"Pike and shot?" Marshal Eckhard echoed, "...I have never heard of such a thing."

"You haven’t heard of it because no one in the Swabian Diet has the organizational discipline to pull it off," Konrad replied.

"When the enemy cavalry attacks, the gunners unleash a devastating volley, then retreat to the safety of the spear-field to reload. The cavalry collide with a wall of eighteen-foot pikes while being bombarded from the sides."

After hearing such words, Eckhard slowly traced his finger over the interlocking squares.

"...It requires perfect timing, My Lord. And therein lies my greatest problem." Eckhard finally admitted, letting out a long sigh.

Konrad set his cup down on the table. "Explain."

Eckhard leaned against the wall, looking out at the training ground. "The largest army I ever commanded was 1,200 men. That was a headache. And now? If I wanted to move that army..."

"I know it takes time." Konrad said flatly.

"Time is putting it lightly."

"To get four thousand men to simply pack up their tents, form their marching squares, and begin walking in the same direction takes hours."

"If we are ambushed on the road to Savoy while stretched out in a long marching column, the pike and shot formation won’t save us."

"The enemy cavalry will hit our vulnerable supply lines before the farm boys even have time to form the squares!"

The Marshal was entirely right... a massive army was a powerful weapon, but it was slow and vulnerable while traveling.

"He speaks the truth, Viscount." A gravelly voice interrupted their thoughts.

Konrad and Eckhard turned to see a heavily scarred man walking up the steps.

He wore a mixture of Swabian blackened steel and strange, furs-lined leather armor that clearly didn’t belong in this region.

His name was Ragnar, one of the veteran mercenary captains Eckhard had just hired with the Fugger silver.

"Captain Ragnar," Konrad greeted him with a slight nod. "You have experience moving large numbers of men?"

"I’ve marched with armies of ten thousand, Lord Konrad." Ragnar chuckled darkly, "And the Marshal is right to be sweating."

"Do you have a solution, or did you just come up here to complain with him?" Konrad asked coldly.

Ragnar grinned, "I have a solution, My Lord. It is a tactic that is already happening right now, just not here. I saw it used by the Hungarians, and the Ottomans use it to protect their slow-moving cannons and infantry from fast horse archers."

Konrad’s eyes narrowed. "I am listening."

"Wagon forts," Ragnar said simply.

Eckhard frowned in confusion. "Wagon forts? You mean the supply carts?"

"Exactly." Ragnar nodded, stepping closer to the drafting table.

He picked up a piece of charcoal and began drawing rough rectangles in a wide circle around Konrad’s pike and shot squares.

"You take your wooden supply wagons, reinforce the sides with timber or iron plates, and you march them in two parallel lines on the outer edges of your infantry column."

"And when the enemy attacks?" Konrad prompted, seeing the raw potential of the idea.

"...the wagon drivers turn the carts inward, forming a circle or square. You chain the wheels together. In less than ten minutes, you have built an instant fortress right in the middle of the battlefield. The horses are kept safe inside the ring. Your gunners stand behind the reinforced wagons, resting their muskets on the wooden rims, and shoot the enemy to pieces while protected from a cavalry charge." Ragnar continued.

"The Hussites used it decades ago to crush the heavily armored German knights," Ragnar stated proudly. "And the Ottomans use it to lock down the battlefield. The heavy cavalry simply cannot jump over chained wagons, and they get shot to absolute ribbons trying to break the wooden walls."

Konrad stared at the charcoal drawing of the wagon fort. .

It was highly effective... however, it was also slightly too passive for Konrad’s liking.

"Once the wagons are chained together, the army is stuck in one place. You surrender your mobility to survive." Konrad murmured.

"That is the trade-off, Lord Konrad," Ragnar shrugged. "You survive the ambush, bleed their cavalry dry, and then unchain the wagons to keep moving."

"I don’t like trade-offs. What if we don’t just use slow supply wagons?" Konrad said flatly.

