Tanya's Third Life as a Barbarian Queen, Chapter XXIX

I will have the chapter as links to download at the bottom of the post. As well as a link to the Google Document page.

Kontia

Major Lucia, Commander of the 4th Tanaoi Battalion.

“Our scouting parties have encountered the outriders of the Ninth Legion during a morning patrol. Roughly twenty Saderan Equites encountered, our scouts attempted to offer battle but the outriders retreated and our scouts withdrew back to the outer perimeter to give their report.” I addressed a handful of the more senior officers and Tanya in a small classroom that the Queen had taken to using in her speeches to us.

It had been a full two weeks since we had arrived at Kontia and it was only now that the Ninth Legion approached the city. It was very likely that this delay could represent Zorzal gathering an additional legion to march upon Kontia with, a possibility that would make holding the outer perimeter the Queen had constructed nearly impossible. Already a fallback line was being constructed, at a slower pace than the outermost line.

Tanya’s plan for the defence of the outermost fort and trench line relied upon her reserve forces being moved to fight off any large breakthroughs from the Imperials. If they had enough men however they could make breakthroughs at mutiple points along the lines and there would not be enough reserves to plug all the gaps. This would allow the Imperials to cut off forts from supply.

“They are finally here.” Tanya said with a smile. She was finally getting her battle, perhaps not where she had originally wanted it, but she had prepared the environs of Kontia for her purposes. I could only hope that her works in the art of warfare were pleasing to Emroy. “Double the scouting parties, but give them standing orders not to engage the Saderans except at a good distance before withdrawing.”

“I will pass along the orders. I will also order another general inspection of our outer defensive line to prepare for us to withstand this siege.” I said allowed to the general murmurs of assent and nods from my peers. Tanya, however, frowned and held up a hand.

“Ah, You misunderstand Major. Let me explain.” The blonde Queen tapped her foot on the ground for a moment before turning towards the black surface and drawing a piece of chalk across it. “First we have the river, then we have Kontia, the Imperial road and bridge, to the north the Imperial Fortress where the Legion once resided and now that army camps outside of our outer perimeter and seeks to assault our position.” Tanya spoke clearly as she turned words to drawings upon the blackboard looking as one would see the world should they be a bird. 

“I can understand why you are confused, in a typical siege you would seek to enclose an enemy force within a specific area. This would naturally imply that you have taken command of a large area around a smaller enemy fortification or other such defended location. In the way we traditionally understand a siege, it involves a town or city being surrounded by an enemy force with the intent to take it via an assault or a deprivation of supply.” She continued to draw upon the chalkboard, drawing ever more and more land and features, clearly memorised in her mind, distant features utterly divorced from the siege at hand. 

“But this is merely a question of perspective. Fundamentally a siege is the deprivation of resources and movement of an enemy force until such a time as they can be destroyed or forced to surrender.” She turned about neatly, placing the chalk on the desk in front of her with a click before clasping her hands together at the small of her back and rolling back her shoulders. “Size matters not.” She said, slowly, carefully. Her sharp gaze playing across the officers seated in attendance. 

“As I have said before, we must not conclude total understanding of war or the elements that make up a war. I am not here to teach you what is, but to provide you with the tools you shall require to conclude what is in any situation you find yourself in.” That this was not supposed to be a lesson, but the briefing seemed to have been forgotten by the Queen as the wisdom of the wargod flowed from her lips. “To have the concept of a siege calcified in your mind so that when encountering a situation that resembles a siege in your conception you act according to preconceived notions of how to conduct a siege is a weakness, it is stagnation, it leads to failure.” She looked across the audience for a moment and I struggled to comprehend the meaning behind her words. A siege could be anything?

“Our current objective is rather simple.” Tanya continued as I sat enraptured. “Prevent Zorzal’s force, the Ninth Legion, from being resupplied by Sadera. It does not matter that the prince has the endless steppe at his back, it does not matter that we are confined to our fortifications and he is not. I shall say this as clearly as I can for you all. We are not under siege. They are.” Her declaration was spoken in the same tone she had taken with every sentence so far, but struck the audience with such potency that she might as well have cast out her voice with magic. It was such a idea, but the more I considered it the more it seemed to make sense. She waited for the incredulous whispers to die down before she continued. 

