The ground beneath Bjorn’s boots bucked, throwing the Viking commander off the steps and hard into the courtyard.

A shockwave of displaced air and pulverized dust blasted over the huddled thousands of soldiers, suffocating the morning light.

For a long minute, it felt like the entire world had been buried in a shallow grave.

Slowly, the choking gray dust began to settle.

Bjorn groaned, his ears ringing with a painful whine.

He pushed himself up from the mud, spitting grit from his mouth... he looked around the courtyard.

Men were coughing loudly, waving their hands in the air, but miraculously, nobody was crushed.

Thankfully, Bjorn knew it... he had seen the angle of that bronze barrel, and his veteran instincts had screamed at him to move his men.

His split-second decision to evacuate the southern wall had just saved the lives of a thousand elite soldiers.

"Is everyone alive?" Hakon roared, "Sound off, you bastards! Who is bleeding?!"

"We are intact!" General Gurvand coughed, leaning against his sword. "The men are safe, Lord Hakon!"

However, the relief was incredibly short-lived... as the morning wind finally blew the gray smoke away from the courtyard, the true reality of the Frankish strike was revealed.

Bjorn slowly looked up. His eyes widened.

The impregnable stone wall of Calais had a gaping hole ripped right through its center.

The top forty feet of the battlements had been obliterated.

Chunks of smoking stone were scattered all over the courtyard... the granite boulder was sitting halfway embedded in the ground, surrounded by the splintered wooden remains of at least twenty steel cannons.

"By the gods..." Odo whispered, "They broke the wall. In a single shot, they just broke the fucking wall."

Through the massive, V-shaped crater in the stone, Bjorn could clearly see the distant fields.

If the Frankish Emperor ordered a full infantry charge right now, twenty thousand man would pour through that hole and spill into the city streets.

"Damn it!" Hakon kicked a loose piece of rubble. "Look at that hole! If they load that bronze whore a second time and hit the gatehouse, we won’t even have a city left to defend! They will entirely bury us!"

"Lord Bjorn, get down!" Gurvand yelled. "If their infantry charges now, you are exposed!"

"They aren’t charging." Bjorn muttered, putting the spyglass to his eye.

He was right... the distant Frankish vanguard was completely still.

But Bjorn’s focus wasn’t on the thousands of enemy spearmen; his eye was locked on the bronze bombard resting in the field two miles away.

The colossal weapon had fired, but the recoil of launching a mountain had a price.

The wooden cart with the thirty-foot wheels was gone... it had exploded into a thousand wooden splinters.

The bronze barrel was now sitting flat in the mud, slowly sinking under its own absurd weight.

"Their cart is destroyed," Bjorn announced, a wicked smile finally touching his lips. "The bronze barrel is sitting in the dirt. They cannot easily adjust the angle anymore."

"But they are already trying to lift it!" Hakon pointed out, scrambling up the rubble to stand next to his commander.

Through the spyglass, Bjorn could see hundreds of Frankish peasants and engineers desperately swarming around the sunken bombard.

They were trying to jam thick timber logs underneath the hot bronze, using ropes and pulleys to raise the muzzle out of the mud so they could load it again.

"If they manage to prop it up, we are finished, Bjorn," Hakon warned softly. "They only need one more shot to finish off the main gate."

Even so, Bjorn’s smile only grew wider...

He slowly lowered the spyglass and looked down at the courtyard.

The boulder had destroyed twenty of their cannons... but the southern wall was incredibly long.

"Leif!" Bjorn roared at the top of his lungs.

The artillery engineer scrambled out from behind a pile of broken stone, looking heartbroken at the sight of his destroyed cannons. "Yes, Lord Bjorn?"

"Stop crying over broken iron, Leif." Bjorn barked sharply. "How many cannons do we still have entirely intact on the eastern and western flanks?"

Leif blinked, "Uh... roughly two hundred and eighty, my Lord. The flanks were untouched by the blast"

"Fortunately, that is exactly what we need," Bjorn laughed.

Bjorn turned to face Hakon and Gurvand. With that massive hole in the wall, Bjorn knew he had to get a solution to this nightmare immediately.

"They destroyed our center," Bjorn stated firmly. "But look at what they did to themselves... all their engineers are gathered directly around it right now."

Bjorn turned back to the master engineer. "I want every single surviving cannon on the walls rotated and aimed at that field. I don’t care about harassing fire anymore. I don’t care about hollow shells."

"But Lord Bjorn," Leif hesitated, "we are still technically out of range for a direct, precise strike with heavy iron balls."

"We don’t need precision," Bjorn yelled. "Pack the maximum amount of black powder the steel can handle. Angle the barrels high, just like before, but this time... we unleash every single gun we have all at once!"

"You heard the Commander!" Hakon roared, "Get back on the walls! Move those cannons!"

The surviving militia men and artillery crews didn’t waste a single second... they sprinted up the intact stairs on the eastern and western flanks.

"Load the powder!" Leif screamed, running down the line with a torch. "Pack it tight! Give them the heavy iron!"

Down in the fields, the Frankish engineers were oblivious to the doom that was about to rain down upon them.

They were focused on shoving timber logs under the massive bronze barrel, trying to lift the giant bombard out of the muck.

Count Boso watched from his horse, satisfied with the hole his weapon had just created in the Viking wall.

"Almost there, keep pulling!" the lead Frankish engineer yelled, wiping sweat from his brow.

Back on the walls of Calais, two hundred and eighty heavy solid iron balls were loaded... the fuses were primed.

"For the Iron Kingdom!"

"Fire!"

He slashed his sword downward.

Two hundred and eighty heavy steel cannons erupted at the exact same time... the sheer volume of the noise was deafening, a rolling thunder that echoed across the channel.

A wall of black smoke instantly engulfed the battlements.

Up in the gray sky, a cloud of solid iron balls arched high over the fields.

Count Boso looked up from his horse. His eyes went entirely wide. "What in God’s name..."

The iron rain slammed into the field around the giant bronze bombard.

The heavy cannonballs pulverized the dirt, throwing geysers of mud and blood high into the air.

Dozens of Frankish engineers were ripped to shreds in the first second of the impact... the timber logs they were using to lift the bombard were snapped like tiny twigs.

"Keep your heads down!" Count Boso screamed, spurring his horse and galloping away from the impact zone.

The iron balls were hitting everywhere... some smashed into the ground, burying the bombard deeper into the mud.

Others slammed into the bronze barrel itself!

As the smoke finally began to clear from the Frankish camp, Bjorn leaned forward, narrowing his eyes.

The bombard was nearly bombed into scrap metal... it was half-buried in a crater of shattered mud, surrounded by the bodies of the enemy engineers.

The bronze barrel wasn’t completely broken... and worse... a burning piece of debris from the cannon fire had just landed next to the open powder kegs the Franks were using to reload it.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me..." Bjorn whispered.