Two days had passed since the news of the Frankish army reached the quiet walls of the royal chamber.

For forty-eight straight hours, the industrial heart of City Titan had been pushed to the brink.

Ragnar had been sprinting back and forth across the city.

He went from the heat of the Royal Smithy, directly to the sawdust-covered floors of the master carpenters, and then straight out to the yards where the laborers were hauling tons of raw iron ore.

"...the casting mold is wrong." Ragnar roared, pointing a finger at a wooden frame resting on the dirt floor.

"We will fix it, King Ragnar!" Einar, the burly master blacksmith, yelled back, waving for his apprentices to drag the wooden mold away.

Ragnar let out a long sigh.

Suddenly, a loud groan echoed from a stack of wooden shipping crates resting near the wall of the furnace.

Louis the Stammerer was collapsed on top of the crates.

"Ragnar..." Louis whined, "I cannot feel my legs... I swear to the heavens, my legs are gone."

"You are just soft, Louis." Ragnar chuckled warmly, "You spent your entire childhood eating sweet pastries in a comfy castle in Paris. A little bit of running between the smithy and the carpenters is good for your southern blood."

"A little bit of running?!" Louis gasped, "We have run across this city thirty times in two days."

"You are an engineer of the Iron Kingdom now, my friend." Ragnar grinned, leaning his arms against the wooden crates.

After hearing such words, Louis dropped his complaining.

If Ragnar didn’t pull off this impossible miracle of steel, everyone Louis had grown to care about in City Titan would be entirely slaughtered.

Louis slowly pushed himself up into a sitting position, ignoring the painful burning in his sore calves.

He looked down at the detailed blueprint resting on the crates next to him.

"I still do not understand this drawing, Ragnar," Louis muttered, "You told me to tell the carpenters to build a wooden model of this... this cart-looking thing. But it just looks like an iron box sitting on top of highly completely strange metal belts."

"It is an armored fortress that can move on its own." Ragnar explained.

Ragnar grabbed a piece of charcoal and quickly tapped the top of the drawing. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

"This dome right here on the top?" Ragnar pointed. "That is the turret. The carpenters are carving a wooden mold for it right now so the smiths can cast it in thick steel. I am going to mount a cannon directly inside that dome."

"A cannon on a moving cart?" Louis frowned, confused. "But if the cart is facing forward, how do you shoot the enemies coming from the sides?"

Ragnar smirked, tracing a circle around the dome. "It sits on a iron ring filled with steel ball-bearings.

The cannon can spin and aim in any direction, without the cart ever needing to turn around. You can drive forward while shooting backward."

"There is a highly advanced, heavily pressurized steam engine tucked safely right inside the iron belly," Ragnar declared. "It is protected by thick steel walls. No musket ball can pierce it. No arrow can touch it. The steam pistons will turn those heavy metal tracks, pushing the tank through deep trenches, over stone walls, and through the center of a Frankish shield wall."

"...It just looks like it equals hundreds of knights holding a musket... no... it is better than a thousand knights." Louis whispered.

Ragnar nodded, however, the joy in Louis’s eyes slowly began to fade, replaced by the deeply practical reality of medieval logistics.

The prince slowly looked around the busy Royal Smithy. He saw the blacksmiths struggling to lift just one of the heavy steel plates.

He looked back down at the insane blueprint. "Ragnar... how much steel is required to build just one of these?"

"About thirty tons." Ragnar answered, "Plus the copper for the steam pipes, the brass for the pressure valves, and the iron for the interlocking tracks."

After hearing such words, Louis slumped back down onto the wooden crates, burying his dirty face in his hands.

"We’re finished." Louis groaned, his voice muffled.

"What are you talking about?" Ragnar frowned, "We have enough raw materials to forge the prototype."

"Having the steel isn’t the problem," Louis yelled, he stood up, "Look at them. They are master craftsmen, yes. But casting thirty tons of steel plates, building a steam boiler that doesn’t explode, and assembling a rotating cannon dome... something like that will take months."

Even so, Ragnar didn’t argue. He knew that the Frankish prince was right.

Building something resembling a modern tank by hand with medieval blacksmiths was an extremely slow and laborious process.

