After the declaration of regicide Jessica gave up protesting. It was pointless arguing publicly with Harrow over things he'd decided before they met. That did not mean she was going to give up ground, however. For as annoying as Samara and Capra could be, they didn’t deserve to be executed. She elected to conserve that point for when she spoke to him in private and instead focus on figuring out what the hell the SSLA was even planning to do.

  “We should keep a battalion in reserve, I think,” Haigha said, long hare ears folded down in contemplation.

  “That plus calling up the garrison in J?rvistad would give us what, three thousand for a siege?” Kap said, counting the thousands with his giant fingers.

  “Two,” Huhu said with a flap of his big arms, “and a quarter of those are auxiliaries.”

  “And what of the adventurers? Our muskets are dangerous at short range, but they have spells which can hit us from over a mile away,” said Haigha.

  Jessica raised an eyebrow. “A mile? I haven’t seen anyone fire off a spell over a mile.”

  Harrow turned to her. “It’s not that hard. I can do it and I only have a Master-tier job. An adventurer with a Transcendent-tier job is a whole different beast.”

  “Right. I forgot Morkal chose not to take your powers for some reason.”

  “I was too powerful by the time we met. She couldn’t have taken them even if she wanted to, though by then Morkal knew we had mutual interests.”

  Jessica scoffed. “Wait, so am I the only one she’s done that to?”

  “No, she used her power to sever Tapestry connections during the war against the Demon King. I’ve met a few like you. Most end up as depressed losers. Present company excluded.”

  Jessica rubbed her eyes. So much annoyance could’ve been avoided if Morkal had waited two seconds instead of instantly dosing her. Meanwhile, the monstress herself didn’t seem to care about the conversation.

  “Whatever. We’re off track. So the point of the artillery is to be able to hit them from outside their spell range?”

  Harrow nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  The reindeer woman cleared her throat. “You mentioned this ‘artillery’ earlier. What is it?”

  Jessica squinted at Harrow. “You haven’t told them yet?”

  He ignored her and turned to the reindeer woman. “To answer your question, Amanita, it’s like a very big gun. The effective range is around five miles or so. At least for my version, which is rather crude compared to a proper howitzer.”

  This astounded the encircling crowd who rewarded Harrow with an ego-boosting ripple of oohs and ahs that, in Jessica’s opinion, he did not deserve.

  “And it must do even more damage than a gun, aye?” Kap asked.

  “Enough to destroy Elsifeya’s fortifications. Depending on how we position them, we might very well be able to hit the city from behind the curvature of Tushita,” Harrow said.

  Trigonometry was not Jessica’s specialty but something didn’t pass the sniff test. She knew it wasn’t that Tushita was curved. Its lunar cycle entailed a crescent moon which meant it was on an ordinary planet. But his math about the size of that curvature was completely off.

  “That can’t possibly be correct. Your artillery piece is, what, four meters tall? The drop-off of the Earth’s curvature is eight inches times the mile of distance squared. At five miles that ought to be… 150 inches? And that’s from an observer at ground level. The prairie is way bigger than that. You’ll be spotted from a guard tower well before you’re in range,” Jessica said.

  Harrow wagged his finger. “Tut, tut, tut! You’re missing a very obvious detail, Jessica. We’re not on Earth. Tushita’s diameter is 5233 and some odd miles. It’s about 2/3rds the size of Earth.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “With the same gravity?”

  “It’s proportionally denser.”

  “In the exact same proportion?”

  “It’s a little lighter too. ITs gravity is approximately 9.56 meters per second squared.”

  This was actually fascinating and she wanted to ask more but in the name of staying on track she asked him to show her the math. It came back bad.

  “Oh…” Harrow said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But! Hmm…”

  The trouble was that the answer they both arrived at after trying to out-nerd each other was a distance of 6.1 miles to hide an artillery piece from a human-sized observer on flat ground.

  Harrow stroked his chin. “But… Hold on, so, there are hills out in the… in the prairie…”

  Jessica shook her head. “I don’t think any of them are over ten feet.”

  “I mean—”

  “And on top of that,” she interrupted, “there is one very crucial piece of information you haven’t considered.”

  He bit his lip in annoyance. “Which is?”

  “You can see the whole god damn prairie from a tower!”

  “Not the whole—”

  “Yes, the whole prairie! I lived in the damn castle! You can see everything straight to the mountains! I’m telling you, you’re not hiding those big ass artillery pieces.”

  Everyone else fell silent, overawed by the two reincarnated Earthlings debating in an arcane language. Even Morkal was at a loss.

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  Harrow bit down on his finger. “Shit.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Jessica said. “They probably won’t even know what we’re setting up.”

  “No, they’ll know. I want them to know what we’re setting up, just not where. It only takes one adventurer to destroy the guns. Just one. God dammit!”

  For the first time since she’d met him, Harrow lost his temper. This took the form of repeatedly pounding his fist into his thigh. She felt an uncomfortable wrongness about it, like the rare occasions when her father lost his own temper.

  “So we’re screwed,” he said.

  “We’re not screwed, would you calm down for a second? We just go about it a different way,” she said.

  Jessica had no idea how or when she became attached to the SSLA’s plan, but she was now almost a little excited. The discussion of horizon lines prodded awake a part of her brain she’d had almost no use for in Tushita and was now sorely missing. Was some brain tickling all it took for her to sign up to bomb people? That was a dark thought.

  Harrow threw his hands up. “If anyone has a better idea, let’s hear it!”

  “Why not create our own hiding spot?” Haigha said. “Like a burrow?”

  “Getting engineers out to the prairie to work on that would be just as suspicious as the guns,” answered the nasally-voiced fox man.

  Huhu’s owl ears perked up. “Can we camouflage them?”

