The thunder of four thousand charging warhorses shook the walls of the Burgundian fortress.

Down in the fields, the elite Frankish vanguard was rapidly closing the distance.

They held their lances forward, screaming their war cries into the misty night sky.

Up on the high stone battlements, King Rudolf slowly turned his head to look at Hakon who was standing right next to the largest cannon.

"Do it, Hakon!" King Rudolf roared over the deafening noise of the galloping horses. "Fire the cannons!"

"With pleasure, your Grace!" Hakon grinned wickedly, a bloodthirsty spark lighting up his eyes.

Down the line, the other Viking engineers did the exact same thing to the remaining nine guns.

Rudolf braced his legs, expecting a deafening explosion of destruction to wipe the Franks off the map.

Sizzle... hiss...

The steel cannon let out a tiny puff of gray smoke from the touchhole, and then went silent...

"Huh?" Hakon blinked. He struck the glowing match cord against the touchhole again.

Hiss... still absolutely nothing.

"Damnit!!" Hakon hissed, slapping his hand against the steel barrel. "What the fucking hell is wrong with this thing?!"

Although the weapons of the Iron Kingdom were usually made to perfection, the realities of the medieval world had a troublesome way of spoiling plans.

"Why aren’t they firing, Hakon?!" Rudolf yelled. He rushed to the edge of the parapet, looking out over the fields.

The Frankish cavalry was getting close... they were ignoring the mud, pushing their warhorses to an absolute sprint.

They were only two hundred yards away now... Rudolf could almost see the crazy eyes of the Frankish horses in the torchlight.

"I am trying, Rudolf!" Hakon yelled back, frustrated as he poked at the touchhole. "The powder inside the barrel isn’t catching the spark!"

One of the Viking engineers, a short man wearing gloves, sprinted over to Hakon’s cannon.

He grabbed a thin iron rod and jammed it down the front of the barrel, measuring the depth.

"The iron is stuck!" the engineer shouted.

"What?!" Hakon roared, grabbing the poor engineer by the collar of his gray coat.

"The bouncing bent a tiny piece of the internal iron ring. The canvas bag of grapeshot is jammed against it... we cannot push the bag all the way down to seal against the black powder!" the engineer explained frantically,

After hearing such words, Prince Conrad, who was hiding behind a stack of crates, lost his mind.

"We are going to die?!" Conrad screamed, pulling his sword out with shaking hands.

Hakon dropped the engineer.

"...how the hell do we fix it right now?!" Hakon demanded.

"We must use the normal cannon ball." the engineer yelled back, running over to a crate and throwing the lid open. "The canvas bag of grapeshot is too soft to push past the stuck iron... but a solid iron sphere will crush the jam! It will seal the powder!"

"Arghh!" Hakon groaned loudly, "Fine! Just pull the fucking canvas bags out and load the balls! Quickly!"

Even so, reloading ten steel cannons under the extreme pressure of four thousand screaming knights charging at your gates was a nightmare.

The Viking engineers grabbed long, hooked iron poles, yanking the stuck canvas bags of grapeshot out of the barrels and tossing them uselessly onto the floor.

Then, they grabbed the round iron cannonballs. They shoved them into the steel tubes, using the long ramrods to push with every single ounce of their Viking strength.

The spheres forcefully pushed past the bent rings, crushing the debris and sealing the explosive black powder at the bottom of the barrels.

"The balls are loaded!" the engineer screamed, falling backward onto the stone.

Rudolf looked back out over the wall.

The Frankish knights were less than fifty yards away... they were incredibly close.

Lord Odo was laughing at the front of the line, believing the silent walls meant the Burgundians had entirely surrendered out of fear.

"They are right at our gates, Hakon!" Rudolf yelled, "Do it right fucking now!"

Hakon was pissed off that his trap had almost failed due to a bumpy road.

He grabbed the smoking match cord, his eyes locking entirely onto the laughing Frankish commander down below.

"Burn in hell, you arrogant southern bastards!" Hakon whispered darkly.

He touched the glowing spark to the powder.

The deafening roar of the ten cannons firing at the same time shattered the freezing night air.

A blinding wave of bright orange fire and choking white sulfur smoke erupted from the walls of Burgundy!

The sudden shockwave was so strong that it knocked King Rudolf entirely off his feet, throwing him hard onto the stone battlements.

Down in the muddy fields, the laughter of the Frankish knights was utterly silenced in a single fraction of a second.

If the cannons had fired the soft canvas bags of grapeshot, the entire front line of horses would have been entirely shredded like thin paper. But they hadn’t... they had fired the iron cannonballs.

...And a solid iron cannonball fired at a flat, downward trajectory into a tightly packed cavalry charge did not just hit one man and stop.

The ten massive iron spheres tore through the Frankish lines like invisible, unstoppable meteors of death.

They smashed through the expensiv steel plate armor as if it were made of cheap, thin glass.

But the absolute worst part was the bouncing...

The iron balls hit the mud and skipped forward, tearing off the legs of warhorses and crushing dozens of knights.

They plowed deeply through the ranks, leaving bloody trenches entirely carved right through the center of the elite army.

Blood, mud, and shattered pieces of Frankish armor filled the air...

When the pungent white smoke finally began to clear from the battlefield, the mighty proud Frankish charge was broken.

Hundreds of elite knights lay entirely dead or dying in the mud.

The surviving soldiers were frozen in shock, dropping their swords and lances to the ground.

They couldn’t comprehend what had just happened... Lord Odo sat alone on his horse near the very front of the line.

By some crazy miracle, none of the iron balls had hit him... but the entire center of his elite vanguard was gone!

He slowly lowered his lance.

"Huh?" Lord Odo whispered.

He turned his head, looking back at the bloody paths carved through his army by the bouncing iron spheres.

"Huh?!" Odo gasped.

He stared blankly at the destruction, his mind breaking.

Up on the high wall, King Rudolf slowly stood back up, wiping a layer of black soot from his smiling face.

As Lord Odo slowly raised his hand to signal a retreat... a new massive explosion echoed through the night.