The salty breeze of the English Channel whipped fiercely across the wide docks of Calais.

Bjorn stood with his arms crossed over his mail armor, his ice-blue eyes fixed on the rolling horizon.

Beside him, Hakon was pacing back and forth... they were waiting.

The gray gulls cried loudly overhead, masking the nervous chatter of the soldiers manning the newly reinforced sea walls.

Today wasn’t just another standard supply drop from the north.

It was the arrival of the largest, most heavily armed trade fleet the Iron Kingdom had ever sent south!

"Stop pacing, Hakon." Bjorn grumbled, "You are making my head hurt."

"I will stop pacing when I see my ships, Bjorn." Hakon shot back quickly, "Do you have any idea how much gold is floating on that water right now? If a stray storm swallows that fleet, Ragnar will mount my head on a pike."

Even so, Bjorn couldn’t blame the merchant for his anxiety.

The fate of Calais, and perhaps the entire war on this front, rested on what was packed safely inside those wooden hulls.

Behind them, sitting awkwardly on an overturned wooden crate, was Hakon’s new Frankish assistant, a highly nervous young scholar named Odo.

The boy was clutching a ledger against his chest as if it were a holy relic.

"Read it again, Odo," Hakon ordered, "I need to hear it out loud to calm my nerves."

Odo scrambled to open the book, pushing his round spectacles up his nose. "Y-Yes, Lord Hakon. According to the master manifest sent by the fast-clippers last week... the fleet carries three hundred steel cannons.

Along with them, we are receiving thousands of repeating rifles and enough explosive black powder to entirely level a mountain."

After hearing such words, Bjorn turned away from the sea, looking over the bustling military camp that had swallowed the once-quiet port city of Calais.

"Three thousand infantry holding the line..." Bjorn muttered, "When those crates finally open, we will arm two thousand and four hundred of them with the new repeating rifles. The remaining men will hold the pikes to protect the gunners. And the local militia?"

"Roughly twelve hundred able-bodied men, Lord Bjorn," Odo answered quickly, flipping a crisp page. "They have been training day and night with the wooden dummy models. We are assigning all twelve hundred of the castle militia to strictly man the new cannons on the walls once they are mounted."

Thus, the defensive web of Calais was finally snapping into place...

Under Bjorn’s command, they had become a fortified stronghold of iron and fire, bristling with the deadliest weapons the world had ever seen.

However, having the best weapons and actually knowing where the enemy would strike were two completely different things...

Bjorn walked over to a large table set up near the edge of the docks, unrolling a hand-drawn map of the Frankish coast and the narrow sea dividing them from England.

Hakon followed closely, leaning his hands on the edges of the table and sighing.

"We are prepared for a brutal siege," Bjorn stated firmly, tapping Calais on the parchment map. "But we are blind to Emperor Louis’s actual target... his main army is massive, Hakon. The southern scouts report roughly sixty thousand men mobilizing from the capital."

"Sixty thousand..." Hakon whistled low, shaking his head. "That is a whole lot of angry Franks. But they are not all carrying those new muskets, right?"

"No," Bjorn replied, tracing a line along the border. "Everyone knows they simply do not have the industrial capacity for it. Even ten percent of them won’t have the fire-tubes. Our spies say maybe ten thousand muskets at the absolute most.

The rest is the traditional southern meat grinder... twenty thousand armored knights on horseback, and the remaining thirty thousand are a mix of peasant archers and standard infantry."

"Ten thousand muskets is still ten thousand bullets flying at our walls," Hakon pointed out dryly. "Don’t get cocky just because Ragnar gave you some shiny new toys to play with."

"I am not cocky, damn it," Bjorn snapped, his brow furrowing deeply. "I have all this overwhelming firepower, but where do I point it? Are they marching all sixty thousand men straight here to take Calais? Or are they splitting the force?

Emperor Louis could easily send a second army to pin us down while his main force does something insane."

Hakon frowned, looking down at the map.

His finger slowly traced the blue ink representing the water between Francia and the British Isles.

"You think he is buying ships?" Hakon asked quietly. "You think that crazy bastard is going to try and sail an army to England while we are sitting here waiting for a land battle?"

