The trip back took more than a week, as the goods laden wagons kept getting stuck and we had to push them out of the muck almost once a day. The cursed Bog would not work as a trade corridor.

  Tired, grumpy, covered in mud and nearly scent-blind, we reached Bog Watch to the cheers of our men. Even they grimaced when I approached them to spread around some dried fruit I had bought in town. Back in Cradle, I received good news that two trebuchets had already been built and tested.

  They were transported to East Gate, where Aramid and Kovar gave us a demonstration.

  “Those are some odd looking trebuchets.” Lothar commented.

  “Seen a lot of them, have you?” I asked.

  “No, but I got a glance one time,” he said, controlling his features. I was curious about his past, but as long as it didn’t hurt us, he could keep his secrets.

  We waited with bated breath as the operators loaded the siege engines. Then, the cord was pulled, the counterweight went down, the sling was flung and the rocks went flying. As they landed deep in the forest, a thunderous crash resounded, followed by the cacophony of thousands of birds taking flight at the same time.

  “So, what do you think?” I asked the dumbstruck Elders.

  We installed the trebuchets at Bog Watch, hidden in the forest, where Lothar began drilling the new crew in firing them under pressure every single day.

  Assuming the worst case scenario where all the soldiers and reservists would be engaged on the front lines, Cradle would be left undefended. So we took the most capable two hundred men after the reservists, inducted them into the newly established Home Guard, and began training them.

  While I outwardly smiled at the men, practicing sniping at straw dummies from the palisade and stabbing them with wooden spears, I inwardly despaired at our measures. If this Lord Ox had thousands of men at his disposal, we might already be doomed.

  Still, I couldn’t afford to give in to despair, not with so much and a special someone to protect. I surprised her with an embroidered cloak I had bought in Wolfenwacht.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, her voice shaking, as she ran her fingers on the white embroidery. “I’ve never received such a gift before.”

  “The first of many,” I said, taking her into my arms, and gave her a passionate kiss.

  I woke up the next morning to a different kind of kiss, and beautiful silver-gray eyes looking at me lovingly. I smiled and let Aprilia perform her magic, until I saw sparks and burst like a champagne cork. She languidly slid on top of me until our noses almost touched.

  “I have something to show you,” she whispered.

  “I'm pretty sure I've seen every inch of your magnificence.”

  “No, you lech!” she slapped my chest, laughing, “something else. Aren't you ever satisfied?”

  “Never!” I exclaimed, flipping her around. I spent my time making her gasp and whimper, letting her go only after I was satisfied she couldn't take it any more.

  When we came out of the castle, the sun was already up in the sky and my guards were smirking like a bunch of idiots.

  “Come on, you lot.” I turned to my thoroughly tucked girlfriend. “Where to?”

  “To the weapon workshop.”

  “Lead the way.” I said, with plans to leer at her all the way. I still couldn't get enough of those shapely legs.

  ---

  Aprilia brought out a crossbow from a hidden storage space, with a magazine and an . I had drawn plans for one but hadn't gotten enough time to even begin building a prototype, but here it was, in the wood and metal.

  “Are you mad at me?” she asked apprehensively.

  “Where did you find the plans?” I asked.

  “I took them from your chest. That encounter with the brigands and Nanon soldiers gave me a scare. You told me how this weapon would turn even the men without years of training lethal, so while you were away, I worked with Aramid and Kovar to finish it. I made sure no one else besides them got a look at them and kept them with me at all times.”

  “No, it's fine. I wish you had asked before taking them out but I trust you. I- I think I love you.” I said, with my quickly drying mouth.

  Those words were as much of a revelation to me as they were to her. We had been together only for a few months, but I couldn't imagine life without her. It wasn't just the amazing time in bed, but companionship; I could trust her unconditionally, could discuss my passions, desires and fears with her and knew that she would not dismiss them, and trust me with her own in return. Not only that, but she had figured out what I desperately wanted to finish and done it herself. Maybe it was too early, but I didn’t care, since we might be dead within months.

  She walked with steady steps toward me, placed a hand on my cheek and whispered softly, “I love you too, Jack.”

  I pulled her into my arms and kissed her deeply, heedless of the audience. Inside, my heart was a roil of emotions, and I decided to calm it, results be damned.

