Antonio de Oquendo was swallowed by the sea with a dull splash. Instantly, the cacophony of horror—the agonizing screams of his men and the rhythmic thundering of splintering wood—subsided into a heavy, muffled hum.

Initially, he had embraced the thought of dying as a defeated admiral, but the human heart is a treacherous, fickle thing. The biting chill of the salt water, seeping into his bones and turning his limbs to lead, sparked a primal rebellion within him. He found himself treading water, gasping for air in desperate, frantic strokes.

As he surfaced amidst the churning currents, he witnessed a sea of wretchedness. Scores of his sailors were flailing in the waves, their cries for mercy lost to the wind. Some struggled to cling to the charred remains of their once-great ships, kicking and clawing at floating planks in a futile dance with death.

Oquendo reached for a passing timber, but his fingers slipped. The relentless tides coiled around his arms and legs like iron chains, dragging his exhausted body toward the abyss.

Is this how it ends?

He felt his eyelids grow heavy. The numbing cold of the deep began to calcify his extremities. His vision blurred, and his consciousness drifted away from the world of men.

Yes… it ends here. I die as the admiral who, in the decisive hour of his nation’s collapse, proved nothing but his own utter incompetence.

He knew the battle had been unwinnable from the start, yet he found himself hoping that history might remember he had at least struggled. He did not want to remain a mere footnote—a foolish loser in a dusty chronicle. He wanted to be remembered as a man who had stood against a gargantuan fate and had been broken only because the world itself had changed.

But he knew it was vanity.

Accepting the inevitable, he allowed his eyes to close. The warm, stinging tears leaking from his eyes merged with the cold brine of the Atlantic and vanished.

Just like this…

Splosh!

“…Hmm?”

***

In truth, Infante Ferdinand had been haunted by dark premonitions when he first surrendered. He had spent his first hours of captivity wondering if the enemy would strike off his head or flay him alive as some kind of pagan trophy.

Fortunately, his fears were unfounded. Mansfeld had treated him with the dignity befitting a royal prince and a commanding general. His anxiety had been born of an absolute ignorance regarding the nature of the Continental Covenant.

Yet, a comfortable bed does not lead to a comfortable mind. Ferdinand understood with perfect clarity that his defeat meant the total annihilation of Spanish military power in North America. The few remaining forces capable of defending Nueva España were now rotting in prisons or scattered to the winds.

Mansfeld, of course, was well aware of this strategic vacuum without having to squeeze a single word out of his prisoner. The Covenant leadership had likely sensed the vulnerability long ago. If this continued, Spain’s Atlantic hegemony was finished.

Ferdinand prayed daily. He knelt before a crucifix—wondering why such a thing existed in a supposedly Protestant nation—and begged that his homeland might find a way to weather this storm. He knew his prayers bordered on the impossible, but he had nothing else left to offer.

One afternoon, as he was mentally tallying his third Ave Maria, a sharp knock sounded at his door.

“Your Highness, the General of the Covenant Army requests your presence.”

Ferdinand let out a long, weary sigh, straightened his doublet, and stepped outside. He found Mansfeld standing on the shoreline, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a heavy overcoat and a pipe clenched between his teeth. The mercenary general turned his gaze toward the Prince as he approached.

“Ah, Your Highness. You’ve come.”

“May I ask why I have been summoned?”

Ferdinand couldn’t help but feel a prickle of discomfort around this man. There was a fundamental dissonance between them—a clashing of temperaments that he couldn’t quite name.

Mansfeld merely offered a pleasant, if somewhat arrogant, smile and pointed his pipe toward the horizon. Ferdinand followed the gesture and froze.

Ships.

“The Covenant fleet has arrived,” Mansfeld noted. “I thought I should inform you, as I expect to be departing this place shortly.”

Ferdinand’s heart plummeted. The Covenant fleet was approaching the coast with a majestic, terrifying poise, appearing almost entirely unscathed. Trailing behind them, appearing like battered, shameful ghosts, were several identifiable Spanish vessels.

The implication was a physical blow. “Admiral Antonio de Oquendo… he was defeated?”

It was the result he had feared. If an army could wield such sorcerous weapons on land, there was no telling what horrors they could unleash at sea. But seeing the confirmation was a different matter entirely. Ferdinand bowed his head, his voice a ragged whisper of despair.

“It is over, then… We are to be dismantled by a superior foe. We provoked a war we could not win, and now thousands shall pay the price with their lives. The people of Nueva España… their homes, their futures…”

Mansfeld watched him for a moment before shaking his head with a polite, measured smile. “No, Your Highness. You can set aside your fears of massacres and pillaging. Such things will not happen.”

He puffed on his pipe. “Of course, with a ‘brilliant commander’ like myself at the helm, the Covenant’s victory is inevitable, but—”

I truly cannot stand this man.

“—regardless, even as we march into Mexico City, the atrocities you envision will be avoided.”

“What are you saying?” Ferdinand asked, confused.

Mansfeld’s smile widened. “I am saying the Covenant Army is ‘gentlemanly.’ The Spanish people will not be slaughtered.”

“But… war is war, is it not?” Ferdinand countered. “When one power strikes another, the lives of the occupied are inevitably ground into the dust…”

“What I mean,” Mansfeld interrupted, “is that the ‘duration’ of the struggle will be remarkably short.”