“We are not defending.” She said with a slowly forming grin. “We are attacking, relentlessly, viciously, constantly. Even as we speak now we are attacking their grain reserves, attacking them with the inexorable passage of time, with our resolve and comfort.” Each word captured the rapt attention of the Lepus in attendance. But still the Tanaoi Queen. The last Queen of our people, continued. 

“The Imperial supply road, the great bridge that crosses the Kontia River, that is the artery that carries vital supplies to the Legion that arrays itself against us now. We have cut that artery. That is why we pushed south, that is why we made way for Kontia.” She took a moment to drink from a tin cup filled with boiled water.

“If I wished to defend from the Imperials I would not have marched south, I would not have pressed deep into Imperial lands! I would not have taken their cities! No, I did not seek to flee or defend, I sought to defeat the Saderans, to attack until we had inflicted upon them conditions such that our demands are preferable to continued war.” A change had come over to her now, her eyes cast out against us but she did not see the women who swore themselves to her service. No, she could see beyond us to something else.

I wanted to know what she could see, but that thought too held a sharp fear that caused the beat of my heart to quicken.

But it felt... right, that we were not running, not defending, no. We were acting in a way that would destroy the legion that had come to destroy us, to take us all as slaves.

A weight I did not know I was carrying, a shame that I had buried away deep inside faded.

As Tanya looked at us with total conviction, I believed for the first time that we could win this war. For we had a Queen that looked upon the vast Saderan Empire and saw only a future where we were victorious.

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Kontia

Motoko, Cadet of the Tanaoi

The whole room, packed full of cadets cheered as the hourglass on the teachers desk ran out. The human, caught by surprise at the sudden jubilation, glanced over at the timepiece before sighing and shaking his head with a smile.

“Well it looks like we are out of time. Remember that tomorrow we will be having our class in the amphitheatre, so it will be at the same time but in that building rather than here. You will be given a subject at random to defend or attack and we will be spending the whole day studying rhetoric. Now, no running, and I will see you again tomorrow.” I jumped to my feet and performed a saute and joined a chorus of girls thanking the slave for the lesson before we marched to the exit as Cadet Corporals watched us with lashes in their hands. 

We kept walking until we had passed the watchful corporals until we were through the entrance of the school and out onto the streets of Kontia where we all laughed and bounded forwards running through the streets. Our passage became a stampede, one that in just a few days people had come to prepare for. 

The run of streets between the school and the eastern gate were clear by this time of day allowing us a run through the city and into the grassy fields left fallow and for animals to graze. But more importantly it was a place where we were allowed to play ball games as we pleased!

It took no time at all for lines to be set up, nets to be hung over them and teams to be established and soon the fields were filled with shouts, laughter and the sound of wind balls being slapped between teams. The Queens new game was fun and actually made sense compared to some of the stupid games the girls came up with. It was what everyone wanted to do in what little free time we had between work assignments, training and lessons.

Even the adults joined in, however they mostly played in their own teams.

We played until the sun began to set across the horizon as food and beer was brought out from the city and set down on wooden boards next to fires to be shared in a group. When we had eaten enough I went to find all of my squad including the new cadets from the other tribes and we all went together to the bathhouse.

Up north baths were taken in rivers or lakes and while it was a lot of fun they were cold and you had to jump out and huddle around a fire when you were done. In the city you could have a bath in steaming hot water and get out without being cold too! While so many of my sisters complained about the city being smelly or how annoying going to class was I thought that living in a city was way better than being on the steppe.

But the city was very stinky, perhaps that was why they had such good baths?

“I heard that the Saderans have arrived and set up camp.” Rei commented as she slid into one of the smaller, hotter baths, letting the water soak into the fur along her arms and back. 

“Oh, so there will be another battle soon?” I asked the girls as Rei let out a contented sigh.

