“Wahhhhhhhhhh!”
Halbert was there, mixed in with the screaming, falling people.
“H-Hey! They just threw away a bunch of people!” Castor shouted, sounding panicked.
If you didn’t know what was up, that was the natural response, I guess.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Just watch.”
At nearly the exact moment I said that, round parachutes sprouted from the backs of all the falling people. Suddenly, their speed of descent dropped. The parachutes blossomed in the sky like white flowers, almost like we were watching fireworks from a distance. Though, if they vanished like fireworks, Hal and the others would be upside down.
Castor looked at the squad of parachuters, dumbfounded. “What exactly… are those?”
“The equipment, you mean? Or the type of troop?” I asked.
“Both.”
“The equipment is called a parachute. When spread, it kills their speed of descent, allowing for a safe landing. I went to the development team and said, ‘Hey, this is a thing that exists,’ and I had them make them for me. Now, as for the type of troop… They’re wyvern paratroopers. I call them dratroopers.”
“Dratroopers?” Castor asked.
“They’re a type of troop that drop from the sky like that to surprise the enemy, throw the enemy’s rear line into chaos, and take enemy positions. Normally, they’re a type of troop you would need airplanes to create, but we do have wyverns here in this world, after all. I decided the groundwork had already been laid to develop them, so I organized it.”
When I’d been thinking about whether I could recreate the types of troops that existed in my former world here, paratroopers had been the first to come to mind. In Germany they were called the Fallschirmjäger, and they had been in use since World War II. Their primary missions were, as I’d explained, ambushes, causing chaos, and seizing positions. Many of them were buff, macho guys, and Japan’s 1st Airborne Brigade had stories about them that would make you think they came out of some manga. (Example: Tearing two-millimeter-thick wire with their bare hands.)
The initial paratroopers of my old world had their equipment dropped in separate containers, so if they came down in a different place from the container, they had to fight with nothing but handguns.
But this was a world of sword and sorcery, so if ours could bring just one specialized weapon with them, they could still put up a good fight. For Hal, if he had just one spear, he’d probably single-handedly cause utter chaos in the enemy camp. From that perspective, they were a good match for this world.
Castor looked at me quizzically. “They’re dratroopers, even though they’re jumping of wyverns?”
“H-Hey, where’s the problem? Besides, dratrooper sounds cooler than wyvetrooper anyway.”
“…I guess it does.”
Yeah, coolness was important. They didn’t necessarily have to jump off dragons.
“That aside… I had another objective in organizing a unit of dratroopers,” I added.
“Hm? There’s still something more?”
“Watch and you’ll see. Okay, Kaede, do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
When I gave the signal, Kaede raised her right hand. Then, “Now… Fire! You know.”
When Kaede brought down her hand, the anti-air repeating bolt thrower in the center of the double circle fired all its bolts at once. The bolts with their range and accuracy enhanced by magic hurtled towards Hal and the others. For the record, the bolts tips were made with materials that wouldn’t injure them even if they did hit, but when they were flying that fast, they were going to hurt pretty bad.
“Screw youuuuu!”
Hal let out an almost incomprehensible war cry as he knocked down the incoming arrows with the spear he was holding. The others cut them down with swords, blocked them with over-sized shields, deflected them with bucklers, or found other ways to defend themselves from the hail of projectiles.
Eventually, as he got close to the ground, Hal wreathed his spear in fire… or not. He just threw it straight at the anti-air repeating bolt thrower.
Thunk!
The spear stabbed through the anti-air repeating bolt thrower. If Hal had wreathed his spear in flames, it would have pierced through the anti-air repeating bolt thrower and set it ablaze, silencing it entirely. In other words… the drop was a success.
“Cease fire! You know.”
On Kaede’s signal, the anti-air repeating bolt thrower stopped. Hal and his fellow dratroopers landed in the double circle one after another.
While watching them out of the corner of my eye, I explained for Castor, “This is the other use for them. They’re anti-air repeating bolt thrower killers.”
The anti-air repeating bolt thrower had been developed to counteract the considerable air power provided by wyvern cavalry, griffon squadrons, and dragon knights. The repeating bolt thrower had its range and tracing ability greatly raised by magic, making it the natural enemy of flying units like wyvern knights. Because of those, attackers couldn’t use their air power to suddenly bombard a city. If they wanted to bombard the city with their air power, they first needed to destroy these anti-air repeating bolt throwers which would be on the castle walls.
Thanks to that, they’d have to launch a siege using a land-based force like the Army. Only once the Army took the walls or destroyed the anti-air repeating bolt throwers on them by using siege weaponry, their forces in the air could carry out bombing operations on the city.
That said, if the city was being bombarded, the defenders had already lost. It was apparently common sense for them to surrender the moment aerial bombardment became possible. That was why, in siege battles, the Air Force’s job was really just to take down the other side’s Air Force so that they couldn’t attack the Army.
That had gotten me thinking. If there were a simpler way of attacking the anti-air repeating bolt throwers, the Air Force could be deployed sooner, and that might allow for the speedy resolution of the battle.
“So, what I formulated as my response to that was the dratroopers,” I explained. “Because, as you saw watching Hal, the elites can apparently cut down the arrows that come flying at them. The dratroopers are a special unit that cut their way through a storm of arrows to land where the anti-air repeating bolt throwers are and neutralize them.”
“Hahh… Hahh… Y-You make it sound so easy…” Hal came over and joined us, panting and looking exhausted.
It must have been a hard training session. Even though it was still only the second month of the year, he was drenched with sweat. He cut off his parachute, and maybe he felt hot, because he stripped down to nothing but a tank top on his top half.
Hal took a canteen of water from Kaede as he complained. “Honestly, you drop me from the sky again, and again, and again.”
“I’ll just remind you, there are safety precautions in place,” I said. “If you go into the danger zone without your parachute opening, the wyvern knights are supposed to retrieve you.”
“That’s not the problem,” Hal said. “It’s damn scary being thrown out into the sky. The wind roars as it races past your ears. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought I was going to die.”
“Ohh. Yeah… I don’t ever want to do it myself.”
“I’m not doing it because I want to, either!” he shouted.
While I was bantering with Hal, Castor raised a question he’d had.
“In order to drop dratroopers, don’t you need to break the enemy’s air power first? If the wyvern cavalry are carrying dratroopers, they can’t fight that well, can they?”
Hmm… That was the former General of the Air Force for you. He’d caught on to a good point.