stop him!”
“The enemy is heading straight for the cannons!”
I finally reached those horrific, monstrous cannons.
A harsh, frantic beep-beep-beep warning alarm seemed to be blaring from the dashboard somewhere. No, honestly, I was so incredibly exhausted it might have just been the agonizing ringing in my own ears.
It was fine.
It would all be over soon.
“S-S-Stop him from reaching the cannons! Don’t let him—wait, huh? U-Uhhh?”
Idiots.
What exactly was I supposed to do to those colossal, solid bronze cannons with a measly excavator? Was I supposed to magically smash them to pieces with the bucket?
Only after violently plowing through every single human obstacle standing between me and the cannons did I finally change my trajectory for the very first time.
Directly adjacent to the cannons.
“N-N-No! Stop him! Stop him right now! Stop him!”
Directly toward the massive, towering stockpiles of highly explosive black powder.
Pulling a cheap lighter from my pocket with a trembling, blood-slicked hand, I violently kicked the dangling, half-shattered door of the cab wide open. And.
I threw the lighter.
Feeling a sudden spike of anxiety that the tiny spark might not be enough, I violently slammed the smoking, overheating excavator directly into the gunpowder stockpiles for good measure.
And in that final fraction of a second, a fleeting thought crossed my mind.
Wow.
This is going to hurt significantly more than when my body was completely incinerated back in—
***
KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
A colossal, apocalyptic pillar of blinding fire violently erupted into the sky.
The Spanish soldiers, the liberated freemen of Florida, and everyone else on the battlefield could only stare in absolute, paralyzed awe at the catastrophic explosion that had just violently detonated right in the dead center of the Spanish army.
The blinding inferno aggressively swallowed absolutely everything in its path.