  I held her at an arm’s distance and looked her in the eyes. “I need to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Not here. In private.” I whispered to her, and turned to the craftsmen. “Good job, you two. Expect my immense gratitude, if we survive this conflict.”

  “What is it?” she asked, her eyes wide with fear, once we were back inside our house.

  With my heart threatening to leap out of my mouth, I forced myself to speak, “I’m not Jack.”

  “What?” her brows knitted in confusion.

  “Remember I told the Elders that I met God?”

  She nodded weakly.

  “I did, after I died in a different place. A very different place. Then I found myself in a very weak body, of a man a decade younger than me. Viscount Jack Nobart. I’m sorry, baby. The real Jack, the savior of the Cha, is dead.”

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I gave her time to process the revelation. Seconds felt like hours.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” She asked, without anger in her voice.

  “Tell them what? ‘Hey there, I’m some other guy in Jack’s body.’ I don’t think they would’ve believed me or taken it well if they did. I would rather not be burned alive or whatever people here do to the supposedly possessed.”

  She bit her lip and nodded in understanding, or so I hoped.

  “I was there when you, Lord Jack, almost died. We thought we lost him. I guess we did, but,” she said, looking me in the eyes, “I don’t mind the replacement.”

  “You’re not mad I hid it from you?”

  “A little, but I understand. You couldn’t have told them the truth and expect them to not kick you out or do worse things. As for me, you could’ve just kept the lie and no one would know. Still, you trusted me with your secret.”

  She approached me and rested her head on my chest. “That’s enough for me.”

  I let out a deep sigh of relief, moistened my dry lips and kissed her with quivering lips. She reciprocated enthusiastically and deepened our kiss.

  With our bond deeper than ever, my relief turned to happiness. We sought each other out every time we were close and free. It took a titanic effort on my part to not commit the same kind of “accidents” the other girls wanted me to commit, made even more difficult by Aprilia’s pleas to do just that.

  I did manage to do some work between all the fun. The crossbow Aprilia and the craftsmen had built was almost four times as fast as the standard one in operation, though the draw power was slightly weaker. We took the lessons from building that design and upgraded the standard crossbow design to accept a magazine and made clips for quick reloading.

  It was a big step up in our soldiers' lethality, but my improvements with the bows and crossbows were coming to an end, as building a proper compound bow was pretty much impossible without modern materials. We needed something a lot more powerful to protect our nascent country against hordes of enemy conscripts.

  I performed some experiments to achieve that goal. I had the craftsmen make a long pipe of iron for me, with one of its ends closed. I filled the tube with the crushed pyrite, that had been found along with iron ore.

  I then heated the pipe to around 900°C (1652°F), which into its constituents, iron and sulfur. As the gaseous sulfur traveled through the long tube, it cooled down and turned into a crusty coating, which I then collected.

  Unfortunately for me, gunpowder was mostly saltpeter. I took the heavily nitrated barn soil we had taken from the village of Hinterfeld, and processed it to obtain crystals of potassium nitrate. Half a cartload of soil yielded a little over two kilograms (4.4 lbs.) of saltpeter, which I then mixed with some sulfur and fine charcoal powder.

  It burned up instantly on being lit, proving I could make gunpowder, but I only had a small bag left.

  “That’s nice.” Aldren said meekly, trying to spare my feelings.

  “It works just fine, boy.” I told him. “Did you notice all the gas it produces?”

  “Yes. Smells bad.”

  “It’s not the smell that matters, but the volume. What do you think would happen if I were to burn the powder inside a pipe like that?”

  “The gas would escape from the open end.”

  “What if I jam the opening with a stone? One that creates a very tight seal so the gas can’t escape.”

  “It bursts open like a potato baked too long?” Kovar interjected.

  “What if the pipe can handle the pressure?”

  “Hmm… the stone would be thrown out?”

  “Exactly. What if I told you that this mixture burns even faster inside a closed space.” I watched the gears move in their minds, as realization dawned upon them, eyes going wide.

  “The stone will be thrown even faster!” Kovar exclaimed.

  “Faster than arrows?” Aramid asked tentatively.