“I was helping dig one of the trenches the other day.” Pella said, brushing her hair from her eyes. “They are so long they go all the way past the horizon. There is nowhere the stupid Saderans can get through, and even if they did the Queen would kill them all anyway.” 

“I guess.” I hummed, tapping the tiles that surrounded the bath as my sore muscles finally got a chance to relax. “I hope we can help out.” I mused at last earning some nods from the other cadets.

“Yeah.” Asuka said. “But we have already been helping out a lot.” She pointed out.

“Not in the actual battles though.” I reminded her. “We spend ages training with spears and slings and stuff and then we have to stay at camp.” 

“It’s effective management of resources. We are not as strong as the grownups anyway so to help them out we have to practice a lot so when we are old we are better than they were. Then they get to do a retirement.” Asuka explained with a nod.

“I know!” I said grumpily. “But it’s still annoying, I am allowed to complain, it’s my rights.” I pointed out.

“No one is saying you can’t.” Rei said doing a very obvious job of de-escalation. “But it’s not very constructive to just complain.” Rei chided me and I grumbled out an agreement and crossed my arms.

There was an awkward silence for a moment before the doors to the bathhouse burst open and a bunch of younger cadets who were waiting for their turn in the baths started to shout about a baby.

I stared dumbfounded at the interruption until one of them managed to explain the excitement.

It was a boy.

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Tanya

I lent over the copper plate, hammered so thinly that it would flex but not so thin that as I ran a sharp steel spike across the surface I would breach though the other side. I worked quickly, the logic being imprinted upon the copper was rather simple. After all a spark formula was a simple thing that had innumerable applications but the most prominent lately had been casting a spell at a distance that the logic would then interpret and release the sparking spell.

Normally while bundled inside a compressed black powder explosive.

Spark formulas were in fact so simple and efficient that the majority of the logic on the board was not to generate the spark, but to activate the formula at the right time. When I had scratched the correct sigils into the copper plate I brushed some finely ground quartz into the grooves, careful to not leave any of the material outside of the grooves, before placing a blank copper plate over what I had just inscribed and folding the edges up and hammering them so the two pieces were properly mated. 

The ground up quartz was not just a conductor of magical power along a predetermined course, but also served as a power source for the device. The powder would soak up a trivial amount of mana from the world around it, but a trivial amount was all that a single spark required.

In my last life, this sort of detonator had become obsolete well before I was born. Such magical signaling could be easily intercepted and mages would quickly be deployed to detonate any mines made with such formulas as they did not have any security baked into them to differentiate one mage from another. 

But it was more than good enough when your enemy barely fielded mages at all and had no idea what to look for.

I finished another spark formula plate and dropped it into a box ready for deployment in various blackpowder mines being deployed in defence, before I began working on a different kind of magical device. 

While the ranged detonators would require the right spell to be cast for them to activate, it would also be useful to have a spark plate that could be activated on touch without the use of magic. Not only would this allow fires to be made quickly without a flint and steel, but it would also serve as an effective ‘trigger’ for cannons and potentially other firearms.

The design I settled on was effectively a button. A small polished glass marble would accrue more than enough magic that when pressed into the channels containing the magical formula it would activate the spark where directed. In allowing myself to fall into the pleasant tedium of productive work my mind had time to wander, considering this problem from many perspectives until an idea occurred to me.

I worked on a new copper plate spark formula design. This time with a crystal that could be removed and a formula that would activate if the plate was deformed while the crystal was implanted. When the plate was finished I turned it upside down and dropped it off the table, watching as it hit the stone floor and a flurry of sparks came into existence before the cheap marble was exhausted. 

I groaned and rubbed my face. How had I missed this for so long? This changed everything! I would have to prototype a new sh-

“My Queen!” I turned about as the door to my little office in my new palace burst open and one of my bodyguards looked at me, her eyes wide with excitement. “Your majesty. It’s a boy! A boy has been born!” She said with a wide smile.

Ah, well, no putting it off now, I had to go and see my father. 

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/18jtjqEDEDPfcljkqj-Tk2O0o7HCMOXiFDUWn9bZmgqg/edit?tab=t.0

Edited by: Y1