Under normal circumstances, it would easily take half a year to build a single working prototype.

Ragnar slowly looked down at the blueprint.

Three weeks... that’s an impossible, even insane, deadline.

"You are right," Ragnar whispered, "If we just use this one single forge... it will certainly take us months."

"Ragnar, you are entirely losing your mind." Louis yelled.

"Why are we rushing into something like this?" Louis asked, pointing to the blueprint. "You’re disrupting our capital to build an iron box in three weeks. We can wait."

"We can wait?" Ragnar asked quietly, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, We can entirely wait!" Louis argued. "We have hundreds of steel cannons mounted on the walls of Burgundy and Brittany." Louis stated firmly, "We have nearly twenty thousand men in the allied army holding the line with King Salomon and your commander."

After hearing such words, Ragnar crossed his arms over his broad chest.

He didn’t interrupt the prince... he actually felt a surge of pride.

"And on top of all that..." Louis entirely finished, "With our ironclad navy, we can block their supply lines. We can easily sail our ships down the coast and bombard their camps from the water even without going to the land. So why are we rushing to build this machine?"

Silence fell, broken only by the flames shooting from the nearby, enormous brick kiln.

Louis stood there, panting heavily, waiting for Ragnar to realize his panic was unfounded.

They have cannons. They have numerical superiority from the Allies. They have the sea and the land... they are clearly safe.

"Hmm? After more than two years, you’re still thinking the same thing?" Ragnar stepped forward slowly. "You are misunderstanding how wars are fought."

"If we just sit behind our walls and wait..." Ragnar explained, "The Emperor, is going to march two his men into our cannons. And you know what will happen? We will shoot them. We will blow thousands of them."

Ragnar slowly looked back at the prince. "But he will not stop, he will march the next ten thousand men over the corpses of the first ten thousand. And then the next ten thousand. He will drown our twenty thousand men in an ocean of Frankish blood."

"Even so..." Louis muttered, "The navy."

"The navy can only control the water," Ragnar stated, "Our ships cannot sail over the dirt. They cannot protect the inland farming villages from being slaughtered by Frankish raiding parties."

"I am not rushing to build this tank because I am terrified of losing the war," Ragnar declared, "I am rushing because I refuse to win a war by standing on top of a mountain of twenty thousand dead friends."

"If we lock ourselves in a grinding war of attrition," Ragnar whispered darkly, looking down at the blueprint, "thousands of brave Breton and Viking soldiers are going to die in the mud. Husbands, fathers, brothers... gone forever."

Ragnar slowly tilted his head, "But..." Ragnar said, "If we push this monster onto the battlefield in three weeks... we shatter their will," Ragnar declared. "When those men see an armored beast breathing black smoke, crushing their muskets under its steel tracks, and ignoring their explosive powder... they will drop their weapons and run."

Louis slowly let out a long, breath. "Alright, you’re essentially betting that just one of them can kill thousands, and that’s obviously impossible."

"That is the spirit." Ragnar laughed loudly.

***

The days passed in preparations for war and trade routes.

The trade route going south was running as expected.

Hakon’s cargo ships sailed back and forth across the choppy channel without a single delay, bringing hauls of raw gold and sending out crates of critical supplies.

All the primitive muskets, the reliable but older models they had mass-produced early on, were now stacked inside the secure armories of Brittany and Burgundy.

Their southern allies were fully armed, ready for the incoming Frankish swarm.

Meanwhile, the repeating rifles were kept locked inside their own armories, reserved for Ragnar’s elite units.

They were not taking any chances with their best weapons falling into the wrong hands.

However, the most drastic change happened right in the industrial heart of City Titan.

The grand smithies had stopped focusing on casting cannons to put on the castle walls.

Every single drop of molten steel, every ounce of burning coal, and every drop of human sweat was poured into one single project.

They managed to do this by running the workers in shifts, keeping the furnaces burning through the day and the night.

"Louis, hold the wrench steady!" Ragnar grunted, he was lying flat on his back underneath a iron chassis, trying to secure a thick bolt.

"I am trying... my fingers are numb." Louis whined loudly, though he didn’t let go of the tool.

Slowly but surely, the royal was starting to actually understand why Ragnar fought so hard to protect his people...