Chapter 135 : The Vatican’s Pleasure Oil, a Demon in the Fire.
Chapter 135: The Vatican’s Pleasure Oil, a Demon in the Fire.
The Federation navy engaged the Church navy in fierce gunnery battles at sea, and the army soldiers within the Kingdom of Paria were not idle either.
The tank division heading for the Royal Capital was still on the road, while another force that had marched ahead to seize Kaluka City had already arrived beneath Kaluka’s walls.
A Church second-class division was stationed here to hold the city; leaving other matters aside, the morale of the Church soldiers was, by Mitia’s observation, second only to that of the soldiers of the Seris Federation.
According to the frontline commanders, they had subjected the city to prolonged, large-scale bombardment, and every probing assault had failed to make much headway.
At first Mitia had not had a good solution either, but as soon as the Federation navy’s telegraph reported that it had won the sea battle, she immediately ordered them redeployed to Kaluka.
A 210-millimeter naval gun was expert at shooting ships; naturally it was also excellent against people and fortifications.
Near Kaluka’s coastline the Federation fleet had subjected Kaluka City to massive bombardment; countless heavy shells rained down on the city defenses and blew the walls to pieces.
Then bombers carried out large-scale strikes on the defenders’ works outside the city, repeatedly ploughing the ground to open an assault corridor for the Federation army.
At the same time the army’s field artillery extended the barrage line, severing the defenders’ support lines inside the city — a threefold bombardment to assist the storming of Kaluka City.
Tanks and heavily armored mechanical-body soldiers cleared the way; anti-air infantry fighting vehicles and ordinary troops were responsible for occupying; the defenders were annihilated without much chance to struggle.
But losses this time were also severe. The Church troops who refused to surrender resisted fiercely inside the city; urban combat was precisely the kind of warfare the Seris Federation hated most, and many soldiers were killed by ambushes.
When it came to fighting in the streets, Mitia was helpless too — urban warfare had caused countless military experts headaches. Apart from engaging the enemy head-on in contact battles, the only remaining option was to level the enemy city to the ground.
If they chose contact engagements, the physical condition of Federation soldiers became the greatest constraint, so the question looped back to the beginning: when could the mechanical bodies be fully deconstructed and optimized to the point of mass production?
For the moment it was impossible. Copying the outward design was no problem, but that did not suit the Federation troops’ constitution — be it the control feel or the conceptual positioning of the mechanical bodies, both sides had different understandings.
Simply put, on the main continent mechanical bodies were designed as generalists: they needed to cover area output while each individual still had combat capability and strong survivability.
In Mitia’s view those were jack-of-all-trades designs that mastered nothing, bloated with a lot of useless features, and the Federation’s scientists could not yet strip out those useless elements.
Most Federation soldiers were still ordinary humans and, unlike mages who could flexibly change tactics as needed, required specialized designs to magnify strengths and reduce weaknesses — in other words, specialization by branch.
At present the Federation’s mechanical bodies could only be roughly distinguished by their installed weapons.
To deconstruct and optimize them, one had to understand the function of each rune carved into them and the complex interactions those runes produced together, then disassemble and refine.
In this aspect the Federation was still at the starting stage, only able to grasp basic principles; it would need time to learn deeper deconstruction.
But the street fighting made her think of trench warfare in her previous life, and trench warfare had a kind of specialized weapon or branch for dealing with soldiers inside tunnels.
That was the battlefield “Satan” flamethrower troops.
With the Federation’s current industry, making a flamethrower was very simple: a fuel tank, a high-pressure gas cylinder, hoses, and a nozzle.
But developing the fuel would take some time; the terror of flame projectors largely came from the damage caused by solidified gasoline.
A thousand-degree heat, long-lasting flame, adhesive; once it stuck, it would not stop until it had burned through bone — it was called Satan’s saliva, crueller even than white phosphorus.
But preparing solidified gasoline was not simple. Although called solidified gasoline, it was neither a solid nor a liquid; it was like a lump of jelly — that was the thickening agent at work.
The thickener had to be made from special metal salts of palmitic acid extracted from palm oil, plus aluminum naphthenate as emulsifier, mixed with white phosphorus and then added to gasoline to form that viscous gel.
Liquid gasoline could be used, but gasoline was volatile and unstable.
Solidified gasoline, however, was very stable; it could withstand storage and transport, and its lethality was an order of magnitude greater than ordinary gasoline.
The more Mitia thought about it the brighter her violet pupils grew — why had she not thought of this earlier? This was too perfect... no, it was the Church’s “happy oil”!
A thousand-degree heat, it consumed oxygen and produced toxic gases, had high adhesive strength, burned a long time, and its semi-liquid state could flow through all kinds of cracks to kill.
Was this not the perfect special attack against Church soldiers who charged shouting “Long live the Goddess”?
One burst from a flamethrower and they would be howling “Long live the Goddess” for five to ten seconds before ascending to meet her — after all, there was no Geneva Convention in this world.
Once she thought of it, the Federation’s chemical department, under Mitia’s unilateral order, quickly prepared the various chemical products needed to make the thickeners; the materials were not expensive and could be produced rapidly and in bulk.
Manufacture of the fuel-container and nozzle was extremely simple, but protecting the tank itself was more troublesome — once flamethrower troops appeared on the battlefield...
The first few times the enemy, being cute and naive, would not understand and would not matter much; once they tasted the sweet effect of solidified gasoline munitions, they would remember it for the next life.
In a sense, solidified gasoline munitions were the ultimate reaper for carbon-based life — a death crueller than lingchi.
In future, if forbidden spells existed they would no doubt want to slam them into the flamethrower troops’ faces; they would be priority targets for concentrated fire, so protection had to be as thorough as possible.
Mitia’s solution was to produce three different specifications of flamethrower equipment.
First, a miniaturized magitech engine that retained only the most basic shield function was mounted on the fuel backpack, effective only for the backpack component, and the soldier had to be physically strong enough to wear heavy armor.
These flamethrower infantry would be assigned to platoon-level units of fifty as basic combat units.
The second type would be equipped by soldiers wearing mechanical bodies: all other weapons removed, with larger fuel tanks and dual shield generators as backup — usable as heavy firepower.
Mitia calculated that as long as a flamethrower-mounted mechanical soldier could withstand a strike from a captain-grade body and be able to return fire, then under the thousand-degree temperatures augmented with white phosphorus and thermite, all beings on the spot would be equal in death.
After all, mechanical bodies were not hermetically sealed — otherwise where would the oxygen come from? A high-pressure oxygen cylinder posed far more danger than simply having an intake port.
The ultimate form was naturally the flamethrower tank: modified large secondary-compression flamethrower barrels could certainly project solidified gasoline hundreds of meters, producing damage indistinguishable from being hit by alien acid.