Chapter 189: The Swabian Vice

Reischach had lost his entire political foundation six months ago.

Since the day he was thrown into the crypts, he had felt alone in a world that had moved on without him.

Seeing General Kaelen alive felt like a strange hallucination...

"How did you survive the mortars?" Reischach finally asked. "We thought you were reduced to shrapnel."

Kaelen kept his eyes fixed on the mountain path.

When the Alemannian mortars plummeted from the sky during the Battle of Vienna, Kaelen had been thrown from his horse by the concussive shockwave.

He had fallen into a muddy crater, buried beneath the bleeding corpses of his own armored knights.

He played dead in the mud for two days, drinking bloody rainwater from his own helmet to avoid dehydration, listening to the Swabian Gatling carts execute the survivors.

When Konrad’s army finally marched into the capital, Kaelen crawled out of the carnage, stole a peasant’s cloak, and vanished into the dense Hungarian forests.

He had been hiding in the mountains ever since, gathering intelligence from black-market smugglers and rogue mercenaries.

Hearing the gruesome reality, Reischach felt a knot form in his stomach.

The finest commander in the east had been reduced to a scavenger in the mud!

Konrad had not merely established a monopoly in Swabia. He had recently signed a massive, exclusive trade pact with Tariq al-Mansur and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.

The Islamic empires were currently using Swabian Pattern-1 muskets to shatter the Papal blockades in the Mediterranean. At the exact same time, the Hejaz merchants were flooding Augsburg with raw saltpeter, feeding Konrad’s insatiable powder mills!

Emperor Charles V and his hundred and forty thousand Catholic zealots were encircled.

The Holy Roman Empire was caught in a vice grip forged by Swabian steel and Mamluk gold.

"..." Kaelen sighed."we are living in King Konrad’s world now. Even the French are perfectly content to sit on their borders and count their imported Swabian rifles."

Reischach listened in silence.

They marched for hours.

Eventually, Kaelen led the horse off the main trail, pushing through a dense thicket of frosted evergreens.

The path ended at a small, concealed logging cabin nestled precariously against a sheer cliffside.

It looked abandoned, the windows boarded up with pine planks.

"We are here," Kaelen announced, dropping the reins.

He unbuckled the straps and carefully lifted Reischach down from the saddle. The Baron hissed in pain, his legs buckling instantly.

Kaelen caught him, slinging Reischach’s arm over his broad shoulder and half-carrying him toward the door.

Kaelen kicked the door open. There was a small hearth, a table, and a canvas cot pushed into the far corner.

He deposited Reischach onto the cot... The Baron sank into the canvas, letting out a long sigh of relief.

"Rest your bones," Kaelen said, walking over to the hearth and striking a flint to ignite a stack of dry kindling. "You look like a walking corpse, Baron."

"I feel like a corpse," Reischach mumbled, staring up at the rafters. "But you didn’t drag me all the way into the mountains just to offer me a nap."

Kaelen stood up from the fire. He walked over to the far side of the room, approaching a chest hidden beneath a pile of wolf pelts.

He carried the object over to the table and carefully unlatched the brass fittings. Reischach propped himself up on his elbows, his curiosity overriding his exhaustion.

Sitting on the interior of the chest was a firearm. But it was unlike the long, elegant Pattern-3 rifles the Jaegers carried.

It was a compact, brutal piece of engineering. It possessed a polished walnut grip designed for a single hand, but instead of a standard breech-block, it featured an iron cylinder bored with six separate, circular chambers.

Next to the trigger was a complex, exposed mechanical hammer mechanism.

"You pack the raw powder and the lead directly into each of the six chambers," Kaelen explained, tracing a finger over the steel. "You place a tiny copper primer cap on the back of each nipple. When you manually pull the hammer back, a geared mechanism rotates the iron cylinder, aligning a fresh, loaded chamber with the barrel."

Kaelen looked up, his eyes burning with a fanatical light.

"It fires six times without reloading, Reischach. It can put six conical rounds through a squad of Jaegers in the time it takes them to cycle a single bolt."

"What in God’s name is that?" Reischach whispered. "Where did you acquire such a weapon? The Toledo foundries cannot even cast a single barrel."

Kaelen grinned, resting his scarred hand on the walnut grip of the revolver.

"It is a revolving-cylinder pistol. A highly classified prototype. And I did not steal it from a dead Jaeger, Baron."

Kaelen leaned forward. "Baron Klaus himself made it."

Baron Klaus? Reischach’s mind stalled.

Klaus was King Konrad’s chief industrial engineer. He was the fanatic who designed the blast furnaces, the man who built the traction engines. He was the most fiercely loyal architect of the entire Swabian revolution!

Why in the world would Baron Klaus, the King’s most trusted genius, forge a six-shot assassination weapon and smuggle it to a disgraced Austrian General hiding in the mountains?!

"...."

"...what exactly does King Konrad want us to assassinate?" Reischach demanded, his eyes locked on the General.

Kaelen blinked in surprise, then let out a laugh. "Assassinate? You think Baron Klaus handed this to me in a dark alley to kill the Emperor?"

"You just said he made it!" Reischach snapped.

"He designed it," Kaelen chuckled, wiping a speck of ash from his cheek. "He runs the foundries in Augsburg. But I didn’t get this from his personal workbench. I bought it from a Venetian merchant in a filthy border tavern two nights ago."

After hearing such words, Reischach felt a profound wave of confusion wash over him. "A Venetian? You bought a multi-shot Swabian firearm from a common trader?!"

"Exactly," Kaelen said, pulling up a stool and sitting next to Reischach’s cot. "This is merchandise, Reischach. King Konrad is exporting them."