"It is a highly real possibility." Bjorn muttered, crossing his arms again. "If he empties his royal treasury and hires enough mercenary fleets from the Mediterranean, he could bypass our walls entirely.

...he could strike directly at the heart of our supply lines. If England falls, the Iron Kingdom loses its food, and we lose our southern anchor."

Hakon let out a heavy sigh.

In a trade route, you knew the exact cost, the safe paths, and the profit margin... In this war, one wrong guess meant twenty thousand dead men bleeding in the mud.

"Well, we cannot worry about ghost ships until we actually see them," Hakon said practically, trying to lighten the dark mood. "Right now, we hold Calais. With twelve hundred men operating those three hundred cannons, if the Franks march on us, we will blow them all the way back to Paris."

Bjorn nodded slowly.

He had to trust the tall stone walls. He had to trust the repeating rifles.

He was a veteran Viking warrior who had spent his youth swinging a bloody axe into wooden shields, and now he was calculating bullet trajectories and heavy cannon placements.

"Look!" Odo suddenly shouted, dropping his ledger and pointing a finger toward the horizon.

Bjorn and Hakon spun around.

There, cutting cleanly through the morning mist, were the dark silhouettes of massive canvas sails.

They were sitting extremely low in the water under the immense weight of their steel cargo, the black flags of King Ragnar snapping proudly in the salty wind.

"Finally." Hakon roared, a genuine grin splitting his scarred face.

He clapped Bjorn on the shoulder hard enough to rattle his mail armor. "The guns are here, my friend. Let the Emperor bring his sixty thousand men! We will feed them hot lead!"

The docks erupted into wild cheers.

The soldiers of the Iron Kingdom, tense and anxious for weeks, threw their fists into the air.

The sheer sight of the massive fleet brought a wave of absolute relief to the entire port.

"Odo!" Hakon barked over the loud cheering. "Get the dockworkers ready right now! I want those cannons unloaded and mounted firmly on the walls by midnight. And tell the quartermaster to start cracking open the rifle crates!"

"Right away, Lord Hakon!" Odo scrambled to pick up his fallen ledger and ran quickly toward the barracks to rally the labor crews.

Bjorn stood silently, watching the majestic ships draw closer...

The logistics of unloading so much heavy weaponry were going to be a nightmare, but it was a nightmare he was incredibly happy to have.

With two thousand and four hundred repeating rifles firing continuously from the hands of his best infantry, a Frankish cavalry charge would be absolute suicide!

However, as the lead ship approached the main dock, Bjorn noticed something wrong... The ship was coming in entirely too fast.

"Hakon." Bjorn narrowed his eyes, stepping closer to the edge of the stone pier. "Why are the long oars out? The wind is pushing their sails perfectly."

Hakon squinted against the morning light, "...they are rowing like they are trying to outrun the devil himself."

The galleon didn’t even bother to slow down for a proper, safe docking maneuver. It slammed incredibly hard against the wooden pylons of the pier, splintering the timber with a deafening crash.

Dockworkers screamed in panic and scattered as the ship grinded to a halt against the stone.

Before the wooden gangplank could even be fully lowered, the captain of the fleet, a veteran Viking sailor named Torstein, leaped carelessly over the railing and crashed onto the dock.

Bjorn pushed past the confused workers, rushing over to the fallen captain.

"Torstein! What in the name of the gods are you doing?!" Bjorn roared, "You nearly destroyed the main pier!"

Torstein coughed, "The cannons... the rifles... they are all safe..."

"Then why are you crashing my fucking dock?!" Hakon yelled, running up behind Bjorn with his fists clenched.

"Because I’m so happy..." Torstein whispered. "Don’t you realize that?"

"Torstein, you ugly bastard!" Hakon roared, stepping forward and pulling the captain into a bone-crushing hug.

"Damn it, Hakon, let go of me before you break my ribs," Torstein wheezed, laughing as he pushed the giant away.

He straightened his wool tunic and looked over at Bjorn, giving a respectful nod. "Lord Bjorn. The channel was a bit rough, but we didn’t lose a single crate."