Eckhard and Ragnar exchanged a nervous glance. "What do you mean, My Lord?" the Marshal asked cautiously.

"I mean, we take the concept of a protected wagon, but we make it an offensive weapon," Konrad muttered, sketching on a blank piece of vellum. "A lighter, highly mobile cart. Pulled not by slow oxen, but by two fast horses. The driver sits behind a iron shield to protect him from arrows and musket fire."

"A mobile armored cart?" Ragnar rubbed his scarred chin. "To carry infantry?"

"We mount a weapon on it. Something that doesn’t need to be aimed precisely... something that just needs to point at an enemy formation and completely erase it."

Eckhard leaned over the table, squinting at the drawing. "Are those... musket barrels? You want to mount a dozen musket barrels on a single cart?"

"More than a dozen..." Konrad said, his eyes wide. "The old organ guns are too heavy and take far too long to reload. What if Master Klemens casts a cluster of heavy barrels... maybe six or eight of them... in a circular rotation?"

Even so, the two veteran soldiers looked at him as if he had finally lost his mind.

"A circular rotation?" Eckhard asked, "How would you even fire that?"

"With a hand crank." Konrad explained, "One barrel fires, the next barrel moves into position, primes, and fires. Over and over again."

Ragnar’s eyes widened. As a man who had survived volleys of arrows and musket fire, the mere thought of a single weapon firing continuously without stopping was deeply unnatural.

"A gun that doesn’t stop shooting? Lord Konrad... the barrels would melt from the heat."

"Not if the rotation allows them to briefly cool in the air before firing again," Konrad shot back, "And not if the cart is moving. The wind will cool the iron."

Eckhard swallowed hard, "If Master Klemens can actually build such a thing, we will have a great advantage."

Konrad took one last sip of his coffee. "Send a runner to the armory, tell Klemens to halt production on the standard twelve-pounders. I need a working prototype of the rotating volley gun by tomorrow night."

While the marshal was rushing to carry out the order, Konrad stayed at the barricade, beginning to think about his child.

It took him several agonizing hours to manage the mountain of trade route money.

The secret western pass was functioning exactly like a highly efficient artery, pumping pure Fugger silver directly into the heart of Swabia.

The exiled Württemberg knights were paying premium prices for the wheellocks, the portable soup, and the lye soap.

Even so, balancing the ledgers for an army of four thousand and one hundred men was a nightmare.

Mercenaries didn’t fight for sugar and coffee alone; they wanted hard coin in their pouches at the end of every single week.

On top of that, Master Klemens was burning through the treasury to acquire the amount of brass and iron required to build the first prototype of the horse-drawn volley gun.

Konrad rubbed his aching eyes, letting out a long breath.

He finally drew a line at the bottom of the canvas ledger, marking the weekly treasury balance as completely stable.

Thus, with the logistics finally settled for the night, he pushed his chair back and stood up.

He stopped in front of the oak door leading to Isolde’s private chambers. He didn’t bother to knock. He just pushed the iron handle down and stepped inside.

Isolde was sitting in a padded chair near the roaring hearth. In her arms, wrapped in fine wool, was Albrecht.

The boy was nearly a month old now... he had grown significantly, having shed the wrinkled, red-faced look of a newborn.

Isolde let out a soft laugh, "Whenever the wet nurse takes too long to feed him, he looks at her like he wants to throw her into a blast furnace."

Konrad walked over to the chair, standing just a few inches away. "I made sure his room is the warmest in the entire keep. I made sure the guards outside his door are veterans who wouldn’t flinch if the devil himself walked down the hall."

Isolde cleared her throat. "By the way, my spies in Munich sent me a bird this morning. You spoke to Lady Katharina a week ago. You told her you’ll marry her at the end of May, before the summer frosts have even melted."

"I did," Konrad confirmed. "Duke Wilhelm needed a firm date to keep his halberdiers on our eastern borders."