Iron Prayer

The roar of guns drowned out the chanting of prayers. The torrent of steel crushed the knight's dignity. This is a time when magic is deconstructed by formulas and phlogiston drives steel. In the smoke of the Old World, the Northern Empire was armed to the teeth with machinery and construction techniques, while the Southern Alliance tried to hold on to its last position with ancient magic and glory. Eric von Krause, a young officer of southern aristocracy but northern training, is caught between two loyalties. He was proficient in the mathematics of calculating ballistic trajectories and knew the provisions of the knight's code by heart. While his fellow knights chanted the Holy Name and launched a fatal charge toward the machine gun emplacement, he lay in the fetid trench, calculating the wind speed, humidity, and phlogiston turbulence wafting in the air that distorted the ballistic trajectory. When the mentor of the north commanded the steel giant and was about to roll over the city wall of his hometown, he had to make a choice—— Should we defend the old glory that is doomed to disappear, or embrace the cold but efficient new truth? Or, in this prayer of steel and fire, carve out a third path of your own. Keywords: hard-core war, magic industrial revolution, modern military, group portrait, technology flow, western fantasy