Ferdinand blinked at the bold declaration. Mansfeld crossed his arms, leaning back with an air of absolute certainty. “This war will be over far faster and far more cleanly than you can possibly imagine.”

Ferdinand considered the mercenary for a long moment. “May I accompany you?”

Mansfeld offered a dark, knowing grin—as if he had been anticipating the request from the very beginning. “By all means. Come and be the witness to my greatest achievement.”

***

“A dispatch from the Admiral! We have triumphed—”

“Casualties?” Kim Lee-sang interrupted, his voice sharp.

“The… er… it appears three or four men lost their lives, My Lord.”

A fleet action involving tens of thousands of men and dozens of ships on each side had just concluded. To win such an engagement with only a handful of casualties was a feat bordering on the miraculous. Yet, Lee-sang’s expression darkened. He was clearly displeased by the loss of even a single life.

Victory had been a foregone conclusion. He had prepared too thoroughly for it to be otherwise. But the cost in blood was never acceptable.

“Fortunately, the report from Texas indicates no significant losses on our side,” a minister added.

“Yes,” another chimed in. “The army seized the momentum quickly, and they made every effort to minimize both civilian and enemy casualties. The enemy commander surrendered at the opportune moment…”

“Ensure they maintain that discipline,” Lee-sang commanded. “Pass it on to the front.”

His meaning was absolute: whether friend or foe, minimize the blood. The war had to be ended swiftly. Speed was the only virtue in such a conflict.

***

The Great White Fleet loomed over the horizon of Veracruz.

The Spanish residents, having never seen the likes of such steel monsters, fled in a state of absolute, gibbering panic. The few remaining soldiers in the coastal batteries managed to fire a handful of defiant shells, but upon seeing their shot bounce harmlessly off the white iron, they promptly surrendered.

Veracruz fell in a heartbeat. The local population was paralyzed by shock. One of the most vital ports in the Americas had been taken without a struggle, and no one was coming to save them. The message was unmistakable: Spanish influence in the Gulf and the Caribbean had evaporated. Spain no longer possessed the means to protect its American hegemony.

The entire Viceroyalty was thrown into an uproar. In Mexico City, the Count-Duke of Olivares realized that every defensive contingency he had just discussed with the Viceroy was now nothing more than scrap paper.

“We must stop them!” Olivares roared. “If they reach Mexico City, it is the end of everything!”

The meaningful Spanish population—the people who could be armed and trusted—was almost entirely concentrated in Mexico City. Beyond the capital, there were only scattered ports and plantations. For all intents and purposes, Mexico City was Nueva España. If the capital fell, the Viceroyalty died with it.

And Veracruz was a mere three hundred kilometers from Mexico City. In the context of the vast American wilderness, they were practically neighbors.

Olivares issued frantic orders to hold the line at all costs. The remaining ‘pure-blooded’ Spaniards in the region huddled in their fortresses, arming themselves with trembling hands.

And then, they witnessed a new nightmare.

“What is that? First those iron monsters on wheels, and now… what in God’s name are they doing?”

Bizarre, colorful tractors and bulldozers circled the fortresses, their engines letting out a terrifying mechanical roar. No matter how many times the Covenant commanders called for surrender, the defenders refused. They clung to the desperate belief that their mighty homeland would send reinforcements to crush these ‘barbarians.’

It was a fool’s hope, but they were commoners who couldn’t conceive of a world where the Great Spanish Empire was being dismantled by a pack of upstarts.

Five days passed in this stalemate.

Soldiers peeking over the ramparts noticed the enemy preparing something new: great, deflated sacks of cloth. As the Covenant troops ignited fires and performed a series of strange rituals with the equipment, the Spanish defenders watched in bewilderment.

“What… what is—?”

The massive sacks began to swell. They grew until they were gargantuan, lifting the wicker baskets attached to their bases and—to the horror of the onlookers—ascending into the sky.

The Spanish had no concept of the physics involved. They only knew that an unidentified object was invading the heavens, a domain that had belonged only to birds since the dawn of time.

Initially, the phantom crafts hovered at head-height, but they slowly rose above the fortress walls, eventually looming hundreds of feet over the heads of the defenders. As the soldiers stared upward, swallowing hard against a rising tide of dread, a commander tried to rally them.

“Stay focused! With patriotism and faith, we can defeat these devil-backed—”

Thud!

Something plummeted from the sky.

Heavy stones and iron shells began to rain down. One struck the ramparts, shattering a section of the wall; another punched through the roof of an abandoned house. A massive boulder embedded itself in the cobblestones of the street, leaving a deep, jagged crater.

The impossible was happening. A few soldiers tried to fire their muskets at the sky, but the balls fell hopelessly short of the soaring vessels.

As the population was consumed by a suffocating fear, a new rain began to fall.

Flutter. Flutter.

Thousands of slips of paper descended like snow. Soldiers and civilians scrambled to read them. They were written in perfect Spanish, bearing a single, chilling sentence:

‘SURRENDER!’

No one could find the words to respond. They could only dwell on the one fact that was now blindingly clear.

They could have dropped shells instead of paper.

If those crafts had rained down boulders or incendiaries instead of flyers, the interior of the fortress would already be a charred graveyard.

They didn’t know the word ‘Hot Air Balloon.’ But they knew one thing with absolute certainty: they could not win.

A fortress that should have taken five months to breach fell in five days. It was a result that satisfied even Kim Lee-sang.