The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 47

The gunner pulled the breech himself, and the shell was one of the two six-pound shells that Allen and Morris had brought out of the basement.

The cannonball fired with a muffled thunderous sound, soaring over the ramparts and tracing an extremely low, flat parabola before crashing into the densest part of the surging horde of corpses.

The explosion's flames tore a dark red wave through the black sea of ​​corpses, and bits of flesh and black blood mist sprayed outwards from the explosion's center. Around them, infected people fell like wheat being cut down.

But that wave only rolled once before being swallowed up by the black torrent behind it.

The empty spaces were filled within a few breaths, and more infected people continued to surge forward, stepping over the fallen corpses, their speed showing no sign of slowing down.

The gun crew reloaded as quickly as possible, the sound of the scouring pad being pushed into the breech was fast and urgent, and then the second shell was fired.

Another black wave was swallowed up.

No one spoke in the position.

The sounds of loading, the clanging of the bolts, and the hoarse voice of the sergeant calling out numbers mingled together, but no one uttered a single superfluous word.

Everyone saw how the wave created by the infantry gun blast was swallowed up by the horde of zombies.

That wasn't a battle; it was throwing stones into the sea.

Perfit stood behind the ramparts, one hand still gripping his cane, the other resting on the hilt of the dagger at his waist.

Her fingers were trembling, and the dull pain from the rapid depletion of her mental energy had spread from her skull to her spine, causing her vision to darken at the edges.

But she still stood straight, slammed the end of her cane on the ground, and gripped it tightly again.

"It's not time to despair yet," she said. Her voice wasn't loud, but everyone in the trenches heard her.

It wasn't because she shouted loudly, but because at that moment, apart from the distant roar of the horde of corpses and the nearby sounds of gunfire, there was almost no other sound on the entire position.

She took two steps forward, standing behind the ramparts directly facing the horde of zombies. Belfast, clad in her steam knight armor, followed closely behind, her chainsaw sword already removed and held in her hand. Although the pressure gauge on the steam core was still hovering near the low-speed standby mark, and the chainsaw's serrations were temporarily unable to turn, the armor, repeatedly soaked and wiped clean by black blood, still exuded an unshakeable sense of oppression.

Perfit stood in front of her, raised his left hand, and pointed his cane at the approaching black torrent.

"They haven't reached the trenches yet. Our guns are still firing, our cannons are still firing. We still have hope." She turned to face the Ross soldiers who were crouching behind the firing ports, their fingers trembling slightly on the trigger guards with tension. Her gaze swept across each of their faces, as steady as a surgeon's scalpel.

No one knows whether what Perfitt said is true.

But they heard the roar of the infantry guns, the muffled thunder of the shells leaving the barrel, and the firing command given by the sergeant major.

These sounds are real; they are people standing there with weapons, not running away.

So they pointed their guns forward again.

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Perfit drew his Midas from his waist and drew the first arc on the open ground inside the fortress.

She didn't ask Alan and Morris to look up alchemy textbooks, nor did she let them refer to any existing magic circle diagrams.

The deductive abilities granted to her by the second page of the Jade Record were now operating in her mind at an unprecedented speed—not simply recalling a known transmutation array, but calculating a completely new amplification structure specifically tailored to the current density of the zombie horde and the terrain of the position.

She chose a clearing on the compacted frozen ground behind the barrier, squatted down, and used the Philosopher's Stone fragment at the end of the Alchemist's Staff to directly inscribe the array base on the ground.

She personally drew the curvature of every arc, the position of every node, and the connection angle between every pattern.

She drew extremely quickly—not hastily, but because the entire structure of the magic circle had already been deduced, and she was simply sketching it out.

Alan and Morris squatted on either side of her, holding chalk in their hands, their eyes fixed on every stroke she made.

After finishing drawing the outermost ring of the array base, Perfit straightened up, pointed at several key nodes on the array base with the end of his alchemy rod, and turned to the two alchemists to begin assigning tasks.

"This is an amplification array, not a conversion array. Its function is to amplify my mental power and then apply it to the entire array, allowing the subsequent material conversion to cover a larger area with lower consumption." She spoke quickly, but every word was clear. "I've already drawn the array base. Allen, you're responsible for filling in the pentagram nodes and connecting them to the array base on the outer ring. Each connecting line must perfectly align with the node I've marked from the edge of the array base."

"Morris, your task is to continue filling in the internal runes based on the pentagram structure that Allen has outlined."

Allen crouched down and pressed the chalk against the first arc of the array base that Perfit had drawn.

He began to draw the connecting lines and pentagram nodes along the inner edge of the arc.

Morris switched the chalk to his left hand and pre-drew three small auxiliary runes on the outside of the pentagram—one to filter high-frequency noise in the fluctuations of mental energy, one to balance the energy gradient between different nodes within the magic circle, and one to prevent the caster's neural circuits from being burned when mental energy backlashes.

The way he drew these three auxiliary runes wasn't taught by Perfit, but rather he added them himself based on experience.

Perfit glanced at them and recognized that the patterns of the three runes came from the mental energy stabilization array in the standard textbook, the reverse suppression array in the Holy Word spell, and an old-fashioned alchemy furnace overload protection array that had been phased out.

He seamlessly pieced together three runes from completely different origins, each pattern embedded in the most vulnerable spot of the pentagram node, as if it were meant to be there.

"Very good," Perfit said. She didn't offer much praise, but those two words made Morris's tense shoulders relax slightly.

The magic circle quickly took shape under their hands.

Allen's pentagram connecting lines were drawn almost perfectly, with each line fitting the arc of the base with millimeter-level precision; Morris's internal rune filling was equally clean and neat, with the spacing between adjacent runes as uniform as if measured with a ruler.

When the last rune was drawn, the entire magic circle unfolded on the frozen ground, presenting an almost perfectly symmetrical beauty—not decorative symmetry, but the precise geometric balance required for the flow of alchemical energy.

Allen put the chalk back in the toolbox and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand; Morris walked around the magic circle, then squatted down to adjust the spacing between the nodes of the two auxiliary runes, making sure that each line was in the optimal position before standing up.