  “That’s a lot of leaves, if we even have the right type,” Amanita said.

  Kap stomped his feet. “What’s wrong with ramming it down their throats, eh? Let ‘em tremble the second they see us rolling our big guns down the road!”

  “Again, the adventurers can hit us from the same distance, fool,” the fox man said.

  “Call me a fool again and you’ll be the first thing out of the barrel, Naali.”

  The argument swelled until the entire crowd was giving their opinions on the matter. Jessica knew there had to be an answer, but her brain was fried from too much information. She needed either a nap or a cup of coffee and neither were readily available. For his part, Harrow was just staring numbly, as though being wrong about a math problem had broken him.

  “Jessica, would some of your alchemy do the trick? Maybe an invisibility potion?” John asked.

  She sighed. “John, not right—”

  Her eyes shot open. “Harrow. Hey! Harrow!”

  He didn’t acknowledge her so she took a shoe off and threw it at him.

  “What!?” he said.

  “Can you get me mineral oil, powdered sugar, and potassium nitrate?”

  The anger disappeared from his face. “Uh… I think I can. What are you— wait that’s a pyrogen—”

  His eyes opened wide in realization. Jessica grinned. He wasn’t entirely a moron.

  “How are we going to deploy something like that?”

  “Burnish and I can do it,” she said.

  “You mean ride with the smoke coming out behind you? Like a mounted M56?”

  “I have no idea what that is, but sure. One rider on a horse won’t raise any eyebrows and by the time the smokescreen is up you should be able to roll the artillery in. You’ll just need to do the ballistics calculations ahead of time. Even better if you can figure out how to squeeze a few more miles out of your artillery.”

  Harrow shook his head and chuckled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have recruited you. Being the smart one was supposed to be my character trait.”

  “Don’t worry, the role of the smarmy, obnoxious one is still open.”

  Seeing that the two reincarnated had come up with a solution, the crowd quieted and planning resumed. More details were hashed out about logistics and battle formations but since these weren’t in Jessica’ realm of expertise, she tuned out.

  As her mind wandered, Jessica contemplated why the SSLA had chosen to discuss all this in broad daylight in front of everyone when Harrow himself claimed there were information leaks. She’d been too excited to tell him her smokescreen plan to play it subtle, but in retrospect, she should’ve pulled him aside and told him in private.

  The other thing on her mind was John. A look of discomfort had been plastered on his face since the discussion began.

  “Everything alright?” she asked him while the others were talking.

  “Nothin’s the matter. Does somethin’ seem the matter?” John asked.

  “You look bothered. Don’t tell me it’s because you don’t like the idea of ending serfdom.”

  “Huh? Oh, uh, no, of course I’d like to see me and my folks freed.”

  For some reason he couldn’t meet her eyes. Jessica patted him on the arm.

  “I dragged you into this against your will, so don’t feel like you need to go along for my sake. If something is the matter, you can tell me.”

  “Nothin’s the matter.”

  The plenum wrapped up not long after and the crowd dispersed, carrying with them an anxious and excited energy at the pronouncement of the army’s first major offensive. Harrow seemed in a hurry to get back to his tent but Jessica stopped him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “I don’t have any other tasks for you for the moment. You’re free to roam. We won’t even stop you if you decide to leave,” he said.

  “Only because you don’t think I will.”

  He grinned and shot a finger gun at her before turning to leave.

  “I wanna know something though. How come you’re not bothering to hide your plan at all? I mean, if there are spies like you said, why are you holding your planning session out in the open where everyone can hear? For all we know we might have just told Elsifeya exactly what we’re up to.”

  “Do you remember when I told you we needed to dissolve the Tapestry to escape?”

  She nodded.

  “Have you given any thought to what that entails?”

  To her embarrassment, she hadn’t. There’d been a lot to process of late and she was still vaguely afraid that dissolving the Tapestry meant eradicating the people of Tushita. Giving it some thought, however, she realized it was completely ludicrous. Destroying a physical law sounded about as easy as attacking and dethroning God.

  “Are you going to tell me how you plan to do it?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a theory. Or maybe you’d prefer I call it a conjecture. That’s closer to what it is. But it goes like this: Humans believed in magic and miracles for most of our history. Why did we stop? Because the irrefutable, physical facts of the industrial revolution tore the old belief system down, person by person, people by people, country by country. You couldn’t believe in protective talismans when they didn’t help you against a machine gun. The romanticists were the last gasp of this belief in magic. Maybe it ended with Tolkein, or maybe Tolkein was the first of the necromancers trying to revive this mystical nostalgia.

  "Either way, there comes a point in that process where everyone wakes up from their dream and realizes the old world is over and never coming back. If isekai fantasies are nothing but the highest and most recent branch of that same tree of magical fantasy, it stands to reason that if you rob Tushita of its magic by injecting brutal reality into it, the Tapestry falls apart.”

  By the end of his rant Jessica could almost see the twisted logic behind it. Adventurers were reincarnated in Tushita because they wanted to escape the real world. If that fantasy was destroyed and replaced by something no better then the real world, there would be nothing to sustain the promises the Tapestry offered. It would starve for lack of desires to fulfill. The adventurers would be forced to wake up and go home.

  Jessica bit her lip. “So the point of planning publicly is for adventurers to hear that they’ll fighting someone with literal artillery?” she asked.

  Harrow shrugged. “That’s what freaked Tolkein out.”

  Jessica shook her head. “That’s absolutely insane, you know that?"

  Harrow looked at her for several seconds then smiled, shrugged, and moved along.

  Ozlyk to draw a portrait of Jessica for me. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out, especially since I gave them basically no reference materials besides a very basic written outline. I have nothing but good things to say about them. If for whatever reason you are in the market for some art, please go give them a look.