  “Far faster and farther than any arrow can travel. Far faster than any man can react to it, and if we can make it, far too powerful for any armor to withstand. You target someone with it, and they’re .”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow indeed. I need your oath though, all of you. This will revolutionize warfare, so you cannot reveal what you have seen here to anyone! Not even the Elders.” I emphasized.

  “I promise to not reveal anything I have seen here. My lips are sealed.” Aldren reassured me, smiling.

  “Same here,” Aramid and Kovar repeated.

  I was glad for their awe at all the new possibilities, but worry irked my mind like a stray stone in a shoe. The soil nitration process took almost a year to finish, so no more gunpowder for me until then. Shit.

  Gunpowder alone wouldn't do much without proper firearms anyway, so I focused on the prerequisites to build them. Aramid, Kovar, Aldren and rest of the Ducklings had my complete confidence by this point, so I began teaching them the ideas that led to mass manufacturing.

  “You two are craftsmen,” I addressed Aramid and Kovar, “but once we are finished, you would have become machinists.”

  “What about us?” Aldren piped up.

  “Some of you will be engineers, and some machinists.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “An engineer must understand the principles behind the design of complex machines, while machinists focus on techniques to bring those designs to life. I want to turn all of you into proper engineers and machinists, but our time is limited. We need powerful weapons before the Nanon kingdom comes at us with its full might.”

  “That is going to happen?” Aramid asked fearfully.

  “I’m not sure Aramid, but as they say, ‘hope for the best, prepare for the worst.’”

  “We made the reloading crossbow, and that’s pretty complex. Are we not already machinists?” Kovar asked.

  “No. The difference between a machinist and a craftsman is that a machinist is focused on extreme precision, with tolerances so tight you cannot even see the difference with naked eyes.”

  “Why would anyone need that?”

  “Remember the experiment we did yesterday?”

  “Yes,” he replied in a hushed tone, then realized what I was hinting at. “The gas seal between the rock and the pipe!”

  “Yes. You need that level of precision and accuracy in manufacturing to create thousands of pipes and projectiles that can trap all of the gas. They are the s of mass manufacturing.”

  “But how can we make anything with precision that we can’t even see?” Aldren asked in confusion.

  “You can’t. Not with your bare hands and eyes, obviously. First, we will build instruments that can measure such small dimensions, then we will use them to build machines that can manufacture other machines and tools that can then produce completely identical products.”

  “That sounds overly complicated and soulless,” Aramid muttered.

  “Regardless, you want your common weapons to be exact copies, not unique piece of craftsmanship,” I insisted.

  “Why?”

  “Because each weapon made by a craftsman is a little different. If anything goes wrong, it requires the attention of an experienced craftsman. A soldier cannot just take out a faulty part and replace it with another. That is a big problem, especially during war, where such issues can be the difference between not just life and death of one man, but victory and defeat of an entire nation.”

  That gave them all pause.

  Our quest for micron level accuracy and precision began with flatness. I taught my seven students the three-plate method; we took three identical and reasonably flat blocks of limestone, and ground them against each other, occasionally changing pairs, until all three became extremely flat. That was a lot of hard work, but the Ducklings worked diligently even when they grumbled. All that hard work gave us three surfaces to measure anything for flatness.

  Similarly, we rubbed their edges together to get straight edges. With simple geometry, I drew a perpendicular on them, and now we could test for squareness.

  Next was the challenge of length. If I had my old body it would have been easy, as I knew my exact height in centimeters. Jack was slightly taller, but until very recently in humanity's history, both units for length and weight had been defined by arbitrary terms anyway, so I followed suit.

  Assuming my height to be 200cm (78.74 inch), we carefully divided a taut thread to define a centimeter and carved it on our flat plates, giving us rulers. Some lessons in engineering drawing from my past life came useful as I was able to use the millimeter scale ruler to make a Vernier scale, giving us precision up to 10 micrometers. We wouldn't be making high performance engines with that level of precision, but 19th and even early 20th century guns should be doable.

  Thus began our arduous adventure to make the machine that makes other machines, the . Unfortunately, it was relegated to the craftsmen’s free time, as we focused on arming all the soldiers and reservists as soon as possible. The men watching the border hadn’t seen any activity, but I could feel an impending attack coming in my bones.

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